Guest Blogger, Maia Caron’s continued Conversations with Freethinking Authors. Today, she’s interviewing Ophelia Benson, co-author with Jeremy Stangroom of Does God Hate Women? and Why Truth Matters. Ophelia is editor of butterfliesandwheels.com, deputy editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine and author of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense.

MAIA: Welcome Ophelia. First, I’d like to say that I loved Does God Hate Women? and agree with Nick Cohen’s comment that it is “At once a joy to read and a call to arms.” With straight forward logic, you and Jeremy Stangroom take apart the arguments of religious apologists and expose their ignorance at a foundational level, even though, as you write, it’s considered that, “Religious law is ‘sacred’ law….and thus fixed, peremptory and inviolate.”

In your book, you say that “… religion has for millennia helped the stronger to go on dominating the weaker.” You also write, “The control of women is dual. The goal is to deny access to woman’s genitals to all men in the world minus one and to guarantee access to one” and “Most people who have grown up in liberal secular societies fail to realize how taken for granted it is elsewhere that girls and women have no rights over their own genitals or their own lives.” And “It’s impossible not to notice what a convenient theology this is, for the men who originated it and the ones who perpetuate and preach and enforce it. It’s impossible not to think that God and the Prophet are simply a fig leaf for a naked and brazen system of sexual slavery.” Because religion is “man-made” is it simply a proxy for men to enforce their will over women?

OPHELIA: Religion isn’t simply that, because religion is a lot of things. But are religious rules governing women and their bodies and their sex lives that? Broadly speaking, yes. Mind you, I don’t think it’s as simple as men sitting down and thinking, ‘Now what’s the best way to guarantee each man exclusive access to at least one woman? I know – pretend it’s what God wants.’ I think it’s more like projection. ‘There is a way things should be; this includes women belonging to men and not being allowed to roam off whenever they feel like it, and it also includes men being in charge and women being submissive. Because that is how things should be, naturally it is how God wants them to be.’ There is no need to think of it as a conscious trick – on the other hand I think it is reasonable to think of it as a large failure of imagination. It’s taken humans a remarkably long time to realize that treating some people as radically inferior is really neither necessary nor desirable.

MAIA: So it’s not so much an evil conspiracy of men plotting to keep women down, but perhaps an unconscious, outmoded ideology. Further on this subject, you write that the reasoning behind religion’s edicts is so flimsy and irrational that it’s a surprise it continues to hold such power, writing that a “combination of chapter and verse and a mere gesture at a secular utilitarian reason is not much on which to base the subordination of more than half of humanity.” It isn’t much at all, and as you say, if women rose up and questioned this perfunctory reasoning, it would be easy to end much suffering and subjugation of women world-wide. Yet most women do not rise up. Are women conditioned from birth to be compliant?

OPHELIA: Some women rise up, fortunately, and others would like to but not at the price of getting killed or beaten up or thrown out of the house or losing their children or alienating everyone they know. But, of course, globally most women are indeed conditioned from birth to be compliant. That’s part of the religious rules, based largely on men’s sense of the way things are supposed to be. It’s also part of other things – it’s a large and complicated subject. But along with being conditioned to be compliant, women and men are generally conditioned to obey the religion they were raised in and the customs of those around them. Being able to think skeptically about one’s own traditions can be seen as a privilege that is available to only a tiny minority of the world’s people.

MAIA: I’m interested in the reasons behind men’s fear of women. A fear which is so strong, men have written religious scripture, creating a god who proclaims them superior to women and thus charged with dominating them. You say that men distrust women’s reproductive and sexual power.  Existentially, why do you think men fear women?

OPHELIA: I’m interested too – partly because it strikes me as out of proportion so much of the time. It’s as if women are not just irritating human presences whose wants conflict with Mine – it’s as if they’re monsters, demons, fiends from hell. How else can one understand men who kill their own daughters and are proud of themselves afterwards? Or the remarkable library of misogynist literature that stretches from Eve to ‘Fatal Attraction’? So the short answer is I really don’t know. The long one is something about Resenting the Mother, something about fear of rebellion and treachery, something about fear of blood and childbirth, a lot about sexual suspicion and fear (she can always get pregnant by someone else, you know, and do it secretly), a lot about having to be brave and strong and tough and resenting people who don’t have to be all that – and so on. I can think of various things that could well be part of the picture, but basically it mystifies me.

MAIA: I’m intrigued by your Resenting the Mother theory. Do you think that maybe men hate and fear woman because she’s a creatress? After all, a woman births (throws) a man into the world. When you think about it, man looks to his mother for answer as to why he exists and of course she can’t answer because there is no answer to the question ‘Why do we exist?’ The creator of the child knows not what it does and she really should know because after all, she’s its creator. The mother creates the child, but she can’t say why/how. A female doesn’t have this same anger/fear because she understands that she also has this power of creation. The male projects his fear and anger toward women in general and thus an angry misogynist God is created to keep this object of fear under control.

OPHELIA: There is something fundamentally scary about it – a human being who can manufacture another human being inside her body. If we weren’t so used to it it would sound like something in a horror movie – well it would sound like Alien. And there is also something enormously enviable about it, so that too may be a factor. This is kind of amateur Freudianism (not that I believe there’s a professional kind!) – spinning plausible theories that seem to make sense but who the hell knows.

MAIA: I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s interesting thinking of how the so-called ‘miracle’ of birth is so taken for granted but really, you’re right, if we weren’t so used to it, it would seem like the parasite/host scene from Alien. In the chapter of your book called Holy Groupthink, you explore the idea that religions “…often declare some kinds of people subordinate to other kinds of people, and they also often deny the right of humans to contradict such claims.” You then give an example of a UN meeting in 2008 where a delegate was giving a statement in regard to rights of women and was interrupted twenty seconds in by delegates from Egypt and Pakistan who insisted the delegate had no right to discuss Sharia law in the UN council and that “Islam would not be crucified” in such a manner. You go on to say that this sort of thing amounts to “protecting an abstraction, a particular religion,” and “specious protection for a social construct at the expense of real people.” This is a notion that is explored at some length in my own book. I maintain that it’s only the individual that can right these types of wrongs and remove the mask of the persona and destroy social constructions. This means that instead of blind belief/faith, questioning and logical thinking is required. What further dangers are inherent in what you call “intense group loyalty”?

OPHELIA: Boy, there’s a big subject. One big one is overlooking or never noticing the fact that groups are not people; groups don’t suffer, groups aren’t conscious, groups don’t have feelings. It is the individuals who make up the groups who are and have and do all that – and each one does it separately, one at a time. The feelings of all those individuals do not add up to one big feeling that the group has – they remain separate. That’s not a reason for people to act as selfishly as possible, but it sure as hell is a reason for people to remember that group prosperity does not automatically translate to happiness for every individual in the group. The same of course applies to families. People who focus all their concern on groups or families or ‘communities’ risk simply forgetting that some members of groups have more power than others, some have different interests and needs from others, some see the world differently from others. How this cashes out in practice is of course that the men of a particular ‘community’ are taken to represent the whole community when in fact the women of that community may have radically different wants and needs from the men.

MAIA: Islam apologists are being criticized in the press lately as defaulting to a kind of “political correctness.” Do you see apologists as acting in a politically correct manner or do you think it’s more a matter that they fear personal harm if they dare to criticize Islam? Have you experienced any backlash for your criticism of Islam?

OPHELIA: Both are in play. Some people admit to simply being afraid of consequences, which at least has the virtue of not prettying things up. Some people are reluctant to criticize Islam because Muslims in the West are a vulnerable minority. This is true, and well worth keeping in mind, but it’s short of a conversation-stopper. Just for one thing it falls foul of the blindness about groups mentioned above. ‘Muslims in the West’ are not just people who want to live by the most conservative possible versions of Islam, nor are they all men who want to impose the conservative versions on ‘their’ women. Some Muslims in the West are women and girls who want to get out from under those rules, so being all politely respectful of Islam no matter what is not automatically doing all Muslims in the West a favor.

I’ve experienced almost no backlash for my criticism of Islam. Madeleine Bunting called me shrill and strident – but coming from her that’s a compliment. Sholto Byrnes gave the book a scathing review in The Independent – but his charges were so sweeping that he seemed to be talking about a different book. There is a Facebook group called ‘Against the book “Does God Hate Women?”’ – and that’s pretty much it for backlash.

MAIA: It’s said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so that Facebook page is helping book sales. In your book, you quote several letters written by Pope Benedict, one in 2004, the other in 2008 where he writes, “God entrusts to women and men, according to their respective capacities, a specific vocation and mission in the church and in the world…” You write that it’s incredible that more people do not openly criticize an “exclusively male hierarchical priesthood laying down the law to women—all women, women as such—when women have no voice in making the law and no channel of dissent.” Why do you think more women in the Church do not question the authority of a male hierarchy and demand at least some forum for discussion and recommendations for change?

OPHELIA: I think because it simply seems natural. One could call it the Walter Cronkite effect. Just as it seems natural to have a man with a sonorous voice reading the news, so it seems natural to have a man with a more or less sonorous voice in the pulpit. I think women mostly don’t really particularly want women in the pulpit, and I think they mostly don’t stop to realize that the male priesthood also means that only men make the rules that both sexes are supposed to obey. One could also just call this habituation. It’s always been this way – it would be such a hassle to change it – there’s laundry to do – I’ll worry about it some other time.

MAIA: Eric Maisel in his book The Atheist’s Way writes that it’s important to speak up when hearing “God talk,” that to remain silent is to give strength to the social construction of religion and its idiocy. Do you think the same way about misogynistic talk? That by saying nothing when it’s bandied about is tantamount to handing power to social constructions that subjugate women?

OPHELIA: Oh, yes. Do I ever. I get into endless, tedious battles over this – over sexist language, in particular. I don’t like it when people who disagree with something a woman wrote call her a stupid bitch – and I like it even less when I say ‘can’t we criticize the article without using sexist epithets?’ and people defend the use of sexist epithets. This drives me nuts, but it happens over and over again – including among atheists. I have this perhaps fatuous idea that atheists should know better, but in fact only some of them do.

MAIA: I think that some atheists should know better, or at least think better. I’m just waiting to be called shrill and strident. Then I’ll know I’m disturbing some foundational injustice that the status quo would like left alone. In my experience, it’s usually women who use the “shrill” and “strident” words, as if they’re dirty. It’s ironic that the women who call other women fighting for justice for women, “strident,” when the women who fought for their right to vote were called strident too. Any woman who speaks up can be called strident or shrill. It’s cop-out name calling. I want to say, “Can’t you do better than that? It’s so last century.” Thanks Ophelia for agreeing to let me interview you today and for being a powerful voice of reason in the world. It was a pleasure talking to you.

If you want to know more about the role that religion and culture play in the oppression of women, and why many Western liberals, leftists and feminists have remained largely silent on the subject, I highly recommend Does God Hate Women?

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