“You cannot be what you cannot see: the Unspoken War against Women

© Rev. Susan Karlson

May 6, 2012

Unitarian Church of Staten Island

Our society promotes the anorexic Barbie supermodel image—if Barbie were a real woman, she would weigh 110 pounds and stand 5 foot 9 inches tall.  She would not have enough body mass index sufficient to menstruate.  Real women don’t look like Barbie.  Depictions of glamorous models on the covers of magazines and advertisements are not just made up and air brushed now; they are digitally enhanced.  Yet that is the standard aspiration that girls and women are measured against.  And increasingly, boys are socialized to expect that girls should look like that and find real girls and women wanting.

Girls are taught through representations across all the media that what is most important is how they look, that in their body and their sexuality resides the only power that they have to make an impact in this world.  According to statistics reported in the documentary Miss Representation fifty-three percent of 13 year old girls are unsatisfied with their bodies and that figure rises to 78% by the age of 17.  Sixty-five percent of women and girls have eating disorders while 17% of teens engage in cutting themselves.

There is a war going on—so subtle we do not perceive the missiles targeted straight at us, so insidious that we don’t comprehend how the evening news mainlines the chemical toxins straight into our systems, so national-wide that we don’t see that we act as soldiers carrying out the mission. There is a war going on that impacts the lives of our daughters and sons, immigrants, young adults, seniors, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, straight, liberal and conservative, people with fit bodies, and people who have accessibility and mobility issues.  It is a war against the soul of this nation.

There are many interlocking oppressions; racism, homophobia, class-ism, able-ism and anti-immigrant violence.  We have held services and social justice actions on these issues but this morning I want to talk about sexism because we so often think that it is one “ism” that has disappeared, that it is just is not an issue for us.  I beg to differ.

Recently, we have seen an all-male panel testify before congress about why insurance and employers should not cover contraception.  Regardless of our feelings about reproductive choice, the fact that congress would not let a woman testify that first week and not let anyone speak up who was in favor of the health care initiative which would impact millions of women, is abysmal.   The slanderous treatment of law student, Sandra Fluke, on right wing radio talk shows following her testimony, revealed the perverse nature of this unspoken war on women.  

The fact that women earn $.77 for every dollar earned by men for the same job is telling, too.  The denial about this and the controversy about the Lilly Ledbetter law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work shows some of the work that still needs to happen.

In spite of the giant strides we have made since the beginning of the women’s movement in the sixties, we are going backwards in some ways.  Women make up 51% of the the U.S. population and yet only 17% of congressional representatives are women.  The 2010 mid-term election was the first time women have not made gains in congressional representation since 1979!  Only 34 women served as governors compared to 2319 men.  

And when you compare our record to that of other countries, we also fall short.  Sixty-seven countries in the world have had female presidents or prime ministers; not the U.S.  The U.S. ranks 90th in the world in terms of women serving as national legislators.  90th!    

The United States is one of the few countries (alongside Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Palau, and Iran that I could detect from my latest search) that has not ratified CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women), passed by other member nations of the United Nations.  This is an issue that is front and center with the International Convocation of Unitarian Universalist Women.

We like to think that Unitarian Universalism has virtually eliminated the sexism within the movement.  However, although more than 50% of our ministers today are women, we still have work to do.  Some of the increases we have seen in women ministers are due to a rapidly increasing presence of community ministers, an important area of ministry but community ministers are not called to serve our congregations.  

I have not done rigorous research but women are not called to our larger congregations at the same rate and they often do not have as lengthy tenures in their called positions.  Add to this that we have never in our entire history elected a woman as president of the Unitarian Universalist Association.  We have moderators who are elected and they surely have important work to do with monitoring and facilitating our annual meetings but they are not our ambassadors around the world, the most visible Unitarian Universalist in a position of authority.  

Though there was unanimous support for calling a woman minister to the Unitarian Church of Staten Island in congregational surveys, there was a long standing tradition of calling only white heterosexual males. This congregation broke that tradition when it called me as its settled minister in 2008.   When you have 156 year history of male religious leaders, there is going to be some shake up with any woman minister.  Women have more relational styles of doing ministry and when women in leadership speak up boldly, they are sometimes seen as being controlling or dominating.  It is not surprising that we should be working through the challenges to our unconsciously sexist and long comfortable postures.  I’ve also been reminded what a minister’s wife once told me--that often the biggest resistance to female ministers comes from other women.  

I realize that I too am a recovering sexist.  Like racism, homophobia, ableism, it is part of the air we breathe.  It is easy to judge and identify people by categories and stereotypes and hard to recognize when we do it.  

It is important for all of us here in this house of worship to reflect on equal rights, justice, compassion and fairness for women. This is a matter that has implications for all of us, women, men and children.

“Miss Representation” dramatically makes the point that the cult of femininity and the cult of masculinity are two side of the same impoverishing coin.  And that change can come when the media begins to fairly represent all the complexity of women in our society and not only the Barbie doll image.  Let us also see portrayed women like Ann Kalil who will be doing her Odyssey this afternoon.

Let us all stand on the side of love with women.  If we are ever to stop this silent war on women, each of us must look beyond the body to the heart and soul of each person, to the content of character, to recognize potential beyond superficial sexuality.  And we must support and elect leaders who look like the nation looks.  We need to boycott movies, television, reality shows, and music that depict violence and objectification of women.  We need to look inside ourselves and see how we perpetuate sexism, how we women compete with one another and how males can share power and value women more fully for their gifts and talents.  Ultimately, we need to see ourselves as whole people, united in care and compassion with one another.  

For it is true—“the only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind when you’re done.” (Fred Small, Everything Possible)