LANGUAGE - Why I'm A Feminist

Open book with language written across it.

A language reveals many things about the culture that created it. Much can be learnt by colloquialisms about a specific region. This is true of our own culture, of our own society. 

 Without realising, the way that we speak, the words that we use convey their own sense of sexism that we are unaware of.

To fight like a girl is a negative thing.
To run like a girl is a negative thing.
To cry is seen as a feminine weakness.
When a man is dominant, we call him assertive.
When a woman is dominant, we use the word ‘bossy’.
When a man works late we say he is ‘providing for his family’.
When a woman works late we say ‘she is cold and distant, uncaring for her children’.
When a man sleeps with lots of women, he is called a ‘stud’.
When a woman sleeps with lots of people she is called a ‘slut’.
No doubt there are many more words, colloquialisms, sayings that I have missed, and probably many more that I still use, without understanding the way that they taint my worldview.
May we be those that are thoughtful in our words, may we be those that are unafraid to challenge everyday sexism where we see it, and may we be those that continually root up those elements in our subconscious that keep us from living the way of love.

 This is my last blog in this series on feminism. For a reminder of the other blogs, here they are:
EQUAL - Why I'm A Feminist
OBJECT - Why I'm A Feminist
ENTITLEMENT - Why I'm A Feminist
REPRESENTATION - Why I'm A Feminist

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading