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The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

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Want your voice to be heard? Submit a letter to the editor, send us an op-ed pitch or check out our open positions for the chance to be published by the Daily Utah Chronicle.
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When will women break away from stereotypes?

By Deen Chatterjee

A feature story in The Chronicle more than a month ago (Sept. 26) presented students talking about the rituals of dating and engagement. What struck me was how incredibly old fashioned and conservative they all sounded, and what a demeaning view of women they all had.

Men asking women out, but not the other way around, was their idea of how to get started with a date-even when, as in one case, both students had known each other long before they started dating. For engagement, again men were to propose to women, never the other way around, and men were to put a diamond ring on the woman’s finger. All the women interviewed concurred with each of these scenarios.

So, what is wrong with this? Well, plenty. It portrays women as lacking agency and authority as they wait for men to make the move. One would expect that this traditional view of women as potted plants-passive and submissive-is gone by now, but apparently not so. Ironically, one of the male students, billed as an “expert,” proudly proclaimed that if a man does all this right, including the right stone on the ring, it shows a great deal of respect for the woman.

The engagement ring itself is problematic. Men don’t get one, but a woman is expected to wear it. The symbolic meaning is that a man marks his possession and proclaims to the world that the woman belongs to him.

Besides, most Americans do not know that children are forced to fight wars in some African countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, and that diamonds are at the heart of the misery that these children suffer. It is not unreasonable to assume a direct connection between the ring on a bride’s finger in America and the child victims in Africa who have had their limbs cut off.

To deny agency to women is to not recognize them as autonomous persons. This cultural denigration of women has its root in religion. Ever since the myth of Adam and Eve in the Bible where Eve is portrayed in a demeaning fashion, women have taken the blame for men’s problems. Women are viewed as roadside distractions, so they are subjugated and controlled to make things safer for men. Denying women control over their own bodies and sexuality robs them of their personhood.

Women’s spirituality is found to be as dangerous as their sexuality, since it threatens the authority of the church fathers. During a 300 year period in the Middle Ages, nearly 9 million women were burned at the stake as witches-the least-known holocaust in history-because of their affirmation of their spirituality (source: “Women and Spirituality,” Canadian Broadcasting Company).

Interestingly, when one calls a man a “son of a bitch,” notice that a woman gets blamed even when a man is cursed.

The pervasive stereotypical gender-dichotomy of “rational man and sensuous woman” is an expression of the biblical portrayal of men as their mind and women as their bodies, which has put women on the sideline ever since the tradition started. Women are under the double bind: Though they are projected as their bodies, they don’t own their bodies. Being sexualized, they are projected as sexual objects-that is, as objects, not autonomous beings.

The guiding norm in all spheres of our society is the pervasive male norm, which casts women as outsiders. Consider a simple case. In most public places where men can go bare-chested, women are expected to wear a shirt (especially in this country). Otherwise they are a distraction to men and thus an object of blame once again.

If women demand that men, too, should be required to wear a shirt in public places because men’s bare chests are a cause for distraction for women, that demand would go nowhere. Our society is still seeped in sexual double standard, which portrays women as passive victims, not autonomous agents of their desires.

One would expect that a great reformer like Martin Luther would help change our traditional religious view of women. But he, too, perpetuates the same misogynic ideas that we find in the Bible.

In condemning homosexuality, Luther writes: “The vice of the Sodomites departs from the natural passion and desire, according to which the male has a passionate desire for the female.”

Luther supported his view that men naturally desire women when he wrote: “The Reason is this: We [meaning men, of course] have been conceived in the bodies of women, nourished in them, borne by them, nursed and reared by them. So we can in no wise rid ourselves of our natural desire for women.”

Ignore Luther’s absurd reason but follow his logic, which says that because men come from women and are reared by them, so men have a natural desire for women.

Well, by the same token, women should have a natural desire for women too.

Why doesn’t Luther see this? Because he is blinded by his homophobic religious dogma and because he holds on to the same demeaning view of women that the Bible teaches us.

Again, in Luther’s own words: “Women, it is true, have a natural inclination to be desired and loved, men to desire and to love.” Because Luther assumed the passivity of women, it didn’t even occur to him that his own logic goes against him.

This view of women continues today, despite the Enlightenment ideals of liberalism, humanism and rationalism. Liberal ideas do not have a hold on our society at large because we remain saturated with organized religion, which keeps us in the Dark Age.

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