Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

Dale Courtney, on his Right Mind-Us. blog, on the tragic death of a young Muslim woman killed by her father for being “too westernized”:

“Funny how you never hear about honor killing of the sons. It’s just the daughters.

I’m sure there’s an appropriate metaphor in that fact…” (Right-Mind.us 11/4/09)

Try this one, Dale. It may not be a metaphor, but it’s illustrative nonetheless:

One man, for reasons having to do only with his sex and the sex of those before him, amasses a fortune in goods and property and builds up a large household, where he rules over not just the women and children, but the men considered “below” him as well. He and countless thousands of men before him, for centuries, have used religion to justify his reign, even when less than benign, and are enabled by an understanding that this is not just how it always has been, but how it must be — so that society will remain stable, God will be honored, and the family’s position secured. In a community ruled by like-males, the affirmation of male privilege is not only necessary, but inevitable.

The women, of course, have no power outside of a narrowly-defined domestic sphere, and historically, and in many cultures now, have been kept uneducated, unexposed to the world outside the ruling male’s sphere of influence, and are presumed to be ontologically inferior in intellectual capacity. They are less considered “stupid” than they are dangerous — able to entice, by virtue of being women, any man in the household or in the community, no matter how upright and moral. The man’s sexual lust is satisfied by his wife or wives, whose sexuality is shrouded in mystery and confusion — she both attracts and repels him, and the resulting confusion causes him not to examine himself, but to blame her, imbuing her sexuality and being with both intrigue and fear.

The more religious of these men may believe that they are behaving in a sexually appropriate manner, as defined by either religious teaching or peer affirmation, and presume that sexual purity in their women is both her highest attainment and his most profound right. This demonstrates that he is a properly controlling monarch over of his household realm, regardless of his own behavior and regardless of the near-impossible dichotomous demands made on his wife. She must satisfy his robust sexual appetite without appearing to have encouraged it, and she must, at the same time, encourage it without appearing to have in mind her own sexual needs. Above all, this “good wife” is publicly viewed as a paragon of private virtue, whose purity says less about her own morality than it does about her man’s control of her.

Her daughter, then, is presumed to be an innocent. Not just virginal, but completely uninitiated into the world of the “feminine mysteries” of birth, menstruation, and caretaking of both young and old, all of the time learning a code of sexual contact that teaches her nothing about her body other than the fact of its eventual use by the man or men her father approves. Her father’s duty is to preserve her chastity at all costs — unless he avails himself of her body, asserting, in his mind, his right to do with his property as he sees fit. And if that exercise of property rights then disgusts him, his now-ruined daughter can be made to bear yet more, the shame and the blame accommodating itself in the contours of her broken body and shattered psyche.

The males’ affirmation of the necessity of satisfied male lust — the belief that when women provoke lust (just because of their female-ness), they must satisfy its longing — assures that the man has steady access to his wife. She who incites his lust must satisfy it; no man in proper control of his household can accept his wife’s refusal, and no woman under control of the ruling male can successfully offer it. Women, then, become caretakers not just of men, but of their sexual appetites as well, culpable both for fanning lust into flame and for the manner in which they extinguish it.

The sons they bear, then, come to see their own sexual need as uncontrollable — ignited as it is by women — and dangerous if not satisfied. Young men may be taught that sexual activity before marriage is wrong, but they see that men are always initiators and women always instigators whose subjection is assured by their availability to him. Moral constraints may cause the man to fear or dread his sexual impulses, controlling them as well as he can, but if he fails — if he sins according to doctrine or fails according to communal mores — his moral failure is mitigated by confirmation that he is demonstrably “all male.”

His punishment, if any, will be private so as not to shame his father. A woman who sins sexually, however, will be publicly shamed, beaten, or even killed — actions that, in confirming her guilt, absolve her father by separating her from him. A young woman who is presumed to be unchaste, whether she actually is or not, is viewed as a reflection of the ruling man’s control over his household. His status is restored when the offending woman is separated from him by death or desertion; his rehabilitation is assured by his swift, deliberate, punishment from his daughter or wife, the violence of which confirms his separation from her.

In a male-supreme world, a man’s failure to properly control “his women” can only be atoned for if the males around him see a deliberate, even violent, punishment, one whose fury is commensurate with the degree of humiliation or scorn with which he’s viewed by his peers. But who is punished? The one who brought shame to her father, the one who bears in her body the result of even the vaguest hint of male dishonor.
No woman in his household ever shames only herself by sinning; she shames him, and the urgency with which his control over his household must be demonstrated is equal to the urgency of the male lust that doomed the young woman in the first place.

That, Dale, is why you don’t see men being the target of “honor killings.” Male honor in some countries and religions is of the utmost importance, but no son can ever shame his father as much as a wife or daughter presumed sexually wayward. The young man who sins sexually may cause embarrassment to his upright father. He may be rebuked for his sin and rewarded for his prowess — but the preservation of his genital purity, separating his very soul and psyche from him in a bizarre focus on sex behaviors and organs, is never the provocation for or subject of his father’s violent wrath. An intact hymen is a badge of honor to the father of the girl examined, and a torn one — or eye makeup, tight jeans, or an iPod — is a threat to the father’s status. This most private of circumstances can only be addressed publicly, swiftly, and violently — and only against the possessors of hymens, the inciters of lust, and the vessels of male satisfaction.

It’s called “patriarchy,” and the soft form Kirk men model in their families is simply a gentler, more reasonable, version of the horror that elsewhere is visited upon women “owned” and “protected” by patriarchs all over the world. It’s a result of the Fall, it’s continuation is an affront to the work of the One whose death and resurrection began to reverse its effects, and every day it takes the life of a woman made in the image of a just and holy God.

The “honor killing” of this young woman by her father, because she seemed “too westernized,” is an outgrowth not of Islam, but of patriarchy. And that’s why I, and millions of other Bible-revering Christians, hate it.