{"id":24205,"date":"2019-07-11T12:51:48","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T19:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24205"},"modified":"2020-07-27T09:47:59","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T16:47:59","slug":"evangelical-pigs-in-spaaace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=24205","title":{"rendered":"Evangelical Pigs … in Spaaace!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"il_794xN.341775485\"<\/a>The\u00a0Mississippi politician<\/a>\u00a0we\u00a0learned about yesterday, the one\u00a0who won’t\u00a0allow a woman reporter onto his campaign bus unless she brings along a male chaperone, comes from\u00a0the same strain of evangelism as former Indiana Governor Mike Pence<\/a>, who won’t allow himself to be alone in\u00a0a room with any woman not his wife.<\/p>\n

The notion that women exist to seduce and ensnare men crosses cultures and religions, but is especially strong in American Protestant evangelism. Let me tell you about a former squadron mate of mine, a graduate of the US Air Force Academy in the days when Protestant evangelism was beginning to get a foothold there (today it’s the Academy’s official religion<\/a>). One day, sitting in the ready room of the alert shack, I opened a magazine to a full page ad featuring a woman in a bikini. The young lieutenant walked into the room, saw what I was looking at, and almost literally tore his eyes away\u2014he shuddered, then quickly slapped himself on the cheek while rolling his eyes up and whipping his head to the side, for all the world like a Looney Tunes cartoon character. My god, I thought, what if I’d been looking at a Playboy centerfold or watching porn on the ready room TV?<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, a week later another alert crew put “Debbie Does Dallas” in the Betamax only to discover our holy roller had recorded PG-rated movies over every porn cassette in the aircrew library. None of us who were there then will ever forget that act of Taliban-like cultural desecration, but what sticks in my memory is the way he shuddered while slapping his own face as he averted his gaze from the woman in my magazine. “This kid is fucked up,” I thought then.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0fucked up is what these other men are, these creepy Christian Sharia Law dudes who think of women as satanic seductresses.\u00a0Didn’t they grow up with sisters? Didn’t they\u00a0go to school with girls and chase after them when they\u00a0grew into\u00a0horny teenagers, like the rest of us? Sure they did.\u00a0So what happened? How\u00a0did those mega-church pastors get their hooks in them and\u00a0teach them to fear women?<\/p>\n

I’ve always\u00a0loved movies and TV shows like “Starship Troopers” and “The Expanse,”\u00a0which depict futures where men and women\u00a0have become truly equal in every field, no assumptions made and no questions asked. And believe me, that’s the future I want, the one I grew up believing it and still dream is possible. And though things do seem to be getting better for women\u00a0… working women in Western societies, that is, who still have to do the two steps backward for every three steps forward dance … there’s such a goddamned long way to go, and men like Mike Pence and this asshole in Mississippi keep grabbing the headlines and reminding\u00a0us that\u00a0the next two-steps-backward regression\u00a0could see us living in the Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I’ve written more than a few posts about women in the military, specifically rated woman officers in the US Air Force. Academy-graduate male evangelicals have moved into\u00a0all levels of Air Force leadership, looking out for and promoting one another. Yes, some women are moving up into leadership roles, but here’s my question: how\u00a0much resistance do these women face\u00a0from senior male officers\u00a0whose first thought\u00a0about\u00a0them\u00a0is that they’re out to\u00a0lure them into some kind of sexual trap?<\/p>\n

Another question: what do evangelical women believe? Mike Pence’s wife. What’s-her-face in Mississippi. They go to the same mega-churches and listen to the same pastors. Do they buy into this women-as-agents-of-temptation\u00a0shit being preached to the men? What about Academy-graduate\u00a0female Air Force officers? Do they plan their career-advancement strategies around the\u00a0fact that male superiors who share their faith don’t trust them and will never think of them as equals?<\/p>\n

I guess I ought\u00a0to ask my senator, Martha McSally<\/a>, because she’s one of them (and also an example of a successful woman Air Force officer and pilot). Maybe she can explain these mysteries to me.<\/p>\n

p.s. The inset graphic at the top of the post is a Soviet poster honoring Valentina\u00a0Tereshkova, who in 1963 became the first woman to travel in space. I thought of her just now when writing about the future worlds depicted in Starship Troopers and The Expanse. I know it’s kind of a leap for a post about creepy evangelical men who hate women, but it’s also where the title of the post comes from, and that’s how my mind is working this morning.<\/span><\/p>\n

p.p.s. If anyone needs an explanation of my reference to former Indiana Governor Mike Pence, it’s for the same reason I never use the title “president” with regard to the current occupant of the White House: neither man was elected.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always\u00a0loved movies and TV shows like “Starship Troopers” and “The Expanse,”\u00a0which depict futures where men and women\u00a0have become truly equal in every field, no assumptions made and no questions asked. And believe me, that’s the future I want, the one I grew up believing it and still dream is possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,250,10,3,14,2761],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-flying","category-military","category-yell-clouds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24205"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26816,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24205\/revisions\/26816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}