So many people have an opinion on women – what they should do, or not, what they should wear, their role – they’re less keen to say how men should be, what it means to be a man, why men are standing in the way of women. The mindless yobbo who rips off a woman’s hijab in the street, or spits at her, might want to tell us that Muslim women are oppressed, if he can string two words together. It’s an extreme example, but it materialises in more civilised parts of society, the people who bang on about women’s oppression but don’t talk to women, who never lift a finger to reduce oppression. Female politicians have gone on record recently to tell us that it is endemic in the Houses of Parliament.
Of course, no one can pick on some women, like Wonder Woman and Cat Woman, male superheroes would need to look out if they were on the wrong side of those two!
There is of course clear sexism and perhaps the less clear misogyny which underlies it. Some of this is driven by privilege and inflated ideas of male importance, usually with a foundation on some pretty serious male inadequacy – how many ‘important’ men who demean or have no place for women at their level are dependent on the efforts of ‘support’ women who organise them. Some of this problem is structural – male thinking institutionalised – men can often be structural while women are more importantly relational. The structural excludes while the relational includes. Women often have a genius for working around the structures, leaving men to do the ‘important’ things while they get on with the *real* work.
What kind of changes do we need to see women running things more and put some flesh on the bones of equality of opportunity? Women bishops is a good example – Priests and Bishops are already persuaded that women Bishops should be appointed. However, the drag of activist opinionated laypeople has prevailed so far. This is why we need to do more with equality and *exterminate* the excluded areas. Why should religious institutions have an equality get out? Why should there be provision for those who have a problem with women? Surely there is a superhero answer to this one, the Queen as Supreme Governor (Super Governor), the most senior woman in the Church could lay down the law, after all it’s not as if God is running the Church! Anyone who stands against women Bishops could be sent to the Tower, or forced to attend a week’s Equal Opps training.
It all shows how some people let their twisted brains override reality, where their hardline opinions are self-reinforcing, interpreting the world through their pricks. It also shows how structures can be bound and gagged by privilege. A structure can only fight against reality for so long, it’s the ignorant who maintain it. It was 200 years after the anti-slavery victory in the USA that the Black Civil Rights movement brought about real change. Inhumanity and inequality needs something special to challenge it, in the meantime a lot of people need to be embarrassed, straightened out and brought face to face with their own problems without scapegoating and oppressing others.
Dark Lord 