We must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom, comes individual responsibility.
--Camille Paglia
Neverthless I think that for women leaders, perhaps particularly in the church, the metaphors around exclusion, blame and speaking out are very powerful. A narrative that can still carry us forwards with some force and some big questions still to answer. It is of course individual women leaders who answer those questions in the way they lead. Somewhere along the line societies and organisations also need to be challenged about the blaming naratives they often write for women.
--Jane Stranz
--Camille Paglia
Neverthless I think that for women leaders, perhaps particularly in the church, the metaphors around exclusion, blame and speaking out are very powerful. A narrative that can still carry us forwards with some force and some big questions still to answer. It is of course individual women leaders who answer those questions in the way they lead. Somewhere along the line societies and organisations also need to be challenged about the blaming naratives they often write for women.
--Jane Stranz
Camille Paglia, a woman, says at Harvard to them that "they" must stop seeing. And she complains about that "narrow lens of gender" (which, if we've heard her long enough through her academic career has been what's propelled it towards androgyny.) What lens, yesterday, does Paglia use to tell "women" in America why they "should not vote for Hillary Clinton" although she writes with eloquence in a British newspaper?
But what if my gender, if your gender Sir, if your gender Ma'am, is more than a lens? What if it a mark, a marking, a brand, a cause for accusation and for blame? What if gender is more a fat force of the society in which you try to live, to lead, or to elect your leaders?
Now if we had no mothers, no fathers, no grandmothers, no grandfathers, no sisters, no brothers, no daughters, no sons, then we could live in Paglia's ideal world of androgynous atheistic progressive liberal feminism. If you take some time, through whatever lens you choose, you might see how Pagilia herself (would she be "itself"?) cannot live in her ("its") world, if now she can presume to be the one who tells women not to look with gender and not to vote for the woman candidate who is not woman enough because Hillary Clinton is, for Pagilia, still too much of a woman.
Jane Stranz sounds a more sensible alarm. Look at yourself in your society and look at your community. Are you sympathetic to the exclusions of some leaders because of their gender, because they are women?
