Controlling Women

Britney Spears is not someone I have paid much attention to over the years, so I was brought up short by Renee Roden’s Religion News Service article, published in NCR: “The trajectory of Spears’ career and public persona can be understood, some experts on evangelicalism argue, through the rise and decline of the evangelical purity movement.” Here I want to look at the movement, not Spears, who has been fighting her father’s conservatorship. Then I’ll pivot to the news about women deacons and the Texas abortion law to think about women making decisions about their lives.

Women’s Studies, for about as long as it has existed as a discipline, has articulated the damage done by the “good girls, bad girls” dichotomy in our culture. People with a religious bent have labeled it as virgin-whore, Mary-Eve. Roden summarizes the roots of the phenomenon she wants to examine: “Purity culture is often used to describe evangelical teachings in the late 1990s and early 2000s that emphasized waiting until marriage to have sex, encouraging young people to take virginity pledges and to dress modestly.” She uses Linda Kay Klein’s description, too: “Any culture that sums people up as good or bad based on other people’s perceptions of their gender performance or their sexuality.”

Which is how we get to controlling women, or especially young girls: “Religion professor Sara Moslener said this emphasized the double standard placed on young women. ‘You have to look sexy but be unavailable,’ said Moslener, who specializes in American evangelicalism at Central Michigan University. ‘You have to look like a bad girl but have the value of a good girl.'”

Roden continues:

"'Purity culture sexualizes young girls, too — that's central to their teaching,' Klein said. Young women were taught that their bodies would be sexually perceived by men without their permission or consent. And for that, Klein said, they were supposed to feel shame. 'Shame over their sexualization is what allows them to be good despite being sexualized. They are supposed to want to protect the poor vulnerable men who are threatened by their sexualization,' said Klein.

"Moslener believes Spears' situation — in which her freedom is limited in the name of her own well-being but also benefits financially the people in her life — symbolizes the purity movement whose life cycle has followed hers. 'The purity movement was never first and foremost about caring for adolescents, either their sexual or spiritual development,' she said.

Instead, Moslener said, the movement was about power — about who controlled women's bodies and who benefitted from that control."

I found this the perfect object lesson about who controls women’s bodies in the Church, which is how I can pivot to Phyllis Zagano, whose column arrived from NCR on the same day. Zagano emphasizes that the agenda of the new commission on women deacons is unknown, after she reviews the history of the three previous commissions. Roden also reviews the politics, in her case the forces that addressed purity culture in the 1980s. She suggests that the backlash to the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic encouraged the emphasis on abstinence and activism by the Catholic League, among others.

The prevalence of the male gaze was another early insight of Women’s Studies, so I find Zagano’s conclusion especially meaningful:

Centuries ago, Pope Gelasius I was scandalized that women — presumably women deacons — were ministering at the altar. The synodal church seems to be moving in the direction of allowing women back there. Their presence at the Eucharist as deacons will symbolize their own dedication to the Gospel and that of the church to the larger question at hand. For until the church restores its own tradition, it will be caught in a morass of falsehoods growing from the single statement that women cannot image Christ. 

These falsehoods continue to dominate the debate about women’s ordination, but Zagano notes the step forward by Pope Francis in confirming the ministry of women lectors and acolytes. Of course, it’s still the gaze of one man: the Pope. I’m not convinced it was the Synodal church that did it, but we shall see as dioceses begin the process the Synod of Bishops has designed to facilitate the coming forward of the ideas of all the people of God.

I note that the deacon commission will meet for a week in the Vatican beginning September 13. The Root and Branch Synod will conclude in Bristol, England, on September 12. Here’s a link to the Programme in case you have not yet been tempted to drop in to any or all of the sessions. Certainly many will gather in this lay-planned synod, some in clerical and religious garb.

The deacon commission does not have the same ratio of lay/religious/clerical speakers, but Zagano notes that it’s not dominated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. She links to Josh McElwee’s article on the members that I can only characterize as gloomy. I myself wrote about the announcement in this blog, including my hopes for one member, Anne-Marie Pelletier, a lay woman theologian; I continue to follow her, if you can’t resist reading my old blogs.

So September begins with two weeks of frantic activity about women in the Church. It also begins with a Texas law and a Supreme Court decision that will occasion frantic activity about abortion. I will disappoint those of you who want me to comment on abortion itself. I try not to offend those who defend this church teaching at the same time they support women’s ordination. What fits into the theme of controlling women is the enforcement mechanism created by Texas lawmakers.

All I have been able to think about is the Compromise of 1850, which enabled “slave catchers” to operate throughout the entire United States, whether slave or free states, and anywhere else, for that matter. The law allowed them to bring the formerly enslaved who had escaped back to their prior owners for a cash reward. Often they captured and transported even those legally free, who had purchased or been granted their freedom.  “Vigilantism” is the word, and it’s dangerous.

The New York Times explains the provision I am concerned about: “Though the patient may not be sued, doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, people who help pay for the procedure, even an Uber driver taking a patient to an abortion clinic are all potential defendants.” I wonder why the law made an exception for the woman, but I do not have the energy to find out the reasoning.

The Times “In Her Words” column continues about these new vigilantes:

"Plaintiffs, who need not have any connection to the matter nor show any injury from it, are entitled to $10,000 and their legal fees recovered if they win. Prevailing defendants are not entitled to legal fees.

'It's completely inverting the legal system,' Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Times. 'It says the state is not going to be the one to enforce this law. Your neighbors are.'"  

I imagine by the time you read this, “vigilantes” will be used more frequently to describe this penalty. It’s in Wednesday’s post by my favorite historian, Heather Cox Richardson, who begins with Reconstruction. She’s got a lot more examples, both about Texas laws and this decision. For example, she begins with a new law there about handguns and goes on to voting rights.   But I’ll remain focused on women being controlled by other people’s perceptions.  Not only their actions, but also their very bodies and others’ actions on their behalf are subject to others’ gaze. Controlling women in these ways is dangerous to themselves and others. It limits the aspirations and spirits of those trying to live their own lives as they see fit.