Male chauvinism - the belief that women’s inferior physical strength is a reflection of their general inferiority and lack of ability is an offshoot of a more primitive plant: misogyny - hatred of women. Both are a frequently unrecognised and often unconscious influence in human relations of all kinds. Some people say misogyny is deeply rooted in male fear of women as ‘mysterious other’. Perhaps men unconsciously fear women’s powers of reproduction, their mysterious bleeding once a month connecting them with the moon and the tides. Some contemporary men are willing to recognise and acknowledge anxiety about women’s abilities to manipulate, their nimble social and emotional intelligence.
Despite the weaknesses in the Democrat candidate for the American presidency, it would be hard to convince me that misogyny and chauvinism did not play their part in this election. I shared a comment(see below) on Facebook last week because it reflected not only the choice of American voters but also of so many political and ecclesiastical elections I have observed.
And my feminist Facebook friends and relations came out to support, comment and argue! It was great!
But as my friends and family put their arguments for and against, I was reminded that my life as a feminist has convinced me that women and men – anyone who cares about equality - must learn to delve deeper, to confess our common human weakness and deal more thoughtfully with gender wars and conflicts of all kinds.
I became a feminist, a Christian feminist (the distinction is important) when I began to understand the different ways women and men were seen and heard. I became a member of the Anglican Movement for the Ordination of Women and the Association of Adventist Women - both seeking ordination for Christian women – the former more successfully than the latter. It didn’t take me long to understand that, ordination was not a cure for the inequality disease. Once ordained my Anglican friends were still not treated as equals by many of their male colleagues. I still believe that creating a world in which virtually all jobs are open to men and women is a good thing. But in the creation of a church where men and women are equal ordination is a comparatively small step.
I slowly recognised that the roots of the conflictual behaviour between men and women were deep and tangled and not easily separated. Nature, nurture, language, culture, history, economic, social and religious factors, the roots went everywhere. What’s more these roots were significant in all fractured relationships where people pay more attention to the differences between themselves and others than they do to their common humanity. Many of the understandings I had developed about gender relations needed only to be adjusted slightly to see that they applied to relations between religions, races, sexualities, ages, variously abled people and all the other divisions we create between ourselves as different members of the human race.
In all these distorted human relationships, I find a common tap root. Its existence is sometimes explicit but it often goes unrecognised and unnamed. It runs through our marriage relationships and families, through our staffrooms and offices and committees from the highest to the lowest, through our social groups and church groups at all levels. We ignore its influence at our peril. It is the lust for power and control. Men want it and women want it. They go about getting it in different ways but the greed is there in both genders. There can be no moral high ground!
Until we can learn to unmask and understand and curb the lust for power, whether it is social jostling or military conflict, we shall not find our full humanity. We shall not thrive as families, societies, businesses, churches, schools and countries, or indeed as a global community.
I am still interested in casual everyday personal and institutional sexism – all of which need to be continually better documented. But my first question about a would-be leader these days is, ‘How does (s)he understand and handle power?’
Experience of the American president elect does not suggest a hopeful answer.
Shared by Jeff Graham Shaffer
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