Lost Liberation & the Failure of Feminism
Once upon a time, until two weeks ago, to be more precise, I used to believe that men were from Mars and women from Venus ... or at least that most men and women were. The fact that I didn't really fit the Martian stereotype - I have three pink shirts, I talk a lot, I can't read a map, I get lost, and then, oh, most un-male of traits, I actually ask for directions - all these only confirmed my own rather smug sense of specialness.
Once upon a time I also used to believe, having read Anne Moir and David Jessels' Brainsex and Deborah Tannen's Men and Women in Conversation, that there was something inherent, genetic, if you like, in the way that most men and women communicate, that the way anyone can observe things to be was the way things pretty much had to be. 'Male and female' God created us and those books, and the research that seemed to underpin their conclusions, were simply confirming the ways that God had made us. Yes, I knew we are all subject to social conditioning but still some things were deeper than that. As one Disney Executive put it, 'It's just a genetic desire to like pink' (My italics).
It looks like I was wrong. It looks like a lot of people were wrong and the implications of this for what men and, particularly women, think they can do, and what they believe they can become, are profound.
It's Natasha Walters' new book Living Dolls that has exploded these myths for me. In 1997 Natasha Walters wrote The New Feminism. Back then she thought that women had won a lot of important battles: the battle over the objectification of women's bodies, the battle over sexual liberation, for example. She also thought that enough beachheads had been made into issues of unequal pay and unequal opportunity for the future for Western women to look bright and beautiful. She's now woken up and looked at the ads, looked at the men's magazines, looked at Bratz dolls, looked at the increasingly narrow understanding of what it means for a woman to be sexually attractive, looked at the increasingly narrow understanding of what it means to be a successful woman and she's concluded that she was wrong, very wrong.
The women's liberation movement sought to empower women to an understanding and embracing of their sexuality, not empower them to think that the body beautiful is not only slim and heavy-breasted - think Jordan - but increasingly conforms to the airbrushed, artificial norms of the pornography that so many men avail themselves of, and so many women. It's not just the incidence of implants that is increasing but the rise and rise of genital depilation and labioplasty. As studies have shown, far, far too many girls look at Cheryl Cole, at female TV presenters, at WAG culture, and think that their best chance of making a good life is to use their sexual allure. As Lily Allen puts it in The Fear 'forget education'.
The language of empowerment and freedom that first and second wave feminists espoused has been hijacked. Empowerment wasn't meant to mean empowered to become a pole dancer or a glamour model (a technical term for wearing not very much for the benefit of men). Freedom was not intended to mean freedom to have casual, emotionless sex with whomever you wanted.
Walters essentially exposes two sets of lies: a set of lies about what it means to be a woman and, indeed, a man that is projected through marketing and media. And a set of lies, or at best unconscious distortions, about the science that has been purported to underpin commonly held assumptions that men are from Mars, women from Venus, that women's brains are smaller, that women use almost three times as many words in a day as men, and so on.
Now the science is important because if the science does actually support the notion that women are genetically hardwired to prefer pink, then there would be no reason to challenge the stereotypes that are foisted on us day by day. Similarly, if it's true that girls are biologically predisposed to be less good at maths then teachers shouldn't expect really high achievement from girls. And there is a direct and significant relationship between teachers' expectations of pupils and their results. The realities seem to be this:
§ There is no hard evidence that women are biologically predisposed to be less good at maths. And the current trends in results in the US and the UK suggest the opposite.
As Walters puts it:
'In order not to trammel the dreams of the next generation, perhaps it is better not to peddle ideas of what women are naturally suited for before they have shown us what they can actually do.'
§ There is no hard evidence that female babies prefer faces to shapes or that male babies prefer shapes to faces - an assertion that was used to support the notion that females begin life, before any social conditioning, predisposed to be more relational.
§ It is an urban myth that women use three times as many words as men. They use around 16,000 per day on average - but that's only slightly more than men.
§ There is no evidence that women speak more quickly than men. The evidence we have suggests the opposite - men use about two percent more words per day.
And I could go on, and Walters does, briskly and firmly. So, why, we might well ask, have we been fed so much material that is false? The answer is this: the studies that support gender stereotyping have tended to be promoted by mainstream media and publishers, whilst those that don't have been given very little oxygen.
Now, of course, we all observe certain general differences in behaviour between men and women but it is dangerous, and I use the word advisedly, to conclude that those differences are the way things have to be. They may just as easily be determined by social factors. Indeed, research has shown that when women and men are aware of what they are being assessed for - e.g. empathy - then they tend to live up to the expectations set for them. When they are unaware what they are being tested for, then the differences are very small. Similarly, in one study, men and women were split into two groups to assess mathematical ability. One group was told that in prior tests women had done just as well as the men, the other group weren't told anything about performance. The women who were told that women performed as well as men did in fact perform as well as the men. The women who weren't told anything performed less well. In other words, they performed in line with the accepted cultural expectation that women are less good at maths - and they did so unconsciously.
Similarly, some studies suggest that 'feminine intuition' may not actually be a skill that women develop but rather a skill developed by people who are the subordinate in a relationship. If I have less power, if I am more vulnerable then I 'need' to be more sensitive, better able to read other people's signals.
In sum, there is no hard evidence to support the received wisdom that a wide range of behaviours that we associate with particular genders are actually biologically predetermined. The implication of this is that we need to look very hard indeed at how we reinforce stereotypes that diminish the potential of the boys and girls and the men and women around us.
You may not think this is relevant in the church but ask yourself this: when a girl between the age of 5 and 12 comes up to you in the coffee lounge after the service, what are most adults, whether male or female, likely to say to them after a general greeting and inquiry as to how they are? Let me tell you, because I've watched myself, and I've watched scores of people talk to my daughter and I've asked lots of adults. The answer almost always relates to something she's wearing or some aspect of her appearance. 'That's a pretty top.' Or, 'I like the way you've done your hair.' Well, in an appearance-obsessed world, it is important to affirm a girl's beauty but if the first comments that most of our young girls receive from virtually every Christian adult they meet is about their appearance, what message are they getting? Answer: exactly the same one they get from the world - what matters is what you wear and what you look like. How conformed to the world we may be. We need some new questions.
Walters isn't a Christian, as far as the book reveals, and there are assumptions about relationships that few Christians would agree with, but she's looking for the truth about how we are made. And she is not content that women, or men, should be imprisoned, enslaved, diminished, corroded by bogus science, sulphuric stereotypes and vacuous appeals to 'choice and freedom'. Nor should we be.
Read this book.
In nine years writing this column (this is my last one) I don't think I've ever said that before. But it could just be my male, testosteromoronic, command and control, domineering, want-to-change-the-system, genetic hardwiring finally breaking out ...
The shalom of Jesus to you all.
Mark Greene
Comments
refreshing to hear agrown up take on this complex issue. Having studied and worked in science and IT I have always been accepted and respected by my male colleagues, but I have been shocked over the last few years to see how evangelical men ignore me. I don't want to make a battle out of it. I would hope that one of the benefits of the changes in society is that we can accept that while most women like pink, there are a lot of us who don't, and not to try to lump everyone together as one after we have just spent a lifteime trying to work out who we are anyway when we don't fit the normal pattern. We need more women too writing with rationality but also empathy who can win respect on all sides in the debate. Having had to struggle with this so much recently, the more I can make sense of the pattern at my old church of the senior lay roles (i.e. the wardens) being one a man and one a woman, and all our fellowship groups having one male and one female leader. That's to say a team approach that spreads througout the church (and I presume influenced by your illustrious founder since the church I refer to is just a few streets away...). Lots more to say and better ways of putting it but that is all for now...
Presentation in the media tends to be polarised. Newspapers have to be sold, and extreme views make better headlines. In the name of "balance" the opposite extreme view is then represented as well."It's not quite like that" requires more explanation than a sound bite. What I find as another spin-off from the subject is the idea that if you don't fit the gender stereotype, then you are probably gay, but that's OK. It's not, it's just another box that you can be allocated to. It's harder work for people to deal with fuzzy reality than with a set of pre-labelled boxes. Good parenting is a tremendous help. My parents raised a girl and 2 boys as 3 equal children. Whover wanted to play with Meccano or help make cakes got to do so. The shock then comes when you encounter others who had stereotypes ingrained from an early age.
John Eldredge and Stasi Eldredge have written interesting Christian books looking at a Man's soul and a Woman's soul. I am sure these would add more to this discussion. "Wild at Heart" and "Captivating" are the titles of the books.
At a 'Flourish' Bible weekend conference in my Church recently our speaker Chick Yuill said in his opening remarks that if anyone was still unconvinced about women in church leadership they only needed to look at the co-hosts of the event, both of whom are female church leaders, one Methodist,one Anglican. It was just a passing comment, but coming, unprompted, from an acclaimed male speaker it noticeably freed up the whole event. Those who say overtly that they doubt the leadership of women in Church are now few but there is a lingering social conditioning about gender that blights our communal witness, and it was that cancer which was addressed in Chick's simple statement. I don't think it a coincidence that this year was our most united and nourishing conference yet.
Mark, I couldn't agree more that we need to look critically at how we reinforce stereotypes (both within and outside the church), that diminish the potential of the boys and girls, and the men and women, who are around us. I think the implications and prejudices associated with some of these issues are critical to matters of justice. One obvious example would be the burgeoning trade of sex slavery, which predominantly involves women and children being seen and used as sex objects. Dr. Katherine Bushnell, who spent most of her life working to end many injustices that women face, including sex slavery, believed that the only way to convince the church to oppose sex slavery was for men to "understand that a woman is of as much value as a man; and they will not believe this until they see it plainly taught in the Bible." There is a great organisation, "Christians For Biblical Equality" that teach and resource women (& men) to be equally active in the transformation of the world through Christ and expose many abuses and lies said about women, most probably motivated by political power. As a woman who has entered such male-dominated arenas of life such as Law and Theology, I am only too acquainted with the prejudices and stereotypical thinking that still abounds. So there is still much work to be done ....
I became a Christian long after a great deal of the gender debate in 'the Church' had been conducted - and left unresolved. I had worked a career in IBM, a global employer in which equality and diversity (buzz phrases today) were not so much discussed as lived. So I have been appalled by some of the prejudice I have found among Christians, not just between genders but between alumni of competitive education establishments and between members of burgeoning associations within the Church of Christ. My studies in theology, conducted by men and women who have gained my respect, together with my life experience, bring me to an understanding of respect for all people, with gender, sexuality (or indeed whatever Myers-Briggs defined box you find yourself analysed into) assuming an irrelevant status when faced with the reality of living as member of an imperfect humanity, albeit created in the image of God. As a man, wholeheartedly supporting the ministry of women in all circumstances, I am disabled by my own gender in lending the support my Christian faith and education points me towards.
Thankyou thankyou thankyou! It is so good to read this, written by an intelligent, thinking, christian male (sadly, people are still more likely to listen to them than their female counterparts). It is something I feel passionately about and have been studying as a mature Fine Art student but something which the church does not engage with, writing women with such views a rabid feminists. I hope many christian males and females will read Mark's article but also the book and begin to engage with the issues.
Well said, Mark. Fortunately I grew up worshipping at a middle-of-the-road Anglican church where girls were valued the same as the boys, and if you went to the local grammar school, then your intelligence was respected all the more regardless of your gender. But in the C.U and later working for a well known Christian charity, the genders were more clearly treated differently. At work, the men were given leadership roles and encouraged to seek promotion over just as well qualified women. A woman in a suit standing beside a man was regarded as his secretary - and even if she was a colleague of equal standing, was expected to have secretarial skills. At places such as Spring Harvest, it was noticeable that the women given upfront roles only gained them because of who their spouse was. Even though there had never been so many graduate Christian women. On many occasion, the British Church seemed behind the feminist movement. Once I was even spoken about in the third person at a Christian organisation as 'not knowing if she's a boy or a girl'! I was simply being the woman God had made me to be. It is good that Christian men are seeing what Natasha Walters has seen, but, frankly, they should have been speaking up for women in the church especially YEARS ago.
Amen, Mark. I am a committed Christian, a physicist with a PhD, and also a wife of 10 years and mother to 2 pre-school boys. I am very concerned - as Meg is - about the influence of popular culture on girls and women. I have always considered myself a feminist and have become increasingly motivated to campaign, protest and generally kick up a stink about such issues. I would encourage others to do likewise. Strangely most of my fellow believers think 'Christian' and 'feminist' just don't go together...
Don't stop writing now Mark! As a high achieving woman, a mum of two girls heavily influenced by pop culture, and the wife of a primary school teacher, I am sure that we and the church need more of this.
I agree!!
Date:
2012-06-29 15:38:08
Author:
John Kendall