Fem Speak

The Solution To The Gay Marriage Issue

by Pat Gundry

Historically, marriage has been many different things. The only thing it has consistently been is a more or less personal relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman.

It has usually been a secular legal agreement between the marriage partners, or between two families.

Not until relatively recently, as time goes, has it been considered a religious ceremony, with vows made before God.

Therein lies the problem, and the solution.

If we allow marriage to be a legal agreement for the purpose of protecting the persons involved and any children they might have, and their property, then the solution is to require marriage to, again, be, first and foremost, a legal agreement with certain minimum requirements set forth to qualify for entering into the agreement.

If we create a basic marriage contract that all must agree to in order to have the legal protection of marriage, we could eliminate the present conflict about whether people of the same gender should be allowed to marry.

If persons desiring to have the legal protections of marriage could simply go to a courthouse and prove their identities, meet reasonable and minimum requirements set forth for everyone, and sign the marriage document, the problem is solved.

And, if those persons desire to have a religious marriage ceremony, of any kind whatsoever, they are free to do that also.

Or, if the marrying parties want to create their own invention for an auxiliary marriage ceremony, they are free to do that.

Let those who want to marry women marry them, and those who want to marry men marry them.

And, this seems to be lost on the majority of opponents to gay marriage, inter gendered people should be free to marry whomever they wish without having to choose a gender and then be restricted in their choice of a marriage partner to a declared opposite gendered partner.

Gender is on a continuum, all the way from what we might think of as totally male to what we might think of as totally female. Many people think they are one or the other gender when they are actually a mixture to one degree or another.

Insisting that we must know the gender of a person and then restrict them to what we may erroneously think of as the opposite gender is forcing individuals to comply with a very out of date understanding of what gender is.

Allowing all adults to choose who they want to marry, not asking them if they are one gender or another, allowing that to be private, as it should be, will solve not only the problem of the gay marriage issue, but that of discriminating against and invading the privacy of inter gendered people.

Stay-at-Home Moms Worth $138,095 a Year??

Here we go again. It's the yearly assessment of housewive's imaginary "salaries":

Stay-at-home mother's work worth $138,095 a year

Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for parents. But this sort of study pisses me off for a number of reasons:

1. Hello. Ever heard of a guy called a DAD? And yes, some of them actually stay at home while the wife works. Heck, some of them don't have a wife bringing in the bacon. A guy I'm dating will have his kid living with him all summer. He's divorced. He doesn't have a new wife. Who's taking care of that kid for the entire summer? Him, and no-one else. Do we see his "salary" added up anywhere? No, and that's not fair.

2. Do all moms work that hard? Sorry, but no. Would you like to meet the welfare mom who got kicked out of our apartment building in March? I'm not saying all welfare moms are like her, but this particular gal was a lazy slob who was perfectly fit, healthy, and young, and spent all her days hanging out with her boyfriend while her neglected kid ran around the complex leaving his toys everywhere for other people to trip and fall on.

3. Here are the 10 jobs that comprise a mother's work, according to the report:

housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, laundry machine operator, van driver, facilities manager, janitor, computer operator, chief executive officer and psychologist

First off, this list is utterly ridiculous. Computer operator? CEO? Gimme a break.

As a single woman, I also serve as housekeeper, cook, "van driver," facilities manager, janitor (um, isn't this the same thing as housekeeper?), computer operator, chief executive officer...and heck, even a shrink (to all my friends who call me on the phone for advice).

I'm not saying it's easy to be a mom. But you know what? The idea of staying home with the kids while a partner goes out and deals with bringing in the money sounds a heck of a lot easier than being single and starting up a business on your own.

Kids can be a handful, I know. But for pete's sake, if you have a husband bringing in the money, and all you need to do is take care of one or two kids and keep a house clean...please, stop whining to the rest of us about how hard your life is.

I respect good mothers. Just don't try to tell me that you should get a special dispensation for the choice you made to have children. I'm sure the moms out there would be the first to say that the benefits of children far outweigh any drawbacks.

So why the need to put a monetary value on that? Housework is just housework. We all need to do it, kids or no.

Stephanie Brail

Domination Cults: Fundies, Jeffs, Cybelians

by Pat Gundry

After posting a link from my new War Against Women blog to a blog that features quite a bit of anti-woman rhetoric I was taken to task and denounced on the linked to blog. If you go there to read about it be sure to also read the comments. I posted a comment, but it never appeared. In my comment I simply thanked them for the link, said I was puzzled about why they linked to FemSpeak instead of the blog they were commenting about, and provided a link to it and my Noodling blog.

Though I hadn't been reading that blog, only went there because someone had forwarded the link to me of the offensive post, I've done a bit of searching and reading on it since then. It's not going to be a regular read for me, though, because I've heard all that before and don't need to read it again and again. And I have no personal need to try and convince women haters to learn to love us.

But, thinking about what I saw there, and something I happened across late last night searching Google for images relevant to a friend's forthcoming book (I'll share it here when it is released) made me notice the similarities between the fundie extremes of female restriction and oppression evidenced on the blog I linked to originally and the practices of the Mormon fundy Warren Jeffs who has just been captured by law enforcement and is being extradited to Utah for trial.

Watching the Larry King show on CNN yesterday evening, which focused on Warren Jeff's Mormonistic cult, and hearing one of the researchers interviewed say that Jeffs commanded women in his cult to produce a baby every year reminded me of the Christian fundy who said the thing he appreciated most about his wife was her fertility. I realized that both the Christian fundy and Jeffs were simply religious cultists. They have in common the use of women as baby machines, the belief in male "authority" over women, and the fortress mentality that many cults exhibit.

Then, searching online to see if there were images of "submissive women," thinking maybe I'd find a graphic or image suitable for a book cover someone was designing led me to a rather surprising site that I don't want to directly link to because it contains nude photos and one in particular that I'm sure would be offensive to many people. But, it's the site for an organization called the Cybelians: First Church of Female Supremacy.

They have everything the above mentioned cultic groups have, in reverse. Instead of forced or coerced pregnancy through unavoidable insemination, their men drink the wife's urine. Sounds really extreme and gross until one realizes that unavoidable insemination has worse consequences than urine drinking and is even more demeaning and more of a dominance act.

I'd realized that the Jeffs group was cultic, and had excused the Christian fundies of a considerable bit of that negative term until I happened on the Cybelians. I had thought the Christian fundies were just people stuck in the Middle Ages, hidebound, some of them obviously women haters, some not. But the Jeffs followers are also throwbacks to the Mormon past. The Cybelians are also past oriented, picking up an ancient religion and bringing it into play again, with innovations.

Interesting what happens if you reverse the genders and see what it looks like that way.

It seems to me that sexual bondage is at the heart of all three groups. Whether one is tied up, dressed in leather, and flicked with whips or not, it's about bondage, and those who practice it are getting their jollies to some extent by having sexual power over the submissive partner or group.

The Cybelians claim their men want it that way, and that the marriages are happy and stable and long lasting. The Christian fundies claim the same thing for their women, and I'd bet that Jeffs group says their women just love to be baby machines, living on welfare fraud money, and unable to protect their teenage sons from being expelled from the community and their teenage daughters from forced marriages to aged inseminators bent on making more Mormonites.

Everyone is happy, except those who get away. And, of course, they were just malcontent troublemakers. Not.

I happened upon just the thing for the Jeffs and Christian fundy submissive woman cultists: special underwear. I hope they are reading this so they can buy some. I haven't seen any for the Cybelians yet.

For the Male Supremacists

For Their Submissive Women

The Coward's Essentials: (Part 3: The "Feminizing" Problem

The Faithful have long been more female than male. In kinder previous times, this was explained by male churchmen as being evidence of woman's more religious nature. They also said things like: woman is more acquainted with the realities of life, birth, and death, so she knows more of the need for God. And, woman is a more sensitive being.

But I wonder if there may be a more down-to-earth reason why women outnumber men in church. The clergy and leadership positions of the church have been pretty much exclusively male for many hundreds of years. The leader of each congregation is an exemplary male who stands before his parishioners each week providing guidance, instruction, and aid. He is a father to them, but not their father. He is gentle and caring, clean shaven, and directorial.

Women growing up in a male dominated society have many wrong impressions about men. They tend to idealize their potential adult relationships with men. And, as a result, they are frequently disappointed and confused by the reality that confronts them when they find themselves in a permanent marriage relationship with their own man. He isn't all those things they hoped he'd be, thought he'd be. Their illusions have been severely damaged.

But on Sundays--here is a man who looks and sounds like the man they thought they could have. They can vicariously take part in a relationship with this man each time they sit in the obedient intimacy of a religious service.

I suggest that the reason, one reason at least, why there are more women than men in any church service is that many women are sexually frustrated and profoundly disappointed with the man in their lives. They come to church, at least in part, to be with a man they can idealize, one who never looks shabby and unshaven, who appears to be forceful, not weak, who smells good and is never dirty or sloppy.

He listens to them and responds to their questions. He cares when they have fears, worries, sorrow, and pain. A sex symbol of the most innocent kind, he can be safely admired from a distance.

They can return each week to reassure themselves about their own basic worth because this man values them for loftier purposes than dark fumbling encounters, hastily eaten meals, and clean clothes thoughtlessly crumpled, or worn and tossed on the floor. They are quality creatures to him--as they had ever been taught they were before marriage negated and shattered those images of themselves in their own minds. The male Domini binds up the self-images of the women in his flock by his simply being there before them each service.

Women who grow up in a society that praises and adores them for chaste obedience find a way to gain comfortable approval from their pastors by chaste obedience, as they gained it from their own fathers--but can gain it no more from them (marriage being the obvious proof of the end of their original chastity and obedience).

Obeying the husband is entangled with many dangers and conflicts that are not present when obeying the pastor. So women find at church a man who answers many needs and fills many empty places in their lives.

But, the cowards who complain that it's a "feminizing the church" problem when there are more women than men in church, not only haven't a clue about women, but trivialize and trash the longings that bring many of them there.

When we allow women equal access to all types of ministry in the church, then maybe some of the adulation toward the pastor will be neutralized as women see "someone like me" before them and are raised up to share an experience rather than idealize a person.

Meanwhile, vote with your feet and your monetary contributions. Scapegoating billy goat preachers don't deserve to have you in their congregations. Go where your presence will be appreciated and treasured.

(Excerpted and adapted from Chapter 35: Why There Are More Women Than Men In Church On Sunday, in my work in progress)

Pat Gundry

Marriage What If

Some food for thought:

What would happen if nobody got married?

What if  people who wanted to made a decision to stay together, a private decision, and wrote up a contract, renewable and/or re-negotiable at intervals they chose?

What if that contract was there to protect the vulnerabilities of both parties and any children that might come to them?

What if everyone invented their relationship as they went along, to please the parties involved?

What if nobody owned anyone else, and no government or religious body had any say about what a relationship between two consenting adults should be like?

What if marriage as it is now were to end tomorrow?

What if you retrofitted your own relationship?

What if you stopped thinking about marriage as a real thing, and focused on the people involved and their own needs?

What if you respected and loved yourself so much that you'd never be in slavery to a concept, a person, or a religious or cultural construct again?

Pat Gundry
http://www.marriagewire.com