Note on feminism, Christianity, and protesting gender norms

America is Protestant, specifically Calvinist. this means: Anyone who is successful can count on being admired, and no amount or kind of suffering will go unpunished.

It follows that around other people one must have a "positive attitude." As if all of life were a job interview, and one can only say hopeful and optimistic things. From which it follows in turn that nothing can be criticized. Except individual persons. And then only from the point of view of the state, the abstract universal standpoint that everyone references and speaks for, and in relationship to which every individual person can very likely always be somehow found lacking. The state or the society is of course defined as not lacking.

It also explains why in America so many men, not just women, are raped. This happens in prisons, were men punish other men for being perceived as weak. The dominant morality is one of success and failure, and thus power vs. weakness.

Feminism will not change this as long as it is about representation, inclusion, and power. If they envision a different kind of society, those who call themselves feminist must tell us what it will be like or on what principles it would be based. We can took at those descriptions and ask if that's what we want and if so how to get there.

Perhaps it would be a religion of gentleness, kindness, care for the Other. But this already exists, at least as an idea. The name of that religion is Christianity. Particularly in its Catholic forms, it was quite feminizing in certain ways.

Though just as American ideas of liberty coexisted with slavery, and doubtless owed something to it, so too did the Christian West combine a bloody history of wars almost with every generation on the one hand with a religion of peace and love on the other.

Maybe this tells us that social problems are not solved just by coming up with new ideas, because every social order does articulate in some ways what it excludes it, what escapes it, and what it wants to be but is not.