woman words and man words

[faceless_wonder]

as i've said before, i satisfy my train-wreck syndrome by reading fundies say the darndest things. many of the things are the same old stuff...lots of parroting what they're told to parrot, lots of speaking without thinking. very few of them actually shock me anymore.

this one today...it shocked me.

"[Can women preach in church?]

No!

The answer is no, but the word no has never stopped a woman before. Eve was told no and she did not take it as a no.
She was then told by God that since she did not listen that her husband will now be her head.

[...]

Now since you are young and I am old I will tell you something that few know and that is women and men do not hear the same word with the same meaning. God has set it up this way for His own reasons and I don't know why.
If you ask a women to defind the word FAIR she might say that all is equil. If you ask a man what is fair he might say I WIN AND YOU LOOSE, this is fair to a man.
So the bottom line here is a woman should not teach men, because their words mean different things.

The word NO to a man means just that. To a women it is never final."

holy misogyny, batman. (or, at least he is trying to convince us to believe that misogyny is holy.)

is he trying to argue that women should not preach because words mean different things to women than they do to men? why is that a reason that women should not be allowed to preach? let's assume, arguendo, that words do mean different things to women than to men.¹

is he going to take it to its logical extreme, then, and force women not to listen to sermons at all, or read the bible at all? or, at least, is he going to force women to have to listen to men (husbands? fathers? preachers? who?) translate sermons and bible verses into woman-speak? will women have to go to separate churches, or be homeschooled by men in their religious education? because, if women are allowed into churches to hear these sermons and read that bible and interpret man words as woman words, before there's a man to set them aside and explain, word for word, what it actually means...it could be dangerous! she could misinterpret the word of God, and send her own soul to hell for eternal damnation, because she heard something in church, started to internalize what it meant to her as a woman, and the ambiguities weren't cleared up by a man soon enough to stop it from impacting what she believed!

and...the men shouldn't have to go to the church or the lessons for the women, to interpret the man-speak into woman-speak! they're men! they know the right interpretations of all the words already! it would waste their precious, manly time!

***
¹ although i think his example of things meaning different things for women and men is a terrible one, it's not a terrible assertion that some words, and some concepts, often do mean different things to women than they do to men. but...it's not a function of God, or anyone else, saying that any gender's interpretation of a word is better than another. it's a function of psychology, and a function of women and men having different experiences in the societal structure. surely, though, gender isn't the only thing that affects what words and concepts mean to a human being. anything in their background may have an effect on how a person inteprets the world around them. i wonder what this guy would have to say about race, nationality, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and other factors as influencing a person's ability to "correctly" interpret the word of God. well...to say i wonder would probably be saying too much. i have a funny feeling that, if he were pressed on the issue, he would conclude that the affluent, white, straight, american, christian male has the right answer.

Comments

[windofderange.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the sad part is that this whole argument that women shouldn't have roles in the church has very little biblical evidence. I used to feel like, hey, whatever, it's their church - they can do what they like. but now that I actually study this shit - man, this whole debate is just silly. there's only one piece of evidence to suggest that women were not allowed full membership in the early church, and a whole lot to suggest that it was just accepted that they did have equal membership, and at this point, pretty much every reasonable biblical scholar agrees that that one piece is a later addition to the text. and yet . . . we have endless debates about it!! I suppose it's better than things like abortion and gay rights, which the new testament says absolutely nothing about . . .

[the-pretend-me.livejournal.com]

The patriarchal male thing in the Bible is just that old Middle Eastern culture thing that the Jews and their brothers the Arabs did, and still do here and there. It just makes me aggravated to read that fundie stuff. They are a bunch of fucking boneheaded idiots.

[mrvoid.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm a man, and I'm pretty sure the word "equil" means something different to me than it does to him.