I was about to fire up the grill in order to cook luncheon for my family, as any good woman would do, and my own child literally just called my whole being into question. “Are you sure you should do that?” she asked. “Shouldn’t our father be handling the fire?”
“I’m gonna need you to get right up off my back,” I reposted, channeling Ryan George. What is her problem? Did I accidentally nurse in my bosom some weirdo patriarchalist?
Some troubles never seem to go away. No matter how long humanity continues, there never is an answer to what sort of lives women should lead. I’ve been interested over the last few weeks to observe the debate continue apace about what a woman should be allowed to read. I shouldn’t be, but I am a little bit surprised that this is a thing that people have time to talk about on Twitter I mean X—and that I have time to scroll and scroll trying to find all the tweets, sorry X’s or Whatevers.
But, just to backtrack and catch all of you up who have lots better things to do, once upon a Twitter Time, a person with a podcast explained to the wide world that if he were ever to discover his wife reading a book that wasn’t good for her, he would “snatch” the book out of her hand. This was his husbandly and patriarchal prerogative, and he suggested more people follow in his footsteps. In response, the interwebs, in its usual decadent fervor, bellied up to familiar, if weary, battle lines. The “debate” generally goes like this:
People on the Right (whatever that means): Of course. Good Job.
Or: I disagree with you and think you’re misapplying the Bible.
People on the Left: How Dare You.
Obviously, there are a lot of other things to think about the perennial question of What A Woman Is Allowed To Do Or Be. First of all, it shouldn’t be controversial, although it is, to say that a lot of heresy has come into the church as a result of women reading dumb books. It just has. It’s a crying shame, of course, but I wish I had a bitcoin for every woman who read Rachel Held Evan’s awful Year of Biblical Womanhood and discovered that the Bible was literally oppressive for women, or Glennon Doyle’s Untamed and decided she was a cheetah, or Jen Hatmaker’s Of Mess and Moxie and became affirming, or—and this is the most irritating one right now— Jesus and John Wayne and rushed straight out of the church and onto TikTok.
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