This is a long, careful, and necessary article, written for those of us struggling to make sense of the life and writings of John Howard Yoder. His description of Christian non-violence is as compelling and beautiful as his history of coercion and harassment of female students is horrifying.
One of the things that particularly strikes me about this is the way our language about such interactions frustrates the victims of them. One woman, for example, told of receiving a letter from Yoder that described her body in wildly invasive personal and sexual detail--so much so that the only language she could conjure to describe the experience of reading such a letter was one of sexual violation. "I felt as if I'd been raped."
I myself am struggling to find words to describe her experience--at second-hand, obviously, and therefore inadequately, but without reference to violent sexual assault. She wasn't touched, she wasn't penetrated, her body wasn't forced to do anything against her will. And yet something dreadfully wrong was done to her, something that women experience far too often at the hands of men, and something that men don't tend to go through life experiencing or fearing. The legal language of harassment wasn't necessarily available during the earliest years of Yoder's career, but even today that language seems insufficient.
But using the language of actual sexual violence is problematic for at least two reasons. First, it does, I think, some injustice to women who have experienced sexual assault, the way it does injustice to survivors of the Holocaust to have non-genocidal situations described as holocausts. And second, it lets men give themselves permission to dismiss women's accounts of such experiences: "Seriously? You got an explicit letter and you felt raped? Gosh, you women sure take these things way too seriously!"
Still, somewhere between "he sent an inappropriately explicit letter to me" and "I felt like I'd been raped," there is a great yawning void in our language, and women are continually struggling against it. The absence of language to describe what sexual harassment does to its victims (and even the word "harassment" has proven wildly inadequate to the job) only helps those who commit it.
By happy coincidence, I read the above article along with this one, about male privilege in the church. The writer does an admirable job trying to put words to those experiences that do not rise to the legal definition of harassment and yet constantly hound women in the workforce. While it would have been nice to have a #11 (You will go through most of your days neither fearing nor actually experiencing inappropriate sexual or personal barrages passed off as "jokes," constant references to your sexual availability, or having a colleague "accidentally" play porn at you when you walk into his office for a meeting), it is, I hope, helpful for men to think about what it would be like to have their work constantly qualified with reference to their gender. No one ever says, "He's the best male theologian we have on staff," or "you're a really good theologian, for a man."
On the other hand, I have to say that very, very few of my experiences of being at a real disadvantage because of my sex have taken place in an ecclesial context. I felt far more vulnerable to men's beliefs and behaviors the few times I've worked in entirely non-religious, male-dominated contexts than I have in the church or in church-affiliated schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment