To have and to hold back?
This may be hard to believe, but I try not to be a jerk about other peoples’ religious beliefs, or their political beliefs, for that matter. Just because I disagree with someone doesn’t make her/him a moron, an idiot, or a worse or less valuable person. In fact, I seek to respect and learn from the opinions of others. I think that in general people want freedom, equality, safety, and to do the right thing to the best of their ability. Because there’s no easy answer to how to best accomplish these things, and because there are many ways to prioritize them, people may have different views, but very rarely do you find someone whose beliefs are malicious.
At least that’s what I want to think. But then people gotta piss me off, and my good intentions suddenly aren’t worth the internet real estate they’re rendered on.
It’s May, which apparently means that lots of weddings are starting to happen. I’m going to two in the next month, in fact. Can you smell the calla lilies, the poised shotguns, the feckless optimism, the… somethings blue? I knew you could.
Anyway, my little brother recently went to a good friend’s wedding and came back with an appalling report. No, the bridesmaids didn’t have (gasp!) butch haircuts. It was way worse than that. The wedding was apparently crazy sexist, so much so that my brother, who is not a feminist crusader in the least, noticed it and was profoundly disturbed.
I’m not talking about the general complaints you might hear about how marriage is an institution perpetrated by the patriarchy, or even how the act of a father “giving away” the bride in marriage is a call back to a business transaction where women were chattel and men held all the chips. What I’m talking about is something that I really didn’t realize existed in mainstream American culture anymore at all: the bride and groom agreed to entirely different things in their vows.
The main reading was the whole “Wives submit to your husbands” thing that I wish would just die already, (Can we just take Ephesians, or actually all the Paul of Tarsus stuff, out of the Bible? That’d be super.) I realize that it’s not my business to decide who gets to call the shots in someone else’s relationship, and that I should not take this personally. Maybe the bride explicitly wanted her vows to agree to being controlled. But the idealist in me finds it upsetting that two (presumably non-kinky) people would set the tone for their marriage with a religious reading about power dynamics. “Love is patient, love is kind” is hackneyed, yes, but at least it’s not appointing a mayor of the marriage right then and there. So maybe it only follows that the stated vows reflected that. I don’t know what they said verbatim, but according to what my brother told me it was probably something roughly like this:
Groom
I, _____, take you, ______, to be my wedded wife. With deepest joy I receive you into my life that together we may be one. As is Christ to His body, the church, so I will be to you a loving and faithful husband. Always will I perform my headship over you even as Christ does over me, knowing that His Lordship is one of the holiest desires for my life. I promise you my deepest love, my fullest devotion, my tenderest care. I promise I will live first unto God rather than others or even you. I promise that I will lead our lives into a life of faith and hope in Christ Jesus. Ever honoring God’s guidance by His spirit through the Word, And so throughout life, no matter what may lie ahead of us, I pledge to you my life as a loving and faithful husband.
Bride
I, _____, take you, ______, to be my wedded husband. With deepest joy I come into my new life with you. As you have pledged to me your life and love, so I too happily give you my life, and in confidence submit myself to your headship as to the Lord. As is the church in her relationship to Christ, so I will be to you. _____, I will live first unto our God and then unto you, loving you, obeying you, caring for you and ever seeking to please you. God has prepared me for you and so I will ever strengthen, help, comfort, and encourage you. Therefore, throughout life, no matter what may be ahead of us, I pledge to you my life as an obedient and faithful wife.
Notice how only one of them has to say “submit” and “obedient”? Also, “performing headship” over someone is not something I’d want to discuss in front of my parents and brand new in-laws and great aunties, if you know what I mean.
I’ve sat through many, many sermons in my life. Some of them opined that Harry Potter is a Satanic text, and some of them patiently explained that the idea of comparing a husband and his wife to Jesus and his church doesn’t explicitly state that one is better than the other, they’re just different, and hell, someone has to be in charge! But why does someone have to be in charge in a relationship? Is it because talking things over and coming to mutually agreeable conclusions wastes valuable time that could be spent praying? I mean, it’s fun to have someone in charge in bed, but I wouldn’t even agree to that permanently.
I suggest that it’s all bullshit; the Jesus/church comparison belies any claim of “separate but equal”. In the Christian faith I was raised in, Jesus is absolutely held up as superior to the church. He’s the paragon of life, for fuck’s sake, and the church is devoted to worshiping him. To say that this comparison doesn’t elevate the man over the woman in a relationship isn’t just wack, it’s wiggity wack. Ladies, if you’re going to give up that much power, at least have a safeword.
P.S. “I do” is not a safe word.
It would be interesting to know how it got decided and especially who decided what vows to say. Though I think a lot of people pay very little attention to underlying sexism (racism, etc.) especially if it is so universally accepted. In fact I think a lot of people don’t give deep thought to much anything, and especially not more complicated philosophical/political issues, I personally never thought too much about sexism or feminism until a few years ago and even now some things don’t spring to my attention until someone points it out to me. But I guess that is the cross I have to bear as a white, straight male between 20 and 40. It is a harsh one.
As for your first part, I think I have become more open minded and calm about people in the last year or so. I used to get really enraged and argumentative, especially on online boards, but I now tend to just let things go. IN some ways because a lot of arguing is futile and also cause, really, people aren’t just idiots because they disagree with me. I suppose harmful or outright malicious ideas should not be left unchallenged, but many things just seem less extreme, I suppose I can see now not all government is just men with guns stealing my freedom and not all religion is just evil brainwashing.
Oh and according to Eddie Murphy the safeword is “half”.
“‘I do’ is not a safeword.”
A-fucking-men.
“some of them patiently explained that the idea of comparing a husband and his wife to Jesus and his church doesn’t explicitly state that one is better than the other, they’re just different, and hell, someone has to be in charge!”
They got it wrong and totally missed the point. The comparison is supposed to be of the ideal relationship, not the entities in the relationship. A is to B as C is to D does not mean A is like C or B is like D.
That of course doesn’t help much at all, as the most objectionable part is the relationship of obedience which is there not the comparison of husbands to Jesus which isn’t. Along with chastity, this is one of the really hard parts for me to accept intellectually. I would frankly prefer it the other way around if there has to be obedience at all.
However, there’s one thing I can guarantee: if your idea of the omniscient God never tells you anything that makes no sense to you and you don’t like, you are not listening to an omniscient God.
However, there’s one thing I can guarantee: if your idea of the omniscient God never tells you anything that makes no sense to you and you don’t like, you are not listening to an omniscient God.
Nope. But it’s certainly worth questioning which bits are an omniscient God speaking through someone, and which bits are a man whose entire experience is of extremely patriarchal cultures filtering his understanding of relationships through his understanding of God.