Emerging Women

By Julie Clawson

The Time Magazine Newsfeed recently posted an article on a new defense women have against rape – a female condom with teeth, literally. From the article –

As a young physician on call one night 40 years ago in South Africa, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers tended to an emaciated rape victim. As she counseled the victim, she always remembered one important thing she said: “If only I had teeth down there.”

Thus the development and advent of the Rape-aXe female condom, designed not so much as birth control or for STD protection, but more so as a defense against rape, particularly in South Africa, a nation where 1 in 4 men say they have committed the crime.

Without really describing how the Rape-aXe actually works, we can tell you how it is designed: the device is a latex sheath with barbed spines on the inside. It is inserted into a woman’s vagina much like a tampon. When an assailant attacks a would-be victim, seconds later he finds himself writhing in unknowable pain and must have the device surgically removed. About 30,000 of the devices were distributed for free during the World Cup in several cities and will sell for about $2 afterward.

But the device is not without its critics, with some saying it will cause rapists to become more violent, and others saying it could be misued by vindictive female lovers seeking retribution. But on her website, Ehlers has answers to all those questions and more.

Regarding men becoming angry upon getting trapped: Rape-aXe will buy you time to get away, ( I know this from a patient that caught himself in his zipper. Rape-aXe will have the same effect just worse.)…

My first thought was that this is a modern chastity belt. But instead of a rusty spiked diaper locked onto a woman by her father to safeguard her virginity, a woman can choose this option to protect herself. But the reason it’s needed remain the same – men feel like they can control women physically and sexually. In the past it was the fathers prizing their daughter’s virginity for the economic and political advances it could get them. Now it’s men asserting their strength and power over women through violence and rape. The times and methods have changed but the message that women are objects to be ruled and controlled by men is still alive and well in our world. But now women can do something to fight back against their attackers, branding them as rapists in the process.

As long as women are not seen as equals of men, men will continue to oppress and abuse us in these ways. I for one would prefer the world to change and equality achieved instead of something like this being necessary. But at the same time, men still treat women as objects and rape is all too common in our world. Giving women means to protect ourselves is a sad but necessary safeguard in a man’s world.

Julie Clawson is a mother, a former pastor, and a writer. She moderates the Emerging Women blog and has a personal blog at julieclawson.com. She is the author of Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of Our Daily Choices.

by Jessica Glaser

I’ve slowly begun to work my way through books written about the Emergent movement or reflecting theology, orthodoxy, and practices that many Emergent groups have come to embrace. Nearly all of them are written by men, which says something much larger than I’d like to discuss here. Nearly all of them gingerly step around the issues of abortion and “promiscuity” (whatever that means), seeing them as modern societal problems. I find this problematic, in that abortion and “promiscuity” are usually two words that are thrown about when seeking to impose restrictions on the lives and bodies of women (the other being “family values” in the unholy antifeminist trinity). I leave bigger discussions of these implications for future essays and debates, but when I hear these, I am forced to notice a deafening silence around much more pervasive issues affecting an enormous number of women in the United States and on the planet at large: sexual violence and violence against women.

Around 1 in 5 women in the United States has been raped or sexually assaulted. Only 37% of rapes are ever reported, according to the FBI, let alone prosecuted. Approximately three women are murdered each day. Nearly 5 million acts of domestic violence occur every year. These assaults and murders are usually performed by an intimate partner or someone the victims knows. Furthermore, somewhere around 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States every year.

On a global scale, approximately one in three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted during her lifetime.

I hope these statistics are enough to convince you that there is a major problem here. Numerous advocacy groups working since the beginning of the Second Wave Feminist movement have been able to help millions of survivors in their fight to be taken seriously and their struggle to find safety. Over 40 years, a societal shift has occurred (although not strongly enough) wherein it is no longer acceptable to hit or rape your wife, or any other woman, and that it is not the woman’s fault if such violence is perpetrated upon her. And yet, violence and rape of women are still happening on a massive scale.

Every election cycle, I hear numerous condemnations coming from Christian communities on the subjects of abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and even occasionally pornography (without the requisite acknowledgment of the work of feminists such as Andrea Dworkin or Catherine MacKinnon). But I never, ever hear condemnations of domestic violence or rape, which hurts families on a grander scale than most (if any) of the issues listed above.

I don’t understand this silence. Is it because American Christians think that people know that they’re automatically against this kind of violence, and thus don’t need to address it? Is it because there is still a society wide (not just Christian) implied pervasive need to blame the victims and survivors of such violence, and residual from the time when women were chattel, less than human according to legal status and protections? Is it because the Christian community at large still values women less than it does men because of the strong patriarchal history and context of the church and its orthodoxy? I’d argue that it’s probably the intersection of all three of these reasons, and others I haven’t mentioned or am not aware of. And based on the way Jesus treated women and his teachings, I’m sure that the fact that this violence goes unmentioned or ignored, or is tacitly sanctioned by the Christian community, is utterly unacceptable.

So let’s have it, churches, theologians, evangelicals, mainliners. Let’s hear what you’re going to do about the abuse of 50% of your members, who you may not see as equals, but who have been equals in God since the beginning, with society just now learning to catch up. This violence inscribed on our bodies, minds, and souls needs to stop, and you need to be part of the solution.

Statistics taken from http://www.feminist.com/antiviolence/facts.html and http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html, which in turn have been taken from the United Nations, the CIA, the FBI, and the US Department of Justice, among others.

Jessica Glaser is a recent graduate of the University of Denver, a former activist with the V-Day Campaign, a mainline United Methodist, an Emergent Lutheran, and an unapologetic feminist.