Summary: An exploration of the ways that misogyny impacts our world.
I reference this all the time, but George Yancy wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2015, where he tried to discuss the problems of race in America by including himself within the problems of sexism. He developed that more in his book Backlash and I have come to use his framing as the best shorthand for how we are in a system, while still having the ability (and responsibility) to respond to the system. Using Yancy’s ideas, I tell people all the time that when I was a stay at home nanny with my nieces and then a stay at home dad with my kids, I just got more support and affirmation as a man doing “women’s work” than women do. I didn’t ask for additional help in the grocery store, but it was given to me in ways that I could easily see that it wasn’t being given to women in my same position. As a man, I think it is important to push back against sexism in big and small ways as much as I can. But I can’t withdraw from the system that still misogynistic. Yancy then goes on the connect that to the problems of race. He says that just as he works to be anti-sexist, sexist (someone who as individual works to oppose sexism, but is still within a sexist society and still internalizes sexism in some ways) he also calls on white people to be anti-racist, racists (to be individually opposed to racism, while acknowledging the reality of continued racial hierarchy, both historically and currently.) And as a Christian and spiritual director, I think a third step of being an anti-sin, sinner is an important way to frame how we continue to be impacted by sin, while working to resist sin individually and corporately as well.
That simple framing of naming that as a Christian white male I am an anti-sexist, sexist and an anti-racist, racist and an anti-sin, sinner gives me a place to start reading Dorothy Littell Greco’s book with the assumptions that as a man, the problems of sexism and misogyny are my problems to grapple with, not just “women’s work.”
The structure of For The Love of Women is familiar. She starts with pointing out that misogyny is in the very air we breathe and it is so incorporated to our culture that sometimes we need help seeing that it is there. And so the next several chapters point out how misogyny exists within healthcare, and the workplace, and in government, and in entertainment and the media and in marriage and sexual relationships and in the church.
There are many books that stop with simply pointing out the problem that the book is about. But there are two essential chapters that conclude the book. One talks about the wounds that are created by misogyny. Those wounds naturally impact women and girls, but they also impact men. The high normative assumptions about gender are restrictive to all of society, not just the naturally assumed victims. We don’t have to ignore that the wounds are different to also say that wounds exist in many different people. (It is part of the really helpful critique of womanism is that we can’t ignore the different types of harms that impact people because harm is almost always interrelated. The final chapter is about hope for a more healthy world and giving ideas to spark a new imagination to bring us to that world.
Over the past few years there has been a movement to criticize empathy. That may not seem to be a part of a discussion about sexism and misogyny, but when you dig into the anti-empathy movement, it is rooted in opposition to feminism. Joe Rigney’s Sin of Empathy suggests that all the ways that empathy ends up being wrong are rooted in feminism. Rigney (and Doug Wilson, his mentor) believe that Christianity is inherently hierarchical and feminism’s work to recognize women as having inherent dignity is a rejection of what he sees as God’s created order.
Books like For the Love of Women remind the reader that if we believe in the Imago Dei, the belief that all people are created in the image of God and so have inherent worth and dignity, then we have to investigate the implications of that. It just is part of historic Christianity that the early church were influenced by their Greek influenced culture that understood women as deformed men. And if we don’t grapple with the ways that Christian theology has been influenced by Greek hierarchical thinking that understood women to be deformed men and people being created to be slaves while others were created to rule, then we cannot live into the full understanding of liberation that Jesus is calling us toward.
For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America by Dorothy Littell Greco Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook