Something Worth Fighting For

Women have a conflicted relationship with aggression and power.  A good illustration of this is the kind of stir Sarah Palin is causing amongst the female population of this country.  Even feminists are divided as to how they should react to her!  On the one hand they respect her for being able to break through the “glass ceiling” in some sense, but on the other hand, resent her for utilizing feminist strategy to promote her conservative political agenda.  There’s no doubt that a woman’s capacity to wield power is often scrutinized differently and more controversially than a man in power.

I have a theory that this goes back (way back) to the way females are socialized.  What happens when a little girl decides to violently stomp on an ant in order to feed it to her cat?  An obscure example to be sure, but this is something that I once did as a little girl and was subsequently made to feel like a “bad girl” whereas my childhood playmate (who was a boy), was simply being a boy when he did the same thing.  In her adolescence the young female teen may not necessarily show her aggression in obvious ways, but has learned to express it in socially acceptable ways.  It’s not so much that girls have less aggression, it just means that having lost the option of outwardly and directly expressing their aggression, they have had to find an indirect way of releasing negative emotion.

This explains the reality of the mean girl phenomenon and we see a caricaturized version of female aggression at its most base level.  She is passive-aggressive, manipulative, vengeful and powerful.  If we take it a step further and this may develop as the adolescent blossoms into a young woman, another expression of female aggression is through her sexuality.  Having graduated from petty flirtations she begins to learn that her sexuality is in fact a powerful medium in which to get what she wants.  This may explain the intense following that the HBO series, “Sex and the City” has procured over the years.  It plays with this idea of what the postmodern ideal for womanhood should look like.  She is successful in her career, her family are her close friends, she is sexually liberated all the while looking fashionable and flawless.  The Sex and the City woman has harnessed her sexuality, intelligence and zest for life and with all her complexity and drama is the projected ideal for today’s postmodern woman.

There is a certain paradox in scripture that I frequently wrestle with.  The “noble” woman is not prized for her beauty per se, but she is prized instead for her wisdom, her resourcefulness, her diligence and her dignity (Proverbs 31).  Another theme that runs through scripture in terms of instructing the woman is that she is to be submissive, respecting of her husband/authority, and wise in the way she utilizes her own power in communal settings.  I’ll admit that I’m a pretty aggressive person.  I like to win and secretly resent it when I lose.  If we take the classic metaphor of the knight rescuing the damsel in distress, I want to be the knight and would much rather not be the damsel in distress.  My conclusion is that there are many many things to fight for in life.  Whether it is the elusive world peace we yearn for or whether it is simply raising and educating your own children, there are many battles that need to be fought and won in our lifetime.  As a follower of Christ, I believe that it is an important part of my own growth to relearn this biblical picture of womanhood.  A biblical woman’s power is at it’s strongest, paradoxically, when she is by secular terms “powerless.”  Her battles are fought and won when integrity is the foundation of her character and wisdom is her crown.  In the end, Christ paints the best picture of what true power looks like - humility and submission before God, which marks the way of the Cross.