The Great Against the Powerless

Sir Robert: "The other one is this. It's from a slightly older source. It is this: you shall not side with the great against the powerless."
Member of Parliament: "Mr. Speaker, point of order."
Sir Robert: "I am on my feet."
Member of Parliament: "Will you yield?"
Sir Robert: "I will not yield, Mr. Speaker. You shall not side with the great against the powerless. Have you heard those words, gentlemen? Do you recognize their source? From that same source, I add this injunction. It is this: what you do to the least of them you do to me. Now, now, gentlemen..."
-Excerpt from The Winslow Boy

I was recently asked why I write about women's issues, why I make it one of my interests and passions. My answer was twofold. One reason I wrote about in the past: I feel that misogyny is as much and more of a threat to what complementarians hold dear as gender blurring. The other is summarised beautifully by the above quote.

In the beginning of time, God created humans, without sin, in beautiful harmony, with binary gender, with love and relationship at the heart of what it is to be human. But we sinned. Our relationship with God was broken, and by extension our relationships amongst each other became broken. Ashamed but arrogant, humanity has been trying to make ourselves look better than we are ever since. Genocides, bullying, social climbing and materialistic greed, self-righteousness, self-harming, an obsessive pursuit of physical beauty or physical strength, "in" crowds and outcasts, unhealthy competition-- so much of what is sick in our world stems from the deep underlying knowledge of our fallen condition and our futile efforts to secure our standing without the sacrifice of Christ.

One way this manifests is in the strong-- whether socially, financially, physically, what have you-- using their strength to oppress the weak instead of to protect them.

God calls his people to protection of the disenfranchised, disadvantaged, and forgotten. This value was embedded deeply in the moral code of the Mosaic law. Over and over in the prophetic judgements against Israel is the refrain of their callous heart towards the poor and needy in their land. As this value relates in particular to women, 1 Peter 3:7 specifically enjoins husbands to show honour to the weaker vessel.

In a rightly ordered world, women, physically weaker in terms of sexual dimorphism, pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and menstruation, would only be protected and honoured by men. This is not so. When we look at human history, we see that across cultures, across eras, across belief systems, women have been oppressed. Women have been denied protection under the law, we have been denied education, we have been denied sexual agency*. We have been subjected to physical alterations**, we have been denied employment and financial independence. We have been told our minds are weaker, our emotions hysterical, our bodies shameful. We have been denied dignity and a public voice.

Some will suggest this is a 'victim mentality' and that men suffer at the hands of women as well.  Of course they do; sin is not restricted to one gender. Individual women do great wrong against individual men. However, I strongly argue that the systemic, institutionalised oppression of men by women has been very rare if not unheard of in human history, and is likely to remain that way, given sinful human nature which sides with the strong and oppresses the weaker.

Perhaps I am overzealous in my commitment to women's rights. However, I think it prudent as a Christian to err on the side of being overzealous for the oppressed rather than the oppressor. Certainly being oppressed does not make one a saint, and the oppressed can be greedy, selfish, self-pitying, manipulative, and so on. But the sympathies of our Lord routinely fall on their side nonetheless, and I should prefer to do the same, in as balanced and Scriptural a way as I can. It is the opposite of what sinful nature would have us do: shut up and side with the strong, protect ourselves, ingratiate ourselves, cling to our own comfort, and try to get in on the benefits the strong are reaping.

Secular feminists frequently hold forth the hope that the work of feminism will eventually bring about a better world, one of equality for women. I hope the church rises ever closer to that standard, but I have not much hope for the fallen world to get there; not as it is now. However, one day the risen Redeemer Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, will come back and make all things right. Until then, "You shall not side with the great against the powerless"-- and "What you do to the least of them you do to me."

*From genital mutilation to child brides to rape and sex trafficking to sexual exploitation in advertising and media.
**From footbinding and neck rings to corsets and plastic surgery.

Focusing Our Firepower

In response to yesterday's blog post, I have been involved in a Facebook conversation with a friend discussing whether it is true that our culture views women as inferior. I wrote in my blog post that "...the church should claim the middle ground, passionately defending the beauty of binary gender as created and called 'good' by God, while at the same time standing firmly against any implied or outright attitudes that mark one gender as superior! ... And in our culture, the gender that tends to be portrayed as inferior is women." This friend argued that our culture has "spent many years trying to present women as equal to or even better than men". My response follows, as I think it merits wider discussion. 

"I agree that our culture would be quite unlikely to say outright that females are inferior. However, much like racism, which presents in subtle ways now that it is no longer socially acceptable to be overt about it, I do think mainstream media and those saturated in its thinking present a degraded, sexualised, and inferior view of women. The graphic I linked yesterday had many examples of this. The vast majority of tales of heroism, friendship, and character growth are fronted by male characters, while females are most often main characters in a romance story intended only for other females. I have explored on my blog dozens of other ways in which females are subtly presented as less valuable."
"Indeed, for the vast majority of history and still in the vast majority of the developing world, women are overtly considered less valuable, intelligent, and capable then men. This is true in the Muslim nations where women are hidden beneath robes as if shameful and have little to no civil rights in comparison to men, this is true in the African nations where females are routinely circumcised so that sexual pleasure becomes strictly male territory, this is true in India where little girls are given away as sexual toys in a parody of marriage to men old enough to be their grandfathers, this is true in China where female infants are aborted or abandoned in favour of males. It is only in the West and in the last fifty or so years that it even became inappropriate (in most contexts, unless it's the internet) to say that women are only good for cooking and looking pretty."
"As I have said repeatedly on my blog, I think the complementarian church is in grave danger of totally undermining its message if it sees feminism as its only enemy, since the enemy of misogyny is far more deeply entrenched over the world and across history. It feels to me a bit like if a movement for more racial equality in the church focused mainly on ways black culture excludes whites and ignored the long and bloody history of the ways whites have mistreated blacks. One is not the answer to the other, absolutely, but we should be very cautious before we decide which side deserves most of our firepower."

As always, deeply interested to hear your thoughts, arguments, and experience, whether here or on Facebook.

Thoughts on the NYFA's Infographic

Since the graphic is so unwieldy, I thought I'd better break this into two posts.

Quick thoughts: what we see revealed by this infographic is an industry that sells a very rigid, narrowly defined ideal of femininity to both women and men. Although half of audiences are female, the industry is dominated both financially and in terms of physical presence by men. This means that what we see on our movie screens-- the sexually postured, youthful, largely silent and subservient female explained in the first section of the infographic-- is a construct designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator being sold by what is largely a group of amoral, godless, and money-hungry males (I'm making assumptions here, but given the material the film industry routinely pumps out, I think they're pretty likely to be true.)

There are two points of consideration I'd like to draw from this. One is how we as Christians evaluate the films we watch-- and the ones we choose not to. It is easy, for example, to decide a movie isn't appropriate because "there's too much nudity" or "the actresses are all dressed immodestly". However, I think it is very important that we move beyond just "that isn't decent/modest" to "that isn't fair or honouring." There is a very real and present pressure on actresses to be sexy and to act sexually and our critique needs to incorporate an understanding of how sexualised female characters in the majority of our narratives contribute to rape, sexual harassment, and the sexual entitlement claimed by so many men of our culture. Are we going into the conversation with our sons beyond just telling them it's not appropriate for them to look at women's bodies in those contexts, to talk about ways in which this harms the actual women in the world around them, such situations as one where a couple of schoolboys can rape a young woman while all their male classmates look on and not one intervenes or goes for the authorities? Simply turning off the film without having these types of conversations effectively condemns the immodestly dressed actress without also explaining that a portion of the blame-- perhaps the lion's share-- lies with those who provide the funding, advertising, and influence to make that a criteria for an actress's success: the largely male portion of the industry.*

The second point I want to think about is something I mentioned in this recent post, about how the bulk of pop culture is radically sidelining, limiting, and tightly defining femininity rather than blurring the lines between the two genders. Pop culture creates a caricature of womanhood in which a beautiful, youthful physical appearance is paramount, the ability to attract a romantic/sexual partner is more important than any true talents, and articulateness, intelligence, and character are of minimal significance. On the other side, a small subsection of our culture pushes against this by arguing all gender differences are social constructs and should be done away with altogether. Surely the church should claim the middle ground, passionately defending the beauty of binary gender as created and called 'good' by God, while at the same time standing firmly against any implied or outright attitudes that mark one gender as superior!**

*Another portion of the blame lies with the men who act upon the ideas about women portrayed in mainstream media, and that's another important conversation to have with our sons, but that's for another blog post, I think.
**And in our culture, the gender that tends to be portrayed as 'inferior' is women, which is why I write the blog posts I write. 

New York Film Acadamy's Infographic on Gender Inequality in the Film Industry

Courtesy of: New York Film Academy

The "Default Male": What's That?

Scenario: a fly is buzzing through your kitchen, landing on your sandwich whenever you put it down. You and your toddler wave it off in annoyance for a while, but eventually you're sick of it. "Run and get the flyswatter," you tell your child, "and I'll kill him."

Scenario: you are reading Are You My Mother? to your toddler. The baby bird comes upon a dog. You put on a special deep voice for the dog as you drawl, "How can I be your mother? I am a dog."

So what do these scenarios have in common?

They are the illustration of a principle called the 'default male'. This term describes a phenomenon where we automatically assume that any creature not directly identified as female by specific "feminine" markings (long eyelashes, pink bows, long hair) is a male. This means that chances are good that you unconsciously refer to every frog, worm, anthropomorphised vehicle (say, an airplane you're watching fly by, or a toy car), bunny in the yard, stick figure, or unspecified professional (doctor, mechanic) as "he". This is true unless the animal in question has its offspring with it, in which case it is instantly a mummy (although the young are probably still "he".)

Try it out! Grab the nearest children's book with animals in it-- Are You My Mother? will do. In this book there are four gender-specified characters: the mother bird and the baby bird (male), the cow (which is clearly not a bull), and the hen. Do you read the kitten and dog as male or female? Consider the dog's reason for not being the bird's mother: "I am a dog." Chances are that if the dog was male, he'd say "I am a male," wouldn't he? But-- with no eyelashes, no frilly collar, odds are good that you read the dog as male and not female. It holds true in other books. Brown Bear, Brown Bear-- the sheep has no horns and the cat is a "girly" colour so perhaps you read them as female, but do you look at the rest of the animals and think "girl bear", "girl dog", or do you automatically assume they're all male?

Have you ever told your child before killing an earwig that you're going to "squash her?" Have you ever stopped to consider the actual natural functional relationships of creatures such as ants and bees (most worker bees and ants are sterile females) before calling them a him? Alternatively, do you ever call an animal pictured with it's offspring the "daddy"? (I had a funny moment today where my son was doing a puzzle, which featured a green-headed duck with four ducklings. Given it's plumage, it was obviously male, but up until recently I would never have called it the daddy, and I would not be even slightly surprised if the original puzzle-maker intended it to be a mummy.) *

So, like with canting, after having described what the term means, I want to talk about why it's a problem.

I've mentioned in earlier posts the ratio of male leads to female leads in children's media. I've also talked about why it troubles me that toys relating to family life are strongly marketed to girls as if family life is somehow not "manly".

These are, I think, two of the main problems with the default male phenomenon.** In general, it's fair to say that male-female populations are about 50-50 in the world, human as well as the animal kingdom. So what message do we communicate about one gender if we consistently leave it out? I would argue the message is like, "Males do more, experience more, and take up more space in the world than females," which, essentially, is tantamount to saying "Males matter more than females." I don't think it is a stretch to interpret it as such. If every creature you encounter is assumed to be male, unless there are very specific indications to the contrary (and sometimes even if there are!), you set up a world where male perspective will be more valued than female, because you've been subtly trained to believe that males are just more there. I believe this feeds into the imbalances of gender leads in our culture's storytelling, and probably strongly contributes to the idea that male's stories are universally representative, while female's stories are just for female audiences. I believe this feeds into the ways our language and cultural predilections make things coded "female" shameful for boys to associate themselves with.

Now, I don't think that the complementarian church as a whole actually holds the stated belief that "Males matter more than females." Indeed, thankfully, I don't know anybody who would say that. But here's the thing: there's a degree to which our actions are going to shout down our words. If we are adamantly insisting that complementarianism is about "equal but different" and supporting the idea that God created us for two different roles in churches and marriages, but that both genders are both image-bearers and equals before God and His law, we need to be careful. We need to be careful that we're not knee-jerking against feminism and thus ignoring ways in which we are not treating women as equal. And if we're defaulting to assuming male presence is more prevalent and male perspective more weighty, then I'm afraid we are not living up to our "equal but different" belief, and are thus undermining the credibility of our complementarianism.

The other side of problem with the default male phenomenon is how it limits girls. Consider how it must affect little girls to be taught by implication from the time that they are infants that if they're not either practicing some form of domestic, maternal instinct or displaying a specific set of beauty ideals (long hair and eyelashes, pink accessories, skirts), they're not a proper, recogniseable girl. Is it any wonder that our daughters are growing up beauty-obsessed, wearing make-up younger and younger, buying into a toxic beauty culture of disordered eating, insecurity, and self-alteration? Is it any wonder that there are still areas of interest that are predominantly seen as not really "for" girls (like STEM studies, politics, athletics)? The church ought to be a safe haven from a culture that teaches girls their beauty and marriageability trumps their brains, their hearts, their ministry giftings, and their talents in importance, and I believe we can be that while still holding marriage in esteem for both genders and proudly holding firm to a belief in different roles in the church and in marriages. And maybe it starts with sprinkling in a few 'she's' with all the 'he's' in your daily pronoun use...

*This post gives some examples from media of creatures interpreted by filmmakers as male despite nature pointing to them being female.
**Although, more seriously, in things like crash test dummies (based on average male figures) and heart attack symptoms (which actually present differently in women), the default male can lead to unnecessary female deaths.

One-Sided?

Someone remarked about the movie review I just did, "Role of women? What about the role of men? Isn't that a little one-sided?" I would like to address that here.

See, yes, it is one-sided. Just like the problem.

Because while there are certainly ways in which Hollywood stereotypes men and makes them one-dimensional and even sexualises them, there is nothing like the same kind of systemic, far-reaching problem as there is with the way women are portrayed in film.

Consider the following:
-According to a recent study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, male characters have nearly three-quarters of the speaking parts in children's entertainment, and in family films, male characters outnumber females 3:1.
-The majority of movies do not pass the Bechdel Test, either featuring only one token female character, or by never having two females cross paths, or by putting two females together and having them only advance the plot on behalf of the male characters. Even more movies only pass the Bechdel Test by one conversation. Try to imagine a world where the reverse was true-- most movies only had one man and if there were two, they wouldn't ever speak unless to talk about the female main character.
-Except for in films made specifically for a female audience, the vast majority of leads are male.

I have to agree with Geena Davis' assessment. Have you noticed recently that the women in your life are hard to come by (drastically outnumbered by the males?) No? What about how they interact? Have you noticed that women tend to avoid each other like the plague unless they are getting together to talk about a man? No? Hmmm... Well, have you noticed that whenever you talk to a female you're bored to tears? Still no?

Okay, so now that we've established that that's not how the world works, I can establish why I want to approach film reviews from a perspective of the role of women. It's not because I think women are more important than men-- it's that I think they're just as important, and Hollywood is doing a terrible job of communicating that. If we aren't aware of just how one-dimensional and marginalized Hollywood makes their female characters, we will unwittingly absorb the message that women are more one-dimensional and less important than men. Like any of the subtle underlying biases in film, being aware of the problem is our best protection against assimilating the message. So I point out the maginalization of women in movies not because I enjoy complaining-- it's because I want change. I want people just starting out in film to think about why a man shouldn't enjoy a story about a woman, to think about what they're saying if they never make two female characters interact. I want movie-goers to come away from the theatre and to say, "The way they had that female character act was unrealistic because x," and then think about what real women are like and go out into the world with realistic, interesting women in their heads instead of a stereotype.

I've heard it said regarding this issue, "Once you see it, you can't unsee it." Thankfully, it's true. And once you're seeing it everywhere, you can become one more voice asking for something different-- something better.