I read this article yesterday on religious extremists and their view of women. In the post, Dr. Peggy Drexler details some of the horrific ways women have been treated at the hands of ultra-conservative men. Women have been viciously attacked, being perceived as a threat to male spiritual discipline. We typically (and at least in the physical sense, rightly) associate these attacks with places in the Middle East.
This quote from Dr. Drexler stood out to me:
As I watched, I wondered: What is it about women that the men of deeply conservative religions find so threatening?
What, indeed?
Dr. Drexler explains it this way, and I think she’s right:
Find a place where men oppress women, and you’ll hear the same justification: we’re doing it for their own protection. It’s not protection. It’s projection.
The logic: My sexual urges take me away from a focus on God. Women cause me to have those urges. The obvious solution is to beat them down, cover them up, and lock them away. What I can’t see won’t tempt me.
The same underlying attitudes which lead to brutal victimization of women can be found in conservative Christian circles here in the U. S. It’s just another manifestation of the old Madonna-Whore Complex. Men have reduced women to a choice between two opposite, and equally objectifying, alternatives. In fact, we have become the embodiment of both simultaneously. We are vile temptresses, luring men to sinful depths, in need of strong husbands to protect us and lead us down the path to righteousness. Obviously, we have no idea the effect we are having on them!
Strangely enough, a lot of men seem to want it both ways. They want their wives and girlfriends to act like the Madonna (at least in public). But they want the Whore, too, in the form of media (with its unrealistic vision of women and our bodies). Separating and reducing enables men to continue to blame women and prevents them from uderstanding that women are much more complex than either of the artificially created, two-dimensional caricatures.
It also keeps them from having to face what it is about women that is so terrifying to them.
Not all men are like this. I believe that there are many men who simply have never questioned the way they were raised or taught. They have never thought about whether what they’ve heard at church fits with reality at all. I have great hope for those men. It’s the ones who insist that they “love and respect” women while continuing to lord it over us, assuming authority they do not have.
Dr. Drexler’s summary says it all for me:
Why is female sexuality and empowerment so deeply threatening to the conservative religious cultures? What would happen to those cultures if women were free to make their own sexual choices, and exercise their own personal power? Would free, healthy, sexual, productive women bring down a society or dramatically strengthen it?
How can we make positive changes that liberate women from the Madonna-Whore Complex?
