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Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Too much kool-aid



See, here's the sad part: She's swallowed whole all the familiar apologetics and is spouting them back without even realizing it. Telling us how spiritual women are and how men will get an upgrade once the Messiah's arrived - does she realize she's fallen for the oldest scam in the book? As the Ramban explains in "Disputation":  "In our country, they say that he who wishes to tell a lie has his witnesses live far away," meaning that a fine way to prove a point is to bring evidence that's impossible to falsify. Ramban was speaking about the claims of Christianity, but the same can be said about the claims of Jewish anti-feminists. Just as its impossible to prove that Jesus defeated death and took the keys of hell from Satan, it can't be proven that being female offers any spiritual advantages. What can be proven, however, is that Jewish woman are kept at a disadvantage, disadvantages Jewish women are asked to accept this in exchange for invisible benefits they can neither see nor touch.

Aside: At the end, the woman on the film suggests that Jewish women who are dissatisfied with their back of the bus status secretly wish to be men. There's some truth to that, of course. Jewish women wish to be men in the same way that Jim Crow blacks wished to be white, meaning they want the same freedoms and opportunities that are available to men. Though Judaism has made much progress in this regard, the RW and Ultra circles still run like MadMen. Telling women they're more spiritual, pat pat, run along, is just a way to protect the status quo.

Update 2/5: As noted on the comment thread, this video is a piece of performance art by Maya Escobar. Maya is not a kool-aid drunk anti-feminist, but her portrayal of one is nearly perfect: She looks and sounds like every NCSY lady I've ever known. The arguments she presents are precisely the arguments given by Orthodox anti-feminists. For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRUTMADR5gY (thanks to RBC for the link) My post was a criticism of these arguments, which aren't really arguments at all, but apologetics. Though it's true that my criticism was inspired by a reenactment, I don't see how that makes the criticism any less legitimate.

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