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A Feminism Survey: Men on the Street
This girl has amazing beatboxing skillz, she recently won the world beatboxing competition.
For the past week, I’ve been referring to God as “She” or “Her” when the need to use a pronoun arises. I mentioned this experiment on the blog last week and it brought with it a string of conversation I found very interesting. It’s also shaped some of my thoughts through out the week. You really should go read the comment section on the post, there are a lot of great thoughts. I felt a clarification or two might be in order.
This Is An Experiment
I think experimenting is important (don’t take that the wrong way). Christians especially are notorious for our sort of black and white stances on so many things. Sometimes I think it’s justified, but many times I think it’s not. When I decided to spend the month referring to God as “She” I did not make a fundemental switch in my doctrine or theology. I’m not making a definitive statement of the gender of God or even of my social or political leanings. If I decide to go back to referring to God as “He” come January, I don’t think any irreversable damage will be done. I think we need to be open to trying new things, hearing other opinions, walking a mile in another persons shoes. This is just an attempt to do that in a small way.
Men and Women have experienced life Differently
Regardless of what you think about gender, gender roles, sexual orientation, societies stereotypes, and more, there is the undeniable reality that we have been shaped by our experience; and men and women’s life experience is fundamentally different. I’m not attempting to make any statement about biology or innate traits of men and women, I’m simply acknowledging that the way we are treated as “boys” and “girls” affect the types of adults that we become. One way I believe we’ve been shaped differently is in our understanding and connection with “God”. The reality that we have almost all grown up with God being a “He” has an impact on us, particularly differently if we ourselves are “he” or “she”. That being the case, this experiment is also an opportunity to see this small aspect of my life differently then I have for the past 26 years.
I’ll try and share more of my thoughts thus far on the actual practice of calling God “She” later this week if I can. For now, I hope these two points open your mind a bit to what this is about.
For 26 years I’ve grown up hearing “God” referred to with male pronouns. Occasionally it’s acknowledge that God is neither male nor female, but following the tradition of our male-centric, paternalistic society (and original bible writers) we refer to God as a male, frequently and often.By way of the suggestions of Lynette, I thought it wise to take a concious look at my blog reader, and see what ethnicity and sex the authors of the blogs I subscribe to are.
I figured I would be sadly disappointed to find it dominated by white males, but it’s actually 50-50 in both sex and white/not-white.
That didn’t include my friends blogs (people I know personally) but after further research, those are split about 50-50 too.
I think it would be wise to lean a little more heavily away from white male dominated influences, so I’m going to try and still think through that a little.
I think I’m going to take a few picks from Lynette’s great list of female bloggers…
Note: This is a 35 minute video about the media’s portrayal of women. It’s a very important and interesting film that you should take the time to watch. I don’t think it needs much further commenting, only that I would strongly recommend that you watch it.
Note: Keep in mind that this is about the dehumanizing and objectifying way the media portrays women, so it shows plenty of examples of that, proceed with caution.
Update: Media Education Foundation is now on youtube
I still found the full video on Google Videos.
Ariah and Zach discuss Bible translations and whether Ariah should be reading through The Message as his Bible reading this year.
Some of the Show Notes:
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