Patriarchy – Page 15 – Feminism and Religion

Reflections on Marriage by Ivy Helman

study My partner and I are getting married in a little over a month. She, a lawyer, and I, a professor, live in the Czech Republic. Technically, we aren’t getting married because the Czech Republic doesn’t have marriage equality. Our relationship will not be recognized in the U.S. For that, we need to be married in a state or nation that has marriage equality. Germany might soon. Other options would be a number of EU countries or the United States, but that doesn’t affect our status in the Czech Republic. Finally, our marriage will also not be recognized by some in Jewish circles as well since the ketubah, the Jewish marriage document which possesses legal status in Jewish courts, is between two women.

There is nothing legal about our Jewish wedding except one could argue its Jewishness. So, the day after our wedding our relationship will have the same recognition as it had the day before and the day before that. This would not be the case if we were a heterosexual couple. It reminds me of the countless commitment ceremonies that took place before marriage equality in the United States. They were not prohibited (like the marriages that slaves had because slaves weren’t considered people under the law or eligible to enter into legal contracts while in bondage (see pages 301-302). Yet, similar to the “contubernal relationships” of slaves performed by their masters or other slaves (page 302), they weren’t particularly legal either. Despite the ceremony, there was no change in status of the couple within society. Yet, recognition was and still is an important component of both struggles for rights. In fact, according to Darlene Goring in “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States,” (345-346), the process of gaining legal recognition was very similar for both ex-slaves and the marriage equality community in the United States. Continue reading “Reflections on Marriage by Ivy Helman”

Making America What Again? Reflections for the 4th of July by Sara Frykenberg

I find myself asking (again), when the religious right, evangelicals, and Christian fundamentalists hear Trump say, “Make America Great Again,” do they really hear him saying, “Make America Christian Again?” How can the really hear him saying that in light of what this man has actually said and actually done? The answer: because of the same mythical purity that erases the violence, slaughter, and atrocity attached to this “Christian nation’s” founding.

Sara Frykenberg My mother sometimes likes to watch the movie “Independence Day,” on the 4^th of July—you know, the one where Will Smith, the gutsy and heroic Marine pilot, Jeff Goldblum, scientist, and Bill Pulman, president, save the Earth from extraterrestrial invasion? It’s an action film loaded with implicit myth and exceptionalism, extolling “mankind’s” common humanness in the face of annihilating, “alien” difference. The heroes ultimately unify the globe with fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants “American” ingenuity, luck, and bravery. Continue reading “Making America What Again? Reflections for the 4th of July by Sara Frykenberg”

Is This How Patriarchy Began? by Carol P Christ

In my widely read blog and academic essay offering a new definition of patriarchy, I argued that patriarchy is a system of male dominance that arose at the intersection of the control of female sexuality, private property, and war. In it, bracketed the question of how patriarchy began. Today I want to share some thoughts provoked by a short paragraph in Harald Haarmann’s ground-breaking Roots of Ancient Greek Civilization. Haarmann briefly mentions (but does not discuss) the hypothesis that patriarchy arose among the steppe pastoralists as a result of conflicts over grazing lands. As these conflicts became increasingly violent, patriarchal warriors assumed clan leadership in order to protect animal herds, grazing lands, and the women and children of the clan. Continue reading “Is This How Patriarchy Began? by Carol P Christ”

Internal Strife – External Conflict by Oxana Poberejnaia

As Po said in “Kung Fu Panda”: “I’m gonna get myself some Inner Peace… Inner piece of what?”

This basically lays out a path of spiritual work for most of us. We aim for peace, yet somehow we feel that we must do something in order to achieve it – rather than just be peaceful.

Another joke that captures this paradox perfectly is:

“My son started doing meditation. Well, that’s something. At least he’s not sitting around doing nothing.”

Sitting around doing nothing seems to be the worst sin in our society. Buddhism is quite radical in this regard. The path to Enlightenment leads through sitting around and doing nothing. Anything and everything else that we do to keep ourselves busy is determined by society, hence impermanent, hence not the truth. Continue reading “Internal Strife – External Conflict by Oxana Poberejnaia”

Resisting Shame and Choosing to Live through the Loving Eye by Stephanie N. Arel

This week, I finished reading The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye, a text I had not encountered in my studies of feminism (in literary theory, psychology, philosophy, or theology) until now. In some ways, I wish I would have read it sooner. In other ways, I am grateful for this more recent rendezvous. From my current position and perspective – theoretical and personal – I was, I think, more able to hear the core message Frye conveys than I would have been years ago. I have less to protect now, and my ego is less fragile. In the text, she names the mechanisms around which Western – and patriarchal – cultures are founded. Her argument is fluent and cogent, even as it threatens the stability this culture offers. Our lives are embedded in it, even if our personal ethics point to alternative, feminist ways of living. Frye pushes her readers to live alternatively, so that we can recognize the times that we conspire/feed into/comply with patriarchal messages and clean the residue of servitude off of our skin.

For the purposes of this post, I engage two opposing concepts Frye presents in the text: the arrogant eye and the loving eye. Located in the chapter entitled “In and out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love,” Frye investigates how men in phallocentric culture exploit and enslave women. The opposing, contradictory eyes of arrogance and love directly relate to the experience of shame which effectively serves to subjugate women in patriarchal culture.

Shame functions within what I call a logic of exposure. Shame relates intimately to the concept of being seen. Affectively, shame results from our interest/excitement being partially truncated. For instance, we are drawn to someone (real or imagined); we are interested in their response to us, and somehow something interferes with the desire to connect. Contact is cut off, and interest/excitement partially halted. Shame ensues. We experience that someone (real or imagined) seeing us as other, different, foreign, maligned, wrong, or worthless. We are seen wrongly. This misperception alleviates joy and relates to the gaze of the arrogant eye under which (as the default gaze of phallocentric culture) we often find ourselves seeking approval.

Continue reading “Resisting Shame and Choosing to Live through the Loving Eye by Stephanie N. Arel”

Sirens, Thunderstorms, and Bowling: The Divine on this Mother’s Day by Ivy Helman

untitled Let’s see if the following course of events makes sense. A few Wednesdays ago, I was thinking about possible topics for this post considering it would be Mother’s Day. In the midst of thought, the warning sirens in Prague began. They were only being tested but, nontheless, I immediately thought of tornados. You see tornados, as awful and devastating as they are, make me think of thunderstorms and lightning. I love a good thunderstorm, the louder the better.

A Wisconsin childhood supplies plenty of thunderstorms. I cannot tell you the number of times as I was growing up that I stood outside watching the sky turn into that distinctive greenish-purple and smelling the storm on the breeze. Nor could I count the umpteen times we gathered in the basement as the tornado sirens blared and the radio advised its listeners in no uncertain terms to seek shelter. Nor could I recall how many times I sat with my mom during more recent summers watching the storms come in or the lightning blaze across the sky like a spider’s web. We’ve been lucky. Never once did a tornado hit our neighborhood although a house or two has been hit by lightning. Continue reading “Sirens, Thunderstorms, and Bowling: The Divine on this Mother’s Day by Ivy Helman”

My Turn: A Femifesto by Marcia Mount Shoop

It’s coming up on a year now that pretty much everything changed in my family’s life. My over twenty years of married life, up until last year around this time, our lives had been built around my husband’s job. John’s work as a coach in the NFL and Division I collegiate football had moved us all over the country—coast to coast and in between.

MMS Headshot 2015 This time last year our move was for me to take a job. No more football. And a move not for football meant massive shifts in the daily life of our family.

I cannot count the number of times since I took this new job that people have said to me, “Finally, it’s your turn!” Continue reading “My Turn: A Femifesto by Marcia Mount Shoop”

Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel

In my last post, Trump’s Misogyny – A Case for the Contempt-Oriented Personality, I wrote about disgust, claiming that media diagnosticians failed to identify disgust- contempt as part of Donald Trump’s psychological profile. At the end of the piece, I said that the statement “Make America Great Again” was misogynistic. I maintain this claim but now want to consider disgust a little more closely – particularly when it constitutes self-disgust underlying or complicit in misogyny. Confronting and ameliorating self-disgust provides an entrance into combating misogyny.

Self-disgust interferes with self-love. As a result, self-disgust impedes connection and empathy in human relationships. Self-disgust also attenuates intimacy –self and other directed. Self- disgust manifests in multiple ways – in withdrawal, refusal to engage, self and other directed violence, addictions (including those to negative affect), etc.: the list is a long one. Self-disgust which manifests as hubris motivates the projection of disgust onto others, so that the other becomes the source of disgust; the abject unwanted object present in the self – rejected and discarded –becomes transported, launched to rest on the back of another.

The simple way to describe this mechanism emerges in self-help literature that suggests that the thing that one dislikes most in others is that which one cannot tolerate in oneself. This negatively perceived part of self can also be conceptualized in terms of Carl Jung’s notion of the shadow – the unknown dark side of the personality which we all carry but whose integration into conscious life defines its denseness, or the weight of its impact. The more conscious we are of our shadow, the more we are able to identify that what we recognize as a deficiency in another is actually what we understand as a personal inferiority. Continue reading “Encountering and Countering Self-Disgust by Stephanie N. Arel”

The Burden of Shame by Oxana Poberejnaia

I know a man who says to his daughter: “You should be ashamed of yourself” when he wants to imbue some good habits in her. One example would be not putting her dirty socks in the laundry basket. It might seem trivial, but I don’t think it is. I feel that shame is a toxic element of our personalities. I believe shame results in negative consequences, such as sabotaging oneself and health problems.

Many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, perceive guilt as a trigger for moral development. The rational is, when we feel bad about something we had done, we will change our behaviour for better. The question is: how bad exactly are we supposed to feel, both in terms of quality and quantity of that feeling? Continue reading “The Burden of Shame by Oxana Poberejnaia”

On Difference by Ivy Helman.

There is no correlation between difference and danger. Yet, differences are regularly considered threatening. In fact, much of Western society’s patriarchal energy is spent categorizing, controlling, managing and fighting difference. Difference is so ingrained within the psyche that most differences are understood to be antithetical, perhaps even unbridgeable, opposites. Good/bad, black/white, rich/poor, women/men and human/animal are just a few examples. To further amplify this distinction, patriarchy considers one aspect of the difference more valuable than the other.

Feminism seeks to end this value-laden, polarization of difference. In its earliest days, many feminists were convinced that advocating sameness was the best solution. Abolition, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the right to vote were parts of this liberal agenda. While sameness worked in some respects especially in terms of ending slavery and gaining the right to vote, the sameness platform also, albeit perhaps unknowingly and considerably to a lesser degree, bought into patriarchal views of the dangers of difference. For example, ending slavery did not end racism nor did gaining the right to vote mean that women were equipped or allowed to think independently of their husbands. Other first-wave feminists who advocated women as pure and moral persons and elevated motherhood fared little better playing into the patriarchal ideals of biological determinism and essentialism. Continue reading “On Difference by Ivy Helman.”