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| "Mawwiage." (From "The Princess Bride.") Image source. |
[content note: it's about how, historically, sexual violence has always been a big part of marriage]
Thinking a lot about marriage lately, and what marriage is overall, in a general sense. As in, if you look at all marriages throughout history. The overall picture of it is very bleak for women, and I don't know what to think about that. My own marriage and my own culture- where you get married to someone because you genuinely love them and want to marry them, and you are equals- this is very much an anomaly if you take an outside, objective view of what marriage has always been.
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In purity culture, I was taught that marriage is so perfect, so romantic- if you follow the rules and marry the person that God planned for you to marry. Marriage is about knowing each other completely, being so transparent and vulnerable with your spouse, and being completely safe in that because you're fully committed to each other and you love each other.
And even though I have a LOT of criticisms of purity culture, I still basically believe in this view of marriage, and it's basically how my own marriage came about. Dating someone, being in love, feeling like everything is perfect and I'm so excited to be with him, so excited on our wedding day, so happy to see him all the time now. And we do trust each other and can be honest and vulnerable with each other.
It's not *quite* the romantic image I got from purity culture- just because we're married doesn't mean we totally know everything about each other. We don't agree about everything, and we're very different people. We continue to be different people; there wasn't some magical change on our wedding day.
Purity culture also makes many claims about marriage that are completely wrong. Like, the key to a good marriage is having no sexual experience at all with any other partners. (What? What on earth? Why would that be the key to a good marriage? As a married person I can tell you that I really don't care at all what me or my husband may or may not have done with other people 15 years ago. Why on earth would that matter? But purity culture teaches that's literally the most important thing, the #1 predictor of whether or not you can have a good marriage.) And the gender roles- purity culture teaches that the man has to be the leader and the woman has to submit. I can tell you it's really great to be NOT doing that- to just interact like normal people rather than trying to fit these arbitrary roles. Also purity culture teaches that "marriage is hard" which is a terrible thing to say that to young unmarried people to set their expectations of what marriage is supposed to be. Then if their spouse abuses them, they'll think that's normal because marriage is supposed to be hard. My marriage is not hard!
But my point is, this idea that marriage is supposed to be this super-romantic thing where you're in love and you totally trust your spouse and you're totally safe letting them know everything about you- I still believe in that.
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I've been thinking about marriage in the bible. I started reading Peter Enns's book, "Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" (and there will be blog posts about this- I'm really interested in it). Also, over the past few years, I have read and blogged about "The Red Tent" and "Womanist Midrash" and also wrote posts about The Bible and "Purity" and The Bible and Polygamy.
What it all adds up to is, the bible comes from an ancient culture where women didn't really have rights over their own bodies, rights to make their own choices about marriage and sex. And yeah, of course I always knew that, to some extent. Of course I knew that in the past, marriages were arranged, based on financial reasons, political ties between families, and pressure to have children, rather than the romantic feelings of the bride and groom. But that's so strange, so alien to me, it's impossible to fully grasp what that means, if you only hear this 1-sentence description.
"The Red Tent" and "Womanist Midrash" really fleshed out the whole world... what would a society look like, if marriages were arranged for financial/political/child-bearing reasons? What would women's lives be like, in such a society? How would people view marriage? How would people view the relationship between men and women?
One of the implications that was fleshed out in "The Red Tent" is that marriage is not necessarily all that different from sex slavery. In my review, I wrote:
In this book, the categories "wife" and "slave" are sort of blurred. Both of them mean "a person you're legally allowed to have sex with" and the other details beyond that- details about how well a man treats his wife or slave- sort of exist along a whole spectrum without an obvious dividing line.
And in "Womanist Midrash," Wil Gafney emphasizes over and over that when the bible talks about "slavery," we should understand this as sex slavery. You're allowed to have sex with your slaves- you're allowed to rape them- both male and female slaves- and everyone knows that's just the way it is.
What would it be like to be a woman living in that world?
I sort of hypothesize that it could go a lot of different ways, depending on what kind of man you end up married to. (And women didn't have a lot of choice in that.) Sometimes, the husband probably raped the wife- he can because he is physically bigger and stronger than her. Sometimes, probably the husband was a decent person and didn't want to physically force his wife to have sex- even so, the setting that they're in isn't really going to allow them to have a mutual, consensual, communicating-our-honest-desires-and-only-having-sex-we-truly-want relationship. And maybe sometimes, the two of them weren't that attracted to each other, so they didn't end up having sex very much, and just kind of settled into a lifestyle where they live together but they're not all that close. Sometimes, the man was [what we would now call] gay or asexual, and they likely wouldn't have sex much for that reason.
What was it like? Normally my reaction is to feel like, oh it's so horrible, the idea of being required to have sex with whatever unpleasant man your family decided is useful for you to have sex with- and I can't really think about it beyond that. Like, wow, thank goodness nowadays it's not like that for women any more. But if we want to understand the culture of the past- if we want to understand what marriage is, in a general sense- if we want to understand the world the bible came from- if we want to understand how the concept of marriage has changed, and how that continues to the modern day and our own society's view of marriage- if we want to understand why we're still dealing with misogynist, patriarchal traditions and beliefs surrounding marriage and sex... then it seems like we need a more nuanced view than "wow it was so horrible back then, thank goodness now it's totally not like that anymore, and now we have the Correct view on What Marriage Is Supposed To Be."
And to take one example that was mentioned in "Inspiration and Incarnation": let's talk about levirate marriage. This was practiced in many cultures in the ancient Near East. The bible's take on it can be found in Deuteronomy 25:5-10,
If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her. The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.
However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.” Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.” That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled.
What was this like? The widow had to marry her brother-in-law? Trying to put it in terms I can relate to... I'm not attracted to any of my husband's relatives, I don't want to marry any of them, I don't want to have sex with them, eww. But this is the wrong way to think about it. This totally misses the point. In cultures which practiced levirate marriage, marriage was not about being excited to be with someone because you're attracted to them/ in love with them. It wasn't about that at all. It was a completely different thing than what I've always understood marriage to be, what I always looked forward to when I was a teenager, what I was excited about on my wedding day, and the way I feel now with my husband- what marriage has been, throughout history, is a totally different thing than that.
What's it like, to be in a situation where you *want* to marry your brother-in-law, despite the fact that he doesn't want to marry you, and you have to threaten to tell the elders if he refuses to marry you? This isn't about being in love at all.
It seems to me like levirate marriage was created to address these 2 problems:
- If a man dies without having a son, there will be no one to carry on his family line
- If a widow doesn't have a man to provide for her, she will be poor and have a terrible life
And both of those things, looking at it from a modern American marriage-is-so-romantic perspective, I'm like, why is this even a problem? The culture of the ancient Near East took these 2 problems very seriously and came up with the idea of levirate marriage. What is it like, to live in a culture like that, where these 2 issues loom so large that they would override any concerns about who is attracted to whom, where the brother-in-law has to marry the widow, even if he doesn't want to, or else everyone will judge him (and they would be right to judge him, because he's being a jerk)?
Is it even possible to talk about consent, in an environment like that?
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And it's not just the bible- you see this everywhere in old stories about romance and marriage.
I recently read "Pride and Prejudice" which was published in the 1800's. It's a romance story- okay, [spoiler warning] here- the point is that the two main characters, Lizzie and Darcy, learn and grow in such a way that they end up falling in love with each other, and they are a good match for each other, and they get married. It's sort of presented as an ideal love story, but also as an exception: there are plenty of other married couples in "Pride and Prejudice" who aren't in love, and got married for other reasons.
For example, Charlotte and Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins felt like he should get married, and so he came and visited the Bennett family thinking perhaps he could marry one of their 5 daughters. He doesn't know the daughters at all, but in that society, getting to know each other wasn't really seen as essential when making decisions about getting married. Mr. Collins asks Lizzie to marry him, she says no, and then he goes and asks her friend Charlotte the next day. Because sure, why not. And Charlotte says yes, because she feels like she's gotten older and probably there won't be any other men asking her. She doesn't *like* Mr. Collins, but she does the math and decides this is probably the best offer she's going to get.
I'm not sure what the readers of this book, in the 1800's, were supposed to think about Charlotte's decision. Was the point that women should be like Lizzie, who rejects any marriage proposal she's not genuinely excited about? That seems kind of naive... Lizzie does what she wants, and doesn't let anyone tell her what to do, and an extremely rich man falls so hard in love with her- but like, how often is that going to happen? Maybe that's why people enjoyed reading this book, both back then and now, because it's a perfect fantasy. Be yourself, don't settle, learn from your mistakes, grow to be a better person, and someone else is also growing alongside you, so you are the perfect romantic partners for each other. Wouldn't it be great if it always worked out that way?
People in the past *did* have romantic feelings. I get the sense that people saw it as an extremely good and lucky thing if you get to marry someone that you're romantically in love with, but that it was kind of... a fantasy, a fairy tale, something that realistically you shouldn't expect to happen. Compare that to now, when people think that being in love and being attracted to each other *needs* to be the basis of a marriage decision.
A big part of the change is how women have so many more rights now than in the past. Women can have careers now and make money and don't need to marry for financial reasons. So we can choose to get married or not, based on whether we actually want to. But for most women who have ever lived, it wasn't like that at all.
In other words, in order for the idea of consent to make sense in the context of marriage and sex, women need to have the opportunity to have careers and money.
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A long time ago, when I was single, I sometimes had thoughts like this:
Well, we know that it's supposed to be like, when you decide to get married it's because you're so in love that you think your partner is completely wonderful and you need them and can't live without them- that's how one makes a decision about something as big and lifelong as marriage, it's because you're so overwhelmed by romantic feelings that you actually believe that your partner is the most optimal partner for you in the whole world.
But, does that mean that if I never meet someone that I have those kinds of feelings for, then I'll never get married? Wouldn't it be better to at least marry someone who's pretty good, even if I don't have romantic feelings biasing me to believe he's the most amazing partner ever and I can't live without him?
How do we strategize about this? How do you set up a mathematical model, where you weigh a potential partner's good qualities against the future possibility that you might meet someone better? I know this isn't how we're supposed to think about marriage; it's supposed to be like, you're so in love that you're not thinking about alternatives at all- but logically, if someone really wants to get married, don't you think it might be possible that it's a good decision to get married, even if they don't feel like "this person is the only person in the world for me"?
Kind of fascinating to look back on that now- how I was so sure that I was breaking some rule by speculating that it might be a good decision to get married because you have a potential partner that's pretty good, even if you don't have romantic feelings telling you that you ABSOLUTELY NEED this person. Actually, that's closer to what marriage has always been, in general.
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I also wonder how people viewed sex back then. And how people viewed the connection between marriage and sex. My own view now is basically, you have sex with someone that you're excited about having sex with because you're really into them. (With caveats that I'm oversimplifying it here; I'm asexual and I know there are many reasons besides being "excited" that lead people to choose to have sex.) But most women's experience of sex, throughout history, wasn't like that at all, was it?
What was it like? What's it like, living in a society that doesn't believe sex depends on the consent of the actual individuals involved, but just the fact that they're in a relationship (marriage, slavery) that says they are legally allowed to have sex?
Modern feminists make a big deal about how the female orgasm is so great, and women can have multiple orgasms, etc, claiming that this points to some grand design for sex where women enjoy sex, perhaps even enjoying it more than men. But... how did that work, if a woman is in a context where she's only allowed to have sex with whatever man her family decided she should marry, and it's when *he* wants to, not when *she* wants to? What was it like?
Also, I know that there have been some cultures throughout history which believed women wanted sex way more than men, in contrast to the modern American culture, which says men want sex and women don't really. I wonder how these views intersect with women's experiences of marriage and sex.
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And there are fairy tales that have a plot point where the king announces that whichever brave knight completes some heroic task will get to marry his daughter. I never thought too hard about that- it was always just a plot point that you read in fairy tales- but, what would it be like to live in a culture like that?
What would it be like to be the princess, being required to have sex with whoever your father decides is politically useful for you to have sex with? What would her relationship with her father be like, since her father sees her sex life as a resource he can use to reward one of his soldiers? Of course the princess has no choice in this.
I want to call it rape, but I don't know if it even makes sense to talk about rape, in a culture where it was seen as completely normal for a woman to not have choices in who she married and had sex with. (Actually this seems worse than rape.)
(This happened in the bible too- Caleb pledged to give his daughter in marriage to "the man who attacks and captures Kiriath Sepher" and then did so.)
Since modern readers view marriage as a happy and romantic thing, these stories sometimes get spun like this: The princess was already in love with a guy, and the king vowed to give her in marriage to whatever man does some certain task, so then the princess's secret boyfriend heroically did it- this is the challenge that he has to go through, so their relationship can get to the "happily ever after." And, maybe sometimes it was like that? But couldn't it also be that some guy who's been acting creepy toward you goes and does the task specifically so he can then marry you and do creepy sexual things to you? And your dad is apparently fine with that? Did men not see their daughters as people back then?
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In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and God banished them from the Garden of Eden, God pronounced curses on both of them. To Eve, he said that she would have pain in childbirth, and "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you." For women, throughout most of history, was being straight a curse? Being attracted to men, excited and giddy about one's romantic feelings for men, and at the same time being powerless and vulnerable, having no choice but to be "ruled over" by one's husband. Sexual violence as a normal fact of life.
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Ephesians 5:25-28 says,
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy... In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.
This comes right after the "wives, submit to your husbands" bible verse.
And the interpretation I've always heard from conservative Christians says, see, the bible says wives should submit to their husbands, and husbands should love their wives. God has decreed that there's *supposed* to be this hierarchy within marriage, but the husband has to be a good and loving leader, so it's all good.
And then the Christian feminists say, actually, this was written in a very patriarchal culture, and it was normal for that culture to say that the husband was the leader and the wife had no rights- but look, the bible is actually being very progressive here, saying that the husband has to love his wife, love her the same as he loves his own body. So God is *not* saying there's supposed to be a hierarchy in marriage; that was just the culture they were in, and actually God wants there to be equality.
And I've always heard this interpretation "this was a very patriarchal culture" but it never sunk in what that meant. But now, writing this blog post, I'm in the headspace of contemplating how, all throughout history, marriage meant a woman has no rights, and her husband controls her life (and is allowed to rape her). And then this command, "Husbands, love your wives," that truly is something different and radical. Their view of marriage wasn't like ours, where we take it as obvious that the two spouses love each other.
(But still, I'm not really on board with arguments about how the bible actually supports equality because it was really progressive compared to the surrounding culture. Okay, maybe it *was* "really progressive compared to the surrounding culture" but what is the point of this argument? People use these arguments to try to claim that the bible *is* right and good and the standard for morality, when we interpret it correctly, and I just think that line of argument is misleading at best and dishonest at worst.)
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Well I keep saying this is about the difference between "back then" and "now" but that's not true. There are still places in the world *now* where marriage is seen in this way.
This NPR article about periods in Pakistan says,
I've seen a lot of mothers that, even after their daughters get their period, they ask them to act like they haven't — [in Islam] it's forbidden to pray five times a day when you're on your period but they ask their daughters to pretend to pray so that the men in the family, especially the husband or the brothers of that child, won't know that she is of fertile age now. Because as soon as they know that the girl has started menstruating, they're going to pull her out of the school, if she goes there, and they're going to marry her off to a man double or thrice her age. And that is something we have seen so often. It just breaks my heart. Mothers are usually very helpless in these situations. The link to child marriage contributes to the secrecy around periods and makes it an extremely isolating experience.
This is a real thing that is still happening in the world- and I don't even know how to get my head around it. If your father finds out you've gotten your first period, he's going to marry you off to a man 2 or 3 times your age? How would that even work? What would it even look like, to have a culture where that could realistically happen? It doesn't sound like the girl is given any choice in this.
And the girl's mother isn't given any choice either. What is going on, in the marriage between the girl's mother and father, where the mother has to keep secrets from the father because they have such a massive disagreement in what they believe their daughter's life should look like?
And how common is it, when you look at all marriages throughout history, to have a situation where the wife kept secrets from the husband because she knew he would do something she strongly disagreed with if he found out? I always viewed marriage as this beautiful romantic thing where you can totally trust each other and be honest with each other, but what if that is the exception rather than the rule?
Here's another example, from an NPR article about leper colonies in India:
Her family sent her away when she was only 12 years old after she was diagnosed with what is likely the world's most misunderstood and stigmatized disease. They feared her presence in the home would tarnish the family's reputation and her siblings would never be married. Alamelu, who is now 75, never saw her family again.
This is so confusing to me- how to even understand the part about "her siblings would never be married"? This is coming from a context that views marriage completely differently from how I always have. I read this and I'm like, isn't marriage about being in love? If you're in love with someone, why would it matter what health problems their siblings might have??? But instead, it seems what's being described here is more like, you want to marry someone from a good family. If it is known that one family member had leprosy, they will then be seen as not a good family, and nobody will want to marry them. But I don't even know how to understand this.
Okay but now for something a little closer to home: I'm American and my husband is Chinese. I met him in China, and I had big romantic ideas about how love is strong enough to conquer all cultural differences. I felt like, if I love someone and we're happy together, it doesn't matter what his family background is. Or if he even speaks English or not. I can speak Chinese, so, that's good enough.
I guess I got lucky- my husband *does* speak English, has about the same level of education as me, and has a job that pays similar to mine. I wasn't really looking for any of those things though- I thought those practical things don't matter if you're in love.
Sure, I didn't think it was *only* about being in love- you need to have experience being a couple, getting to know each other, working well together, and have similar plans for the future. But I didn't see any reason it should matter what background your partner comes from, how much money they have, etc- isn't it "shallow" to care about those things?
And I've heard stories, because I'm in some social media groups for international women married to Chinese men- the cultural gap is just so big in some of these cases. Stories like "when we go to visit my husband's parents in rural China, they don't even have a refrigerator, they leave leftovers sitting out and we eat them again the next day. I got food poisoning every single time." Like, maybe you *should* consider the family that someone comes from (and whether or not they understand refrigeration and bacterial growth???) before marrying them, rather than believing that "all you need is love"?
And plenty of other issues that come up in these cross-cultural marriages (some of which have come up in my own marriage), about how to raise children, and how much one's parents get to have a say in one's life, etc.
I often see articles about marriage trends in China- about how it's expected that a man needs to own a home, or else no woman will marry him- and so the rising housing costs are causing people to delay marriage, and it's just so confusing to me, that housing costs would be an obstacle to *love*. It seems to come from a very different way of viewing marriage.
And when I got married, our wedding was in the US, but I asked some Chinese friends about what weddings are like in China. Some of them said, they feel like the wedding is something you do for your family, not really for yourself and your spouse. Some even feel like it's a lot of trouble to have a wedding, and they wish they could have a smaller party, but they have these family expectations and they have to have a big wedding (and one reason is because your guests all have to give you cash, and this is how your parents recoup all the cash they've given other people at weddings and birthdays over the years). This was so completely different from how I always viewed weddings, and what my own wedding was like. I always saw it as this big romantic thing, the fulfillment of all my romantic desires, this dream-come-true perfect day for the couple, everything is exactly how they want it to be, little girls dream about their ideal wedding for years, etc. But my Chinese friends felt very differently.
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And on the topic of immigration and marriage: what about situations where someone chooses to get married for immigration reasons? You want to be an immigrant, and one of the legal pathways for doing that is to marry a citizen of the country where you want to live.
I've seen this used as a plot point on tv shows (like "Heated Rivalry" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"). It's not really treated as a serious thing though- it's like... 'for immigration reasons, maybe I should marry someone that I don't really want to marry,' and then the plot resolves such that they don't have to do that, thank goodness, that would have been terrible. But this is a real thing, and I think it's more complicated than that.
For one thing, if you're applying for a US green card, it's not enough to just be legally married. My husband and I were going through this process a while ago (but then we decided to stay in China for now)- the US doesn't just want to see your marriage license, they want to see evidence that it's a "bona fide marriage." What on earth does that mean? It means, from the perspective of the US government, it doesn't count if you just went and got a marriage license, but you aren't living like you're married, in practical terms. They want to see evidence that shows things like: you live together, you have met each other's families, your friends know you're in a relationship and you love each other, you travel together, you have pages and pages of text messages you have sent to each other, you own a home together, you have joint bank accounts, you have children together, etc. (I have heard that the interviewers might even ask invasive questions about your sex life.) You don't have to literally have all of those things, but at least enough to convince the US that you "really" are married and you didn't just get a marriage license for immigration reasons. (I wrote about this in this post: US Immigration and the Definition of Marriage.)
In our case, my husband and I have children together, so, I know that would be enough to "prove" that our marriage is "real." But this system is not great for people who might have unconventional relationship structures- queer people, polyamorous people, asexual people, aromantic people. The system is judging if your marriage is "real" and earns you the right to be a legal immigrant, and the standard for "real" is the extent to which it looks like a conventional heterosexual monogamous child-raising marriage. (See: If your relationship isn't seen as "Marriage", not sure what green card options you have.) For people in non-normative relationship structures, they're going to run into problems along the lines of, "You don't live together? How is this even a marriage?" or "You have other partners? How is this even a marriage?" or "You don't have sex with each other? How is this even a marriage?"
But let's talk about the opposite case- where the marriage really is based on immigration benefits rather than freely wanting to marry each other. From how it's portrayed on tv shows, you get the impression that it looks like this: You go and ask your friend "Can I ask you a favor, as a friend? Can we get married, so I can be an immigrant?" And you both know it's "fake."
Sure, there are probably couples in societies where romantic feelings are viewed as absolutely essential for marriage, who do feel like "our marriage is not real because we don't have those feelings for each other, it's just about the immigration benefits." But I speculate that another kind of scenario may be much more common: In my post On "Unjust Marriage", I discussed an article about Vietnamese women who choose to marry Chinese men, for immigration reasons. The woman in the article says:
The next family offered 100,000 yuan and had a two-story brick house. The suitor was in good physical shape, had a junior high school diploma, was five years older than me, and looked to be freshly shaven.
The first time I saw him, I felt nothing; my only concern was the bride price. After weighing it up, I decided to marry him.
This isn't "let's make a fake marriage"; this is a woman looking at what this man can offer her- what kind of home he has, what kind of job and salary, and asking herself if she can accept marrying him, having sex with him, giving birth to his children, doing his housework, in order to get the benefits that he can offer. And honestly there's nothing "fake" about this; this is what marriage has been, this is what marriage has always been, for most women throughout history. The immigration aspect adds another dimension to it, but is it really any different than all of the other societal forces which have limited women's options, such that marrying some guy she may or may not like is the least-bad option available to her?
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So, what even is marriage?
Religion has a lot of opinions about what marriage "should" be. Purity culture has a lot of opinions about what marriage "should" be. Feminism has a lot of opinions about what marriage "should" be. The LGBTQ community has a lot of opinions about what marriage "should" be.
But what does it even mean, to talk about what marriage "should" be, when that's not what marriage has been, for most of its history? That the overall history of marriage is more about sexual violence than about love and romance and being equal partners, and, you know, genuinely wanting to marry your partner.
I feel like, it's important for me to understand this history, because there are still some places in the world that have this kind of perspective- on the extreme end, not letting the woman have a choice at all, and on the more moderate end, having a choice but it's based on all sorts of factors that are rooted in gender inequality limiting women's options and have nothing to do with romantic feelings. And this history affects how we view marriage now. (And the modern view that marriage needs to be based on romantic feelings and attraction is a new thing, and maybe we should question that too.) It affects our ability to understand writings from long ago (like the bible).
It seems to me like, our arguments for "what marriage 'should' be" can't be based on some imagined ideal that we believe is an essential part of the original definition of marriage (whether that "ideal" was "defined" by God, or wherever it came from). There is no such ideal- marriage was never about consent and equality.
I always thought it was obvious that men and women should be equal, because we're all people. And sexism kind of crept in, and we have to get rid of it, all the little pesky ways it marred that ideal. But... actually equality is not some kind of obvious "default" state- it's never been like that. To say men and women should be equal is to say we have to build something new, and that takes work. It's not just about removing the sexism to reveal the core of equality that was always there- no, I don't think it was always there.
If God intended for men and women to be equal, then why did They make pregnancy so difficult, with such a high rate of maternal and infant mortality, and put that burden entirely on people assigned female at birth? Yes, in Genesis 1, God creates both male in female in the image of God, and instructs them together to rule over the earth- we see equality here, day 6 of creation, but was it ever even possible for society to live up to that ideal?
But we have to do it, because it's the right thing to do. Men and women should have equal rights; let's figure out how to do that. It's these big ideas, about equality for women, equality for queer people- and finding new ways to build society so that these big ideas can start to become reality. It's about birth control, the abolition of slavery, technological advancement, education, modern medicine which has greatly decreased maternal mortality and infant mortality. There is no "ideal" of what marriage "should" look like- we have to figure out how to make one.
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Related
On Rebekah, Virginity, and how to Read the Bible
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