“Community Columnist” Michael Schrader

(About abuse of women)

Written 11 July 2015

Ray Rice. Joe Mixon. De’Andre Johnson. Now add Dalvin Cook to this infamous list. Why are these men infamous? They are all football players who have been videotaped punching a woman in the face.

Some would say that they are the exceptions, that it is the result of inflated egos that come with being football players. Perhaps, but I doubt it. This abuse is not the result of their status as athletes, but as their gender as men. If you read the excuses for their behavior, it becomes painfully obvious – we live in a society where men are deemed superior to women and men have every right to reinforce that superiority, by force if necessary. In all four cases, the man was in an argument with the woman he struck, and the woman, standing up for herself, struck the man first. According to the apologists, the women deserved to get punched in the face for standing up for themselves. In the most recent case, the woman was resisting unwanted sexual advances. But hey, it’s okay, because the woman is supposed to submit to the man, and if she refuses, then she deserves to be punched in the face.

Where did we get such a vile worldview? Where exactly does it say that that a woman is supposed to be submissive to a man? In the Bible, and specifically several epistles of Paul. Paul, according to an English translation of his words, states that women are to be submissive to men, are supposed to be quiet, and are not allowed to teach the sacred word. Based on these selected passages of a very large book, we, and I mean men, have decided that we can be tyrannical dictators to women, that they better submit to us or else we have the right to beat them into submission. The discussion by Paul that men are to love and respect their wives, which means you don’t treat them like slaves and human garbage, is conveniently forgotten. Also forgotten is that fact that Paul’s original words were translated from a different language to ours, and as any linguist will tell you, often times the true meaning of texts are lost in translation. Finally, we are taking words written two millennia ago by a man to a particular group dealing with particular world events and applying them to a completely different group in a completely different temporal context.

To understand Paul, one must understand what was happening in his world. In the Roman world, men were expected to join the military for the honor of the state. Being in the military in the ancient world often meant being away from home for years at a time. With the men gone, the roles that might have been filled by the men had to be filled by the women. In essence, the ancient civilizations were filled with one parent female households where the woman had to fill the role of both mother and father. Into this world throw in a religious group, Christians, who were pacifists by nature and whose men did not join the military due to religious objections. Suddenly, you had communities where both genders were home, leading to confusion as to who was to do what, because the traditional role of the male, to serve in the military, had been eliminated. Paul, facing a crisis, set out to delineate the new roles.

I don’t view the Pauline text as necessarily misogynistic, as many do. I also don’t view it as giving men the right to be mini-Stalins. Perhaps it was a subtle way to prompt the men to do something, and to relieve the women of some of their burden. Somehow along the way it has been perverted to condone misogynism and verbal and physical abuse of women.

If you look around our community, you will see many men who believe in this twisted view. I am repulsed how they treat women. What you see in the eyes of the women isn’t love, but fear. It needs to stop.

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