nakedpastor
We live in a stereotypical world. Stereotypes abound. Like labels, they make life easier because it is predictable and understood. Stereotypes lessen mystery.
If women would just be the stereotypical woman and men the stereotypical man then wouldn’t life just be easier?
Our societies and cultures impute upon women an ideal of what they should be. Add upon that most religions that impute upon women not only the cultural ideal of what they should be, but also impute upon women theological rationalizations for these ideals, and then add to that the threat of discipline and even punishment, temporal and eternal.
The churches I grew up in had and taught very strict and well-defined ideas of what a man and a woman was and should be, and what a biblical man and a biblical woman should be. For either one to step outside of those clearly defined boundaries was fatal.
We are so enmeshed in stereotyping that we have lost the fact that there is no pure female ideal. There is no pure male idea. The gender spectrum is so vastly diverse! There are as many kinds of female as there are females and there are just as many kinds of male as there are males. And everything in between!
No matter what we look like or are like, we all get full pass.
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