Bear with me until I get to the point of this blog post, because first I must quote some passages from the Holy Bible:
And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man and brought them to the camp at Shiloh…And they instructed the Benjaminites, saying, “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and watch; when the young women of Shiloh come out to dance, then come out of the vineyards and each of you carry off a wife for himself…The Benjaminites did so; they took wives for each of them from the dancers whom they abducted. Judges 21:12, 20, 23
Then Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the Lord had commanded Moses: The booty remaining from the spoil that the troops had taken totaled six hundred seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand donkeys, and thirty-two thousand persons in all; women who had not known a man by sleeping with him. Numbers 31:31-35
When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword. You may however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoythe spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you.
Deut. 20:10-14
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God hands them over to you and you take them captive, suppose you see among the captives a beautiful woman whom you desire and want to marry, and so you bring her home to your house; she shall shave her head, pare her nails, discard her captive’s garb, and shall remain in your house a full month, mourning for her father and mother; after that you may go into her and be her husband and she shall be your wife. But if you are not satisfied with her, you shall let her go free and not sell her for money.
Deut. 21:10-14
In an essay entitled, “Violence against Women in the Historical Christian West and in North American Secular Culture: The Visual and Textual Evidence,” theologian Margaret R. Miles wrote,
Women who are fortunate enough never to have been
sexually assaulted, often do not realize how much we
adjust our lifestyle to avoid victimization. These “precautions”
constitute an implicit recognition of the danger; the threat of
assault and rape is enough to make us rearrange our lives,
reflecting our constant state of terror.
Women who have been sexually assaulted realize only too well how much their entire lives have been altered. Their recognition of danger is not “implicit,” but rather, quite explicit.
Margaret Miles wrote this essay in 1987, fourteen years before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, fifteen years before the creation of the Homeland Security Act, which created the Department of Homeland Security, and years before the words terror and terrorism became a part of the daily lexicon of American language and rhetoric. When I read that word, I realized that in her description of the daily experiences of women throughout history, Margaret Miles chose exactly the right word; terror.
In the past few days, my students and I struggled with Miles’ analysis of the “visual and textual evidence” of Christianity’s contribution (yes, contribution), to “conditions that promote violence against women in our society.” We struggled not because Miles’ essay was intellectually difficult reading. We struggled because the evidence is so overwhelmingly clear. We struggled because her argument was so stunningly valid. And in the midst of the realization; in the midst of the clarity, the air in the classroom became tinged with sadness, silence and just a hint of despair.
In this first blog post on this theme, I will briefly present some of Dr. Miles’ argument, with a bit of commentary of my own. Her argument begins with an examination of American secular culture. She exposes the myths of the universality of rape and its biological, “hormonal” cause, beliefs which serve to leave us with a sense of helplessness in the face of sexual violence. 1.) Rape is not a universal phenomenon. Rape is a learned response influenced by the ways in which societies organize. 2.) The widely held notion that men “can’t help themselves” is without basis in fact. There are cultures in which rape occurs rarely or not at all. That rape is so prevalent in western culture leads to the misconception that men are victims of their own actions.
The Biblical and theological foundations for the promotion and defense of violence against women include:
**A patriarchal history that groups women together with cattle and donkeys as male possessions engenders a sense of male entitlement. After all, one can do whatever one likes with one’s property, right? The American legal system reflects this view. That many states, including South Carolina do not recognize spousal rape as a crime is grounded in the belief that when “the two become one," the one they become is the husband.
**A pervasive androcentric world view that judges women to be “naturally” inferior, weak and carnal and therefore in dire need of control. What shall be done if the only way in which one can control one’s woman is to beat her, or kill her?
**That women are perceived in connection with body, biology and nature with a proclivity to lust has led to the prevailing view that women are responsible for male arousal. Tertullian wrote in the second century, “Such eyes will wish that a virgin be seen as has the virgin who shall wish to be seen. The same kinds of eyes reciprocally crave after each other. Seeing and being seen belong to the self-same lust.” In other words, if a man is aroused by the sight of a woman, she means to arouse him. I suspect that Church Father and theologian Tertullian might have been the first to ask, when told of a woman’s rape, “What was she wearing?” How ridiculous would it appear to someone if he were told that it was up to him to ensure that no one desire his car?
**Miles argues that , “Although patriarchal religious ideas and visual images are still strong in their religious settings in large sectors of the American public, their translation in the secular media has insured both their continuing influence and their constant availability to Americans (emphasis mine).” That a Biblical misogynistic inheritance is a part of American culture is something I have always recognized and maintained. It is perpetuated in religious settings daily, but this inheritance continues also through a secularization of the religious ideology.
**The eroticization of violence against women has a long textual and visual Christian history. Pornography, video games, music videos and market advertising that conflate sex and women’s bodies with violence is not a modern perversion, but one that stretches far back into the Christian past. Christian art graphically depicts the virgin martyrs’ gruesome deaths; St. Agatha and St. Barbara shown naked, their breasts being sliced off or pulled off by giant pincers held by a threatening executioner as they are whipped by another. Eroticized violence exists too in the written descriptions of virgins’ martyrdoms, as in the account of the martyrdom of Saints Felicitas and Perpetua. A leopard is prepared for them in the Roman amphitheater and the chronicler interjects, “But for the women the devil had made ready a most savage cow, prepared for this purpose against all custom; for even in this beast he would mock their sex. They were stripped therefore and made to put on nets; and so they were brought forth. The people shuddered, seeing one a tender girl, the other her breasts yet dropping from her late childbearing. So they were called back and clothed in loose robes. Perpetua was first thrown, and fell upon her loins. And when she had sat upright, her robe being rent at the side, she drew it over to cover her thigh, mindful rather of modesty than of pain.” The first time I read the Martyrdom of Felicitas and Perpetua, I thought to myself about the author, “What a sick freak.” There are those who maintain that this particular account was written by Tertullian.
Doire tangent: The unholy, unhealthy suppression of sexuality (particularly female sexuality) in the Christian west is further exemplified by the neurotic veneration, elevation and cult-like status given to virginity. The Virgin stands as its most noted victim, but the point here is not that a woman has been elevated, but that virginity itself, as a state and condition of being is what is so prized. Historically men seek to penetrate and impregnate women, “but the woman they value is the untouched, untouchable” one. (Miles) Andrea Dworkin in her book Woman Hating wrote that one of the results of identifying women with body, nature and sin is the exaggerated esteem of female virginity, which she calls, “a real sexual perversion.”
** And finally, something that I have been arguing for years; that the traditional Christian interpretation of suffering renders it beneficial, and the path to transcendence and salvation, especially for women. Women could not imitate Christ on the altar, on the “battlefield” as Christian soldiers or in power, so for women, suffering provided the “surest route to participation in religious [and spiritual] power.” The Biblical foundations for this noble view of suffering, coupled with female submission are lain in scripture, in the deutero-Pauline letters to the Ephesians and to Peter:
Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of his wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be in everything, to their husbands. Eph. 5:22-24
Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh. For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval.
Peter 2:18-20
The man has been made the master of the wife. He has been given rule over her. And the wife has been made subject and if she suffers at the hands of her husband, she glorifies God. For the abuser, it is a match made in heaven. For the abused, a match made in hell.
The evidence is indeed sobering and has been only partially reproduced here. Part II of this blog entry will be my own examination and analysis of the historical experience of women, who for centuries have known only too well what it is to live within a culture of terror. To be continued...
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