MIKE PENCES MARRIAGE AND THE BELIEFS THAT KEEP WOMEN FROM POWER
By Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/mike-pences-marriage-and-the-beliefs-that-keep-women-from-power
SNIP.............
Prophylactic gender separatism can be found in conservative strains of other religions, of course. In framing extramarital interaction with women as categorically dangerous, Pence has something in common with fundamentalist Muslims and Orthodox Jews. And the basic idea isn’t just the province of the devout or conservative—or even, really, the province of men. Gender essentialism—and, more specifically, the abiding sense that women are sources of sexual danger—is so entrenched that people of all political orientations, including women, get married and then semiconsciously shrink their social lives so that only friends and close colleagues of the same sex remain.
By and large, there’s nothing wrong with living by whatever works for your marriage, your temperament, and your principles. And the outrage directed at Mike Pence’s chastity-belted Google calendar stems in part from many liberals’ unfamiliarity with conservative religious mores—as well as a gleefully voyeuristic interest in the striking details of Pence’s marital life. (The two that keep resurfacing: he calls his wife “Mother,” and she engraved a gold cross with the word “Yes” and stashed it in her purse in preparation for his proposal.) Infidelity can be corrosive in marriages worth preserving, and guarding oneself against sexual deceit is a bipartisan practice. The revered progressive writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, in 2012, that he “believes in guard-rails” when it comes to his marriage, and “in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not.” This quote, naturally, has been circulating among conservatives on Twitter as proof that liberals are hypocritical, and that Coates and Pence are essentially the same.
But it’s one thing to avoid a particular situation involving a particular woman who makes you feel a certain way; it’s another entirely to avoid all women as a group and as a rule because of the abstract possibility of sexual temptation. It’s telling, and extremely disheartening, that many people can’t tell the difference—that knowing the best thing to do for your partnership and subscribing wholesale to an idea about gender that calcifies woman as secondary could plausibly seem like the same thing. The Pence approach rules out a lunch meeting or a professional dinner with a woman. It also “included requiring that any aide who had to work late to assist him be male.” As National Journal reported two years ago, other congressmen had similar policies, in some cases to avoid the appearance of impropriety—a policy that, the Journal noted, may very well violate laws against discrimination in the workplace. Certainly, this approach is likely to lead to more all-male meetings of the sort we have seen so frequently in the early days of the Trump Administration. And, outside the professional world, it seems well nigh impossible to view a group of people as fully human if you refuse, categorically, to have them as friends.
One can imagine some version of these rules that applies equally to both genders and exists in a utopia where men and women have the same share of governmental power. But that is not where these rules come from, and that is not the world we live in. At play here are two basic evangelical ideas. The first is complementarianism, which finds beauty in the idea of men and women holding rigid, separate roles: men lead and women provide support for men. In complementarianism, women are intended to find worth and agency through obedience and submission. There are plenty of women, as well as men, who believe that this is a fundamental truth about human life, and they are free to do so—but when that conviction is allowed to shape public policy the result is a repressive and theocratic state. The second evangelical idea here is that Pence and his fellow hard-liners are simply making the most honest attempt possible to reckon with human sin. The problem is that women always end up bearing the burden of that reckoning. If we are framed as temptresses, our only power is sex. It’s remarkable, and depressing, that the top two people in American government agree so colorfully on this matter. Trump may be blatantly irreligious and Pence exotically devout, but our President and Vice-President come together quite well in their stated inability to resist women. Trump bragged about grabbing them by the pussy. Pence merely prefers to eat alone.
..............SNIP
= new reply since forum marked as read
