Women and Religion

This Washington Post op-ed, "Religion lies about women," by Paula Kirby, sees discrimination against women as rooted in religion (I quote at length--her writing is just too passionate and scathing and broadly dismissive not to share):

"The truth is that the Abrahamic religions fear women and therefore go to extraordinary and sometimes brutal lengths to control them, constrain them, and repress them in every way. Show me a non-religious society that feels so threatened by the thought of female sexuality that it will slice off the clitoris of a young girl to ensure she can never experience sexual pleasure. Show me a non-religious society that feels the need to cloak women from head to toe and force them to experience the outside world through a slit of a few square inches. All three Abrahamic religions share the myth of Adam and Eve, the myth that it was through woman that evil was let loose in the world. They share the heritage of Leviticus, which declared a menstruating woman unclean, to be set aside, untouched, a revulsion that remains even today among some orthodox Jews, who will refuse to shake a woman’s hand for fear she may be menstruating. What kind of lunacy is this? It is the lunacy of a Bronze Age mindset fossilized by the reactionary forces of religion."

The op-ed argues that religion reduces women to beings who reproduce through its insistence that sex be connected to reproduction. She sees much of religion's treatment of women to come from anxiety toward women's sexuality:

"In the eyes of the Abrahamic religions, the archetypal woman is Eve: disobedient, unreliable, easily led astray, and a seductive temptress of man – man being more noble, yet easy prey to the wiles and seductions of his weaker mate. Woman is the source of danger, the one who corrupts him, the conduit for all that is evil in the world. She is dangerous … yet irresistible; and this very irresistibility makes her more dangerous still. ... And have you ever stopped to wonder what became of the male lover of the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John? Why wasn’t he threatened with execution by stoning and hauled before Jesus?"

The writer sees New Testament women as either prostitutes (who are portrayed as reprehensible) or virgins (who are praised): "sexless, locked forever in a childlike state; devoid of sexual passion or sensuality; obedient, self-sacrificing, selfless: a woman, in other words, from whom all that would make her fully human, let alone fully woman, has been stripped. Here, finally, is the woman that religion need not fear. This is the highest ideal to which a Christian woman may aspire: a cardboard cut-out of womanhood, a mere handmaid, silent, submissive, a vessel for the production of babies, passively and gratefully accepting her fate."

It seems that the thrust of this woman's argument is that religions that advocate different roles for women cannot offer justice for women. Presumably, Kirby would advocate in contrast, a role for women that is identical to that of men. Kirby seems to be suspicious of any difference between men and women--affirming women's reproductive potential, for Kirby, implies the reduction of women to that reproductive capacity.

Actually, I'm struck by an obsession with sex in her op-ed--she writes in the passage about the virgin above: "a woman, in other words, from whom all that would make her fully human, let alone fully woman, has to be stripped." Sex makes us fully human? (Or is it selfishness?) In addition, she understands religion to advocate babies but not sex, while she ends up advocating only sex (and I suppose babies, if they are explicitly chosen post-conception).

She ties Female Genital Mutilation to religion in a way I've really never seen done before. As far as I know, Female Genital Mutilation is not by any means a practice primarily associated with the "three Abrahamic religions," which Kirby focuses on throughout the article.

The primary problem that I have with Kirby's argument is the problem that I have with the new atheists' writings (Sam Harris, etc., who aren't very new anymore): Sure, religion led to lots of wars and deaths, but so did secularism (totalitarianism and communism, for instance). Susan Miller Okin's Women in Western Political Thought carries the same critique of a functional treatment of women that this article offers, but Okin sees functionalism as present in all of history, not just in religion (she focuses on Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill).