Although this article does make a very good case that you can’t be a feminist and religious at the same time. Even the most peaceful religions, like Jainism and Buddhism, treat women as inferiors.
The article doesn’t mention any female-centered religions, though, like Wicca…I suppose you could be a Wiccan feminist, but you’re still stuck trying to believe in crazy stuff.
The thing about Wicca is that, in its most common form, there’s a lot of mythos around masculine/feminine energy or Qualities or whateversuch woo. I maintain that genuine feminism must include criticism (or at least analysis of) of societal gender constructs, and many of the Wiccans I know have internalized those quasi-alchemical gender stereotypes pretty thoroughly. YMMV.
The religious attitudes against women simply reflect the facts of life in the past, where women were tied up with child rearing, while men mostly were hunting, trading, manufacturing, & farming, & getting concerned over the paternity of their wife’s children, because they didn’t want to be cuckolded.
We now live in a very different society, so these ancient religious codes for living (for men) need to be abandoned, because they’re now offensive to any sane, thinking person.
I’ve royally pissed off some feminists by telling them that being religious is basically incompatible with feminism. These are people who will piss and moan for hours over a stupid billboard but don’t seem to notice the misogyny that’s institutionalized in the religion they choose to practice. I’d like to consider myself a feminist, but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.
#2-
But they can’t abandon them. Religious texts are “The Word”. I find it revolting when the religious cherry-pick from their holy text and claim that only parts of it are meant to be taken seriously. It’s all or none, IMO.
These beliefs about women (I think) are derived from the “Great Mother” theology of the Neolithic period. Women then were the birth givers, the mothers of all life because the role of men was unknown. We have plenty of worship figurines from the period, showing gravid female statues. It was only after men learned that they participated in conception that they wrested power from the women. These laws and beliefs are holdovers from those days, meant to prevent women from returning to ascendency.
On another note, there is a TV show called “How to look good naked.” The host, openly gay comedian Carson Kressley, takes “curvy” women through a self exploration of their bodies. It’s amazing how they’re all emotional when confronted with their own beauty. It’s all part of the common thinking that women should be ashamed of their bodies. It’s a kind of coming out ceremony for women of all sizes.
SG
Gotta love ignorant people writing about things that they don’t know about but hate.
I’ve known plenty of feminist Christians, including ministers, some of whom were lesbians.
But, then again, this crowd is nearly as fond of quoting the Bible to say what “Christians absolutely must believe” as are fundamental Biblical literalists.
Ignorance on all sides.
The article’s mention of Buddhism with Christianity and Islam seems unfair to me. Buddhism has usually been a “religion” (no god in it, in most traditions) that eschews mucking about in politics, so the warring sides in a civil conflict may be Buddhists, but it’s not Buddhism fueling the hatred.
There is nothing in most ancient Buddhist writings that declare women to have any particular place in a hierarchy at all; it’s the various Buddhist traditions that have interpreted those things, generally in response to local custom. And to my mind, even modern Buddhist groups have done a very poor job of catching up in their treatment of women. Nuns still have almost no status at all in most Buddhist countries, for example. It’s in the West that women have become priests and teachers in Buddhist groups. In the ancient sutras, women became enlightened too, right along with men, so it’s depressing sometimes to see how badly women are treated in that religion nowadays.
Our old priest (when I was younger) said that he was tired of complaints that the Chorch was anti-woman. “Nothing could be further from the truth! We venerate Mary and elevated her to Heaven as an example of the perfect woman, high above men!
Because she gave birth as a virgin. Because she herself was immaculately conceived. No stain of sex passed through That Girl’s vagina prior to the Lord’s Birth.
What a message to the women of the parish. “If you must submit, close your eyes and think of Mary.”
If you assume that “a religion equals an idea developed by a village chief (male) to maintain and consolidate power” then it all makes sense.
Keeps people in their place. Makes them unquestioning of certain rules. Promotes growth of the desired population growth (regardless of other ones). The role of women is then obvious…
Ignorance on all sides.
Of what? I’m aware that there are people who declare themselves to be Christian feminists. That doesn’t make it not ridiculous.
Even as an atheist, I can understand the need to interpret the Bible if a person – for reasons I’ve never understood – feels the need to take it as a foundation. There are odd little bits and pieces in it that are fairly easy to omit. But misogyny in the Bible is a goddamned major theme. You can’t ignore it. It’s so deep and inherit. So if you’re a “Christian” who takes that much liberty with the thing, then you should probably just admit you’re not much of a Christian, because you think for yourself. And if you’re a feminist who buys into a book with subjugation of women as a highlight, you’re not much of a feminist.
I take the Sam Harris position on this: even moderate Christians are hurting the cause for rationality, and rationality is the feminists’ best friend.
I can agree with the specific details about specific religions making some pretty glaring inconsistencies with standard feminist thought, but I still think it’s kind of arrogant to claim religious thought and feminism are incompatible.
That seems to much like telling people that we know more than them what they believe, and I know from experience that I can’t stand it when people tell me what I believe as an athiest. I also know too many people who describe themselves as christian yet reject so many of the standard tenents of the faith (like the sin of homosexuality or female inferiority) that I can’t believe they actually consider themselves one.
Pointing out those glaring inconsistencies in thought… fine. We definately need to do that. But equating all feminist religious belief as being fundamentally against their feminist ideals smacks of arrogance. Who knows what they actually believe. I have a feeling that most feminists are pretty aware of how misogynistic most religion is.
Science Goddess: “the “Great Mother” theology of the Neolithic period…. We have plenty of worship figurines from the period, showing gravid female statues.”
Natalie Angier
New York Times
September 17, 2000
Goddess Theory. A survey of the matriarchal myth and its origins.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/17/reviews/000917.17angiert.html
“By all accounts from archaeology and anthropology, the possibility that there has ever been a true matriarchy, a society in which women effectively ruled, is about as likely as the chance that an obese fellow in red pajamas can deliver presents to some two billion children in the course of one night. Yet despite considerable evidence that contradicts the story of a prelapsarian gynecocracy, and a glaring lack of evidence to support it, many people, according to Cynthia Eller, continue to subscribe to it. As Eller lays out in the fascinating if often depressing ”Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory,” a sizable corps of feminists is convinced that male dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon and that before patriarchy grasped the globe in its bloody talons, women were respected members of their tribes, equal if not above men in status and influence, revered for their capacity to give birth and nourish the young and for their innate connectedness — to one another, to the earth, to the men they suffered with fond affection. …
As the matriarchalists see it, the lost paradise of female power was a paradise because women are so wonderful. … Eller quotes Jane Alpert’s delineation of the qualities that inhere by nature to those who give birth, including ”empathy, intuitiveness, adaptability, awareness of growth as a process rather than goal-ended; inventiveness, protective feelings toward others and a capacity to respond emotionally as well as rationally.” Reading such paeans to female ”niceness” makes one reach for Joyce Carol Oates and her brilliant snarl, ”How can I live my life without committing an act with a giant scissors?””
Robert, I don’t know what someone believes unless they tell me, but if they’re a “Christian”, then I know more or less what they’re supposed to believe. See, there’s a book that lays it out… If “most feminists are pretty aware of how misogynistic most religion is”, then they should freaking get rid of it.
Rob Knop (#6):
Bully for them!
Is that what we do? My impression has generally been that the goal of the Bible-thumping atheist is almost, but not quite, exactly the opposite. Instead of dictating what Christians “must believe”, we observe that nowadays, you can call yourself a Christian when the only parts of the Bible you consider “inspired” are a few verses in John and the book of Ecclesiastes.
Quoting Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, p. 249):
Or Hector Avalos (The End of Biblical Studies, p. 20):
It is easy to tie all the negative to religion, but the average atheist family is equally unequal as religious families. Along that vein, the percentage atheists among scientists is shockingly high, but does that lead to a more balanced gender division among them. Not really.
but the average atheist family is equally unequal as religious families
This is not my anecdotal experience. Also, it doesn’t make any sense. Atheists tend to be, statistically speaking, more liberal and more educated. Which would make them “more equal”, not less.
the percentage atheists among scientists is shockingly high, but does that lead to a more balanced gender division among them. Not really.
That makes no sense whatsoever. It would make sense IF there were as many women who have graduated from college with science degrees as there are men, and the “old boys club” wasn’t letting those women become scientists. But that’s not the case. There haven’t been as many women getting science degrees in the first place. That’s not the fault of scientists–for the reasoning behind that I think we have to look at the society females have grown up in, which encourages little girls to become wives and mothers, interested more in make-up and how to do their hair than in studying the sciences.
Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe I’ve just missed the fact that little girls have been encouraged in the sciences all these years, and 50% of the college graduates in the sciences really are women, and they keep trying to be scientists but the male scientists just won’t let them/sarcasm.
Via Language Log, of all places, I found an article called “Feminism’s Fatal Flaw” at vertical thought (“vertical” being one of Huckabee’s odder buzzwords, being contrasted with the “horizontal logic of the freethinker”). I would have liked to dissect it, but I was starting to throw up in my mouth, so I’ll have to leave that job to somebody else while I go scrub my browser cache and watch a math video to restore my brain.
Link to Language Log on “vertical” thought.
Cotton Mather, (1663-1728) the famous Puritan leader:
“I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same time, there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I: ‘What mean and vile things are the Children of Men, in this mortal state! How much do our natural necessities abase us and place us in some regard, on the level with the very Dogs!”
Major religions consider humankind to be dualistic but quotes like the one above point out the fact that we humans are little different from animals. How much more the female of our species. There are the bodily functions of menstruation and giving birth, with all the fluids involved, but also the powerlessness of men to resist the appeal of and the desire for a women. This all argues against the spiritual nature of man. There is a reminder of our beastly nature and that is woman.
The way that religion chose to deal with this dichotomy is to denigrate woman, projection if you will. That way we don’t have to think of our mortality. If we accept women as equals then we have to accept our mortality and our animal nature as well. Not a good reminder if you are a dualist who believes we are essentially spiritual.
Similarly, Pinker’s writing on profanity has much to say that is pertinent to this point. However, Richard Beck goes further by saying:
“Specifically, as I’ve written about before, psychologists have amassed evidence that the body is a mortality reminder. That is, the body, with its waste, smells, ooziness, and vulnerability, makes our animalness salient. We find this degrading and fearful. Man wants to be an angel. Profanity cuts through those illusions. This is the source of the offense.
To profane something is to strip off the spiritual overlay, to make something sacred base and common. Profanity desacralizes human beings. For example, to call a woman a f****** b**** is to take someone made in the Imago Dei, to be encountered as a mysterium tremendum, and reduce her to a barnyard animal in heat. This is the offense of profanity, its desacralizing maneuver.”
I think that anything that reminds us of our mortality is denegrated by religion including, as we all know, evolution.
off topic, but girls (boys too) can be interested in makeup AND science. And it’s important that what has been is not always right.
I slogan springs to mind …
“A feminist needs religion like a fish needs a fish hook”.
Well, not so much “not let them” as often unconsciously fail to promote them beyond the college graduate level. There is research showing that it’s often harder for a woman to get a grant than for an equally capable man. Luckily there are no sacred texts of science that stand in the way of fixing this.
Where’s Emma Goldman when you need her?
I’m a feminist and an atheist, and as far as my personal beliefs go I am convinced that all religions I know of (including Wicca) are props for the patriarchy. Unfortunately, the article linked to is badly written, scantily researched, and obnoxious in tone.
As is jeffk, in no. 3:
“These are people who will piss and moan for hours over a stupid billboard but don’t seem to notice the misogyny that’s institutionalized in the religion they choose to practice. I’d like to consider myself a feminist, but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.”
Thanks for lumping all we feminists into one big trough of “pissers and moaners”, jeffk. Maybe the feminists you’re speaking to aren’t really that interested in taking your point about religion because they’re fed up with being told how to do things by a man – one who even presumes that it is his place to tell women how they should do feminism.
There are interesting points to be made about the inherently patriarchal nature of religion, but this article seems to me to make very few of them. Instead, it falls back on speculation: “we know little of Amna, Mohammad’s mother, let alone his actual birth, but we can assume the good prophet didn’t sully himself in vaginal juices. Like the rest of the prophets, Mohammad probably materialized from the heavens.” No he didn’t, as the author would know if she did any research at all. She might at least have taken the trouble to get Mohammad’s mother’s name right: it’s Amina.
Can she really think of so few solid feminist anti-religious arguments that she actually has to make one up? There’s no shortage of proper, serious material.
Well, not so much “not let them” as often unconsciously fail to promote them beyond the college graduate level.
Someone near and dear to me was treated like shit – that is to say, hit on – by male faculty while she was in grad school.
When she refused their advances, she was subsequently ignored and treated like shit. She excelled at her studies but became discouraged by the treatment she received and did not go on to become a doctor.
Great world we live in.
Christian feminist? What a joke.
The whole idea of women fighting to become priests/ministers has been and always will be ludicrous. It’s akin to blacks fighting for their right to be slaves.
Of course there are women who call themselves christian feminists just as I can call myself Marie, Queen of Romania. Doesn’t make it so.
Thank you Colugo, #12.
Richard Harris, #2. Quote: “The religious attitudes against women simply reflect the facts of life in the past, where women were tied up with child rearing, while men mostly were hunting, trading, manufacturing, & farming, & getting concerned over the paternity of their wife’s children, because they didn’t want to be cuckolded.”
Women have never been solely tied up with child rearing. Except for women attached to wealthy men, women have always been labourers responsible for a huge amount of the world’s agricultural tasks, and were put into the factories and mines as soon as such places were available. Even in the recent past in North America, women on farms, for example, could typically spend only the barely necessary amount of time on nursing and child care, which was normally done by any elderly women in the households or older children.
…and Science Goddess, #5. Quote: “We have plenty of worship figurines from the period, showing gravid female statues.”
I wish I could find it, but British Archaeology magazine a few years ago published an interesting alternative interpretation of all those little pregnant ‘goddesses’. Some of these figures are notable for having rope-like decorations, some have remarkable hairstyles and decorative skirts, some are very plain. At least one interpreter thinks some of them may have represented, like coins or tokens, captive or slave women, or simply any woman, who could be traded for goods. And another interpretation suggested they were no more than a form of reminder for a male traveller, of the women at home – like a wallet photo of the wife, or a pornographic image.
I believe it is a failing of older archaeological speculation to place a religious value on every mysterious artifact.
off topic, but girls (boys too) can be interested in makeup AND science.
No doubt. Perhaps, though, not at the same time…
Science Goddess: “the ‘Great Mother’ theology of the Neolithic period…. We have plenty of worship figurines from the period, showing gravid female statues.”
The images I’ve seen of these “worship” figurines, shows faceless, and often extremity-less, spawn carriers with exaggerated sexual features. Not much different from some of today’s porn. Neolithic man said, “Wow, she’s got great child-bearing hips! I must empregnate (oops, I mean WORSHIP) her!” Maybe not, but there’s the same amount of evidence for my take as there is for the “powerful and worshipped Neolithic women” hypothesis.
Other than these stone male-fantasy-object figurines, there is exactly NO evidence of any Neolithic “Great Mother” theology.
I thank Allison Kilkenny for her article. It states exactly why I have been an anti-theist for the past 23 years.
Maybe the feminists you’re speaking to aren’t really that interested in taking your point about religion because they’re fed up with being told how to do things by a man – one who even presumes that it is his place to tell women how they should do feminism.
Is feminism only for women? You could easily reframe any analysis of anything into “hey, how is it YOUR PLACE to tell me what to do?” and “who are you to generalize”? These rhetorical tactics are completely generic and boring and are a distraction from my point. It’s not my place to tell anyone what to do but it certainly is my place to offer opinions about a topic that I’m interested in. And my generalization was not about “all feminists” – and I didn’t imply that it was – but came from specific experiences that I have had in conversations, both online and in person, with a great number of feminists about religion. I stand by my critique, regardless of my sex.
“Death by schnoo schnoo!” (Amazon women in Futurama.)
Bee @ # 28, I didn’t say that women were solely tied up with child rearing to the exclusion of all else. However, in medieval England, it was the men who did the shopping, which in those days required haggling over the price. The point that I was making was simply that there was a de facto division of labour, but I don’t suppose that it was absolute.
Windy, your point is well taken. My point wasn’t to deny that there is sexism among male scientists, or to imply that women who are interested in/encouraged in the sciences have an easy time of it. My point (poorly stated, I suppose) was that in order for the numbers of scientists to be balanced at 50% male/50% female, that the first thing that needs to be accomplished is for the number of males and females interested in science/enrolling in science courses/getting science degrees needs to be balanced. So, I was speaking more about the formative years in a female’s life.
Admittedly, though, even if the majority of science grads were women, we could very well see the numbers of male/female scientists still unbalanced, with a higher proportion of men. But, you are right–at least there are no sacred texts standing in the way of fixing the problem.
Roman Catholic Pat Buchanan:
Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism…The momma bird builds the nest. So it was, so it ever shall be. Ronald Reagan is not responsible for this; God is.
——–Washington Times, Nov. 18, 1983.
Does not the Roman Catholic church wield immense power by its stand against birth control and abortion and skillfully lobby against legislative change? IMO, one cannot be a Catholic and a feminist.
But, then again, many women do not want to be feminists.
“…the synagogin’, the tabernaclin’, the psalmin’, that goes on in this hoose, that’s enough to break the spirits o’ ony young creature.”
———— Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1782-1854), Scottish novelist
jeffk, #31:
By your own say-so, jeffk, it isn’t for you. If you’re not on the bus, not only do you not get to do the back-seat driving; you also don’t get to piss and moan about the style of the driver’s hat.
If you wanted to “be a feminist” you’d be a feminist because of your own convictions. It’s not as if we all have to wear the same damned pink T-shirt and the color just doesn’t look good on you, poor guy.
We don’t need you, hon. We’re all pedaling madly and the bus is lurching merrily on and we’re having parties and swapping places and passing that nice bottle of homebrew around and we don’t miss anyone who Doesn’t Get It. Your “critique” isn’t new, nor is your approach. You’re just another guy who’s walked in to tell us we aren’t doing it right, while not doing it himself at all. Don’t expect a welcome and a swig, much less a cookie.
As to the purported main point of the post: The evident fact that any religion or philosophy has aged into a way to diss women just demonstrates that the patriarchy is basal to religion and, so far, philosophy. I Blame the Patriarchy.
No, no arguing. :-) Wholeheartedly sustained instead, Allison Kilkenny’s essay, without the slightest reservations. Feminism was one of the roads I traveled from Agnostic City to Atheistville.
^_^J.
Apparently Jeffk is an authority of feminism and allowed to criticize the feminism of others, but others aren’t allowed to criticize his feminism. I think Catherine hit the nail on the head.
I’ll also say that a person’s religion is what people make of it, not what a book or anyone else says it is. I’ve never met a christian or member of any other faith that actually completely followed their holy book or dogma.
Apparently Jeffk is an authority of feminism and allowed to criticize the feminism of others, but others aren’t allowed to criticize his feminism.
So far, the only criticism my feminism has gotten is being told I wasn’t “needed” because I’m male. I’m happy to have my feminism criticized, but it simply hasn’t happened yet.
“I’ll also say that a person’s religion is what people make of it, not what a book or anyone else says it is. I’ve never met a christian or member of any other faith that actually completely followed their holy book or dogma.”
Thats pretty much what I was trying to say, only you said it better. I absolutely agree the Bible is misogynistic, but that doesn’t mean that every feminist who self identifies as a chrisian is a hypocrite.
I’ve never met a christian or member of any other faith that actually completely followed their holy book or dogma
I haven’t either. But I’ve met a lot that claim to.
… with one exception my first reading failed to register: the “Mohammad’s mother” bit seems somewhat far-fetched and rather gratuitous, me thinks.
^_^J.
I’m happy to have my feminism criticized, but it simply hasn’t happened yet.
Um, you aren’t a feminist, you already said so. Remember?
“I’d like to consider myself a feminist, but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.”
So you have no feminism to be criticized.
Of course feminists can be religious. Anyone can be religious: Social workers can be religious, serial killers can be religious, politicians can be religious, genocidal dictators can be religious, philanthropists can be religious, scientists can be religious, rapists can religious, anyone. Name a “type” of person, and that type of person can be religious. Being religious precludes nothing, because religion doesn’t correlate to anything.
Religion doesn’t correlate to anything.
Religion doesn’t make you a better person, religion doesn’t make you a worse person. I know people who are perfectly kind and decent and wonderful, despite identifying with religious teachings that are immoral and depraved. All Christians are True Christians, all Muslims are True Muslims, all Buddhists are True Buddhists, because religion is a cypher. Religion has subjective meaning to the individual religious person, religion has social and historical significance because it has been used to justify acts both noble and degraded, but by itself religion means nothing. It doesn’t correlate to anything, and religiosity as a premise has zero predictive power.
Name a “type” of person, and that type of person can be religious.
A dead person ;)
“I’d like to consider myself a feminist, but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.”
I think you’re reading too much into this, as there’s a little hyperbole there, but I will clarify.
I DO consider myself a feminist, but WHEN feminists mix priorities and waste a lot of energy on things that, while may very well be misogynistic pale in comparison to the grand tower of sexism that is religion, the credibility of feminists becomes damaged.
Funny how religious people are just as guilty of picking and choosing their morality as we atheists are. I just like to think we atheist have a more sturdy structure for our morals.
Yep.
1. The worst offenders are the Death cultists. They have reduced the 10 commandments to 8, having thrown out the ones about lying and murdering. Some are down to 7, having thrown out the one about not coveting thy neighbors ass.
2. The Catholic church is second. If anyone actually paid much attention to all the rules and regulations, they would have 15 kids and no sanity left. Instead, the birth rate among US Catholics (the largest sect at 21% of the population) is almost identical to the national average. Catholics are very good at smiling and nodding and doing whatever they think is best for themselves. I don’t know what the priests do but if they tried to enforce the rules and tossed everyone in violation, my guess, somewhere between 1/2 and 90% of the membership would be gone.
Anyone who seriously tried to follow all the Xian rules and regulations in the USA would spend the rest of their life in jail. It is illegal to own slaves, stone disobedient children, have multiple wives, or burn witches and heretics at the stake. At least until the fundies gain complete control.
I DO consider myself a feminist, but WHEN feminists mix priorities and waste a lot of energy on things that, while may very well be misogynistic pale in comparison to the grand tower of sexism that is religion, the credibility of feminists becomes damaged.
That’s assuming that, to use your previous example, billboards of half naked women with impossible body types don’t do more damage to girls and women than religion does. Sure, Christianity is sexist, I would say inherently so, but that inherent sexism is not nearly as in your face as is the idea that a woman must look a certain way in most places.
I live in the San Francisco area and I certainly don’t see religion here are nearly as much of an impediment to women than I see poor body image. In fact, I know women who have died and nearly died because of their poor body image, and yet I know not a single person who has died or nearly died from their religion.
Thank you for actually considering what I was saying rather than telling me to run along because I’m male.
Poor body image is certainly an issue, and damage done by religion is always so hard to assess. In the simplest terms, I see this: objectifying media – which is arguably though I don’t always think sexist – is soundly rejected by feminists, and understandably so. Blatantly sexist religion, on the other hand, is not rejected.
Further, religion injects the specter of irrationality. When you allow that to come into play, now you’re giving up your greatest weapon, because both sides can just squabble over what a non-existent entity thought about women, and even worse, the only piece of “evidence” is on the side of the fundie jackasses.
I think you can educate people to the extent where objectifying images don’t hurt them much. The nature of media is fairly easy to understand. But how do you root out the sexism that comes from peoples’ religious views? Much more difficult, I think. Our entire societal structure is largely based on our Judeo-Christian history, and that’s what needs to be fixed. Women had it a fair amount rougher 100 years ago when there was more religion and no half-naked billboard models.
Tim, #7:
Unless it’s Buddhist violence against Hindus, Muslims or Christians. It might not be Buddhist scripture fueling the violence, but Buddhist self-identity is definitely involved.
But this is true of damn near all the major world religions. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all had noteworthy female missionaries, scholars, leaders, theologians, and even clergy in the early days of their respective faiths. Even Judaism had female judges co-governing the Hebrew people post-Exodus according to scripture.
Once these faiths became “the establishment”, however, they settled into predictable patriarchal patterns, largely based on existing cultural mores.
Because despite how most Westerners view Buddhism, in the East it’s as corrupt and debased as Christianity here. Read up on the sohei of feudal Japan for an example of the Buddhist equivalent of the Knights Templar. We rail against the abuse of children by Catholic priests: among the monks of Tibet, pedophilia was practically institutionalized. You can find these sentiments in Asian literature and film.
My favourite example is the final scene of Akira Kurosawa’s film masterpiece, Rashomon. A merchant, a Buddhist monk and a poor woodcutter have spent the evening listening to a sordid tale of human deception, treachery and selfishness, when they hear a baby cry. In the corner of the temple where they’ve taken shelter, someone has abandoned a child.
The merchant’s first instinct is to steal the cloth the child is wrapped up in, despite the woodcutter protesting it’s all the infant has. The Buddhist monk can only moan at how the world is an evil place. It’s the poor woodcutter who decides to take the child home, despite already having six children of his own.
Sorry for the rambling, I just get irritated when I hear the implication that Buddhism isn’t as bad as other world religions. That only seems to be the case because in the West we only see normative Buddhism, the New-Agey peace-loving Richard Gere version. Not its actual practice in cultures where it’s a centuries-old institution.
nobody who has died from their religion? Jim Jones? The UFO cult? Jehovah’s Witnesses? lots of people die from their religion.
objectifying media – which is arguably though I don’t always think sexist – is soundly rejected by feminists, and understandably so. Blatantly sexist religion, on the other hand, is not rejected.
But religion is not all blatantly sexist. I think that advertising has far more of a hold on the contemporary mind, depending on where you are, than religion and as such is often far more damaging. Because of this I would see someone who, say, goes to seminary, such as my partner does, as not necessarily believing in a bad thing or doing a bad thing, whereas someone who uses resources they control to put up billboards with scantily clad, impossibly thin women on them is doing something that contributes to harming women.
nobody who has died from their religion? Jim Jones? The UFO cult? Jehovah’s Witnesses? lots of people die from their religion.
I was obviously talking about religion within a specific context. Go reread the post again.
But this is true of damn near all the major world religions. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all had noteworthy female missionaries, scholars, leaders, theologians, and even clergy in the early days of their respective faiths. Even Judaism had female judges co-governing the Hebrew people post-Exodus according to scripture.
Unlike the other religions mentioned, Buddhism doesn’t say explicitly in its sacred texts that women are worth less than men and should be treated differently, that I am aware of.
But yes, realistically speaking, Buddhism is used as a tool of oppression of women just as other religions are.
Why do so many freethinkers have such a blind spot around Buddhism? Who do you think orchestrated and perpetrated The Rape of Nanking? Who operated unit 731? Shinto may have been the state religion of Imperial Japan, but the men who actually perpetrated Japanese war crimes were overwhelmingly and unapologetically Buddhist.
As I said upthread, religion correlates to nothing, and has no predictive power. There’s nothing preventing someone from being both fully Buddhist and fully despicable.
The kind of meditative practice and nonviolent philosophy we associate with Buddhism in the West is hardly typical of how Buddhism is practiced in historically Buddhist countries. If you consider that a religion is what a religion does, then Buddhism is primarily about ancestor worship, divination, ritual, and superstition.
If every Christian were Martin Luther King or Hildegard of Bingen, Christianity might seem like a pretty good deal. But they’re not. Likewise, most Buddhists aren’t Daisetz Suzuki or the Dalai Lama.
As I said upthread, religion correlates to nothing, and has no predictive power. There’s nothing preventing someone from being both fully Buddhist and fully despicable.
Yes, the point is that a lot of the really horrible things that are enshrined in the holy documents of other religious documents are not there in Buddhism. This obviously doesn’t make Buddhists any more moral than other religions, it just means that the scriptures are closer to what we would call moral.
Of course you can. People aren’t logical or consistent. Look at Ken Miller – religious and a ‘Darwinist.’
Put on proof.
So, I think we can conclusively prove, given the weight and preponderance of archeological evidence, that Jenny McArthy is a goddess.
How about “fuck off asshole.” Seriously, feminism isn’t by women for women, dickhead.
Anyone who has daughters and wants them to have a equal chance, and are not second-class citizens by virtue of their gender, is expressing some of the fundamental core beliefs of feminism. Another is “you’re not defined by a man” and you can say “no” and expect it to be respected.
Another is “stab AND twist…” But without the context you might not get that…
But, once again, fuck off. I don’t need a douche-bag to tell me I’m not good enough to enjoy her club because of my gender.
Seriously, feminism isn’t by women for women, dickhead.
So now women don’t get to be feminists? That’s great. You are so progressive.
I don’t need a douche-bag to tell me I’m not good enough to enjoy her club because of my gender.
So, saying that a man shouldn’t tell another woman how to do her feminism is telling you that you aren’t good enough to be in “her club.” I don’t see how that follows.
You guys need to be a little less defensive when women criticize you.
Seems like coathangrrr is from the juvenile, “girls rule” or feminism, and Moses is from the “chicks are as equal as everyone else,” school. Delightful.
HP is right about Buddhism as it has historically been conceived and practiced outside of the contemporary West. Also, see Buddhist Thai selling their daughters into prostitution, brothels serving monks, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, Tibetan warlords, Bhutanese slaveholders etc.
In addition, Blavatsky’s garbled Buddhism in the form of Theosophy influenced malign ideologies like Steiner and volkish-Aryan cultism.
*”girls rule” school of feminism….
Also, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “you can be a feminist and a christian without having a lot of arguments with feminists and christians, each of which would win against you in a fair debate.”
It’s difficult. A lot of people call themselves Christians, but really do have very little idea of scripture. I’ve had the experience of educating a weekly-church going friends on the finer points of biblical teaching.
Also, religion does determine a lot of things. Maybe not globally, but at least in American culture, weekly church goers are more likely to vote Republican, be pro-life, and, for all I know, to have teen-pregancies. To say that religion does not have predictive power is demonstrably wrong.
Seems like coathangrrr is from the juvenile, “girls rule” or feminism
Yes, saying that men shouldn’t define what feminism is and criticizing them when they try to tell a woman what is and is not feminist can obviously be described as “juvenile.” Because I am clearly the one who started swearing because someone had the audacity to say that maybe some guy shouldn’t be telling his female friends what is worse for them, religion or billboards that reinforce negative body image. I am also clearly juvenile for using such erudite terms as ‘”girls rules’ school of feminism” to describe other peoples views.
And this would be why some of us are annoyed. You’re explicitly inputting gender into the convo. There is the implication that women can perhaps tell men how to do their feminism. And of course women can probably tell each other how to do their feminism. Man-on-man feminism coaching? The jury’s still out.
This may not be what you mean. You may mean that nobody should criticize anybody’s feminism at all. But that’s the basest form of relativism, and so we assume that you’re at least rational enough to know that criticism *is* a good thing that should be allowed.
So: who can (constructively, we’ll say) criticize feminism? Do the genders of the participants matter at all? If so, why? If not, what’s wrong with jeffk’s criticism?
Religion is an exercise in contradiction anyway, specially if you’re trying to be ‘progressive’ and reconciling the more barbaric aspects of it to the modern world. Feminism is just one more thing on the list of things you have to work around/with.
Science Goddess said:
“It was only after men learned that they participated in conception that they wrested power from the women.”
How many weeks do you figure that took?
Remember, paleolithic people lived with nature in the sense that their survival depended on understanding what goes on. Children in some present-day “primitive” cultures build blinds in trees and observe animals to lean about them. The observation that other animals mate seasonally, and also reproduce seasonally, should really have told them something, don’t you think?
Just because they made stone tools and made huts with mastodon ribs doesn’t mean they were idiots. I wouldn’t want to get into a conflict with them in their own environment.
If not, what’s wrong with jeffk’s criticism?
Several things, actually:
1) He’s playing a form of concern troll in which he acts to create a monolith that is “feminists.” C’mon, feminists are doing all sorts of shit, including challenging religious belief itself as well as attempting to change religious institutions from within. (What’s his name at the NYTimes is great at this sort of thing, as is Anne Applebaum….it’s the “why aren’t feminist doing what I think they should, well except those feminists over there who I’m excluding from the definition of feminist so I can maintain this illusion” tactic)
2) In making the universalizing claim against which he’s setting himself up (might we call it a “strawfeminist”) he takes what is often a strategic difference (which issue should we address?) and says that anyone who chooses to tackle other forms of misogyny than he thinks they should all feminists “look ridiculous.”
3) Gender does matter. It’s one thing to analyze a situation and another to live it. I’m never going to have the experience of menstruation or childbirth (and you have no idea how happy that makes me). However, as a gay man, I really do get the issue of the relationship between body image and being the subject of the “patriarchal gaze.” (I don’t go to a gym, so I barely exist.) To be told which issues to focus on by someone who doesn’t live your life can be really annoying.
Sorry about the double post, but to the the people ganging up on JeffK about his remark – would you have said the same thing if the username had been female or if a woman had said what he did. I don’t think his remark was an attempt to tell anyone what to do. I think what he was trying to say (and correct me if I’m wrong here jeff) was basically that, when a person supports or endorses a particular identity, particularly when non-supporters assume it to be homogeneous, one idiot in the fold makes the whole lot look bad and makes everyone else’s position seem less defensible. That does not mean that everyone else must instantly give up their position on the subject or that the individual isn’t entitled to say and do as they like, but it’s just irritating.
Thank you, MAJeff. ^_^
It’s unfortunately difficult to get into a discussion of feminism without a few people commenting from the (accurately, if childishly, named) “girls rule” camp. Frex, Catherine Martell, #25. Coathangrrr is a tougher nut to crack – I suspect that when she seems to be doing this it’s merely by accident, or perhaps merely a touch of unconscious thinking. Overall her comments seem to make her plenty rational.
Jeffk did seem to generalize inappropriately and cast criticism against all feminists, at least implicitly. That’s not a good thing.
While true, it is still the case that feminism can’t be a banner just for women, nor can it (imo) hold itself together coherently while perpetuating gender differences. Most men may never feel quite the same way women do under the ‘patriarchal gaze’, but I’d wager it’s pretty similar to how men feel under the “how much do you make?” gaze. Men and women probably have a lot more to share than some people realize. ^_^ Realizing that is precisely one goal of feminism already!
In essence, any real intimation that women get to do things in the movement that men aren’t allowed to is a Bad Thing. It’s precisely the opposite of what feminism is meant to do, in my mind.
HP:Of course feminists can be religious. Anyone can be religious: < ...>Name a “type” of person, and that type of person can be religious. Being religious precludes nothing, because religion doesn’t correlate to anything.
Sure, you can be Christian and claim to be a feminist. Then again I can eat meat and yet still claim to be a vegetarian. That doesn’t make it so.
Your objection appears to be merely semantic, you just bleach the intended meaning from the words “religious” and “Feminist”, and then announce that there is no obstacle to being both. This is quite clear when you say that anyone can be religious because being religious precludes nothing. Clearly “religious” in this context means something quite specific and precludes rather a lot. (Like being an independent atheist for example.) It is intended to mean, in this context, “an adherent to the Christian, or some other religion”. Likewise “Feminist” is accepted as meaning “someone who opposes gender-based social, political or other inequity”. Between those two characterizations there is a conflict. You simply cannot be someone who actually opposes inequality and simultaneously participates in the promotion of it.
If you think the original language was sloppy, that’s one thing. Manipulating that to suggest that the underlying point is actually invalid is something else again.
It was only after men learned that they participated in conception that they wrested power from the women.
This is one of those “just so” stories that’s accepted without any evidence. It’s at least as “commonsensical” that the male role was known, but paternity wasn’t a big issue. In some extant cultures a man’s heir is his sister’s son, for instance. A matrifocal/matrilinear (not necessarily matriarchal) society wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about who donated the sperm in that context.
Alexandra said:
The thing is, being a vegetarian means that you don’t eat meat. Very simple to define. What does it mean to say that someone is a Christian? That’s a bit harder.
I am reminded of the astrologers who objected to Randi telling them that what they believed was ridiculous. Long story short, his view of what they believed was not theirs. IOW, his portrayal of their beliefs was a straw-man. (not, BTW, to give any credibility to astrologers, but logic is logic)
My Dad used to say he never met a “true” liberal, by which he meant that nobody believes the entire menu of “liberal” talking points. Similarly, just because somebody doesn’t believe each and every part of a very broad and (some say) self-contradictory set of beliefs, is no reason to say they are not Christians.
Last Xmas I watched something on History channel about missing books from the Bible. Originally Adam was created along side a woman named Lilith. Both were made at the same time from the same materials. Lilith wanted to be treated equally and would not submit to Adam. So God punished her by murdering 100 of her children every day.
To me that sums up the Xian attitude towards women: women are inherantly unequal and only for reproduction.
“I’ve royally pissed off some feminists by telling them that being religious is basically incompatible with feminism”
I’ve royally pissed off some feminists merely be declining to agree with them when they insisted that women are superior to men.
Really, ever since feminism achieved its reasonable goals back in the mid-70’s, it’s degenerated into a pack of mystics and misanthropes, while left the”movement” in droves and got on with their lives.
-jcr
Do’h! Hit the post button too soon.. That last sentence should say:
while reasonable people left the”movement” in droves and got on with their lives.
-jcr
Oh, the things that pass for feminism these days.
I’ll preface my comment by admitting I’m a practicing Soto Zen Buddhist (I’ve found it very compatible with my atheism, it’s like an atheism club with additional mental health benefits), but I would like to share a bit of verbal lore on the role of women in Buddhism. One of my old teachers liked to comment that, while the Buddha is traditionally held to have voiced a lot of hesitancy about ordaining women, adding a ridiculous amount of additional rules, canonical accounts of his life also reveal that he broke every gender-based rule in his own life time (ex. violating the rule that nuns could never summon monks through regularly obeying summons by his aunt, etc.).
At least food for thought – while old Japanese monks like to laugh over traditional tales that even these gender rules aren’t necessarily upheld, you typically have to go to a university with a secular religious studies dept. to find out that women were clergy in the first centuries of Christianity.
On an unrelated note, I couldn’t help but notice the vegetarian comments as I scrolled down to add this…. as a strict vegan of many years, I’m constantly amazed by the number of persons I encounter that self-identify as vegetarian but eat all manner of animal (often simply abstaining from red meat). This primarily annoys me as it makes it more difficult for the honest ones among us to communicate our real needs to waitstaff at restaurants. “Vegetarians” take note: if you eat chicken, you have ceased to be a vegetarian!
Hey John C. – So unreasonable goals include not being discriminated against in the job market, having your labor valued at the same wage as men’s, being able to bring charges against a rapist or an abusive partner without being blamed for your victimization? Is it unreasonable for families to want to decide for themselves if one parent stays home with the kids (most can’t economically)? That we don’t want to be verbally assaulted when we try to access our legal right to contraception and abortion? If you think we should be resting on our reasonable 70s achievements, you, sir, are a demented fuckwit. Get rid of the god-botherers and misogynists in the men’s hut, then we’ll talk.
Feminism has gone in a range of different directions in modern times, and in many ways is no longer a single, coherent movement.
Historically, feminism has had close ties with elements of progressive Christianity as well as freethought/atheism. As a movement in the mid-late nineteenth/early twentieth century, it was nourished by an attitude towards women generated by changes in evangelical theology in the nineteenth century that presented women as a positive moral force (‘better’ in a moral sense, than men). Thus Christian attitudes (and to an extent, Christian organisations) were closely involved with political enfranchisement at a certain point.
Religion, often alternative religion, was also involved in some of the feminist movement in the 1970s/80s. This relationship was more fraught and complicated, but there was a fairly significant group within feminist movements that were either very liberal Christians or adopted some alternative/new religion (mother goddess etc.). I know some female priests (Anglican, of course) who, while barely Christian in the orthodox sense, identify their feminism strongly with some form of spirituality, and attempt (I don’t think these attempts are intellectually satisfying or successful, but they do try) to remove the patriarchy from Christianity.
I am not saying that religion is good – I do not think that – but it should not be ignored that feminism – the suffrage movement, even more recent ‘waves’ of feminism – have been tied up with religion in complex ways. And restricting ‘feminist’ to a subset of ‘atheist’ narrows down the definition of feminist to a very exclusive club that excludes a large number of historical feminists.
Of course, Christianity is patriarchal, but few people can claim to be entirely free of ideological contradiction. My point is that ‘feminism’ is a complex set of movements with a wide variety of ideological vectors. So anyone who talks about it needs to be specific as to what they mean when they use the term – whenever I see it used these days it seems to be narrowly applied in service of some other, more specific, ideological force.
I think the advent of Christine Hoff Summers style pretend/backlash feminists have merely clouded the issue, and fostered ongoing confusion over the feminist label. There is not only productive feminist scholarship since the 70s, but sound, empirical work, as well. As a psychologist, I frequently recommend (and have previously assigned to classes) Carol Tavris’s The Mismeasure of Women. Tavris is a social psychologist who built her reputation as a critic of pseudoscience in clinical psychology; The Mismeasure of Women focuses on the difficulties researchers of multiple disciplines have had in publishing null findings of gender difference in leading research journals (and the low bar for publication that isolated findings of sex difference receive by journals such as Nature and Science). As an ape in a lineage fairly bereft of the sexual dimorphism some of our biological cousins exhibit, I think the burden of proof for difference lies among those claiming it, whether we’re discussing race or sex.
On another note, now that I’ve caught up reading all the comments here I’d like to throw out an additional point relevant to the discussion of social attitudes and religion. One of the worst abuses that fundamentalists commit is an illogical and, often, absurd adherence to claims that what they currently believe is uniformly and historically true of their faith. For a variety of reasons, Catholicism of today is unlike the Catholicism of the 12th century, both at the level of theology and that of the subjective experience of each believer. Why are we, a group of primarily atheists, falling into this fiction and pretending it is so? The current, living experience of those lesbian feminist Methodist ministers out there is unlikely the sexist faith of her grandparents. What rule says it must be? Who cares that it isn’t? More power to her. As has already been commented, all faiths and faith identities are profoundly shaped by the culture they inhabit – I’m sure we’re not all so intellectually rigid as to refuse the possibility of interpreting or exploring the relative contributions of culture and religion as separate entities? PZ has frequently commented on the fluffy nature of theology – is it really worth discussing, or even a big deal, if someone wants to read these texts from a gender equal, science-accepting, or queer positive perspective?
I just get irritated when I hear the implication that Buddhism isn’t as bad as other world religions
Equal to Islam? That’s about as extreme and unwarranted as the view that Buddhism is perfectly peaceful.
#7…The Tripitaka, which is about as close to a Buddhist Bible as you can get, specifies in great detail the different vows for monks (something like 220) and nuns (300+). It’s all there, in the texts.
Interesting. One comment choses female ablution for their insult, while another taunt employs the “woman-as-little-girl” jibe.
not to join in the general disagreement on what does or does not constitute feminism, but I have to agree with “tjh” #82.
The church I grew up in was pretty much equal opportunity for men and women from the beginning. The church was founded in the late 20s, the first female minister was ordained in the 30s. And when women weren’t the ministers, they were usually pretty much leaders of the various groups and institutions – from the Finance Committees on down. That’s a fair amount of power being held by the women of the congregation.
As I understand it – many of the supporters of suffrage for women in Canada were influential members of this church and its predecessors, including Nellie McClung.
Equality has pretty much always been the rule of thumb in that church (Canada’s largest protestant denomination, BTW).
While I am no longer a member, and am an atheist, I have many friends who are still a part of that church and if you were to suggest that any church tenet was inherently anti-feminist, well…you’d have quite an argument on your hands.
Needless to say, this was not a church that practiced literalism in any form – in fact, I was in my 20s before I realized that there were people who did not equate creationism with theistic evolution…
That’s been my experience as well, from conversations with my sister. Basically, they stipulate that their male and female deity figures are morally equal…and then graft traditional gender roles onto their various “aspects.” That stipulation is an improvement, but less of one than a lot of them think.
Just out of curiosity, is it possession of a Y-chromosome that makes a person incompetent to notice and point out that two sets of beliefs to which a person subscribes have tenets that cannot be reconciled with each other? Or is it a hormonal thing?
would you have said the same thing if the username had been female or if a woman had said what he did. I don’t think his remark was an attempt to tell anyone what to do.
He outright said that he has told women that their religion is incompatible with being feminist, meaning that they must choose one or the other. That sounds to me like he is telling women what to do, i.e. choose whether they want to be feminist or religious. And the whether or not he is a he or a she is completely apropos to the issue, because he has never been, I assume, a woman who is being told that she can’t believe what she believes and be feminist. So, no I wouldn’t have said the same thing. But, to say that that makes me some sort of hypocrite is absurd, because to exclude gender from a discussion that revolves around gender is absurd.
There is the implication that women can perhaps tell men how to do their feminism.
And who else will? How the hell will men know what oppression women are experiencing without the point of view of women?
Just out of curiosity, is it possession of a Y-chromosome that makes a person incompetent to notice and point out that two sets of beliefs to which a person subscribes have tenets that cannot be reconciled with each other? Or is it a hormonal thing?
You’ve missed the point. The original comment that started this was by someone complaining that he would tell he feminist friends that religion is misogynist and he was pissed because they were more worried about billboards. I have not seen a single comment that is criticizing PZ for stating the fact that religion is inherently sexist. Even though he is not a woman.
I see where you’re coming from with this. But personally I think it’s very easy to reinterpret most religious frameworks in a feminist light. It all depends on how much you’re willing to compromise with the 100% absolute truth of your holy text (especially the case with “the big three”). If it’s not an issue for you to take your religion’s ideas in malleable, allegorical or metaphorical forms, then it’s quite easy to come to a feminist understanding of those ideas.
Even then of course, that only helps your own belief system. It doesn’t change the structure of your religious community, which I personally believe is the far greater issue. For myself…I could reconcile my Christian beliefs with my feminist beliefs, but it was so much fucking work that I gave up on it. Why force it when clearly most other Christians are going to be constantly questioning my interpretation? It wasn’t worth it. And thus I went Neo-Pagan.
Also, on the subject of Wicca (one of many pro-woman pagan/neo-pagan religions) not only can it be seen as feminist, but Dianic Wicca is totally separatist, and the Reclaiming tradition is synonymous with eco-feminism. The note about traditional gender role’s functioning within Wicca is true to a point though, there should be even more feminist questioning and analysis within some Wiccan trad’s. Because embracing a true Divine Feminine, and embracing what your biased and patriarchal society sold you as feminine but elevating those attributes to Divine doesn’t advance anything. Still, I think most Neo-Pagan traditions are totally compatible, and in many cases inseparable from, feminism.
Just out of curiosity, WTF does that even mean?
There’s a lot of fallacious thinking here. The founder of the Women’s Studies program at UCLA is a preacher’s daughter and a firm believer. Being such does not negate the fact that she is a feminist. One can believe a particular religious dogma without favoring any particular policy of the church it’s attached to.
Just out of curiosity, is it possession of a Y-chromosome that makes a person incompetent to notice and point out that two sets of beliefs to which a person subscribes have tenets that cannot be reconciled with each other?
It’s stupidity and ignorance that makes someone talk about “sets of beliefs” having “tenets”, and to imagine that people cannot be both feminist and religious, especially when the world is full of such people.
http://julieclawson.com/2007/10/17/what-is-a-christian-feminist/
Well, Julie, here in this thread you can find the other side of this foolishness.
I am not saying that religion is good – I do not think that – but it should not be ignored that feminism – the suffrage movement, even more recent ‘waves’ of feminism – have been tied up with religion in complex ways. And restricting ‘feminist’ to a subset of ‘atheist’ narrows down the definition of feminist to a very exclusive club that excludes a large number of historical feminists.
That won’t stop various morons from making such counterfactual claims.
I’ve royally pissed off some feminists merely be declining to agree with them when they insisted that women are superior to men.
I’ve royally pissed off some _______ merely be declining to agree with them when they insisted that men are superior to women.
How shall I fill in the blank? Men? Assholes? People? What sort of jackass would fill it in with “masculinist”?
“Sure, you can be Christian and claim to be a feminist. Then again I can eat meat and yet still claim to be a vegetarian. That doesn’t make it so.”
The thing is, being a vegetarian means that you don’t eat meat. Very simple to define. What does it mean to say that someone is a Christian? That’s a bit harder.
Indeed, anyone who offers the quoted argument is far more irrational than a religious feminist. Quite remarkable is the hypocrisy of people complaining about religious feminists holding irreconcilable views while themselves practicing the most transparent intellectual dishonesty. Do these morons who claim that people cannot be both religious and feminist have any idea what “feminist” means? Would they be so foolish as to claim that there were no Christian abolitionists?
objectifying media – which is arguably though I don’t always think sexist – is soundly rejected by feminists, and understandably so. Blatantly sexist religion, on the other hand, is not rejected.
What a fucking moron. Feminists can reject all blatant sexism while, for instance, still believing in the resurrection of Christ.
I DO consider myself a feminist, but WHEN feminists mix priorities and waste a lot of energy on things that, while may very well be misogynistic pale in comparison to the grand tower of sexism that is religion, the credibility of feminists becomes damaged.
Hey, I thought the claim was that they aren’t feminists at all?
What the hell does it mean to say that the “credibility” of feminists becomes damaged? If anyone’s credibility is damaged, it’s someone who offers such idiotic well-poisoning arguments.
I absolutely agree the Bible is misogynistic, but that doesn’t mean that every feminist who self identifies as a chrisian is a hypocrite.
It does to some morons.
One thing I regularly do with xtians is to refer to god as “she”. This really pisses them off. As if a being that (they think) created the universe has gender!
SG
There seems to be so much fracturing within the feminist movement itself that its pretty hard to make a solid definition of it’s relation to religion. Just reading it’s wikipedia entry makes my head spin. Maybe these discussions can only be done in direct person-to-person communication so that arguments can be kept specific. “Feminism” itself is not specific enough.
I think maybe the point is that you cannot be a feminist and religious, unless you are willing to accept a religion made up by feminists so that they could be religious.
No, that isn’t enough. There are cultures in the Amazon rainforest (at least) that didn’t know till the 2nd half of the 20th century that “father” isn’t a social construct but a biological reality. (Perhaps the Yanomami? I forgot.) I also remember reading about a culture in New Guinea where the connection had been made, but misinterpreted: it was thought, in an interesting reversal of the medieval European idea, that the semen is merely nourishment for the growing baby — so that men had regular sex with their pregnant wives and continued for years after the child’s birth to rub the child in their semen. None of these cultures was anywhere near matriarchal.
In a tropical rainforest there are no mating seasons to observe…
Or you just read the Bible. Female deacons are mentioned in the New Testament.
Do you realize you just said you picked the religion you liked best? That you believe just because you want to believe, no matter if what you believe is actually true?
No, that isn’t enough. There are cultures in the Amazon rainforest (at least) that didn’t know till the 2nd half of the 20th century that “father” isn’t a social construct but a biological reality. (Perhaps the Yanomami? I forgot.) I also remember reading about a culture in New Guinea where the connection had been made, but misinterpreted: it was thought, in an interesting reversal of the medieval European idea, that the semen is merely nourishment for the growing baby — so that men had regular sex with their pregnant wives and continued for years after the child’s birth to rub the child in their semen. None of these cultures was anywhere near matriarchal.
In a tropical rainforest there are no mating seasons to observe…
Or you just read the Bible. Female deacons are mentioned in the New Testament.
Do you realize you just said you picked the religion you liked best? That you believe just because you want to believe, no matter if what you believe is actually true?
Azkyroth:
The idea that the problem with jeffk’s pronouncement is his sex was entirely fabricated by jeffk. He’s “not on the bus” because in his first post he said, “I’d like to consider myself a feminist but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.” Note the conditional and the “but.” As I said: if he were a feminist, he’d consider himself a feminist, and this would be entirely a different quarrel rather than a “you-should” fingershaking “credibility” sort-out.
There was also the “you-should” note about getting pissed off about billboards. If I yell “Ouch” when the cat bites me, that isn’t evidence that I don’t support leash laws for dogs. Frankly, it’s more likely to work and less likely to irritate if a bystander offers a bandaid for the cat bite and takes up the religion issue when it’s actually germane or timely — precisely because it’s a separate issue.
Feminism never has been all unified and generally agreed-upon. It’s silly to expect it to be; we’re many and varied and quite a few of us value our streak of pure cussedness because it keep us going. It’s been my experience that people who say “You can’t be a feminist if…” mostly stir up lots of useless timewasting. Hell, I’m too old and experienced to reject the alliance of even the “empowerful” pink-sequin-thong-and-poledancing-lesson kids. I figure they’ll find stuff out sooner or later, and if they don’t, not my problem. I don’t get to say what shape feminism will take and I am a feminist. Unconditionally. Because of my own convictions.
Actually, in answer to someone else’s question: This same sort of argument has been happening for decades (that I know of personally) between women who call themselves feminists from the git-go, and between feminists and INaFB* women. (*I’m Not a Feminist BUT…)
My own feminism, meshing neatly with a growing and joyful rationalism, is most of what got me free of the Roman Catholic church and any other religion simultaneously. Part of it was one of those insights involving their own dictum, “By their fruits you shall know them.” I am impatient with support of any kind for an institution that oppressive, in spite of people like Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy.
But telling people they can’t be feminists and be religious? Wastes my energy and theirs.
Oh. Chances are that any feminist has heard the phrase “You can’t” de haut en bas so often it trips a reflex all on its own, all else aside. Not sure how much credit you should take, philosophically, for pissing them off. You sure you weren’t more-like trolling them?
Sorry, but this is bullshit. You can argue that religion isn’t true, but that’s orthogonal to whether or not it’s inherently incompatible with feminism.
A lot of interpretations of many religions *are* incompatible with feminism–and those interpretations tend to be the most dominant, unfortunately.
But Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. all contain strong feminist traditions. Do they also contain patriarchal strands? Yep, and those strands tend to be more powerful than the feminist strands. That doesn’t mean the feminist strands don’t exist, or are somehow less “authentic” than the patriarchal stands, or that a Christian/Jew/Whatever can’t embrace the feminist interpretation rather than the patriarchal interpretation. Religion is not a monolith when it comes to feminism, any more than it is when it comes to slavery or torture or whatever.
So no, there’s no reason to think that any religion is inherently incompatible with feminism. But there is reason to point out that religion is often used to shore up patriarchy and other oppressive systems. If you ask me, that’s enough of a reason to be wary of religion right there.
Oh, and also? It’s a mistake to evaluate the feminism-content of Asian religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism the way you evaluate the content of Abrahamic religions. Why? Because the Abrahamic religions are all centered around a single basic text that’s more authoritative than anything else.
Whereas in the major Asian religions, there are usually multiple texts and multiple traditions and multiple religious leaders, all of whom are authoritative. So you can’t figure out the religion’s stance on feminism (or any other social issue) by simply looking it up in a book. There’s more than one source to consider.
#33:
However, in medieval England, it was the men who did the shopping, which in those days required haggling over the price.
That is simply not the case. Medieval Englishwomen did both shopping and selling (and yes, haggling). Go and read, say, Jeremy Goldberg’s work (and many other historians) on medieval women’s work and economic activities.
Seriously abeja, discrimination in the sciences is endemic. When I was attending CMU in the late 80s I knew more than one woman in the science departments who was counseled by her male faculty advisor that “physics/chemistry/insert field here really isn’t for girls.” I also know a woman scientist who received a HUGE settlement from the University of Colorado because she was systematically denied credit on papers on which she had done the research by male cowokers who TOLD her that was why they wouldn’t put her on. She received enough to set her up for life, but has been permanently blacklisted from working in science.
Science Goddess – that’s simply not true for all Christians. The church I grew up in routinely referred to God as female. Catholicism does so frequently as well.
I will admit that in evangelical/fundy churches the likelihood of it happening is slim to none, but to paint all christians with the fundy brush is akin to painting all athiests with the “athiest because of despair” brush.
It’s unfortunately difficult to get into a discussion of feminism without a few people commenting from the (accurately, if childishly, named) “girls rule” camp. Frex, Catherine Martell, #25.
I didn’t say that men couldn’t be feminists, or that – excuse me? – “girls rule”. I pointed out that possibly female feminists find being told what to think and how to arrange their priorities by a man rather tiresome.
I welcome feminist men. I don’t welcome silly, obnoxious and uninformed generalisations about feminism, like the ones jeffk made in his original comment. In my experience, men who are actually feminists do not dismiss female feminists as “pissers and moaners”. Another defining aspect of their behaviour is that they are willing and even interested to listen to women’s opinions, rather than stepping straight up to tell women how they’ve got it all wrong.
Serafina Pekkala makes an excellent point in no. 108. For instance, the original article uses the Laws of Manu to point out sexism in Hinduism. I agree that the Laws of Manu are profoundly offensive – in terms of caste as well as sexism – but many Hindus reject the Laws of Manu altogether. Others see them as a reactionary commentary rather than a holy book. There is even a school of thought that says these laws were lost to Hinduism until a British scholar translated and revived them in the 18th century.
Personally, I still find Hinduism incompatible with feminism for many reasons: gender stereotyping of gods, the humiliation of Sita, the treatment of widows and sati would be a few. But this article has not bothered to research any of this properly, which is why it comes across as slapdash.
Re Colugo’s post #12, perhaps Colugo could explain how come Hannibal had to get permission in crossing Gaul to reach Rome
from the local districts’ councils, which were all female ? Oh, yes ! Wimmin only !
Gallic society was very different before the advent of the extraordinarily patriarchal Romans. And the presence of hundreds of gold mines in Gaul was a stroke of luck for old Julie, what a lucky boy!
Intriguingly, in Gallic society men were the peacocks, women only wore drab colours, principally grey or white, but really serious jewelry. Who could have guessed ‘chic’ to be so ancient ?
Re Colugo’s post #12, perhaps Colugo could explain how come Hannibal had to get permission in crossing Gaul to reach Rome
from the local districts’ councils, which were all female ? Oh, yes ! Wimmin only !
Gallic society was very different before the advent of the extraordinarily patriarchal Romans. And the presence of hundreds of gold mines in Gaul was a stroke of luck for old Julie, what a lucky boy!
Intriguingly, in Gallic society men were the peacocks, women only wore drab colours, principally grey or white, but really serious jewelry. Who could have guessed ‘chic’ to be so ancient ?
I’d like to consider myself a feminist, but that kind of shit destroys their credibility.
Do you think there’s no such thing as a feminist atheist? Well, I’m one. Now you can officially consider feminism credible enough not to seek excuses not to embrace.
Care to substantiate this? I grew up in a Catholic family and find this highly implausible (unless you’re referring to the writings of some off-the-reservation liberal theologians on whom Ratzi hasn’t yet gotten around to stomping).
The article seems to equate being Christian with being fundamentalist, evangelical and/or the religious right. Somebody forgot to tell them that a Christian is somebody who believes in Jesus Christ, which fits a very wide spectrum. The rest of the baggage got added on by a bunch of humans.
I see no reason why someone couldn’t be feminist and believe in Christ. I see no reason why somebody couldn’t believe in Christ yet reject all the baggage that got added on to his name.
The article seems to equate being Christian with being fundamentalist, evangelical and/or the religious right. Somebody forgot to tell them that a Christian is somebody who believes in Jesus Christ, which fits a very wide spectrum. The rest of the baggage got added on by a bunch of humans.
All the “divinity” and stuff was added on by a bunch of humans.
Hey Rugosa,
Do you really think that you win an argument by trying to put words in my mouth? If I oppose nutcases like MacKinnon and Dworkin, does that make me a misogynist?
-jcr
The article is massively disengenuous…
It uses wording commonly found in tracts by bigots to get women to hate other religions. It’s also extraordiarily slapdash…
and in the last, there are *no* phrases from the New Testement represented in that rant.
I’m willing to bet $1000 of savings I don’t have, that the linked article is sourced from places that would be recognized here as bigoted, to put it lightly…
MAJeff,
Unless it was something Jesus was quoted as saying or doing, it’s add on. *L* And even those are occasionally up for interpretation.
That’s just my opinion on the add on. Others will disagree on every front they can think of.
Irregardless of what I personally do believe, it seemed to me that the article smacked of one more attempt to tell women what they should and shouldn’t believe. Personally I’m fine with whatever woman do or don’t want to believe, it’s their choice no matter what the article says about it.
Well, you’re the one who said:
If you assert, contrary to fact, that the modern feminist movement is primarily or even significantly concerned with those positions of Dworkin and MacKinnon’s that you dislike, and that “feminism achieved its reasonable goals back in the mid-70’s”, and you can’t be bothered to make the minimal effort to learn that those assertions are contrary to fact… yeah, that kinda does make you a misogynist.
“If I oppose nutcases like MacKinnon and Dworkin, does that make me a misogynist?”
Since, chances are, you know absolutely nothing about either of those women, except that someone once told you that Dworkin said “all men are rapists”, or some other bald faced lie, then yes, it does.
“Oh, and also? It’s a mistake to evaluate the feminism-content of Asian religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism the way you evaluate the content of Abrahamic religions. Why? Because the Abrahamic religions are all centered around a single basic text that’s more authoritative than anything else.
Whereas in the major Asian religions, there are usually multiple texts and multiple traditions and multiple religious leaders, all of whom are authoritative. So you can’t figure out the religion’s stance on feminism (or any other social issue) by simply looking it up in a book. There’s more than one source to consider. ”
This is just way too base a reading of the Judeo-Christian faiths, which have tons of other books as well. The Talmud is extremely important to Jews, and in addition to other forms of interpretation has lead to many and varied traditions, clearly there isn’t just one “text”. The same can be said for Christianity, heck even the difference between a Catholic bible and an NRSV or KJV leads to differences, not to mention the work of various generations of theologians who developed Christianity outside of the bible.
A true Divine Feminine is as complicated as women are, and goddess takes many forms.
Basically the comparison I was making was similar to accepting women as women, versus accepting women only as you’ve already defined them.
We are various and do not conform to predetermined gender prototypes. Goddess is the same, as far as I can tell.