“After the Patriarchy Falls”

“After the Patriarchy Falls”    January 13, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Some people need to create a nightmare far worse than the one they came from before they will go back and heal their early wounds. We see this in trauma survivors all the time. They pile hell upon hell, until they have only two choices—die, or heal the wounds they are fleeing. I used to find this confusing, but I no longer do. Sometimes the first hell was so bloody bad that it takes a far worse hell to uncover it. Bows to those who choose to heal their hells, after so many years on the run. Bows to those courageous beings who give reality a try before they have any evidence that it will serve them. If this isn’t courage, I don’t know what is. from Jeff Brown’s “Spiritual Graffiti” 

I know that it irritates a lot of parents, but I loved it when my daughter went through that toddler phase of always asking why. It didn’t last long for her because, I assume, most pre-schoolers don’t really want you to drop everything and sit down and exploit that teachable moment for an hour or so.

But I sincerely think that more of us should get some of that curiosity back. We stop asking “why?” and we start accepting the status quo as if the way things are is just the way that they should be. And, in fact, religious people will insist that the way that things are is the way God wants them to be.

In the past couple of years, we’ve begun to talk a lot about patriarchy, about toxic masculinity, about white male privilege and the assumptions we make about who holds the reins of power in society. Why won’t the Catholic Church ordain women as priests? Why won’t the Assemblies of God, the Baptists, and most evangelical churches allow women to be ministers? Why are most corporate CEO’s men? 

And last year, when we had the largest number of women elected to the legislative branch of our government in our nation’s history, why is it that women still make up less than one fourth of the Senate and no woman has ever been elected president? 

May I ask you to indulge me just a moment to reflect upon this anthropologically? 

We all know that in any crisis, we place much higher value on the lives of women and children than we do on men. This is not just true about loading lifeboats on the Titanic, this has been true for centuries in warfare, or times of scarcity or starvation. This is not simple chivalry.

In the ancient world, when tribes competed for control of resources, it was much more important to protect women than men. If most of your tribe is wiped out in war, natural disaster, or illness, then it takes women and children to rebuild the tribe. A single man can sire many children in a month, but a woman can bear only about one child a year. Therefore, men are expendable, and women are precious to a tribe’s survival. 

This value creeps unconsciously into our cultural assumptions. Anthropologists have looked at how expendable men are in video games. 

Sure, women get portrayed in exaggerated sexualized ways in many video games, but men are typically portrayed as being entirely expendable. Even in games for children, shooting up dozens of men as if your six-year-old was suddenly John Wick is not much of an issue, it doesn’t raise much of an emotional reaction from almost anyone. 

But you don’t see games in which dozens of women are thoughtlessly mowed down in a hail-storm of bullets. Unconsciously, even in fantasy, men are expendable, and women are to be protected. That might sound like a good deal for women and children but what they sacrifice in this life or death exchange is their freedom from domination.

Patriarchy becomes the price that women pay for protection. The role of men as warriors translates into men as rulers, owners, decision makers, and, like it or not, predators. 

To the degree that cinema is a reflection of society, we have to admit that for the first hundred years of movies, women were basically to be either protected or seduced. 

In the early James Bond films, it was not so much that the dashing secret agent was irresistible, it was that he was basically a misogynist and sometimes a rapist. In fifty years of push back from feminists and more equality minded movie consumers, the movies have gotten a little less rape-y but not much less misogynistic. 

The popular genre of superhero movies have, in the past year, finally given us a black superhero and a female superhero but take a look at their respective costumes:

If you were going to war on a snowy battlefield in Germany, wouldn’t you wear something a little warmer?

Gender progress evidently comes slowly.

 Terry Crews, a professional football player turned actor, comedian, and author, has written a book about toxic masculinity, something that he says he has known from the inside. He talks about his own journey to correct those masculine stereotypes and, quite literally, how to be a better man, but what intrigued me was when he talked about some of the high-profile sexual predators who have been fired, criminally charged, or forced out of office. He talked about the enthusiasm around the trial of Bill Cosby, the firing of Harvey Weinstein, Trent Franks, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Louie C. K., Kevin Spacey, Mark Halpern, and now, 

R. Kelly will get his own documentary series to allow all of the women that he has abused to have a chance to speak. 

But I really appreciate Terry Crews saying that all this media bluster about famous figures amounts to “cutting a tree down by the leaves.” Some of these guys have been absolute monsters and their cases make for great TV news drama but Crews is saying that the real problem of toxic masculinity is in the trunk of the tree, it is a part of society. 

And as bad as the whole matter of employers sexually exploiting their employees is, the real meat and potatoes of sexual harassment is peer to peer in nature. It isn’t just politicians, movie producers and musicians, it is the guys working out at the Y who think that just because you are working out at the Y that they can come over and say salacious things about your body. It is the guy working beside you in the insurance office, the manufacturing floor, or in the restaurant who believes that proximity equates to permission to touch, suggest, even demand sexual attention. 

Patriarchalism, white male privilege, toxic masculinity is so prevalent in society that we tend not to see it. And once a virtual crusade against these evils begins by targeting high profile figures, there is bound to be collateral damage. 

I personally believe that the hunt for male predators went overboard when they equated the offenses of people like Garrison Keillor and Senator Al Franken with the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. 

And this is just for free, I believe that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand may be announcing her candidacy for president in 2020 this week. It is time for a woman to become president and she is just the sort of person who may have won but I am afraid that her willingness to sacrifice the political career of her peer, supporter, and friend, Al Franken, will mean that a whole lot of us who have supported most of her views will never trust her. 

As you know, this time last year, we invited Dr. Nicole Fisk to this pulpit to publicly applaud the #MeToo movement and we have not changed our laudatory view of the process, but we don’t want to try to cut down the tree of patriarchy by just cutting the leaves. We want to make substantive change, the kind of change in society that will change what going to work will be like for waitresses, flight attendants, assembly line workers, and secretaries; not just actresses and recording artists. 

Hollywood is beginning to evolve. If you have not seen either of J. K. Rowling’s screenplays in which she offers us the male role model we have been dying to see in the magical character of Newt Scamander, played by Eddie Redmayne. Newt is intelligent and sensitive. He heroically rescues endangered, albeit magical, beasts, but he is reserved, sometimes passive, but strong in his respect for women, for life, and for troubled people. He offers us a view of a man who is to be admired and praised who is not a toxic, power hungry, violent man. 

In the same way that having openly gay characters in sit-coms helped Americans to change their view of the gay community, these kinds of cinema evolutions in how we think about leading men can only help us to reimagine what it means to be a good man. 

That, when coupled with offering us some images of strong, self-reliant women who don’t have to be rescued, seduced, or tarted up for the camera, and maybe our daughters have a chance of seeing themselves in a different universe than the one we grew up in.

But by way of conclusion, I will confess that there was a bit of free association involved with my selection of our wisdom lesson today. When I first read this short this text from Jeff Brown’s “Spiritual Graffiti,” it made me think more about the back and forth of society in the past decade. We took a huge step forward in 2008 when we elected a black president. Eight years later a woman won the nomination of the DNC, and, in fact, the popular vote. But then, like society’s “id” demanding another day in the sun, we have the absolute worst of human nature asserting itself in Donald Trump’s presidency. 

Jeff Brown is talking about how individuals will make a situation in their lives ten times worse before they develop the activation energy necessary to start getting out of that situation. I see this among domestic abuse victims all of the time. They will go back and back and back into a dangerously toxic relationship until it comes right up to the point of murder before making the necessary break to end all contact.

I think that America is in a toxic relationship with Donald Trump. On day one of his campaign it was obvious that he was an uneducated, unqualified, racist, and misogynist. Every day it has gotten worse, down to this weekend’s breaking news that the FBI has been investigating him out of substantive fear that he is actually working for the Russian government while holding the highest elected office in the world. The one thing that he has shown us is just how far off the rails a Republican president can go without being impeached. Bill Clinton was impeached for having an in-office dalliance. Trump makes Clinton look like a choir boy, but I am forced to wonder if this is all an unconscious way that our entire culture is just going deeper into a toxic relationship in order to find the collective activation energy to finally make substantive progress. 

I can imagine a 2019 in which Trump is either forced to resign or be impeached. I can imagine a movement in our country that will bring progressive goals into the mainstream, making things like universal healthcare, sane gun laws and immigration laws, access to higher education, and rebuilding of our infrastructure, centrist ideas rather than radical socialist views. 

The last couple of years have been tough for those of us who have spent decades working on progressive ideas. Yes, Trump blew all of the dog whistles of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, classism, and Islamophobia, to get elected but please note that the Women’s march that protested Trump’s election was three times the size of the crowd that came out to his inauguration. Sure, it was a serious loss, brought to us by an unholy alliance between the angry white men voters of America and Russia’s propaganda arm, but that failure is instructive.

The world is changing. In many ways it is changing through attrition, as the angry white vote is marching literally and figuratively towards the graveyard, and the next generation of voters is not simply browner and blacker, but it is less prejudiced, better informed, and more progressive. The current congress has more women, and more people of color than any preceding congress and it is up to us to make certain that this kind of inclusivity increases in the future. 

We may be in the midst of a very cold winter of a fall back into the hands of greedy capitalist, racists, and white nationalists but this winter will not last forever. Have I ever told you that as much as I love spring and summer, my favorite season is