Tag: feminism

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We liberate a man

I have found Walter Wink’s brief little book on non-violence a thought-provoking read. He makes it quite clear that non-violence does not imply passive acceptance of an inhumane situation. Here’s an example of what non-violence does not mean:

How many a battered wife has been counseled, on the strength of a legalistic reading of [Matthew 5:38-41], to ‘turn the other cheek,’ when what she needs, according to the spirit of Jesus’ words, is to find a way to restore her own dignity and end the vicious circle of humiliation, guilt, and bruising. She needs to assert some sort of control in the situation and force her husband to regard her as an equal, or get out of the relationship altogether. The victim needs to recover her self-worth and seize the initiative from her oppressor. And he needs to be helped to overcome his violence.

(From Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way)

The last point ties in with Margaret Mead’s comment that ‘every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man’ (quoted in Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach [eds], Fifty Shades of Feminism). How true!

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We’re at the mercy of our descriptions

‘We’re at the mercy of our descriptions’, says Lisa Appignanesi, and again: ‘creatures of word and image, we humans are … made and remade by our descriptions’.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of that statement. How we describe the world determines how we experience it. How we describe ourselves shapes our experience of ourselves. And how we describe others clinches which dimensions of the other we can and can’t perceive. Our description of the world we encounter becomes that world, becomes ‘reality’ – at least to us, not infrequently to adverse, in some cases even disastrous effect.

In a book devoted to the issue of feminism, Appignanesi applies this insight to women’s concerns regarding the fact that their lives have always been defined by male descriptions:

… from a little base of biology, humans elaborate who they are through their writing, culture, politics and institutions. For women’s lives to change, it was important to take more of that power of description into our own hands.

From ‘Fifty Shades of My Own …’, in Lisa Appignanesi, Rachel Holmes and Susie Orbach (eds), Fifty Shades of Feminism