…healing begins where the wound was made.
- Alice Walker
“Hey sweet China
eyes,” shouts the man on the corner to my roommate. “Them are some sexy China
eyes!” We keep walking.
“How much, baby?” The man rolls down the passenger side
window and makes an offer to my friend. She keeps walking.
“I love Mardi Gras! Ya gotta show ‘em,” our neighbor slurs
toward my female housemate. “Come on, let me see ‘em! Ya gotta!” Our male
housemates laugh nervously. Everyone walks away.
“A man who sits in front of the liquor store was saying
really sexually inappropriate things about [female teammate],” reports a male friend. “So, I think you ladies need to be more aware of what you’re
wearing. Maybe start dressing more modestly.”
“Do you notice Freire writes ‘women and men’?” My female housemate asked. “He puts women first.
Isn’t it jarring?”
Jarring. For women
to be first. For women to be considered at all. Jarring.
There is a deep feminine wound that
penetrates every culture, every language, and every major religion—a wound so
deep, so engrained in the fabric of our collective subconscious skin, that many
women don’t even know it is there; others are awakening to discover they’ve
been in pain for years, aching from an injury they never knew existed.
I look into the eyes of the women
in my Fifth Ward neighborhood, women who have seen the days of cold sidewalks,
cold hearts, the back of a palm, the bottom of a bottle. Women who have
accepted the image projected upon them: object. I see the hopelessness in their
eyes, the glazed stare that looks beyond me to a future covered in darkness.
They are addicted. They are ashamed. And the men on the corner yell a little
louder, pull them in a little closer, let their hands linger a little longer. I
see the women. I see their wound. The same wound within me, within all women.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire explains,
“Self-depreciation is another characteristic of the oppressed, which derives
from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them. So often
do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of
learning anything…that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness”
(45). To be convinced of their gender’s inadequacy and their second class
citizenry, how often do the young girls in my neighborhood need to see their
mothers touched and yelled at by strange men; how often do they need to hear
their pastors tell the congregation that women should remain silent; how often
do they need to see the advertisements and billboards telling them they are a
sex symbol, an object of men’s scrutiny; how often do they need to sing the
hymns and read the words that pronounce God as male and women as the downfall
of all creation, the stain of original sin embedded on their bodies and in
their souls, the sex that brought the curse. How young does she have to be to
internalize the message that she is worth far less than her male counterparts
in our patriarchal society?
The Christian Church of North America has relied largely on the idea of banking
education to both implicitly and explicitly assert male dominance. The
“knowledgeable” men from the pulpits and from ancient history pour static
reality—static religion—into the brains of “ignorant” women, women who have
internalized the patriarchal view of womankind and, in the eyes of the
“educators,” need to be told how to think and feel. Those who have benefited
from patriarchy are quick to distrust those who do not benefit, those who
question the system. They have a “lack of confidence in the people’s ability to
think, to want, and to know” (42). Even women, “given the circumstances which
have produced their duality…distrust themselves,” thus relying on the
information fed to them by the beneficiaries of a patriarchal culture and
religion (45). In his weblog “5 Ways to
Avoid Undermining Your Theology of Gender,” Tim Peck discusses his own interactions
with patriarchy benefactors within the Christian church saying, “In my previous
ministry experiences, opinionated and assertive women were sometimes labeled by
male leaders as “troublemakers” or “busybodies”. Once labeled, men had the social
justification to discount anything these women said, in effect silencing their
voice.” By silencing women, men effectively close the door to dialogue.
Friere writes, “Because dialogue is
an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation
where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation; it must not
serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one person by another”
(70). Instead of dialogue within the
church and the society it has shaped, men have chosen to name the world on
behalf of women, expecting complicit acceptance of this fixed reality.
“The language we use says a lot
about what we value,” says Tim Peck. “…I would sometimes speak of ‘men’ or
‘man’ to refer to all people, not realizing that such language eclipses
women...” In the Bible, God gives Adam, the first man, the task of naming the
animals and his helpmate, thus making meaning of, identifying, and shaping the
world and the women in it. It has been passed down from Biblical times that those
who “named the world,” who created the language, the vocabulary, and the
terminology of our culture, did so on behalf of those who were not, as the
story goes, granted that authority.
Women have not had the opportunity or the encouragement to make their own
meaning, to name their own world. The
inability to create their own meaning of the world has had rippling effects on
women throughout time, converging in examples I see within my own neighborhood.
Women in my neighborhood have been submerged in the myth of God-given male
dominance. Women respond to this myth in several ways: anger, indifference,
submission, or eager assertion (because they do not see how the myth only
benefits the oppressors, in this case, the men who have perpetuated the myth).
In many cases, I have seen women
fall prey to fatalism. As Freire explains, fatalism could be misconstrued as
docility, but far from being an inherent characteristic trait this fatalism “is
the fruit of an historical and sociological situation” which leads to women
seeing “their suffering, the fruit of exploitation, as the will of God—as if
God were the creator of this “organized disorder.” Submerged in reality, the
oppressed cannot perceive clearly the “order” which serves the interests of the
oppressors whose image they have internalized” (44). Fatalism, in turn, leads many women in my
neighborhood to drugs or prostitution. The thinking behind these choices may
very well be based in the idea that the world has been presented to them as a
static, unchanging reality that they can do nothing about; they must accept
their domination as submissive receptors. When she does not feel she has the
power to change her world, her situation, her place in the “pecking order,” she
must find some way of dealing with this system by numbing her pain or giving in
to the idea of submission, if only as a façade in order to survive. Since women have been conditioned to perceive
this system of oppressive male dominance as being assigned by God, Freire says,
“it is extremely unlikely that [they] will seek their own liberation—an act of
rebellion which they may view as a disobedient violation of the will of God, as
an unwarranted confrontation with destiny” (145). In Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Sue Monk Kidd explains her own
violent awakening to the oppressive system of patriarchy, her first steps
toward the “rebellion” of which Freire speaks: “I was in a religion that
celebrated fatherhood and sonship. I was in an institution created by men and
for men… the church, my church, was not just a part of the male dominant system
I was waking up to, but a prime legitimizer of it…religion has given men a God
like themselves—a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed
their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority
has been vested in them by the Supreme Being…” (50).
As Freire points out, “as long as
the oppressed remain unaware of the causes of their condition, they
fatalistically “accept” their exploitation” (46). The first step toward true
freedom from oppression is dialogue and problem posing. This step has been in process for years, but
needs to be culturally and historically situated to meet the needs of each
generation. While women nowadays are not asking, “Why can’t we vote?” They must
become aware of the questions that need to be asked in our cultural context:
Why are women not leading the church? Why is pornography the biggest industry
in the world? Why are women expected to change their appearance to satiate
men’s sexual impulses? Why is it expected for women to marry and have children?
Why are most single-parent households female led? Why is rape happening and
being used as a weapon in war? Why are women being exploited around the world
for sex? Why are women not given the same opportunities as men to lead
businesses, households, and congregations?
While working with an after school
program at my church, a little girl asked, “Are you married?” “No,” I replied.
“Why not?” She asked, obviously
confused. This little girl had already internalized
that female identity relies on men. She did not understand how a woman could
grow to adulthood without being married, without a man as her distinguishing
factor. She had not yet learned to ask
questions about her thought process. She had learned only to accommodate to
“this normalized ‘today’” (73).
As women and men begin to ask
questions about “the way it’s always been,” they will begin to enter into
dialogue, together. “Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue
becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers
is the logical consequence,” says Friere (72). This mutual trust among women
and men opens both genders’ eyes to the disservice being done to both of them
through this system of male dominance, which has made women into objects and
men into object owners. Both genders
need to be liberated from the oppressive unjust system of domination, freeing
both women and men to embrace their full humanity and become creators of their
world, a world in which equality is for everyone.
As my neighbor Juanita told me,
“Oh, you gotta be a woman. You be a woman. Everywhere you go, you be a woman.” Advocating one another’s
full humanity, women and men can liberate themselves from our patriarchal
culture.
References
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy
of the Oppressed. New York:
Continuum International
Publishing Group, Inc.
Kidd, S. M. (2002). Dance
of the Dissident Daughter. New
York: Harper Collins
Publishing.
Peck, T. (2013, Nov. 20). 5 Ways to Avoid Undermining Your Theology of Gender.
