I do not want my daughter to grow up in a world where the boys and men around her constantly judge her morality in terms of physical attraction. I don’t want her to hear things like, “waiting till marriage is sexy” or “it’s a turn-off when girls smoke”.
The piece is insightful and much-needed. I'm glad to see someone with a large audience calling out this phenomenon. But something is still missing.
It is absolutely problematic that boys and men are judging the women around them based on their physical appearance, but isn't the bigger problem that they're judging their morality at all? Would it be okay for them to say, "I don't think you should dance that way/dress that way/act that way because you might go to hell?"
I had a discussion with a friend once about a girl she knew who had called off her wedding because her fiance was insisting on the "no pants" rule. My friend didn't agree with him, but she thought my interpretation of his behavior was too simplistic. "I don't think it's about control," she said. "I think he's wrong, but he's really doing something that he believes is for the good of her soul. He think she'll go to hell if she wears pants." When faced this kind of boneheaded fanaticism, it's hard to tease out the underlying sources of the problem, but I did my best. Why, I wanted to know, was he marrying her in the first place if he didn't trust her to make good, moral decisions about how to dress? Why did he think he needed to make those decisions for her?
The problem is that some men think they can look at a woman and know what's going on in her soul and what she should be doing instead. Last time I checked, only God can do that. And last time I checked, there's a whole story in the New Testament about what Jesus thought about men who take it upon themselves to stone women sinning in public. Remember? Oh, yeah, that one.
So while I agree that it's wrong for men to substitute "not attractive" for "morally wrong," it seems to me that the real issue here is why are these men bossing these women around in the first place?
And no, I don't think "You're not my brother, husband, father" is a good response to these men, because that brings in another whole boatload of problems about whether men in general have some kind of authority over the women in their lives, with some restrictions. Yeah, I don't buy that, because A. Casti Canubii explicitly calls out and condemns men who treat their wives like subordinates and minors, B. It's been a loooong time since my father had moral authority over me. You know, like when I was a child. C. My brothers having authority over me is just a weird idea, period. They're far too busy living their own lives to want or need to police my actions, even if such an idea occurred to them in the first place, which it wouldn't.
These men, the ones condemning women for being "unattractive" when they really mean "sinful," have seized on a woman's natural desire to be loved and found lovable and turned it to their advantage. Most know they would not get away with stating in so many words that women should follow the moral guidance of regular, everyday laymen, but they still want to claim some of that oh-so-tempting authority for themselves, the kind that only the Pope or God or a priest in a confessional has. Kind of like my friend's friend's fiance, who put his future bride in the position of having to choose between saying no to marriage with a man she loved and saying no to a normal adult life where she would make her own decisions about what clothes to put on in the morning. And the root of the conflict was that this young man refused to relinquish what he thought was his right to have veto power over every moral decision his wife might make, even the tiny ones. He assumed she would not give up a life of being loved, even if that love was conditional, and he was right, because she married him anyway. Living a life of being rejected and unloved is a terrifying prospect for most women.
"What's the motivation?" Okay, let's run through this again. Only God gets to police our moral decisions, and His representatives on earth. The Pope, etc. Anyone else who tries to horn in on this right is trying to be like God. Becoming like Gods; gee, what does that remind me of? Weird how it all fits together when you really think about it.
So yes, it's problematic that women are being made to feel bad about their appearance in yet another way, but lets not ignore the root of the problem. You can have the kind of confidence that genuinely doesn't care about what men think of your appearance, and the problem will still be there, because those same men will find some other way of manipulating women in order to get what they want, whether it's a hot sexy always available female companion, or a submissive jean-skirt wearing undemanding self-sacrificing wife-in-the-background. In the end, it's about snatching control and using it for self-centered purposes.
"What about the women?" Women are just as likely to rant and rave about how unattractive "slutty" women are, or to call for dress codes in church, so why just attack the men?
Honestly, that one puzzles me, too. I have no idea what those women get out of it, although I can think of a few theories. Maybe they're trying to get in the good books with the men who make the complaints in the first place. "Look at me! I'm not one of those hideous slutty girls. Wife Material right here." Maybe it's their own desire to control; hey, women can be bossy. Maybe it's jealously of the attention those women get or, more likely, jealously of the freedom exhibited by women who haven't conformed to rigorist religious standards. Maybe they're simply doing what women do best: caring for and being loyal to their own communities. The last interpretation is the one I prefer to believe, because quite frankly I don't have the heart to think about it too much, nor do I want to add my voice to the many others who are griping about women's behavior and how they should change it.
Clearly, men do not, by virtue of being men, have a special ability to advise women on moral behavior.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, the sex divide doesn't make moral critique impossible. So, for instance, from Calah's post about swearing I gather the debate that she and Patrick Madrid actually had on his radio show was as to whether or not using profanity is sinful. Now, if a man wants to argue that using profanity is sinful, he's not precluded from doing so simply because the person he's speaking to is a woman. It only becomes a problem if the man the proceeds to claim, "And you, as a woman, should listen to me because I am a man."
Of course, men and women can have conversations about what's sinful or what isn't, and fraternal correction can come from either side. (Although some people really overuse it.) But if you read both posts on the topic, Calah describes how Patrick Madrid seems to be conflating what is sinful and what he, personally, finds attractive in women.
DeleteSo there's a few different things going on.
One is that there seem to be an awful lot of Catholic men around these days who wax lyrical about what they find attractive in women, as though being attractive to men is what all women aspire to be all the time, and as though their personal preferences basically amount to canon law. This wouldn't be such a problem if it just came from a few cranks here and there, or if women didn't listen to it, but neither of those seems to be the case.
Another is that there are far more articles, books, blogs, etc., focusing on what women should be doing or how they should look or act than there are (specifically) for men, at least in my experience. I would be happy to be proven wrong on that point, actually. Since I started blogging a year ago, it was a huge disappointment to me to find this out about the Catholic blogosphere. I was really hoping that my personal experiences up until that point would be inverted. They weren't. What this tells me is that a surprising number of Catholic men really believe they have some kind of authority or duty to admonish women all the time.
Third, which is my main point in this post, it seems to me these things go together. Most of the men doing them won't say, "You, as a woman, should listen to me because I am a man" so they use subtler methods, like telling women that certain behaviors make them "ugly" in order to get them to stop.
But, I agree with your main point. If a man wanted to argue that swearing is sinful there certainly wouldn't be a problem with that if the person he was arguing with happened to be a woman.
Part of my beef with Calah's approach is that reading through the original tweets on the topic, and then her two posts discussing it, it doesn't sound to me like Madrid was equating the morality of women using profanity with what he finds attractive. He started out saying that he finds swearing unattractive in women. When asked why he exempted men, he said he finds it unattractive in men as well, but was more surprised to see Catholic women bloggers swearing than men. Then in Calah's follow-up post where she takes a deconstructionist approach to language in order to explain why words themselves aren't bad, she opens by saying that contrary to her expectations Madrid's big focus in their radio discussion was on whether using profanity is sinful. That strikes me as a perfectly legit topic, though not one I'm particularly interested in.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is an overall cultural assumption in some quarters that women have some kind of a duty to make themselves attractive to men. Obviously, they don't. People are entitled to their aesthetic preferences, but no one has a duty to meet any other person's definition of attractiveness.
But while I strongly oppose any one group asserting that another group has to obey its ideas of attractiveness, I also really strongly dislike anything that smacks of "I'm a [fill in the group] so how dare you criticize me!" argumentation.
It's not that I think men can't ever criticize women; it's a question of degree. Every time I turn around, some guy is making a declaration about what he thinks women should or shouldn't be doing. It's being taken to an extreme. My guess is that you haven't noticed this, which is fine and not surprising, since you're a man and married anyway. It took me years to notice it and as a single female, I'm on the receiving end of most of it, and in many subtle ways get it made clear to me on a regular basis that I'm not marriage material unless I conform to certain arbitrary standards. I'm not talking about reasonable things like being a practicing Catholic, objecting to birth control, being overall a normal, decent person. I'm talking about minuscule things like wearing pants or how I talk on the phone, or other totally arbitrary rules of being ladylike that have nothing to do with who I am as a human being and everything to do with conforming to some guy's imaginary picture of a perfect wife. It is demoralizing and demeaning, and says something very troubling about the men who approach relating to the opposite sex in this way.
DeleteSo my point isn't that I can't handle criticism. If a man said to me, assuming he was a close friend or a family member, "You shouldn't miss Mass on Sunday," that's perfectly reasonable. "You shouldn't wear your hair like that. It's not attractive" is a whole other ballgame, not to mention fricken rude.
Patrick Madrid moved seamlessly from saying he didn't find swearing attractive in women to saying swearing was morally wrong. That was Calah's objection in the second post. He talked about them like they were the same thing, and from the rest of her post I gathered that she started to see a pattern in the way a lot of other men offer commentary (endless, endless commentary) on women's actions and, most of the time, their appearance in the same terms, which is something I've noticed myself for quite some time. She even went out of her way to say that if the two objections to swearing were treated separately, she wouldn't have a problem discussing either one. But I've noticed that a lot of a Catholic men fixate on something that they find physically attractive and then try to make it a moral requirement. Or, alternately, they find something that they think is a moral preference, and then shame women into doing it by saying that they won't be attractive if they don't.
In my opinion, considering how much pressure women receive from society at large to conform to impossible standards, Catholic men should refrain from commenting on women's appearance at all. I'm not making this a moral requirement. I just think it would be the gentlemanly thing to do. It would be a small way of making the world a more comforting and protective place for women.
This comment was left at the slut-shaming post:
Delete"I rather expect that men use the appeal to attractiveness because they sense that that will help their point get through. I don’t think many young women (or young men) would be very much moved by an abstract appeal to their self-worth."
This man admits, somewhat cluelessly, that this is a tactic men use to get what they want. It has nothing to do with simply stating a personal preference. Why he thinks he needs to "get his point through" instead of just minding his own business and not bossing women around is not explained.
I'm sorry you've experienced men trying to control you or judge you by your appearance. As with my post on your chastity blog, it seems to me that while they may have been trying to demonstrate their suitability as (a certain kind of) husband material, in fact their conduct had the opposite effect, in that you were wise enough to recognize that they misunderstood the role of husbands as described in the Bible.
DeleteIt's a phrase I've used before but my understanding of what the Lord tells us about leadership in marriage is that it amounts to what is known in modern management theory as 'servant leadership'. In both Corinthians and Ephesians the role of a husband likened to Christ's headship of the Church. Which is surely loving rather than judgemental, empowering rather than limited and, above all, self-sacrificing rather than punitive.
No way would Christ make a woman go out in a skirt on a cold day, or even a warm day if she didn't want to; he would not criticize her hairstyle or any other aspect of her appearance to make her feel small. I don't know whether men do these things because they prefer women to look a certain way, because they get off on exercising control over them or because they think it marks them out as good leadership (= husband) material, but as a man I feel shamed by it.
Your description of leadership makes a lot of sense, and certainly makes the phrase "as Christ loved the Church" actually mean something instead of being disregarded the way the obedience-insisting types like to do. I've never felt justified in throwing out the idea of the man as the head of the family completely, but I knew it couldn't mean justifying actions like "making a woman go out in a skirt on a cold day." Even when I tried to adapt, I knew in my gut that something wasn't right.
DeleteDo you have a blog? I think it would be great if you put some of those ideas out there.
Thanks for your kind suggestion that I start blogging; I've considered it, but don't think I'd be anything like as good at it as you and for that reason would probably not attract a readership. And a blog without readers is surely just an exercise in vanity.
DeleteI hope you won't find me too forward in saying I think the young man who put you off with his talk of obedience and obligatory skirts missed out on a wonderful young woman; I hope he learned from the experience, and that another man in time proves himself to be more deserving of your love.
As a Christian I believe we should live as laid down in the Bible, so I do believe that men are responsible for headship within families; but I also recognize that the Bible has been studied and interpreted almost exclusively by men until recent years, and those men were bought up in a society that marginalized and devalued women.
While I have reservations about much feminist thought - there's a lot of talk about 'me' and 'my rights' rather than 'the contribution I can make' - I admire the select body of Christians who advocate the elimination of sexism from our faith, not through revisionism but by respecting the original text.
I think there are two fairly different reaction here:
ReplyDelete1) I liked Calah's meta point in her second post (that we shouldn't phrase moral arguments in terms of attractiveness, because the moral issue is the real one and making it an attractiveness argument makes it sound as if people are entitled to have us behaving in ways be find attractive) but I thought that a lot of the examples she used didn't actually illustrate her point well -- the Madrid example being one of those.
2) Whether because I'm male or just as a matter of mentality (since several of the women I know well in real life react the same way, I'm thinking perhaps mentality) I tend to assume that people won't change. Thus, in the example in your post about the couple who disagreed on pants, the thing I don't understand is if the guy objected to pants on some weird kind of moral basis, why did he have any interest in the girl in the first place? Why didn't he just go find one of those skirt-fanatic girls who write articles about the inherent dignity of wearing only skirts? The flip side of this is that I don't tend to be surprised that a lot of people find my views unattractive (I that is, after all, the thing about being a religious and cultural minority) and whenever I hear someone expressing views at variance with mine, I just kind of assume that they're not "my people". So while I see the endless pontificating about dumb questions like the wearing of pants or the necessity of headcoverings boring, I find it hard to put myself in the place of finding it oppressive since it seems like the obvious reaction is to just accept that those people won't like me and ignore (or mock) them.
1) It's not quite as cut and dried as what you're making it out to be, I think. There are shades of meaning to these kinds of comments. I can't speak for Calah, obviously, or the examples she used, but I know in general that I see far too many remarks from Catholic men about how "disgusting" women who dress or act a certain way are. This can range from over the top provocation to simply wearing a skirt a bit above the knees at Mass. So a comment like "I think women who wear mini-skirts are not attractive" might sound neutral to you, but I hear, "I'm another walking virgin/whore complex." I think it's worth asking why men are so free with their opinions on women's attractiveness. Why can't I log into facebook or talk to people after Mass or date a guy without hearing a comment like, "I think women who wear pants look like monkeys." (Actual quote from an ex)What does it say about Catholic culture, at least here in the US, that there is such an emphasis on how men perceive women, to the point of it being generally accepted that man has the right to criticize any and every woman and how she looks, regardless of whether that particular woman or women in general find it hurtful and demeaning? Calah seems to think it's about objectification. I agree with that, but I take it a step further. Objectification is, ultimately, about control. It's about changing someone else to make them fit how you see them in your mind and rejecting them if they fail to add up to what suits you best so that you never have to do any changing or compromising.
Delete"I don't understand is if the guy objected to pants on some weird kind of moral basis, why did he have any interest in the girl in the first place?"
DeleteBecause she conformed to his idea of the perfect wife in every other way, I imagine. It would have been much harder for him to go out and find another girl who was not only quite pretty, like that girl was, but who also was willing to go along with all the rules of femininity that he was raised to expect. By the way, I only met this girl a few times, and she seemed to go out of her way to put on a Stepford wife act. That's her right, I suppose, I was actually surprised to learn that she objected to the no-pants rule. I thought that between the two of them, the fiance was the more down-to-earth and "normal", until I heard the story. But women like that attract controlling men, I've learned.
The reason he didn't move on was because he, evidently, loved everything about her except that one thing, and so he wanted her to change it, because he couldn't compromise. Finding another girl would have been compromising, too.
I dated a guy who did this exact same thing to me, which I think is why my friend told me this story. He went on and on about how we were perfect for each other, but he couldn't tolerate the fact that I wanted to do some things differently from what he wanted, like #(%&#$ wearing pants. This wasn't some crazy request on my part like wanting to go to Hawaii twice a year. When I didn't agree, he invoked wifely obedience.
You can say that was just a bad experience, and I used to think so, until I found out that there are a lot more people who hold this view, and similar ones, than I ever could have imagined. And my ex was not upfront about it, either. I had a bad feeling about it, and asked point blank how things would be after we were married, and then he accused me of not trusting him. It was all kind of underhanded and manipulative and cowardly, and having seen it up close, it's easy for me to recognize now.
"Why didn't he just go find one of those skirt-fanatic girls who write articles about the inherent dignity of wearing only skirts?"
I can think of two reasons, although I don't know them well enough to say for sure. One is that a lot of the men who require this kind of fanaticism also want a beautiful, stylish wife, and many of the skirt-wearing fanatics are dowdy. They want it both ways. The other is that maybe she did always wear skirts because she still living at home. That was what the issue was in my case. I lived at home till I was 23 and didn't rebel against the skirts only rule, but I expected that once I left it would be up to me. My boyfriend didn't like that and I suppose felt a bit like he had been tricked.
"I just kind of assume that they're not "my people". So while I see the endless pontificating about dumb questions like the wearing of pants or the necessity of headcoverings boring, I find it hard to put myself in the place of finding it oppressive since it seems like the obvious reaction is to just accept that those people won't like me and ignore (or mock) them."
Fair enough. But imagine if those people were your people. Imagine if they were family and the people you grew up with. Imagine if the only way to get away from them would be to either to leave the faith that you love and that you believe will ensure your eternal salvation, or, perhaps, be put in a position where you have to seek out communities that are so different from the ones you're used to that you feel like a fish out of water and that people have been telling you your whole life are going to lead you to hell. And then imagine if you did all that and still found people saying the same things. You'd either go crazy, or fight back, or give in and assume that you're the problem and not them.
"I find it hard to put myself in the place of finding it oppressive since it seems like the obvious reaction is to just accept that those people won't like me and ignore (or mock) them."
DeleteI just wanted to add that in general, and given the frequency that Catholic women are on the receiving end of criticisms about our appearance through these kinds of comments or reprimands about modesty, it's unrealistic to expect us not to be affected by it. If it was just an occasional thing, it would be offensive but probably not that impactful. Women do react to criticisms about our gender and hearing hurtful things over and over. It's not a question of just brushing it off.
I suspect that that's why, in some cultures like the Victorians, men were expected to be careful not just when talking to women but also about women. They probably took it too far, but some expectation in this regard for the sake of not making women feel bad would go a long way. Asking women to just not care and not be bothered by it so that men can wax poetic about their physical preferences is asking too much.
"Fair enough. But imagine if those people were your people. Imagine if they were family and the people you grew up with. Imagine if the only way to get away from them would be to either to leave the faith that you love and that you believe will ensure your eternal salvation, or, perhaps, be put in a position where you have to seek out communities that are so different from the ones you're used to that you feel like a fish out of water and that people have been telling you your whole life are going to lead you to hell."
ReplyDeletePart of the issue here, I suspect, is difference in background. I think my own approach is very much formed by how I grew up: As theologically faithful Catholics who were serious about our faith (but not any particular group such as traditionalists or chrismatics), my family was totally isolated as I was growing up in 80s and 90's Los Angeles. We had books and magazines to let us know that we weren't the only Catholics like us out there, but there wasn't any other family we knew in our parish or the parish school (prior to starting to homeschool) who shared our outlook at all. My parents had a group of close friends from college based on academic and literary commonalities, but none of them were Catholic. My dad was an only child, and my mom had a lot of brothers and sisters but every single one had left the Church. So my default is kind of to assume that there is pretty much no one like me except my immediate family (which, blessedly was always very sane and supportive), while having a number of moderately close friends with whom I shared various interests, but did not share beliefs.
On the one hand, this meant I was very used to being alone in my faith. On the other, it meant that when I finally made it to an environment where there were a lot of other people my age who were also serious Catholic (going to college at FUS) I and basically everyone I knew there was so glad just to be around other faithful Catholics that very few people, got worked up about little stuff, and those who did seemed like people obviously worth avoiding.
And, of course, I was lucky enough to meet MrsD there and thus had a built in community from there on out.
That sounds like it worked out really well. I'm always happy to hear stories about people who grew up as serious Catholics in a way that was healthy and balanced, since it doesn't seem to work out so well to just go along with whatever is easiest, either.
Delete