Fannie the Feminist and other scary straw women of NON complementarians!

I had a good giggle today when I read Mary Kassian's article: “Dora the Doormat” and other Scary Straw Women of Complementarity

Why the giggle? I guess a person on twitter called her a 'uber' complementarian. I can't stay I blame her for fluffing off the label, but it did encourage her to throw out some silly stereotypes for an article.  She listed some for everyone to read to show how the straw women misrepresents truth.

As Ms. Kassian defined: A straw man argument is one that misrepresents a position, knocks that position down, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted. It’s a common, but faulty way to argue against an idea.

So how about we have some FUN today, and see if we can come up with some stereotypes of our own - in the other direction of course.

Ahem - lets start with everyone thinking about ominous music for the background before we begin!

Ready? Lets GO!

Lets meet our first stereotype:

'Fanny the Feminist'

....Virtually all the women portrayed in the media in the past decade. From children's cartoons to television series to movies, women are portrayed as having an in charge—don't need a guy—I'm powerful, traditional marriage and family and morals are outdated—I have the right to rule—how dare you tell me what to do—mentality.

In the past decade, we've been inundated with the message that when it comes to relationships, women can hook up, be in a casual or long-term relationship, live common-law, get married or not, get married and then get divorced, get pregnant or abort the babies, sleep around, live with a guy or a girl, have sex with a guy or a girl, and participate in a whole assortment of immoral and perverted behavior as long as they are friends. In other words, woman makes her own rules and sets her own standards, and as long as she is nice, it really doesn't matter what she does. Who are you to judge?

And WHO can never forget of the FAMOUS

Nancy the Narcissist

...As long as women are first loyal to themselves and second to their female buddies, they're on the right track. Single, married, lesbian, heterosexual, promiscuous, perverted—they can be vulgar, crude, and crass, but if they are for themselves and for other women and are caring and nice, then they're okay.

In the new worldview, men are whiny and needy and not too bright and totally unreliable. They're marginalized and de-masculinized, used, regarded, and discarded like Kleenex out of a box.

...Now days, the epitome of empowered womanhood is to live a self-serving, self-righteous, neurotic, narcissistic, superficial, and adulteress life. The main character in Sex in the City series wraps it up well when she counsels women that, “The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself.”

So in a few short decades in the span of my lifetime, the ideal of a happy, fulfilled woman has gone from one who serves and exalts her children, her husband, and her community to one who serves and exalts herself and has a very different type of commitment, very different type of idea towards men and women.

 We can NEVER leave out...

REBELLIOUS RUBY!

...authority role is what caused woman's heartache and heartbreak. It wasn't just an abstract concept of men having more power and authority than woman. It was woven throughout our entire society's family and social and political and religious structures. It was laced throughout our social etiquette and our customs, our rituals, our traditions and laws, our entire system of education and division of labor, and all of these things were responsible for keeping men in a dominant position and women in a submissive, subservient position. Patriarchy was seen as the ultimate cause of woman's discontent, and only the demise and the deconstruction of all patriarchal structures would lead to her freedom. Only when woman broke free from the traditional, male-defined, Judeo-Christian roles and rules would she find meaning and fulfillment, and thus, the trigger was pulled.

• Full self-determination—woman needed to decide who she was and needed to have the legal right to act independently of her husband.  
• Freedom from biology—that prompted feminists at that time to lobby for birth control, for legalized abortion, state daycare, reproductive technologies, such as test tube babies, anything that took the burden of bearing and caring for children off of a woman's shoulders and put it more on society as a whole. 
• Economic independence—pay equity, equal pay for work of equal value, changes to financial practices, total and equal integration, affirmative action.

 and ONE of my Favorites....

Consciousness-raising CASSIE

SPEAK bitterness to recall Bitterness!  SPEAK PAIN to recall pain - Mao Tse-tung

...if they gathered women together in small groups and got all those women talking about their hurts and grievances against men, then all the women in the group would begin to get upset with men, even those women who didn't have any hurts and grievances themselves, and then their anger could be directed into action. They could be empowered to rebel against the authority of the males in their homes and also in society as a whole and change the rules of the game, and this technique was called consciousness-raising.

...the most powerful, effective tool to lead women to a personal, “aha” moment of consciousness-raising—the moment that she accepts and she understands that all the problems in the world and all the problems of women are due to the rule of men and that she has the right to take things back into her own hands. 

The moral of the story?  DON'T be known as 

Henrietta the Heretic

The fundamental premise of feminism is that women need and can trust no other authority than our own personal truth, and that was a really quick fly-over of just where we've come from in the last 40, 50 years.


It was a philosophical quake that shook underground, and like a tsunami—the waves of the implications of that have come back over society in wave after wave after wave, and the carnage is unbelievable. The carnage in young women's lives, in older women's lives, the carnage is unbelievable. We are so broken. 

We have been taught that we ought not to bow and submit to any external power, but that's not the message of the Bible. God created us. He created us male and female, and that's not inconsequential. That means something. 

Now wasn't that fun?  Heck I didn't even have to WRITE most of it!  I just took statements from Mary Kassian herself!

On the article where she states her own brand of stereotypes?  Lets look at her conclusion and rebuke:

If you want to talk ideas, let’s talk ideas. Let’s talk hermeneutics. Let’s talk presuppositions. Let’s talk biblical exegesis. Let’s talk principles of interpretation and application. But stop misrepresenting the complementarian position. Stop using syllogistic fallacies, non sequiturs, disambiguations and fallacies of propositional logic. But most of all, please stop parading out those silly straw women!

Nice!  HEY!  can we start with the article I just quoted?

 Sorry...but that was to easy.

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