Love, Joy, Feminism
It didn’t take evangelical pastor Doug Wilson long to weigh in on the Women’s March.
A couple days ago there were “women’s marches” all over the country. It was a very important event I hear tell. Momentous. Charged with meaning. Galvanizing. It was sort of like a Tea Party protest of the left, only without any particular point.
Doug Wilson is a troll. It’s not hard at all to look up what the marches were about. I wouldn’t feel the need to respond, given Wilson’s well-known penchant for intentionally using inflammatory rhetoric, if he weren’t so well connected. Wilson’s not a random pastor. He has the ear of conservative evangelical theologians and is widely published. He’s not fringe.
Anyway, back to Wilson:
Look. You cannot be the kind of movement that applauds topless slut walks for a decade or two, and at the end of it still attract the instinctive respect that men used to show to their great grandmothers. That is what you feminist ding dongs deliberately threw away. You cannot be the organizer of the city-wide Herpes on Heels March and somehow have the same moral authority that Galadriel had.
Oh good god. First, feminists don’t want the respect men used to show to their great-grandmothers; we’d prefer to be treated as equal and worthy of the same respect as any other human being. Second, nice name calling there. Very mature. Third, we threw away the straightjacket restrictive gender roles created, not people’s ability to show respect for other people as human beings. Seriously, does Wilson think men are that shallow? Fourth, calling slutwalk participants “Herpes on Heels” is a complete (and likely deliberate) misunderstanding of what slutwalks are about. Fifth, I’m not even going to pretend to understand Wilson’s perspective on Galadriel.
Actually, given the positioning of Wilson’s comments, he seems to be referring to the Victorian ideal of womanhood—women were expected to be chaste and gentle and soft spoken, and to focus on the home and family life, and in return they were given an elevated level of moral authority. In theory, at least. I’m curious whether Wilson knows that women of the late nineteenth century leveraged this ostensive moral authority to push for women’s suffrage, and to argue that they should be allowed to enter the political sphere and public realm.
Here’s what Wilson is missing—the women who participate in slutwalks aren’t asking for more moral authority than men. They’re asking to be treated as equals.
These are the people who, if you were talking to them about the authority of the Scriptures, would protest that the Bible cannot be taken as the Word of God because it required the extermination of Canaanite men, women and children. These are the same people who, just two days ago, were out there marching in the defense of their own right to slaughter their own children. In short, they do not object to taking of human life, but rather they object to the taking of Canaanite life by the God of Scripture. They object to this because they are obviously Canaanites, and so the whole set up makes them nervous. They do agree that the deity has the right to take life as the deity wills it—they just insist on the right to be the deity.
Okay, this is actually really interesting.
According to Wilson, feminists argue the Bible can’t be the Word of God because God ordered the Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites. This is a strawman version of the argument, of course, and it erases Christian feminists. But let’s run with this.
Wilson says that these same feminists who object to genocide against the Canaanites believe they have the right to slaughter their own children—he’s talking about embryos and fetuses, of course. But in addition to ignoring the many distinctions between embryos and fetuses and human beings that have been born (I don’t know any feminists who are okay with slaughtering babies or children), Wilson never addresses his own problem—if he is against the abortion on the grounds that it involves slaughtering children, how is he okay with a God who ordered the Israelites to slaughter children? He is too busy criticizing others to explain.
Anyway, back to Wilson:
And don’t you love how that word “protester” gets used so creatively these days? It is so hard anymore to tell the difference between protesters and rioters. Here is yet another Irony Fail. As David Burge pointed out, during the Inauguration, “protesters” were a couple blocks away from the main event, all dressed in black, smashing windows, setting fire to cars, because they were . . . wait for it . . . drum roll . . . protesting fascism. And for good measure, I have ten bucks here that says these stalwart anti-fascist “protesters” would overwhelmingly have a deep antipathy for the state of Israel, and would love nothing more than to broaden their protests into a little Jew-baiting.
It’s my understanding that it was easy to tell the difference between the black bloc anarchist group, which smashed windows and so forth during the inauguration on Friday, and peaceful protestors both during the inauguration on Friday and at the Women’s March on Saturday. It’s only hard to tell the difference between protestors and rioters if you’ve decided there is no difference and don’t even try.
Wilson’s words about Jew-baiting ring hollow in an era when Trump’s senior advisor, Bannon, has made openly anti-semitic comments. I’ve heard people defend Trump by pointing to his pro-Israel stance. Well guess what? It’s really not that simple. For one thing, individuals close to Trump have reported that he has made anti-semitic comments himself. See, being anti-semitic isn’t synonymous with being anti-Israel. You can talk up and down about your support for Israel and still repeat anti-Jewish talking points and stereotypes. For another thing, and I’m not going to get into this because I don’t know enough to do so, but the political situation within Israel itself isn’t simple or one-dimensional—not every Jewish person supports Netanyahu.
Wilson defends his comments about protestors like this:
I am a mere observer. A reporter. I simply comment on what I see.
Methinks Wilson has a very strange idea of what a reporter is. Reporters don’t just comment on what they see. They also take the time to do research, and to read background information. They interview a variety of individuals involved, and (if they’re good reporters) they try to present the various individuals and factions involved accurately (and without loaded language). Wilson does none of that.
So let’s get back to those pink p**sy hats for a minute. These are the people who have been degrading public discourse for a generation, fighting for the mainstreaming of every form of vulgarity, insisting that the taxpayers fund their blasphemous art, fighting technology that has figured out how to scrub crudity from our entertainment, and have been demanding that various forms of filth be decanted into fifty gallon drums and imported into polite company. And then Trump says something that would have gotten him drummed out of polite company seventy-five years ago, and they want to turn it into material for a national march. Where have you been?
Wait, what?!
No, Trump’s comments about grabbing women’s genitals would not have gotten him drummed out of polite company seventy-five years ago. There was a strong “boys will be boys” mentality that is exactly what Trump was tapping into when he called the comments “locker room talk.” This is exactly why the second wave feminist movement arose—because men viewed women as objects to be used and exploited. Feminism did not cause this problem—it sought to solve it!
This is also what makes men like Wilson so frightening—they don’t know (or don’t care) what consent is. Yes, the feminist movement championed the idea of “sexual liberation.” But that is a completely different thing from sexual assault. Feminists talk about consent over and over and over again. Also? The march wasn’t just about Trump’s comments about women. It was about so much more than that—which Wilson would know if he were an actual reporter, like he claims to be.
We had a women’s march here in our community as well, and one of my parishioners saw a woman wearing a shirt with the text I have included off to the right. There it is, out in the open: “Keep calm and kill babies.” Kind of right out there. Isn’t it?
I call shenanigans.
I just checked the google and couldn’t find any such shirt. In fact, I couldn’t find any pro-choice paraphernalia with that phrasing. If someone did wear such a shirt, they did so ironically—as a joke. It’s also possible that Wilson’s parishioner misread the shirt, seeing what they wanted to see (like the time my grandmother says she overheard a store employee telling an immigrant woman that she didn’t have to pay sales tax because she wasn’t documented). All in all, Wilson’s tale about the shirt sounds like the kind of “just so” story conservatives invent and pass around while gasping in horror until everyone has forgotten exactly where it came from.
What was the problem with what God did to the Canaanites again? They could never believe in a God who would kill babies.
No, not really. They could actually never believe in a God who would ask them to have babies. That is the root of the problem, the source of their rebellion.
And so, rebelling against their own nature, revolting against the sweetness that God gave to them, rising up against the impulse that is down in their bones, they really have become nasty women. What impulse is it that they are repressing? The impulse to conceive a child, carry him for nine months, suckle him at the breast, hold him on her hip, push a stroller around, and get back home in time to make the child’s father a sandwich. If you start by making fun of such decent things, it should not be a surprise that you end with “keep calm and kill more babies.”
Yup, Wilson really did just go full sexist.
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