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Tag Archives: femininity

Devil’s Dictionary: CREC edition

21 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by in American Christianity

≈ 16 Comments

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Abortion: the reason nothing else should be considered morally wrong, including racism, slavery, the mass murder of adults, the sexual abuse of minors, and stealing other people’s ideas.

Community: the kindness of the church-goers for one another is paramount, because it presents a helpful distraction if anyone raises an objection about the way the church hierarchy functions.

Post-traumatic stress: a sign of rebellion against God’s plan for your life.

Depression: also a sign of rebellion. Don’t be depressed. If hearing that doesn’t cure you, you’re a sinner.

Pantywaist: a term used to describe a perceived lack of masculinity, which allows the user to employ the slightly naughty word “panty.”

Robust: a code word meaning strong, hard and/or persistent.

Insist: a strong, masculine verb used to describe an opinion voiced in one-sided internet arguments. Most often used in blog posts and sermons to cover for the author’s failure to prove his point with evidence and logic.

Full throated: intended to mean hale and hearty; actually means obnoxious, strident and abusive. As in “we employ a full-throated defense of the gospel.” Meant to connote the idea that straw-man stereotyping and name calling are all in good taste and for a good cause, whereas they are actually fallacious misrepresentation.

Conventional marriage: when a robust man takes possession of a physically mature yet emotionally stunted woman from her father, and then colonizes her garden.

Garden: polite euphemism; using the medical term is a sign of serious sin. Having your garden colonized may not be a very pleasant experience for you, but remember: flowers have no say in how they’re fertilized. Their duty is to bring joy to their gardener. The gardener’s skills in the flowerbed is obviously completely immaterial to the garden’s lack of enjoyment. Ladies: just shut your eyes and pray for it to be over quickly.

Feminine: concerned with being deferential to those in authority over her; also probably dressed in modest but tasteful attire attuned to her gardener’s needs. Absolutely no tattoos or outlandish piercings.

Feminist: a woman with small breasts who eats lentils and screams about how much she hates the patriarchy. Actually desires to be a man, which is the only reason she has any carnal desire for men, because sex drives are entirely masculine. Also known as a “small-breasted biddy” and/or as a “lumberjack dyke.”

Tattoo: the outward declaration that you belong to a tribe that is not our tribe. In our tribe, we all look like Edith Schaeffer, the face of 1950s-era Christian wholesomeness.  

Classical education: a term used to describe the process of enculturating youth into a dead culture, specifically that of 1950s-era Christian wholesomeness.

Biblical education: see classical education. Inculcating children with highly specific political and theological viewpoints backed up with tenuous Bible verses (“How are you today?” “Better than we deserve”). Includes shouting these viewpoints en masse, in unison, during assembly.

Shepherding students: includes but is not limited to spanking sessions doled out by the male principal to particularly beautiful, sassy young girls. Also includes eavesdropping on private conversations and critiquing hairstyles as moral failures.

Culture: building an army of loyal, full-throated, robust men and feminine women using the methods above.

Loyalty: the most important trait a human can have, unless you’re Doug Wilson and are striking out on your own.

Plagiarism: a common mistake that most people make when they write books, and not important to consider when choosing which biblical education text to purchase.

Student plagiarism at New Saint Andrews: reason for expulsion, no matter what the excuse.

Co-author: someone available to take the fall should it be discovered that the more prominent author is part of yet another plagiarism scandal.

Editor: check collector; this position requires no actual work, other than sending a mass email to CREC friends asking for contributions, and then running their contributions through spellcheck (but definitely not a plagiarism check, because nobody cares and everyone does it).

Dean: the person you complain to if a girl in your NSA class excludes you from a study group in a way that you’re just positive is on purpose, even if she says she was just having a few friends over and it was not on purpose at all.

Parental authority: what the dean appeals to when he calls you into his office to ask why you excluded someone from your study group.

Sermon: a good way to admonish “fictional” girls who exclude others from NSA study groups.

Generosity: the act of giving many thousands of dollars to the pastor so he can go on vacation and purchase good scotch. The church’s financial generosity should only be extended to people and causes the church deems appropriate, and definitely should not be used to feed and clothe degenerate widows and orphans.

Spot on: any idea thought of by any Wilson*.

*or published by without citation; may not actually be original.

Kicking the devil in the teeth: phrase celebrating how the gospel is like Game of Thrones; meaning the most vicious, bloodthirsty people win.

Persecution: opposition.

Bitterness: what you display if you are upset at being abused and wish to stop others from being abused by the same person or people. Bitterness must be confessed and repented of.

Iron sharpening iron: the notion that people within the church are actually quite different because they have complex debates about very minor theological and cultural differences.

Elder: a church officer chosen on the merits of loyalty, whose chief responsibility is to present a united leadership front and agreement with the pastor. Encouraged to believe he thinks independently because of iron sharpening iron.

Belief: you don’t believe what you say you believe, you believe what we say you believe. For example, if you say that you believe child abusers should be jailed for public safety, we know that actually means you don’t believe in the gospel. If you say you believe the elders made mistakes, we know that actually means you believe the elders are evil. Since the elders are not evil, and since the gospel is real, what you believe is a lie.

Strawman: only a logical fallacy when our enemies do it. See also: every other logical fallacy there is. Logical fallacies are actually great for debate, because they sidetrack the conversation and hence we win.

Letter of censure: a means by which elders and pastors can insist on the veracity of their own authority by kicking congregants in the nether regions as they flee out the door.

Slander: to tell an inconvenient truth. Any criticism of our leaders that doesn’t have a bulletproof, court-ready set of evidence and proofs to back it up. And even the ones that have that proof and evidence, because God, Gospel, Church Authority and Obviously.

Divisiveness: the act of pointing anyone to publicly available documents in support of critique, since critique by itself is dismissed as slander. If you are a peon and the other person is a pastor, you are guilty of divisiveness regardless of the facts.

Orc: anyone causing divisiveness.

The internet: a ridiculous place where people who do not agree with the church slander publicly and with impunity. Not a reliable place to get information, unless you are Doug Wilson; are writing textbooks edited by him; or are reading Mablog or any offshoot Wilson/CREC blogs.

Wikipedia: discouraged as a source for Logos papers, but an excellent place to copy and paste from without citation if you’re writing textbooks.

Scurrilous: any criticism of the leaders that isn’t couched in mountains of fawning and deferential language, or that offers a critique of any substance with or without the fawning language.

Ax to grind: phrase used to indicate a person whose specific assertions can be safely disregarded because they are known to criticize the leaders. Anyone who does that more than once is scurrilous, and hates God and therefore must not be listened to.

Fellowship of the Grievance (FOG): anyone who dislikes Doug Wilson’s teaching and who is friends with anyone else known to dislike Doug’s teaching is automatically part of the FOG. The only possible reason they could be friends is because they love being scurrilous together. Anything else they share is a lie.

Bedfellow: word to describe what a person becomes when they criticize the leaders, as some other reprobates have before them; namely, they get into a metaphorical bed with the rest of the scurrilous and thereby prove they have an ax to grind by joining the FOG.

By Katie Botkin, with St. Tara

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On being female

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in American Christianity

≈ 12 Comments

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IMG_7120Having come out of a subculture that was obsessed with modesty of both dress and speech, it took me many years to express interest in men I liked. Looking back, I can see clearly at least three instances where I was attracted to someone who liked me back, yet I refused to flirt, refused to show any interest beyond extremely subtle signs that apparently fell by the wayside. I thought showing restraint (and basically nothing but restraint) was the right thing to do. Two out of three of these men decided I wasn’t into them and married someone else within the year.

So thinking back over all this, it is unsurprising for me to realize that in traditional Christian culture, the two sides of being female are presented starkly as virgin/whore: Mary, the chaste, the untouched; and conversely, Mary Magdalene, the one used by men to her own detriment. As the whore, Mary is bad but somewhat ambiguous; she may be the seductress or she may be the abused; she is either wicked or having something wicked done to her — or perhaps both. She becomes Christian by reforming her ways and presumably acting like the Virgin Mary. The two extremes: virgin/whore; good/bad; which category do you fit into?

Although motherhood is often celebrated in the church, there is no divine imagery of the mother or motherhood in Christendom. Mary comes closest, but Protestants tend to downplay her and Catholics focus on her perpetual virginity. The Perfect Wife is described in Proverbs 31 with a wide variety of characteristics, but Protestants name her above all things virtuous, the Puritan Goodwife who presumably also puts out because it’s her duty. Catholics are bit less prudish about it: they translated the word as valiant: “For who can find a valiant woman? Her price is far above rubies.”

As for the woman who is strong and sure of herself, sure of her power apart from what anyone else says about her, the Bible gives us Jezebel, who was so wicked she ended up cast from a window, her blood eaten by dogs. A Christian friend of mine recently confessed to me that she really liked Jezebel, whose only crime, she says, was staying loyal to the religion she was raised in after being married off to a foreigner.

A few thousand years past the Bronze Age, there are many in this country who still aspire to Biblical gender roles. However, to get a good picture of the lives of Biblical-era females, look no farther than the headlines Orthodox Jewish males have made over their refusal to sit next to women on airplanes. Women weren’t even allowed in the synagogue in Biblical times; that was reserved for men; men alone read the Torah. Women were innately contaminating; they were kept off to the side in the Women’s Court and well out of sight while the Torah was read.

But in spite of this negative heritage, in spite of having the virgin/whore dichotomy stamped into my psyche in a variety of ways, I read what I choose and I go where I please. Now I am strong, sure of myself, apart what anyone says about me — or at least I aspire to be. I say what I mean directly, to the people I directly wish to address, a far more compassionate route to the males of my environs. This means that I say yes when I want to say yes as much as it means I say no when I want to say no. And vice versa. This has taken some practice, and will for a long time. Though screeching to get attention and reactionary dithering have no place in my vocabulary, shamefaced wallflowering doesn’t either.

Because of this, I am more self-assured than I have been before. Now I am strong with a dark ferocity, and I will protect myself and those I love. I am strong with laughter in the daylight, my body is strong through use, my mind is strong and demanding. I am feminine, I am slight, but my spirit is unflinching. Many have tried to push me into the mire and have failed. To them my best vengeance is to rise, to show them I have endured their humiliations more graciously than they themselves have. I am not invincible but my triumph is invincible.

I am woman. Hear me roar.

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It’s a basically-accepted fact that the most dangerous thing known to woman is man. There are two extreme temptations here: claim that the only antidote to this is more man, or that the only antidote is avoiding all men. Both, when examined, are patently ridiculous. Saudi Arabia hasn’t solved rape by insisting that women need to be chaperoned everywhere by honor-bound male relatives. And short of becoming a recluse, it’s impossible to actually avoid men altogether.

One News Years Eve several years ago, three friends and I decided to go watch the fireworks on the Champs Elysees. We were in Paris, and this seemed like the obvious choice. After midnight, however, this very quickly devolved into us finding ourselves in the middle of a crowd of maltov-cocktail throwing revelers whose first choice in entertainment appeared to be trying to grope females in the crowd. Namely, us. They appeared to think we were tacitly agreeing to this by being in their midst. We quickly came up with the plan of linking arms, all four of us, and marching down the street aggressively in search of a café. This did not deter the gropers, however, until I started hurling curse words at every man who came within two feet of us. Then, aggrieved, offended, they backed away, hands in the air. All shreds of tacit agreement dissolved into the chaos and the broken glass of midnight.

The great irony is that one of these women is related to Doug Wilson, who insists on male protection to avoid harassment. But he and his family, thousands of miles away, were impotent in this situation — so much for male protection. The protection we got came from our solidarity and my nasty, loud, female mouth. My knowledge of French curse words, French culture, French accent; I came across as a pissed-off local who would raise hell. Not a lost, easily-preyed upon American.

The first line of defense against rape is not men, particularly not the men who are statistically most likely to do the molesting — take note, statistically, rape victims are assaulted in their own homes by people they know more than any other single place or group of people.

So the first line of defense is you. It’s your voice. Your loudness. Your insistence that you will tell the truth. You screaming for attention instead of playing it safe and polite. It’s also your community, your female friends, your male friends — whoever stands with you against the crowd. Whoever comes along to link arms in the night. I tell this to my nieces, too, when they express concern about bad guys: your voice is a powerful weapon. If you are in danger, if you are afraid, use it. Call for help. Do not be quiet. If they say you must be quiet, they are lying.

In Paris, the four of us found a café, and then we sat on the banks of the Seine and made up songs about our evening. I still get texts from one of these friends, every New Year: bonne annee, the salutation of every man who tried to touch us. I can laugh about it, because I was loud. I was loud, and they retreated.

I am a woman. I will raise my voice when the need arises.

 

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Photos are of Madaleine Sorkin in Krabi, Thailand — far and away the best climber, male or female, I’ve ever met.