Help, help, I'm not really oppressed!

You're going to have to wait to hear about my awesome nap at the Renaissance Hotel indoor pool, because I can't resist throwing in my two cents / hopefully gently disagreeing with some people.

Jon Acuff, of Stuff Christians Like fame (a hilarious book that I thoroughly enjoyed) recently posted this --an ostensible calling out of Christian guys for liking "girls with a past" better. It was offensive to women of all different "pasts", unfunny, and not satirical at all. Better, famouser writers than I pointed all of this out. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth on Twitter. It was a sordid affair. (Mostly on his part.) (And here's a hint: If your humor blog post requires a double Update-Disclaimer section at the beginning of it that's nearly as long as the post itself, maybe something has gone horribly wrong.)

Apparently by coincidence, some other people then started sounding off on the state of evangelicalism in regards to women and sexism in the workplace. And the whole chorus of all these women accidentally calling out together started to sound a whole lot like "Help, help, I'm being repressed!" And it got me thinking about what true oppression looks like.

Oppression is being sold or kidnapped or tricked into sex slavery for travelling pedophiles, or having your children stolen to harvest chocolate. Oppression is being forced to abort your daughter by your in-laws who want a son. Oppression (as witnessed by my husband in eastern Afghanistan) is having your worth measured in cows or goats, or being forced to work in the fields all day while your husband does drugs and picks fights with neighboring tribes--and this is standard operating procedure in your country. Oppression is dying a slow, painful death by sucking chest wound because you've been taught that as a woman you cannot let male medics treat you, and a stray RPG just happened to hit your house.

I realize that there are cults and abusive relationships and Warren Jeffs types and more evil than I want to think about in our country--I don't want to discount the disgusting way that some women are treated here, I'm not saying that I disagree with all the women who described sexism in our culture, and I hesitate to call my own experience normative...but: I don't think that sexism to the point of oppression is what the average American "evangelical" woman experiences (to use a loosey-goosey term). Sometimes we need to take a step back, take a deep breath, thank God for what we've got, and look for ways to help those worse off than ourselves.

Comments

[Megan]

Good thoughts and I totally agree. Martin and I both have had incidents recently that help to put our "problems" into perspective. So many of us are very lucky to live the lives we do and its just because we happened to be born in this country and not another.

[Leslie]

Preach it, sister.