The old Guerrilla Girls question, “Do women have to be naked to get in the Met. Museum?” comes to mind as Jerry Saltz challenges MoMA to explain why only 4% of the work on its 4th and 5th floors is by women artists. Exactly 20 years ago (after a “weenie count”), the Guerrilla Girls observed that only 5% of the art in the Modern art galleries at the Met was by women, though 85% of the nudes were female. Did anyone imagine progress would be so slow–or that we would actually regress?
In today’s Washington Post, Anne Applebaum offers an important corrective to dominant theories about the uprising in Iran: “In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.”
Kathryn Joyce’s smart new book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, chronicles patriarchial fundies who express their contempt for women in exquisitely calibrated doublespeak. Joyce writes about groups that espouse “wifely submission,” encourage virtuous dress and behavior, discourage women from entering the paid labor force, frown on female friendship, and believe women should have as many children as possible for God and Republicans: to get more conservatives in Washington, writes one believer, the movement needs more “arrows for war.” For each family, a quiverfull.
Others promote high birth rates as a solution for “demographic winter,” which sounds a little like reverse ethnic cleansing: if the right kind of (radical Christian nutjob) people have more babies, the right kind of population growth will follow. And the scary part is, they’re doing it: Joyce describes families of 12 and 15 in which under-educated teenage girls (home- schooled in curricula no serial mom has time to oversee) are drudges in training to serve men who can barely support them, in substandard conditions. “Ladies, instead of fighting this,” says Doug Phillips, founder of Visionforum, a huge proponent of these values, “..realize you’re not losing anything…..And if you say ‘I love this, I love this,’ God will change the world before your very eyes.”
Christian wife abusers are easily vindicated through circular reasoning. According to James Dobson, founder of a group called Focus on the Family, some uppity wives goad their husbands into violence because they aren’t properly obedient or sexually subservient; others deliberately provoke men in order to gain a “moral advantage” in the relationship, an excuse for divorce, or attention in church. Who knew the old blame-the-victim mentality inflicted on rape survivors could be repurposed for abused wives?
Obedience, even to deadbeats who don’t deserve it, is justified as service to Jesus. Thus, the most disturbing passage in this book—a quote by a woman who left this lifestyle and later realized that her abuse by her own father was “the perfect setup” for religious submission: “…it felt so right because I was doing what I’d always done, but now I was being rewarded and loved for it instead of punished.”
Olive Oatman, 1865.
This photo (courtesy Patricia Carreon) didn’t make it into my book. It was taken in Rochester, soon after Olive was married in 1865, when she was about 28. She sent a copy to her Oregon friend, Abi Colver, and inscribed the back as follows: “How do you do, my friend and sister? I do not know whether to call you Abi Colver or not for I have not heard whether you are married or not–please write me direct to Rochester NY.”
When a journalist asked me if the Oatman story sheds any light on expectations of women today, my first impulse was to talk about how far we’ve come since the 1850s when she became a public figure whose story was written by a man, who was concerned about remaining in her proper sphere on the lecture circuit, and who had to conceal her body even as she discussed her tattoos. But there is a striking continuity: people were fascinated by Oatman largely because of her body: they lined up to see her and pondered her physical violation both sexually and through the tattoo. Her story gave them permission to stare at a woman and allowed her to present and even refer to her body in public.
As in Oatman’s day, when women were forced into body-modifying clothes involving corsets and bustles, we’re still obsessed with women’s bodies in terms of shape (whether they’re too fat or thin or old or mannish or cosmetically reconstructed or in need of reconstruction) and in terms of behavior (whether Britney’s wearing underwear in public or not, whether President Hillary Clinton would have aged in office to Rush Limbaugh’s satisfaction, whether Michelle Obama’s arms have semiotic significance, and so on). Oatman had to be very careful about discussing her tattooed body in public, reinforcing the notion that whatever her physical experiences had been with the Mohave, she was their victim. Today, women are much physically freer, but our culture is equally obsessed with the body and what women do with it.
The difference is that now, showing is not only permitted, it’s expected. I sometimes wonder if centuries from now people will look back at public rituals like the Grammys and the Academy Awards and marvel that exposure is virtually a requirement for women in formal wear, while men’s bodies are fully concealed. The same applies to Esquire’s Women we Love entries (of eight photos posted in this page right now, two women are naked, two are topless, three are wearing lingerie, and one wears a tank top). And Elle’s best loved men? A hairy forearm is as racy as it gets.