How To Disappear Completely

Gender-Essentialist Ire

Perhaps because he felt my blood pressure was getting too low, Evan sent me a link to "raise my feminist-essentialist ire." I just have to say that I find this article by James Jordan to be rather bizarre to say the least. He wants to make the case that there are essentialist differences between men and women based on their liturgical functions in worship. Contrary to most trinitarian/male-female relationship analogies I have seen in which the Father's authority is associated with the male and the Son's obedience associated with the female, Jordan relates these functions to the work of the Son and the work of the Spirit. The Son is the initiator while the Spirit fulfills in glory. Men therefore initiate worship (by leading it), while women fulfill worship (I guess by just being there in the pew?? I am rather confused by this point).

Which might sound all well and good until you start to apply it. This is where the craziness sets in. Maybe Jordan is just really bad at describing what he means, but he ends up with some bizarre analyses of male-female relationships. Men come across as the half-baked project-starters whom women are always cleaning up after. Apparently men get to be ugly while women alone are beautiful. And, while men are launching a thousand ships over a woman's face, the countless things women do to impress the men they love simply fall below Jordon's radar. If Jordan is trying to describe normative functions of humanity, he certainly doesn't leave us much better off than post-Fall self-help pop psychology.

I also am not impressed by Jordan's equivocation of glory with beauty. The glory of the Lord was terrifying, not something decorative (a quality which Jordon, along with the whole Western world, again assigns to femininity). Apparently glory is the same as beauty, however, because a woman's hair (which is beautiful I suppose) is glory because it grows outward (like a radiant halo??). But beauty and glory cannot be the same thing. For beauty is associated with the quality of being-looked-at. But the hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy," reminds us that "the eye of sinful man/Thy glory may not see." Even the unsinful angels cover their eyes in the presence of God. So glory is NOT associated with being-looked-at.

I wish people would stop disguising Victorianism as biblical truth.