Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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      1

      Who Are We?

      We are everywhere. We are your daughters, sisters, friends, partners, coworkers, lovers, and mothers. We sit next to you on the bus. We’re behind you in the line at the checkout counter. We sit beside you in church. We walk in front of you on a crowded sidewalk. Everywhere. More than one source claims that the majority of rape cases occur during childhood and adolescence,¹ more often by someone we know and trust.² One out of three of us faces sexual assault in our lifetimes: 61 percent of all rapes occur when we are seventeen years old or younger; 29 percent when we are less than eleven years old; 6 percent when we are older than twenty-nine.³ Nearly half of the three thousand women surveyed in one college study said they had experienced some form of pressure to have sex since the age of fourteen.⁴ One out of seven women report being raped by a spouse.⁵ Marital rape remains legal in two states: North Carolina and Oklahoma.⁶

      Anti-“rape-hype” commentators like Katie Roiphe have rallied a chorus: “I don’t know of anyone who’s been raped or molested. Why don’t they come forward?” Over 85 percent of rapes never get reported, 42 percent of victims never tell anyone about their assault.⁷ There is good reason for a victim of rape to be reluctant to expose the sexual crimes against her. Coming forward requires a just context. And history tells us that women are responsible for the sexual crimes against them. Fewer than 5 percent of the rapists who are reported go to jail, and 67 percent of them are repeat offenders.⁸ If women are not blamed, then they are grossly trivialized. One Pennsylvania judge who “punished” a man who raped his date decided that a seven-hundred dollar fine would suffice. The money would allow her “to take a short vacation and get over it.” No wonder victims of rape are nine times more likely than nonvictims to attempt suicide.⁹

      The women interviewed for this study, in a number of ways, could be any woman from the Christian middle class. They are between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-eight. They are college educated and come from East Indian, Native American, African American, and Euro-American backgrounds. Their faith systems are Christian based. Their sexual preferences are diverse. (See Appendix I for more demographic detail.)

      Because I am a survivor of incest, a former seminarian, as well as a woman who has struggled with the traumatic symptoms of food, body, and weight preoccupation, I have chosen to include my story as one of the anonymous case studies presented. I felt my story both shapes and reveals the theories I have formulated, and my own example should help sharpen the sense of differences among all the case studies. In keeping with good social-scientific research, I feel it is better to own up to my own hermeneutical perspective rather than make the spurious claim to some unassailable objectivity.

      Yet it is not my intention to remain anonymous as an author. When I feel that my own experience challenges or enhances the understanding of a theoretical point, I put it forward directly. The politics of anonymity reflects the way patriarchal cultures have “read” sexual violence as something that victims invite. If I were to report on the religious meaning that survivors of burglaries give to their secondary traumatic symptoms, I could keep the survivor’s narrative together and even add her first and last names—for no one would dare blame the victim of a burglary. But where sex is involved, a woman has carried the blame throughout time. Such a misallocation of blame is why my narratives, and those of others, have been “broken up” and are used to show themes in the psychology and socially gendered nature of the trauma, its symptoms, and the religious meaning a survivor gives to it. And because these survivors know all too well the repercussions of public exposure, their names have been changed to protect them.

      Definitions

       Patriarchy

      Because I use the term patriarchy throughout this book, it is important that I first define it. I see patriarchy as

      a familial-social, ideological, political system in which men—by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law, and language, customs, etiquette, education, and the division of labor, determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male. It does not necessarily imply that no woman has power, or that all women in a given culture may not have certain powers. . . . The power of the fathers has been difficult to grasp because it permeates everything, even the language in which we try to describe it.¹⁰

      If we read newspapers or popular magazines, go to the movies, look at how we allocate money for military spending as opposed to social programs and how we treat our natural resources such as earth, air, and water, it becomes clear that our system seeks domination. I believe there is a gendered quality to such destructiveness.

      In North America, statistics of murder, rape, and incest are decidedly skewed toward the victimization of females. Over 150,000 females die each year of anorexia, which takes more lives than the AIDS virus.¹¹ In addition, one cannot help but wonder if the federal government’s cutting of seven billion dollars from food stamp programs is evidence that women are undervalued, since 85 percent of the recipients of food stamps in the United States are women and children.¹² In many parts of the world, cultural and religious tradition dictates that women are second-class citizens, and they should not question their status—men eat first, are educated first, and make decisions for women.¹³ As feminist philosopher Mary Daly notes,

      All of the so-called religions legitimating patriarchy are mere sects subsumed under its vast umbrella/canopy. They are essentially similar, despite variations. . . . And the symbolic message of the sects of the religion which is patriarchy is this: Women are the dreaded anomie. Consequently, women are the objects of male terror, the projected personifications of “The Enemy,” the real objects under attack in all the wars of patriarchy.¹⁴

      Because СКАЧАТЬ