As a living sacrifice
A wives-submit type explained to Kathryn Joyce.
“Man is ultimately responsible, when he stands up before God in heaven, for how he ran and managed his family. We women are responsible for how we were as helpmeets. We’re not supposed to be wearing the pants to the elbows, like a lot of women do. We’re equally intelligent and capable of doing the things theat men do, but that doesn’t mean we have to or that we should.” This is a common rejoinder of biblical womanhood advocates…they acknowledge women’s equal capacity, but they suggest that women lay their abilities aside with their pride as a living sacrifice fit for their Savior. [Quiverfull p 71]
But why? That’s what I want to know. Why a sacrifice? What for, what is the reason, what is the point?
Why would their “Savior” want such a sacrifice?
It’s an incredibly primitive idea, frankly. “Lay aside” good useful things as a “sacrifice” for a hidden god. Why? To mollify it so that it doesn’t eat you? No, Jesus is supposed to be better than that, but if he wants women to stifle their own abilities as a “living sacrifice” (what a horrible notion) then he’s not better than that.
And why is it only women who are supposed to lay aside their abilities? Because it’s in the bible. Yes but why is it in the bible? Oh we’re not allowed to ask that.
It’s tragic when people so totally lose their grip on the real and the human and waste their only lives for the sake of an old story.
And what about the idea espoued in the Bible of using your talents and/or not hiding your light under a bushel basket? Perhaps it only applies to men.
I don’t mind when other people waste their lives.
That fits with my ideas about freedom, I can spend my life doing things that others find wasteful (and I do) and others can do things that I find wasteful.
I care more about them insisting that I must follow their example and waste my life their way.
Its also sad that ‘its in the bible’ is a good enough reason for anything and questioning further is not allowed. That’s not my definition of reason, no matter what professional theologians or philosophers say.
OT perhaps, but stream of consciousness leads me to: There was an article posted this week, here or on freethoughtblogs, where a fundagelical said of another cult: (I paraphrase) “that is a leap of faith that doesn’t make sense”. My reaction was: once you’ve made the initial leap of faith you’ve already left reason and sense behind.
Once you’ve divided by zero, you can’t trust anything else you get, no matter what you do next. Multiplying by zero does not fix it and nothing else you get is trustworthy. If a certain result turns out to be true, it doesn’t make your derivation technique valid- it makes your result true by coincidence.
Oh come, now, Ophelia, You know why! Why? Just because!
Over on normblog there’s a great paragraph by Hitchens on the mindset of totalitarian leaders. It’s extraordinary how appropriate it is to the subject at hand:
“A full participant in your own oppression” is an excellent way of describing Bachmann’s philosophy.
Brought across from the taqiyya thread:
It’s actually a bit beyond that, Ophelia. There are a lot of submissive women out there (sexually, of course), such that I’m sure that they never have to pay to have their desire satisfied. This is less true of kinky expression in the opposite direction, so much so that I suspect it has a biological origin.
This behaviour really is all about the sex, except that the ‘submissive but not kinky’ women who want it are using the Bible as a basis, rather than people who wrote about it intelligently and thoughtfully and who understood the impulse.
Who knew, the Bible as bad Gor novel…
There’s a line from Austin Dacey of which I’m fond:
Similarly (well, not really, but…), it is not that religious women are submissive because God commands it, but rather that God commands it so that women will be submissive.
Buford – but they’re not just wasting their (own) lives, and they’re also not doing it because they choose to. That’s why there’s all this enforcement and repetition. They think it’s mandated. And they spend a fuckofa lot of time and energy telling other people it’s mandated, and of course there are their children – lots of them, because of quiverfull. Plus they’re political. So it’s really not just a matter of whatever floats your boat.
That is a great (and apt) quotation, Chris.
Speaking of Austin Dacey – he has an excellent book in the pipeline. Watch for it.
I’m not sure about you skepticlawyer, but my own experience with kinky people (of which I am one), men and women, suggests that the degree to which the submission is “all about the sex” varies from individual to individual. For some, that’s completely accurate. For others, sex takes a secondary role, and in some cases doesn’t enter into the equation at all, except as a “well I’m submitting in almost every other way, sure, I’ll submit in bed too” attitude. For some, it really is just about the service and the giving up of power to someone else.
I agree with the rest of your point though.
Chris:
Re #4: “A full participant in your own oppression” is a good summation of the role the tyrants invite the subject to play, but it only tells part of the story.
The art of people management as practiced by tyrants is very similar to, and draws upon, the techniques of livestock management and animal husbandry. (The late Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua, used to refer to the whole country as “my farm.”)
The art of skilful livestock management is to give the animals a limited range of choices, with the easiest for them being the one you wish them to make. So a steer has the choice of remaining with the mob or turning on the stockman. (In the latter case, the steer will almost certainly win.) Then, it can follow the mob out of the larger paddock into the (smaller) yard, or make a break for it on its own. And so on, till it is up the ramp and loaded on the truck.
Similarly, Gaddafi’s troops always had the choice of shooting the protestors, or turning on Gaddafi. The latter, until recently was always the hardest choice. But it has become progressively easier, and lately, the easiest of all. Each man had his own internal choice-making system acting as his own internal policeman.
Much of the Bible is a manual instructions for our own internal police: how to set up; how to maintain; what to do in this or that eventuality.
Someone once remarked that if you want to know how oriental despots were addressed in ancient times, read how God is addressed in the Bible.
The point about wasting your talents is a good one.
Ahem: “bad Gor novel” is redundant.
I think the relevant quotation is (Virginia Wolfe’s?) that women have for centuries been mirrors with the delightful quality of reflecting men at twice natural size. Trained not to argue, not to outshine, compete nor out-earn but to be the at-hom support system and launch pad–unless of course they are poor or there’s a war, in which case they are expected to pitch in cheerfully.
This strikes me as a riff on Nietzsche’s “we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving”.
Because, because, because, because, because
Because of the wonderful things he does!
Sing it with me!
Anyways, reading through these female-submission ideologues has been a trip to Oz. The most interesting thing I’ve seen so far is one post on “Ladies Against Feminism” in which the author said that abortion is “a treasonous shredding of the image of God” (this is probably not an exact quote, but it is close). I must agree with Ophelia: it really is tragic when someone feels they must justify what they do, and stop doing what they can’t justify, entirely on the grounds of ancient literature. And though I notice the female-submission bloggers like to emphasize that the biblical prescriptions do not allow men to abuse women, the stance toward female submission seems to foster abuse and give it leeway where it otherwise would not be tolerated, as Kathryn Joyce’s “Biblical Battered Wife Syndrome” article points out. Even the rhetoric of these same bloggers has disturbing implications, as we see in a section Ophelia rather charitably did not quote:
It’s things like this that make me downright repulsed by christianity. The excuses about how true christianity prohibits abuse ring rather hollow when morality as such is directly tied to voluntarily being tortured. The Father (male authority) arranged the torture Christ (the model of female submission towards men in their writings*) for some ill-defined end which the Father could have easily avoided in the first place. How could that ever lead to abuse?
* This is my perception, but of course it varies when the Church is the Bride of Christ. I guess whoever is subordinate is deemed female in any given situation.
the good jesus : http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/neighbour.html
I wonder about the roots of this. And I’m not sure it has much to do with religion
Have you ever come to the end of a particularly hard day, with all the difficult decisions pressing in on you – whether at home or at work, and wondered if life might be easier if the power to make decisions was simply taken out of your hands entirely? Simply submit to someone else’s will – let them wrestle with your dilemmas. They might not act in your best interests, but you’re tired, you’re fed up, and you’re not quite sure you’re capable of acting in your own best interests anyway. I know there are days when it would seem tempting to me, even if there might be many more when the whole idea would repel me.
The tragedy, of course, is that when this becomes an ideology – worse still one backed up by claims that it is the will of an omnipotent being with a strong vengeful streak, it is bound to affect those who have not ‘chosen’ it at all – and would not want to. I would hate to be the daughter of a mother who had chosen to believe in this ‘quiverfull’ nonsense.
See that’s the problem. Sure, there are always times when one would like to dump all responsibilities on someone else – but not at the price of doing so permanently.
This whole issue reminds me of the story of the ‘fall from grace’ in Genesis. If God wanted Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, why place it slap bang in the middle of the garden and point it out only to say, ‘don’t do it’? Likewise, if women are supposedly ‘made’ to be submissive to their husbands, why do we have a capacity to be so much more? It is totally nonsensical.