If you type “Blogging” into the Unsplash Search bar, this is one of the images that pops up. Clearly, this is a spiritual representation of what I look like “every” morning when I sit down to be your morning cup of coffee:
So now, with my butterfly shoes strapped on, I’m going to try to get through the next section of Chapter Ten in She Deserves Better which is, rather curiously, titled “She Deserves Permission to Be Big.” As someone who is persistently, in the second half of life, when all the sorts of hormonal processes that make it possible for a person to become smaller have fled away, and am therefore doing my best to become, if not very small, at least slightly smaller than I am right now….look, I’m just trying to lose the ten pounds I’ve gained, that’s all…the chapter title causes me serious angst every time I look at it. I would love “permission” to “be big,” not just in physical girth, but in every other sense of the word. And yet, I find that God is always cutting me down to spiritual size. He is always afflicting me, getting in my way, frustrating me, making it harder for me to do the things I want to do. Why? Why can’t God let me go lumbering down that beautiful, wide road, eating a box of donuts and shouting at all the passersby?
There is a well-worn, though uncomfortable answer to that question. God doesn’t let us “be big” because he loves us and it’s not good for us to have and say and be everything we want. Being “big,” especially if it’s in the Glennon Doyle Cheetah manner, is destructive. If that’s what Gregoire means, then her advice in this chapter is not going to be good for young ladies and their mothers trying to flourish in any church context. As I said somewhere this week, the person held up for our consideration by Jesus himself is John the Baptist who literally said, “he”—that’s Jesus—“must increase and I”—that’s John”—“must decrease.” This isn’t a happy kind of narrow humility to face when all the world wants you to believe that it is only by more self-expression, not less, that you will reach peak moral goodness and eternal joy.
So for Gregoire to have named the chapter, “She Deserves Permission to Be Big” is, how shall I say it, problematical. It lacks spiritual nuance and biblical literacy. Setting that to one side, let me very briefly take up the section in this chapter called “She Should Know: Girls Don’t Talk Too Much.” To kick off the discussion, the authors describe a Christmas card of a mother and her daughters with duct tape over their mouths and the father and his sons brandishing a sign that says, “Finally! Peace on Earth!” This, they explain, isn’t just a funny joke. Apparently, 52.1% of women felt that “girls talk too much while they were in high school, and 15.8% still believe it today.” Figures support the data. They go on to explain that if women, when they were young, believed that girls talk too much, they are more likely to end up in abusive marriages, are less likely to talk about their troubles to their husbands, are less likely to be sexually satisfied in marriage, are more “likely to feel uncomfortable about how” their husbands look at other women, and are “less likely to have a husband who does his fair share of the chores around the house.”
How does this happen? It’s very simple—"if a girl believes she talks too much, she has internalized a message that her opinions and needs are an inconvenience to those around her. She’s been primed to refrain from speaking up.” The technical term for that is “internalized misogyny” which, they say, you can read about in the academic literature.
As I complained yesterday, there is so much here that it’s hard to know where to begin. But it’s Friday so I’ll do a quick listicle because I have to rush into the day.
If this book had been written a hundred years ago, again, I would have paused to wonder to myself about the place of women in society. The book came out this year, however, which is a strange and difficult time for all kinds of speech. This is the time of the Girl Boss, of the men who get canceled when they say unacceptable things about the differences between men and women, of the censorious lady in the grocery store yelling at people to do better. That type of person to be so called is most unfortunate because I know actual people with that name who aren’t like that at all. At the very least, one can say definitively that if internalized misogyny was a big problem in bygone times, it doesn’t seem to be a problem any longer. Even in the church—sometimes especially in the church—men know that they had better apologize a lot before they speak about anything to anyone. Gregoire, perhaps, just hasn’t noticed this, in which case, I recommend she get out more and read more, or even spend more time on Twitter.
It is true, and has always been true, that some people talk “too much” and other people talk “too little.” Marriages have been torn asunder because one partner just wouldn’t say what needed to be said, or because the one railroaded the other. It’s not always the woman who talks too much, sometimes it’s the man. But it is also true that some people do talk too much. Sometimes people even blog too much—perish the thought.
It is not really helpful to make vast, sweeping generalizations about one half of the population, which, ironically, is their point. No one should have said that “women talk too much” because not all women do. But it is also true that not everyone can read this section and conclude that their daughters *don’t* talk too much. Certainly, at least one person reading this book will have at least one daughter who talks too much.
But also, there’s a reason that Christmas card might be funny. Those guys probably do have a hard time getting a word in. Women, in general, do like to talk about certain kinds of things more than men do. My husband goes on an hour-long walk with me four times a week so that I can just talk…and talk and talk and talk. He listens and nods, and often his mind wanders because my gosh, who can handle so much speech?
Remember that awful, insulting moment when C.S. Lewis had Mrs. Dimble explain to Jane in That Hideous Strength (I’m not looking this up, so this is not a perfect quote) that ‘wives talking is so useful to help the husbands concentrate on their reading.’ This is not because of all the internalized misogyny. It is because of the great mystery of men and women trying to be with each other across the chasm of unlikeness. They are like, but also unlike. They don’t think about the same things. They don’t always know why the other person can’t understand them. The world becomes very bland and terrible when all the men have to listen to all the women all the time.
And, of course, it becomes bland and terrible when the men don’t listen to the women either. Sense, is what is required, and also sensibility.
There is one person to whom you can always say everything you want—the Lord Jesus. He will always listen and perfectly understand you. You don’t ever need to worry about talking too much, or indeed, too little. Because he cares for you, he will not let you be a Girl Boss. He might let you endure being small in the eyes of all your fellow creatures, which will be painful. But he went into that narrow place before you, going even to death, opening not his mouth before all his accusers. He went there in order to make you glad for as many days as he had afflicted you. He went there so that you could go into a wide, capacious, open space with enough of everything. Whenever you find that you lack for words, companionship, and understanding, he is always there with you.
Have a nice day! I guess I’ll go yell at my husband that he’s not doing his faith share, for that is the sort of speechifying that every man likes so bright and early in the morning.
Anne, you sometimes make me laugh. This time I wept. I quote with joy your profound proclamation of truth, linking our suffering humility with His, and therefore, our glory to His.
He might let you endure being small in the eyes of all your fellow creatures, which will be painful. But he went into that narrow place before you, going even to death, opening not his mouth before all his accusers. He went there in order to make you glad for as many days as he had afflicted you. He went there so that you could go into a wide, capacious, open space with enough of everything. Whenever you find that you lack for words, companionship, and understanding, he is always there with you.
Gratefully, and grace-fully.
The first time I heard this concept of "being big", it was from the lips of Ken Kesey (head of the Merry Pranksters). Back in 1965, he and "Mountain Girl" (later the wife of Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead) were arrested for possession of marijuana. A video exists of the arrest (which I will try to link below).
Toward the end of the arrest video, the interviewer asks KK: "Mr. Kesey, do you feel that you have the right to do what you want, whatever you want, and still live in this world?"
Kesey answers: "I feel that a man has a right to be as big as he feels it in him to be." Which, I suppose is another way of saying, "Yes." Bigness is a euphemism for selfishness.
When I first heard Kesey's quote, I adored it and went around saying it to people. But since 1965, we've really seen how this philosophy of Being Big does not end well for ourselves or others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqrcbDpjgWk