Submission is not always announced by the word "submit." Sometimes submission arrives dressed in the moral vocabulary of its era. Yesterday it might
Submission is not always announced by the word “submit.” Sometimes submission arrives dressed in the moral vocabulary of its era.
Yesterday it might have been obey your husband.
Today it might be be accommodating.
Tomorrow it will have another name.
The question women need to learn to ask remains beautifully simple:
Who is being asked to move, who gets to remain exactly where they are, AND what happens when the woman says no?
We have inherited cultural habits that repeatedly treat female accommodation as virtue and female refusal as something requiring explanation. Those habits can appear in marriages, churches, families, workplaces, activist movements, medical settings, politics and public policy.
People who aren’t in faith spaces believe it is in church. Only.
People estranged from families believe it is in families.
But this pressure, is everywhere where girls and women are.
There is the demand that women explain themselves indefinitely while men are rarely required to explain why access to women is necessary. That reversal fascinates me. Instead of asking why a man needs access to a particular female person, body, relationship, institution, category or space, society asks the woman to defend withholding it.
Without the language to explain, and the social training to smile, laugh, and pleasantly go along with; girls are at a heightened risk.
Do not be fooled because some women and “good men” notice it and exploit it for their own gain.
We can still challenge it, speak, and change it. Girls and women deserve peace, privacy, opportunities and safety just as much as boys and men.
And The Global Pressure for Women’s Submission Continues…
(We are listening to you even when you think that it doesn’t that it doesn’t “come out right.”)
