Nature or nurture? Can gender equality truly be handled through education? In my case it is especially difficult to separate the two. I am not sure if my religious past forced me to pay close attention to the gender equality issue or if I am just destined to buck the system. Perhaps it is both or perhaps the nurturing fed my curious nature. All I know is that I was aware of gender bias from a very early age. When I went to kindergarten I was shocked at how differently the boys were treated compared to the girls. They were allowed to go to the bathroom upon demand and girls were told to hold it. Their boys gym classes consisted of baseball and soccer and the girls jumped rope and played hop scotch.
My brothers were born a year later and I saw this trend continue, even in my own home. The boys were allowed to do things that the girls were not. The boys were allowed to be aggressive. They were encouraged to be aggressive, to take the lead. The term “sissy” was something to be avoided but “tomboy” was acceptable. I remember that my sister was not allowed to play baseball at our bus stop because she threw like a girl. I remember thinking “its better to throw like a girl than to throw like a frog.” Punishments were different for the same act. If a girl spit, she had to write “girls don’t spit” a thousand times. If a boy spit, they were told not to do it indoors. This all seemed to be so different from the way adults acted.
Quite frankly, all of the women I knew at that time in my life were very powerful. They ruled their households and the room when they occupied it. Even my truck driver step-father found an escape route when the women convened over coffee. I remember laughing out loud when my step-father quoted 1 Peter 3:7 and said that women are the “weaker vessel” that the husband was to “honor and protect.” That got me a fierce look from my mother which only made me laugh harder.
There was something very backward about that entire scripture that made me think that somewhere along the lines of history, that was translated backwards. I remember thinking that I had never seen a man “honor” a woman because she was “weaker.” Exploit her, ridicule her, lord it over her, condescend her, mock her, yes, but never had I ever seen a woman honored for it. In my limited experience, I had only seen women honored when they trancended their male counterparts while maintaining a public facade of humilty and submission.
Religious rehtoric taught me that men were slaves to their desires and women were to be careful not to unleash that desire. Just about every story in the bible protrays a women that caused the downfall of great men - Adam and Eve, Sampson and Deliliah, Jezabel, King Solomon and Bathsheba. I was once counselled that my shirt was inappropriate because the pockets drew attention to my chest. I was 10 years old and flat as a pancake but somehow those pockets on my shirt could cause a man’s mind to mistep. At 10, I had never been “turned on” by anything so the idea that these uncontrollable feelings were entirely gender based made sense to me.
Thankfully, my nature did not allow this pattern of spoonfed guilt to destroy me. This experience did, however, fuel my natural instinct to make more observations, read more on the topic, and ask deeper questions of those powerful women that are all around me…
December 21st, 2006
One thing that I like about being a Baha’i is that one is never “done” becoming a Baha’i. In our community we sometimes use the expression that “deciding to become a Baha’i doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived, it only means you’ve decided to buy a ticket.” This means that there is always much more to learn, but it also means that you can occasionally look back on what you have learned over time. In my own case, I find one thing that has changed is my understanding of the equality of women and men. Below I’ve traced the issues of valuing women for more than their looks and balancing the masculine and feminine within ourselves. In each case, the process starts with becoming more aware of the issue which leads to making some personal changes and finally to developing a broader awareness of how the issue is playing out in society.
I became a Baha’i when I was 28 and already married. In my relationships before I dated my wife, I always put a very high value on my partner’s looks and sexual availability. My respect for them as intelligent human beings was secondary. I was very fortunate that when my wife and I started dating, we had already been good friends for five years. I respected her on many different levels. This was the first time that I had a partner that I thought of as a whole human being. However, in my head, I often valued people, especially women, too much based on their looks.
Most of the people who taught me about the Baha’i Faith were women. Some of us became very good friends and they shared things with me about their life experiences. From these discussions, I began to develop awareness that incidents of domestic violence, rape, childhood sexual abuse and just plain sexual harassment were far more prevalent than I would have previously believed. According to statistics given at http://www.endabuse.org/resources/facts/, up to one third of American Women have reported being abused by their partners. This does not include childhood sexual abuse or even rape by people other than their partners. Based on my own personal experience with women that I have gotten to know well enough to talk about such issues, I would say that these estimates might be low.
Having become more aware of this issue, I could see that for many of my women friends, the result of these events had left life long scars that affected their relationships with others and also their view of themselves as being valuable human beings. I also began to realize that at the root of most of this damage was an insecure male ego that viewed women primarily as sexual beings. It was clear to me from the Baha’i teachings that God does not view our gender as being particularly significant, and wishes for us to recognize each others spiritual qualities more so than our physical ones. It was also clear to me that I had some work to do, since I was still placing too much emphasis on physical attributes. So for almost 20 years, through studying the Baha’i writings, talking with others, praying, meditating, and redirecting my inner dialog with myself, I have been working on trying to appreciate women’s spiritual qualities above their physical qualities.
As I began to try to do this, I became aware of how many social forces reinforce the idea that women are primarily sexual beings. Movies, newspapers, video games, television, and magazines are all full of advertisements and characters that reinforce a model that says clearly that a woman’s main worth is how attractive she is. This is often done in the most sensational and provocative way possible. After all, sex sells. To change this culture into one that is truly interested in treating women and men as equals, people of both genders are going to have to speak out.
(Note that I left out the booming pornography trade which I think is an abomination in so many ways that I can’t begin to address them all here.)
In 1997, there was a pamphlet put out by the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States entitled: Two Wings of a Bird. This brief document lead me to the realization that part of creating gender equity in the world involves finding gender equity within ones self. That is, we all have the ability to balance our masculine and feminine qualities. In this document, Abdu’l- Baha is quoted as saying “The world in the past has been ruled by force, and man has dominated over woman by reason of his more forceful and aggressive qualities both of body and mind. But the balance is already shifting; force is losing its dominance, and mental alertness, intuition and the spiritual qualities of love and service, in which woman is strong, are gaining ascendancy.” From this quote and other passages within the Baha’i writings, it became clear to me that within each of us we have a combination of traditional male qualities like forcefulness and traditional female qualities like love and service. Bringing about equality of women and men is not just a social phenomenon but one that takes place within each of us individually.
Again, to take this to a personal level, it meant working on developing my less often used qualities like intuition, love, and service. In this case I was helped in this process because a number of Baha’is had come to similar conclusions. Now, we get together periodically to talk about what type of things we are trying in order to balance these aspects of our lives. In a typical weekend session, the men will all meet together and consult about the issues that they deal with and the women will do the same. When the men are together, we make a list of issues and questions that we would like to discuss with the women and the women do the same. The women and men then all meet together and discussion the issues on the list. This has proven to be a very powerful format for sharing.
As to the wider implications of this concept, I think it is painfully obvious that world leaders, who are predominantly male, are trying to solve their differences by using their traditionally male qualities of forcefulness and aggression. It simply is not working very well. A more collaborative dialog with a wider range of problem solving skills will require more reliance on the traditionally female qualities and is sorely needed to settle some of the long standing conflicts that the world faces.
A recent publication by the Baha’i international community entitled: Beyond Legal Reforms:Culture and Capacity in the Eradication of Violence Against Women and Girls now has some points that I need to understand better. I have read it twice and there is much to think about and discuss with others. And so I continue the process of becoming a Baha’i.
Note that there are other documents regarding the Baha’i teachings on the equality of women and men listed at: http://info.bahai.org/article-1-8-0-4.html
I guess that’s all for now. Thanks once again to Christina for allowing me to present an alternative to the “spin machine” view of men and women.
May you all be well and happy.
Mike
Technorati tags: gender, equality, religion, Bahai, faith, beliefs
December 5th, 2006
