Time Immortal

Count Roland writes in with a comment on…this article, I think. It is, as he himself notes, mostly tongue in cheek.

But, O Writer, are you not a patriarchal Christian who follows the misogynist St. Paul’s God given ordinance to demand your wife be your servant as if you were the Lord?* It says it plain as day right there in Ephesians 5:23. Oh, I remember too that the righteous man Lot offered his daughters for rape instead of his male guests. And isn’t this husband, by listening to and helping his wife contravening Paul’s admonition that women are to be silent and listen to their husbands instruction? As a Catholic, how do you work with these texts and the matriarchal reprisals of secular culture? I can’t seem to think of a third way, can you?

One observes in the case of Lot that the angels of God — probably in response to Lot’s unjust action — quickly intervened to ensure that the whole family escaped unscathed. God corrects for when men — even righteous men — go astray, as all men do.

One piece of Scripture that I’ve seen a couple Catholic bloggers mention in response to this article is Proverbs 31:

An excellent wife who can find?

She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life.

She seeks wool and flax, and works with willing hands. She is like the ships of the merchant; she brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night.

She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.

She makes bed coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers sashes to the merchant.

Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: “Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.” Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.

And indeed, my own thoughts in response to Ephesians is to admonish the person citing just 5:23 for being a narrow-minded fool with no ability to quote Scripture in its proper context. For indeed, if one reads past Ephesians 5:23, one quickly encounters St. Paul’s instructions for men. And indeed, if one considers the cultural context in which Paul was writing, the instructions to men are the more radical. It is not exactly new or novel to suggest to wives in a patriarchal society (such as the society of the Ephesians to whom Paul was writing) that women should be obedient to their husbands. It’s a very novel — indeed, radical — thing to suggest to men in that same society that they must love, in the most absolute and powerful sense, their wives.

And of course, if one reads a little further, Paul gives away the game by admitting that he is merely drawing on the cultural context of the Ephesians in an attempt to give an example of the relationship between Christ and the Church. Although he does end thusly: “however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”

How remarkably sexist!

(Actually, in the spirit of keeping one’s tongue firmly in one’s cheek, it would probably be taken as an intensely sexist suggestion if one were to say to the husband-bashing MSNBC columnist that she should respect the husband she has just finished trashing in print.)

As to whether there’s a “third way” about it, I do not know. Mind you, I suppose the question has to be asked: has the Christian way ever really been tried, honestly and in full alignment with the teachings of Christ and His apostles? Methinks the answer may be a resounding “no!”

But why does society seem so binary? science or Religion. Matriarchy or Patriarchy. Conservative or Liberal. Orthodox or Heretic (wait, there are some true binaries…)

Other than the obvious ease of such thinking. I think it is because we have lost the ‘and more’ that faith brings to the union of faith and reason. Reason is ultimately based in logic which, in general, has two truth conditions: T and F. There are logics with more than two truth conditions, but they are out of the experience of all but logicians. positivism reduces reality to the observable and the unobservable, but it tends not to remember that there are things which can be observed which just not have yet been observed and, more importantly, forgotten that the five senses, even with aids, are not necessarily the only modes of touching reality. Hubris, you have called something like this before.

Quite. And indeed, it is hubris.

A binary worldview has its uses, of course — Roland points to the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, which is certainly binary. Equally, the distinction between right and wrong is, if we are honest, usually “cut and dried.” That does not mean that it is always easy to sort out the heretical from the orthodox, or the wrong from the right…but just because the way is difficult does not mean that there is really only one destination we should end up at if we strive to follow Christ.

*Of course I am facetious in this paragrapch and slightly in the next, but this seems to be a ‘teachable moment’ in which the proper use of Scripture as well as the beauty of recent Papal teaching on the subject of marriage can be explored.

Roland adds this to his email. I hope, to the good Reader, that the disclaimer on his part was not necessary.

Mind you, it’s also good to see a number of women standing up against it. I think I have to agree with The Anchoress‘ description of this MSNBC columnist as a “miserable toothache of a woman” — she, and her views, are at least despicable enough to warrant that label.

Not that I don’t agree that husbands shouldn’t do their part to participate in the day-to-day upkeep of the family home, of course. What I disagree with is the level of cyincism and outright contempt being poured out on this columnist’s poor husband — who, she admits, does his part around the home! — in such a widely public forum as the MSNBC news/opinions website!

I admit that my husband helps out more than many men, but here’s another news flash: It isn’t because he’s such a fabulously enlightened being. Left to his own devices, he would doubtless park himself in front of the TV like some sitcom male-chauvinist couch potato while I did all the work. The reason Jeremy “helps” as much as he does (an offensive terminology that itself suggests who’s really being held responsible) is simple: He doesn’t have a choice.

From the beginning of our relationship, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be any husband’s unpaid servant. If Jeremy wanted to be — and stay — married to me, let alone have kids, he couldn’t stick me with all the boring, mundane stuff nobody wants to do. We were going to share the work, or we were going to forget the whole deal.Unlike my first husband, who announced after our wedding that he didn’t like the way the French laundry did his shirts and he now expected me, the Wife, to wash and iron all of them, Jeremy recognized both the righteousness of the principle involved and the intransigence of the woman he’d married, and proceeded to pitch in.

That was 17 years ago, and while we haven’t exactly achieved equity, we’ve come a lot closer to it than most of our peers, judging by all the dreary surveys proving that men are slugs and their wives are superwomen. So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.

Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.

Precisely what is she talking about, O Reader? Another human being? Or is she in the process of breaking in a small animal, as though training it not to pee on the carpet? Does her husband put up with this?

I realize that I’ve been quite lucky in marriage when I read stuff like this; Grace is a wonderful wife, and feels no need to exert this sort of control over every detail of my life. I’m grateful for that, because my tolerance for the sort of attitude our crusading columnist here displays is…rather miniscule. I wouldn’t be surprised if the aforementioned husband didn’t start working late hours at the office simply because his co-workers were preferable company to the shrew of a spouse he found for himself, who sees fit only to demean and insult him in her published online column.

What I hope the good Reader realizes is that in the end, this columnist — whose name I see no reason to articulate here, incidentally, for fear of lending her undue credibility — is chauvanistic and steeped in misandry. In her quest to proclaim her liberated-ness as a woman, she has become the very thing she decries, although in reverse.

Don’t believe me?

You’re supposed to insist, that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s not as if men don’t have leverage these days; despite the progress that feminism has made, men are (we are told) still earning more money on average than women, and many men are still the primary wage-earners for their households. And yet women, it seems, initiate a good two-thirds of divorces. What does this tell us about their relative levels of satisfaction within marriage? What does this tell us about the relative gratitude of the sexes?

And while I recognize that gender stereotypes are risky, in my experience women are a lot like children. They will get away with whatever they can get away with. When you put your foot down and make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer, somehow the kids’ rooms get cleaned, the groceries bought, the laundry folded, and the sex had. It really does work, I promise.

Had this column been written by a man, and had he ended it as I have edited the ending of the existing column above, MSNBC would have handed him his pink slip within an hour of the article’s publication. And rightly so! But this columnist gets a pass because instead of being a man, she has made men her victims subject?