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acroyearPooflingers Anonymous: You Gotta be F#%$ing Kidding Me:
Given the obsession many religious groups seem to have with perceived modesty standards in clothing, it's no surprise that there would be a website dedicated to just that.
[...summary including the site's referencing of John Calvin as a source...]
Oh no! Give somebody a bit of personal freedom and they might run with it! The horror! The basic gist of the paragraph is that if women are allowed to frolic about bare-headed, they might want to uncover over things... which might lead to some horrible things like bare ankles and *gasp* cleavage.
The justification the author uses for wanting to keep women covered about the head is - surprise - a Bible verse:1 Corinthians 11: 5 & 6That's right, ladies: if you want your tresses displayed to the world, you might as well shave your head. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to one day find an article extolling the virtues of the burqa on this site, given the fawning comments on the head covering post.
"But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered."
My main issue here is that, like most such sites, they don't seem to ever extend the same restrictions or scrutiny toward the men. Nowhere on the site will you find an article explaining why it's immodest and will lead to horrid social decline if men shave their faces or wear blended cloth, though both are found in the same book used to justify the head-covering rule for women. Sadly, it seems that fundamentalist religions in particular are all about telling the women what they can and cannot do whilst giving the men a mostly free pass. Also sad and frightening is that this sort of approach also seems to highly correlate with the thinking that a woman's mode of dress is somehow responsible for the actions of the men around her. These are often the sorts of men who, upon hearing that a woman has been sexually assaulted, will ask first what she was wearing. Fuck that. How about "what the hell was he thinking and what can we do about it?"
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no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 01:44 pm (UTC)That's the main problem with patrilineality. Because a woman can more easily pass off another man's child as her husband's than a man can pass off another woman's child as his wife's, patrilineal cultures have to exert more sexual control over a woman's behavior in order to assure that the proper children are counted in the proper lineage than a matrilineal culture has to exert over a man's. Sometimes, because cultures tend to elaborate on biological necessities, these restraints become extreme.
(Not to be one-sided here, matrilineality has its problems too. Among other things, it doesn't lead to as much in-law exchange and thus relationship between clans. A man in a matrilineal culture doesn't need to change his clan to his wife's clan (and his children's clan) as a woman in a patriliny does, because he doesn't need to be as involved with his own biological kids' lives as she does. Thus, there isn't as much exchange between clans, nor as many members of a clan who come from outside and have a strong personal interest in maintaining relationships and peace between clans. Not that kids don't need father figures, but because of the time and energy inherent in pregnancy and nursing, kids need their own biological mother to be around and heavily involved in their lives for at least the first couple of years. And by then, there are usually more kids who need her. These are things that her children's father's sister can't really do for them. But a man in a matrilineal culture can father children, and then go off and be "father" figure to his sister's sons, secure in the knowledge that his children's mother's brother or her uncles will take care of them.)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 01:54 pm (UTC)I don't care what it was 500 or 2000 (or 2800) years ago. It no longer matters.
There's no reason at all to be citing 500 and 2000 year old works in order to justify your own close-minded bigotry and misogyny in today's world.
And neither birth control nor DNA testing have anything to do with this. This is all about pure attitude of control and it is over ALL aspects of women's lives, not just sexual domination (though yes that's a major part).
Citing the Bible's most sexist writings is bullshit justification for a bullshit attitude and rather than defend it as historical baggage (and that the Bible is irrelevant for that baggage), we should EXCLUSIVELY be open in condemning it in today's world and the future.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 06:14 pm (UTC)But it's NOT primarily a religious problem - religions just take the cultural norms and give heavenly sanction to them. Correcting religious attitudes doesn't do much, if the culture underneath is still acting on the same assumptions and norms. Religious beliefs tend to get co-opted to argue for cultural norms, rather than the other way around.
Take Islam - originally, revolutionary in the way it treated women as equals, able to act and own property in their own right - but little by little, adapted itself to the male-dominated cultures around it until now, some sects of Islam in some areas are hideously repressive and oppressive to women. (Not all. And I would point out that in the most devout Muslim family I know, everyone expects the daughter to go to college as well as the son, the women do not cover their head except to pray, and the wife is a more assertive personality than the husband, and tells him what to do far more often than vice versa. Given the appropriate cultural context, Islam can be a feminist's religion, or an oppressive one.)
Christianity likewise - you had Jesus praising Mary Magdalene as one of the wisest and best of his disciples (NOT as a lover or a wife - acceptable "female" roles - but as a particularly adept student and gifted teacher and recruiter of other believers), and accepting women as disciples and apostles on a relatively equal basis, and then you had Paul (or pseudo-Paul), within a generation, arguing for hair coverings, because that was what the underlying culture expected. You can much more easily predict a person's attitude towards gender roles by the area of the country where they live, and the cultural background they have, than by whether they're a Christian or not.
And it takes human cultures a while to get this sort of thing out of our system. This is a pretty basic aspect of our culture, dug in over thousands of years of taking-it-for-granted and indeed, some actual biological need (given that women DID need to devote their lives to reproduction, through most of human history, for the species to survive, and given that a solid cultural structure WAS necessary to ensure survival of as many kids as possible - once you start down the patrilineal path, it's kind of inevitable that you'll get here). The attitudes are solidly ingrained by society - hence the fact that even in high school, the words "slut" and "stud" are used to describe the same behavior when indulged in by females and males, respectively. It's not something we can really change in a minute, by asserting statements of fact - but it IS something that the real changes in sexuality and childbirth brought about by modern technology, combined with generational changes in attitude, WILL take care of over time, whether we want it to or not (and for the record, I'm ALL in favor of change there). It helps that our ("our" in the sense of Western European-descended folks) culture has always had elements of bilineality, is now mostly bilineal and only nominally patrilineal, and indeed may be moving towards matriliny in some areas.
(Birth control and DNA testing are the counters to the biological needs these systems address, however imperfectly - they let you help ensure that a father knows his own kids without exerting sexual control over women. That's why I brought them up.)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 06:37 pm (UTC)That alone invalidates all of your claims. Yes, I know damn well that in the f'ing desert, you wear something on your head or you'll die from sunstroke, you don't eat pork 'cause you have no idea how to cook it, and a whole host of other artifacts that went from common-sense survival to "laws dictated by God".
But all of that is besides the point. The point is TODAY there are people using RELIGION to justify their oppression. The religion is not the origin, but it IS THE EXCUSE, and THAT HAS TO STOP.
And all of your historical baggage justifications ARE NO EXCUSE for this.
Either openly condemn and ridicule it [this justification of oppression and irrational stupidity to fellow men through religious quotation], or you're just encouraging it.
I'm damn serious on that.
It stops only when we tell people it won't continue.
If you don't stop it, then their interpretation of these religious texts WILL DICTATE YOUR LAWS as much they already have in so much of this country.
Just going "it'll change in time" does not make it change. It never has.
Slavery wasn't ended because people went "it'll change in time".
Women's suffrage didn't happen because people went "it'll change in time".
It changes when some of us get so sick of the bullshit that we point it out and say NO MORE.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 08:53 pm (UTC)I'm pointing out that the roots go deeper than religion, and that you HAVE to root it out of the culture before you root it out of the religion. If you root it out of the culture, the religion changes over time, because religions wish to attract adherents from the culture in which they exist.
Which is why my friend Fatima, as Muslim a lady as any in Saudi Arabia, has a job, wears no headscarf unless in actual prayer, and is sending her daughter to college and ensuring she gets a driver's license. In an American context, the Muslim interpretation of women's rights is sharply different from the Muslim interpretation of women's rights in a Saudi context. It's the culture, not the religion.
And oppressive behavior stops when we change the cultural conditions, not just because we say so. Slavery ended when the cultural condition that supported it - the Southern economy - was radically altered by the Civil War (and even then, it continued in implicit form for a century or so afterwards, because we did not change the culture enough). Abolitionist verbal and written protest over years did far less good than the practical efforts of the Underground Railroad, John Brown's provocative actions, or finally the actual war.
Women's suffrage came about when cultural changes (started by the Puritans, among others) affected women's position within the family and women's autonomy outside it.
Speaking out against oppressive attitudes is fine, but it doesn't change nearly as many minds as altering the cultural conditions that support them. To a large extent, they have been altered, which is why you are citing a fringe group rather than a mainstream group, as you would have been 200 years ago. What is needful is to protect women's reproductive rights (a necessary part of allowing women full independence as people, as a person who is treated like an incubating machine and expected to bear, bear, and bear until she dies of it is not a full human being). What is needful is to educate girls, and ensure that women have power and influence in the workplace. What is needful is to ensure that even girls raised in oppressive religious or cultural conditions know that they have certain legal rights which the secular government will enforce on their behalf. When these things are done, women's rights follow like a river whose bed has been redirected.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 03:01 am (UTC)However the attitude of society is changing. Over time more and more people are seeing the bullshit, lies, hubris and predation of religious organizations and are turning away from it. This is panicking the wingnuts to no end because they're losing their flocks. More and more people are not following in their parents religious footsteps a they have in the past. Less asses in the pews means less money, less power and fewer choirboys to molest.
It'll change in time. It's just slow.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 03:05 am (UTC)I stand by my claims for abolition and suffrage. Without SOMEBODY pointing out how bad slavery was, it might not have actually happened.
Without SOMEBODY actually suggesting and re-suggesting and re-suggesting OVER AND OVER again the idea of suffrage, it never would have happened.
We can't JUST "give it time". It won't happen in silence, because in silence, they will only listen to themselves forever because there's nothing else to listen to.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-27 05:04 pm (UTC)p.s. if you need to shave your cleavage, I'm a little scared....
no subject
Date: 2009-01-28 02:52 am (UTC)