I remember an old college-fellowship song we used to sing that went, "I am the church. You are the church. We are the church together. All who follow Jesus all around the world, we are the church together." I think if you make this secular and geographically confined, you might get to society. (I wonder if this song was based on that one about a walrus.)
Now, there are subsets of this that form their own societies-within-a-society. High society. Collegiate society. Others that aren't coming to mind. You can also look at certain ethnic or racial groupings as being societies in themselves -- made up of people sharing certain traits, associating with others within that society differently than others not in that society. I don't mean in a way that's exclusionary, but just that (say) Puerto Ricans might do things together in a Puerto Ricany way. Say a party or a Quinceañera.
Seen this way a person can be in more than one society --- a kind of intersectionality.
Now thinking of society, it's bad for the church to be a society, because a society is by its very nature exclusionary, inward-looking, or at least has a discernible boundary. And the church wants its boundary to be porous, if it is going to grow.
Just kind of thinking out loud here. If anybody pushes me too hard, I'll say I was just batting around some ideas. This is not set in stone in my mind. As Belle of the Ranch says, "It's just a thought."
Piffle, dude. Don't be so dismissive of your ideas, that all makes a lot of sense to me.
Or maybe most of my thoughts come off that way too, but...yeah. I'm also very aware of social intersectionality. We identify ourselves by collective identities and these are all, to greater or lesser extents, porous and interactive.
To your concern, I think of two lessons from seminar (to avoid rambling, which I'm tempted to do.)
In the OT, if you read it through according to some scholars, you can actually see the ancient Israelites shift back and forth between inclusion and exclusion. I think the theory was that when they were small and needed people, they were often very happy, almost a little too happy to allow other people to "marry" in a la "hey! that's not my wife, that's my sister, you can have her!"
But later on, as cultures developed and got more competitive, there was a dramatic shift to "No, you will not go anywhere near those heathen women because they will corrupt you and turn you away from our precious cultural norms."
And all of this was, so the theory went, driven by a need for organizational survival. People are making up the rules as they go to do what is best for the ongoing existence of the institution. I think something similar might be going on with immigration in the US. People are scared of being culturally enveloped (shout out to Sid Meier's Civ IV!) but they also really need a critical mass of bodies to continue their culture's existence. This is a big political question
Relating to that, in evangelism, Dr Teasdale compared churches to families. And he observed that some churches have very porous boundaries and some churches have very fixed boundaries. And the analogy he made was that, when you visit for the big holidays, it's always the stricter, more exacting family that tends to get more visitation, and it's the culture that demands more of a person that gets remembered. If you don't expect people to present something, if you don't make yourselves peculiar in a certain sense [credit to Shane Claiborne with that usage of the word], then how are you different than the swirling chaos of general society? Why should someone hold on to you instead of any other social organization, or facebook?
The question of how porous to be, how to strike the balance between inward and outward, this a very important one. It probably deserves its own thread.
Funny, this also relates to the fact that I have intentionally decided to turn down my interaction with facebook a lot because I think Zuck is...zucking the place up too much and I don't think it's healthy, so I think I'll be coming back here more in addition to using bluesky for my social connection fix.
As I say in other places, it all runs together. Eventually. Cool stuff!
@Bullfrog Interesting idea about society demanding you "present something." What exactly do they mean? Are the Korean women in question failing to "present something" and thus becoming peculiar?
@Bullfrog I'm not posting as host here and I see the scriptural context you are using but because it was buried in a quote it took me a while to find that and where the word had come from but 'peculiar' is really not, as I see it, a helpful word to introduce in this context.
In common parlance it's a slur and it can look sexist when men suddenly start talking about women being 'peculiar' so could I ask if there might be another way of expressing this which avoids the word?
Also what do South Korean women themselves say?
Discussion of women by men with regard to what academic men say kind of feels like an opposite of the 'Bechdel Test' to me - and we've seen this dynamic on other threads (not mentioning the name of the prominent male academic discussed, lest I summon a derail)
So this is personal plea as a female shipmate, could we make a point of avoiding this kind of dynamic on this thread as it is about women not male academics or writers or theologians?
Shipmates: Since many of us are not female and all or almost all of us are not South Korean, this discussion will be hard to have thoughtfully. Would sources help? Here are a few I liked and why I liked them.
In case sources are helpful, I like this BBC article because of the way it portrays why women are right to be afraid prejudice as well as including many women's voices. It's a good piece of context for anyone who wants a clear introduction to the topic.
I would say this article from The Conversation is better though. Besides being written by a South Korean woman, I appreciated all the relevant cultural issues Min Joo Lee references here. She gives me enough info to do my own research if I want.
I’ve just read this article on the BBC about how the male gaming community in South Korea attacks feminists and how little women are protected https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo
If women are afraid to be feminists then it is going to be hard fighting the misogyny entrenched in society. Is it any wonder, then, that women are asserting themselves in one area of their lives they can control and rejecting marriage.
A young colleague of mine was telling me today about a (female) school friend who is dating a South Korean man, and currently they are both working in South Korea. The boyfriend will not let her meet his parents because he says they will then immediately start planning a wedding. If he is right, then good on him.
@Bullfrog Interesting idea about society demanding you "present something." What exactly do they mean? Are the Korean women in question failing to "present something" and thus becoming peculiar?
It has been years since I read that book, I think that Shane's thought was that Christians should be held to be not of the world in a sense. That if you follow Christ, not the principalities and powers of the world, if you take him at his word to give up everything and follow him, then you'll be different. And that will show. You will be strange to the world, as it were, to avoid the awkward connotations of the word peculiar. That was literally the word Shane Claiborne used, but I see no need to insist upon its particular use.
I cannot really speak to the experience of being a Korean woman, but I suspect that feminism often means presenting one's self - male to female - in a way that does not fall into line with patriarchal assumptions about femininity. For instance, I'm a guy and I'm mostly a stay at home dad. This is strange to patriarchal society. There are probably some cultures where I'd be mocked or ostracized for not following the norm.
On the topic of Korean women, a personal anecdote:
At least when I was in seminary, it was observed there were rather a lot of female Korean Methodist preachers in Chicago. Why was that? That's because there is a progressive Methodist seminary in Evanston, just north of Chicago. This progressive seminary attracts a lot of Korean women who want to pursue a vocation and know full well that they could never get ordained in Korea, so they end up settling in the US to preach. It's an interesting situation, and I think I can still count a few friends among that cadre.
That’s interesting, because I was at McCormick Seminary (Presbyterian) in Chicago at the beginning of the ‘90s. They also had a Korean language programme, but women in that programme were few and far between.
(I had the job of editing the student newspaper and the first time the Koreans gave me a page to stick in, I accidentally stuck it upside down, not knowing any better! After that they always indicated which was the top…)
That’s interesting, because I was at McCormick Seminary (Presbyterian) in Chicago at the beginning of the ‘90s. They also had a Korean language programme, but women in that programme were few and far between.
(I had the job of editing the student newspaper and the first time the Koreans gave me a page to stick in, I accidentally stuck it upside down, not knowing any better! After that they always indicated which was the top…)
Cool! To out my background, I was thinking of Garrett Seminary in the early 2010s. I wasn't keeping count, but Koreans were generally one of the largest non-white populations in the student body.
The Methodist thing is interesting because 87% of Christians in Korea are Presbyterians. I'm glad they could find a place to pursue their choice of vocation.
The Methodist thing is interesting because 87% of Christians in Korea are Presbyterians. I'm glad they could find a place to pursue their choice of vocation.
Yeah, I got the impression Methodism was pretty big there too, but I've not had inclination to do much digging beyond "wow, I guess there are a lot of Methodists in Korea."
And yeah, I got to knew some pretty serious scholars and I'm honored to still be in touch with them via social media.
The results consistently showed no significant relationship between male victimhood ideology and objective economic hardship. In Study 1, variables like education, unemployment, and non-regular employment did not predict male victimhood beliefs. Study 2 similarly found no association between income or precarious employment and such beliefs. In some cases, higher-income men were more likely to endorse victimhood ideology.
On the other hand, perceived status decline was a consistent and strong predictor. In Study 2, men with anxiety over status decline were more likely to adopt victimhood beliefs. Study 3 reinforced this finding, showing that men perceiving downward mobility, comparing their current socioeconomic status unfavorably to their status at age 15, were more likely to endorse male victimhood ideology, especially among middle- and upper-class men who experienced sharper losses in privilege. Study 4 further confirmed that perceived status decline relative to one’s parents strongly correlated with male victimhood beliefs, again most pronounced in men from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.
These patterns were absent in women, who displayed much lower levels of victimhood ideology under similar conditions. The findings consistently demonstrate that male victimhood beliefs are driven by perceived privilege loss rather than objective economic hardship
That's interesting Louise. Like Bullfrog I am a (mostly) stay-at-home Dad, and I echo his thoughts on that matter. But I grew up in a fairly low-status environment, had a sometimes higher-status education and early career, and have I suppose slunk back into the obscurity from which I came. It doesn't much bother me (and I certainly don't 'blame' professional women, though the demands of my wife's career were objectively what brought most of this situation about). My Dad took it much harder, in a way which I think might chime with the Korean study you mention above, but involving 'living through one's children'. Never a good thing, I would suggest, but perhaps tangential to this thread.
I thought of this thread when I came across an article today which isn't specifically on South Korea but on sexism globally and how gender equality turns out to be good for both men and women around the world
It has this fascinating observation on 'benevolent sexism' and 'hostile sexism' and the 'benevolent' sexism actually also being dangerous which could be a thread in itself.
Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is superficially positive but patronising. It includes attitudes that reward traditional women, such as stay-at-home mums, by idealising them, offering them male protection and provision. This sounds innocent, but such beliefs imply women’s weakness.
It also had an interesting mention of women holding sexist views against themselves which is indeed a thing
While men are more sexist than women around the world, women’s beliefs about themselves are also sexist to some extent. Interestingly, as men’s hostile sexism increased, women embraced benevolent sexism more (sometimes outscoring men) – probably attempting to secure the promised protection and provision.
Unfortunately, this benevolent promise appears false. Across our 62 countries, the higher benevolent sexism, the lower was the gender equality, women’s labour participation and the more time women spend on unpaid domestic chores
(I suppose, again tangentially, I could add that from this man's perspective, gender equality is a straightforward good thing. Which is to say, if I were earning as little as I do in an environment where my wife had traditional expectations of being taken care of, I don't suppose we would remain married for very long. I'm not sure how widespread acceptance of this stuff is amongst men and women, even now; one hears about 'unmarriageable' low-earning men and high-earning women still, often enough. Perhaps one can tell it must (despite protestations) bother me a bit, because I have bothered to write a tangential paragraph on it to internet strangers :-) ).
Coercing women into having children should always be anathema, but we should aim to create a society where people generally feel optimistic enough about the future to want children and secure enough to have them. Fertility rates in most developed countries may never again reach what demographers call “replacement level,” in which the average couple has 2.1 children, enough to keep a population stable. But there is a big difference between countries where the fertility rate is falling gradually, as in France, and those where it’s collapsing in a way that threatens society’s future, as in South Korea, whose work force could shrink by 50 percent over the next four decades.
There’s a common factor in countries where birthrates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal. Last year, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birthrates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy. The lowest-fertility countries, Goldin found, modernized so recently and rapidly that social norms around gender equality didn’t have time to catch up. That left women with far more economic opportunity but not much more help from their husbands at home. Between 2009 and 2019, for example, the average woman in Japan spent 3.1 more hours a day on domestic work than men. The average Swedish woman spent 0.8 more hours than men.
In the most unequal countries in Goldin’s analysis, men wanted to have more children than women did. That makes intuitive sense, given that women would have to shoulder most of the burden of child care. “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear,” wrote Goldin.
Many women, it appears, simply don’t want to get stuck with all the domestic drudgery that comes with raising children, and there’s little evidence that state subsidies can make traditional social arrangements more appealing. Hungary spends more than 5 percent of its G.D.P. on its family policies, a greater percentage than America spends on defense. But while the fertility rate rose a bit in the years after the new policy was instituted in 2019 — when the total fertility rate was 1.55 children per woman — it has since sunk to 1.38.
This seems like one of those observations that seem obvious, but it's good someone has actually done a rigorous study on the matter. The observation about Hungary's government spending in support of pro-natalist policies is pretty telling. There doesn't seem to be a level of government compensation that can overcome unequal domestic partnerships in a modernized economy.
And that's something that generally blows my mind a little today. I've heard the conservatives in the USA saying for years that a free market is the best way to run things because people are free to make their own choices, but this kind of "focus on the family" social construction takes a lot of direct public investment.
Ironically, maybe the old school GOPers were right all along, because it seems like even government investment isn't enough to tilt the scale that much.
I saw a recent report that our current president was considering literally paying women $5K to have a child, and based on my experience as a three-time dad, that won't even cover the cost of a standard no-problems hospital delivery, sometimes even after insurance.
Conservatives always say government is incompetent. When elected, they seem to strive to prove this.
Why should women make sacrifices for humanity as a whole? Why is that your suggestion? Why isn't it that these cultures make marriage and child-rearing attractive to women?
This is exactly the question right here. I've thought through many things that I've experienced as a parent of one and my general observation was this: when I got married my workload doubled, and when I had a baby it quadrupled.
There are a lot of ways I can think of to make fulltime childrearing more attractive to women than simply relying on the goodness of their life partner and the sheer vagary of the employment market in upholding that partner's ability and willingness to provide.
It's costly and time consuming to raise well educated, well adjusted, ethical and capable human beings. If we want things to go better for us as a society, we have to do better for those who choose this as their career because once a baby is in the picture, that IS the career, no matter what one does for wages.
It's also devastating to your sense of identity. You are no longer an intelligent, highly educated adult. You are merely the mother of a child and most people treat you as if you are just as incapable of thinking for yourself. You have all the responsibility of looking after it, with as much contradictory and mutually exclusive advice from your acquaintance as you can bear to listen to, but if anything goes wrong it will be your fault. Whatever you do (or fail to do), someone will be happy to tell you you should have done something different.
And you are stuck with being somebody's mother for the rest of your life. I don't blame young women for not wanting to buy into that.
You are no longer an intelligent, highly educated adult.
I noticed a huge difference between ante-natal appointments with my first, when I was going be-suited straight from work Could you provide us with a mid-steam urine sample please, Mrs Surname? and my second, when I was turning up in the sort of clothes suitable for parenting a toddler Could you do a wee-wee in this pot, First Name?
Having said that, people out and about are far better disposed to mothers than lawyers. Less respect, but more smiles.
Comments
Piffle, dude. Don't be so dismissive of your ideas, that all makes a lot of sense to me.
Or maybe most of my thoughts come off that way too, but...yeah. I'm also very aware of social intersectionality. We identify ourselves by collective identities and these are all, to greater or lesser extents, porous and interactive.
To your concern, I think of two lessons from seminar (to avoid rambling, which I'm tempted to do.)
Funny, this also relates to the fact that I have intentionally decided to turn down my interaction with facebook a lot because I think Zuck is...zucking the place up too much and I don't think it's healthy, so I think I'll be coming back here more in addition to using bluesky for my social connection fix.
As I say in other places, it all runs together. Eventually. Cool stuff!
We appear again, to have some version of failing to notice men discussing women in a othering manner. Please think about the import of your posting.
Doublethink, Temporary Hosting
In common parlance it's a slur and it can look sexist when men suddenly start talking about women being 'peculiar' so could I ask if there might be another way of expressing this which avoids the word?
Also what do South Korean women themselves say?
Discussion of women by men with regard to what academic men say kind of feels like an opposite of the 'Bechdel Test' to me - and we've seen this dynamic on other threads (not mentioning the name of the prominent male academic discussed, lest I summon a derail)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
So this is personal plea as a female shipmate, could we make a point of avoiding this kind of dynamic on this thread as it is about women not male academics or writers or theologians?
Thanks.
In case sources are helpful, I like this BBC article because of the way it portrays why women are right to be afraid prejudice as well as including many women's voices. It's a good piece of context for anyone who wants a clear introduction to the topic.
I would say this article from The Conversation is better though. Besides being written by a South Korean woman, I appreciated all the relevant cultural issues Min Joo Lee references here. She gives me enough info to do my own research if I want.
If women are afraid to be feminists then it is going to be hard fighting the misogyny entrenched in society. Is it any wonder, then, that women are asserting themselves in one area of their lives they can control and rejecting marriage.
It has been years since I read that book, I think that Shane's thought was that Christians should be held to be not of the world in a sense. That if you follow Christ, not the principalities and powers of the world, if you take him at his word to give up everything and follow him, then you'll be different. And that will show. You will be strange to the world, as it were, to avoid the awkward connotations of the word peculiar. That was literally the word Shane Claiborne used, but I see no need to insist upon its particular use.
I cannot really speak to the experience of being a Korean woman, but I suspect that feminism often means presenting one's self - male to female - in a way that does not fall into line with patriarchal assumptions about femininity. For instance, I'm a guy and I'm mostly a stay at home dad. This is strange to patriarchal society. There are probably some cultures where I'd be mocked or ostracized for not following the norm.
At least when I was in seminary, it was observed there were rather a lot of female Korean Methodist preachers in Chicago. Why was that? That's because there is a progressive Methodist seminary in Evanston, just north of Chicago. This progressive seminary attracts a lot of Korean women who want to pursue a vocation and know full well that they could never get ordained in Korea, so they end up settling in the US to preach. It's an interesting situation, and I think I can still count a few friends among that cadre.
(I had the job of editing the student newspaper and the first time the Koreans gave me a page to stick in, I accidentally stuck it upside down, not knowing any better! After that they always indicated which was the top…)
Cool! To out my background, I was thinking of Garrett Seminary in the early 2010s. I wasn't keeping count, but Koreans were generally one of the largest non-white populations in the student body.
This might be specifically a Methodist thing.
Yeah, I got the impression Methodism was pretty big there too, but I've not had inclination to do much digging beyond "wow, I guess there are a lot of Methodists in Korea."
And yeah, I got to knew some pretty serious scholars and I'm honored to still be in touch with them via social media.
'Male victimhood ideology driven by perceived status loss, not economic hardship, among Korean men'
https://www.psypost.org/male-victimhood-ideology-driven-by-perceived-status-loss-not-economic-hardship-among-korean-men/#google_vignette
(Bold mine)
I thought of this thread when I came across an article today which isn't specifically on South Korea but on sexism globally and how gender equality turns out to be good for both men and women around the world
https://theconversation.com/sexism-linked-to-social-ills-for-men-and-women-finds-largest-cross-cultural-study-of-its-kind-247183
It has this fascinating observation on 'benevolent sexism' and 'hostile sexism' and the 'benevolent' sexism actually also being dangerous which could be a thread in itself.
It also had an interesting mention of women holding sexist views against themselves which is indeed a thing
This seems like one of those observations that seem obvious, but it's good someone has actually done a rigorous study on the matter. The observation about Hungary's government spending in support of pro-natalist policies is pretty telling. There doesn't seem to be a level of government compensation that can overcome unequal domestic partnerships in a modernized economy.
Ironically, maybe the old school GOPers were right all along, because it seems like even government investment isn't enough to tilt the scale that much.
I saw a recent report that our current president was considering literally paying women $5K to have a child, and based on my experience as a three-time dad, that won't even cover the cost of a standard no-problems hospital delivery, sometimes even after insurance.
Conservatives always say government is incompetent. When elected, they seem to strive to prove this.
This is exactly the question right here. I've thought through many things that I've experienced as a parent of one and my general observation was this: when I got married my workload doubled, and when I had a baby it quadrupled.
There are a lot of ways I can think of to make fulltime childrearing more attractive to women than simply relying on the goodness of their life partner and the sheer vagary of the employment market in upholding that partner's ability and willingness to provide.
It's costly and time consuming to raise well educated, well adjusted, ethical and capable human beings. If we want things to go better for us as a society, we have to do better for those who choose this as their career because once a baby is in the picture, that IS the career, no matter what one does for wages.
AFF
And you are stuck with being somebody's mother for the rest of your life. I don't blame young women for not wanting to buy into that.
I noticed a huge difference between ante-natal appointments with my first, when I was going be-suited straight from work Could you provide us with a mid-steam urine sample please, Mrs Surname? and my second, when I was turning up in the sort of clothes suitable for parenting a toddler Could you do a wee-wee in this pot, First Name?
Having said that, people out and about are far better disposed to mothers than lawyers. Less respect, but more smiles.