A Wide Stance Prophet?

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has linked to this verse (16:49) from the book of the prophet Ezekiel:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

The link is to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which apparently trades in pointing out the icky parts of Holy Writ, a useful service to be sure. I presume Avedon's point was to follow the popular progay-Christian argument that Sodom and Gomorrah were nuked for the sin of inhospitality, not for men doing the nasty with each other. Like most progay-Christian arguments, it's an oversimplification, especially if you do what everyone always tells you and read for context.

Despite that stuff about neglecting the poor and needy, most of this part of Ezekiel is concerned with other sins. Personifying Jerusalem as an exposed infant whom Yahweh rescued and raised to nubile womanhood, whereupon he "spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine" (16:8). But alas, unlike Sodom, Jerusalem turned out to be all too hospitable. Yahweh complains through his prophet that Jerusalem is a whore whore whore whore whore:

But thou didst trust thine own beauty and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by; his it was.

And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.

Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and my silver, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them. ...

Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

Thou hast also committed fornications with the Egyptians thy neighbors, great of flesh; and hast increased thy whoredoms, to provoke me to anger [16:15-17, 25-26].

I've left this in the 17th-century English of the King James Version, because otherwise it might be too NSFW; as it is, you can just explain that you're reading Scripture for your spiritual benefit. Yeah, that's it.

I especially like that bit about the Egyptians being "great of flesh," which means what you think it means, because it ties in to a later verse, 23:12, which is one of my favorites in the entire Bible:

For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Yahweh appears to be somewhat obsessed with the, um, endowment of the Egyptians (conceived, of course, as allegorical rivals for the favors of Jerusalem). As you can see, the theme of Jerusalem's whoredom runs for chapter after chapter in Ezekiel. Whatever the "sin of Sodom" might have been, inhospitality seems to have been only a passing concern for Yahweh and his prophet. Big Egyptian donkey phalli and buckets of semen being enjoyed (in the divine mind, anyway) by the nubile Jerusalem were clearly much more important.

And yes, I know, this is an allegory, not meant to be taken literally. The point is that the allegory is built on imagery that is best described as pornographic. I'm not shocked by it, but I should think that the people who regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God would be appalled by it if they dusted off the archaic verbiage of the Authorized Version and considered what it was saying. And the Skeptic's Annotated Bible follows a venerable tradition of collecting the icky bits so that Enlightenment rationalists can be appalled by the brutal, obscene language of so-called Holy Scripture -- over and over again as needed. (I should track down the lovely story reported by Emma Donoghue in Passions Between Women [HarperCollins, 1995], of the headmistress of a respectable girls' school around 1800. She assured concerned parents that their daughters would not be reading improper parts of the classics, because she had carefully marked those passages, so that the girls would know which parts not to read. I'm sure it worked.)

All this reminds me of a passage from a Charles Bukowski story I saw quoted in a review somewhere in the 1970s. A man and a woman are arguing about their relationship. (I quote from memory.)

"You're a whore, you're a whore, you're nothing but a goddamned whore."

"Sure I'm a whore, or I wouldn't be living with you!"

"Hm, I never thought of it like that."

Maybe Jerusalem should have sassed Yahweh back in just those terms.

A Wide Stance Prophet?

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has linked to this verse (16:49) from the book of the prophet Ezekiel:

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

The link is to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which apparently trades in pointing out the icky parts of Holy Writ, a useful service to be sure. I presume Avedon's point was to follow the popular progay-Christian argument that Sodom and Gomorrah were nuked for the sin of inhospitality, not for men doing the nasty with each other. Like most progay-Christian arguments, it's an oversimplification, especially if you do what everyone always tells you and read for context.

Despite that stuff about neglecting the poor and needy, most of this part of Ezekiel is concerned with other sins. Personifying Jerusalem as an exposed infant whom Yahweh rescued and raised to nubile womanhood, whereupon he "spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine" (16:8). But alas, unlike Sodom, Jerusalem turned out to be all too hospitable. Yahweh complains through his prophet that Jerusalem is a whore whore whore whore whore:

But thou didst trust thine own beauty and playedst the harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on every one that passed by; his it was.

And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon: the like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.

Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and my silver, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them. ...

Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

Thou hast also committed fornications with the Egyptians thy neighbors, great of flesh; and hast increased thy whoredoms, to provoke me to anger [16:15-17, 25-26].

I've left this in the 17th-century English of the King James Version, because otherwise it might be too NSFW; as it is, you can just explain that you're reading Scripture for your spiritual benefit. Yeah, that's it.

I especially like that bit about the Egyptians being "great of flesh," which means what you think it means, because it ties in to a later verse, 23:12, which is one of my favorites in the entire Bible:

For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Yahweh appears to be somewhat obsessed with the, um, endowment of the Egyptians (conceived, of course, as allegorical rivals for the favors of Jerusalem). As you can see, the theme of Jerusalem's whoredom runs for chapter after chapter in Ezekiel. Whatever the "sin of Sodom" might have been, inhospitality seems to have been only a passing concern for Yahweh and his prophet. Big Egyptian donkey phalli and buckets of semen being enjoyed (in the divine mind, anyway) by the nubile Jerusalem were clearly much more important.

And yes, I know, this is an allegory, not meant to be taken literally. The point is that the allegory is built on imagery that is best described as pornographic. I'm not shocked by it, but I should think that the people who regard the Bible as the inerrant word of God would be appalled by it if they dusted off the archaic verbiage of the Authorized Version and considered what it was saying. And the Skeptic's Annotated Bible follows a venerable tradition of collecting the icky bits so that Enlightenment rationalists can be appalled by the brutal, obscene language of so-called Holy Scripture -- over and over again as needed. (I should track down the lovely story reported by Emma Donoghue in Passions Between Women [HarperCollins, 1995], of the headmistress of a respectable girls' school around 1800. She assured concerned parents that their daughters would not be reading improper parts of the classics, because she had carefully marked those passages, so that the girls would know which parts not to read. I'm sure it worked.)

All this reminds me of a passage from a Charles Bukowski story I saw quoted in a review somewhere in the 1970s. A man and a woman are arguing about their relationship. (I quote from memory.)

"You're a whore, you're a whore, you're nothing but a goddamned whore."

"Sure I'm a whore, or I wouldn't be living with you!"

"Hm, I never thought of it like that."

Maybe Jerusalem should have sassed Yahweh back in just those terms.

Surrender the Pink(er)

Another commenter at WhoIsIOZ challenged me to explain why I’d said that Steven Pinker’s quoting Camille Paglia on rape discredited him. The commenter helpfully posted the quotation itself:

For a decade, feminists have drilled their disciples to say, "Rape is a crime of violence but not sex." This sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense has exposed young women to disaster. Misled by feminism, they do not expect rape from nice boys from good homes who sit next to them in class....

These girls say, "Well, I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening." And I say, "Oh, really? And when you drive your car to New York City, do you leave your keys on the hood?" My point is that if your car is stolen after you do something like that, yes, the police should pursue the thief and he should be punished. But at the same time, the police---and I---have the right to say to you, "You stupid idiot, what the hell were you thinking?"

That first paragraph is a stunning non sequitur. What’s the connection between rape as a crime of violence and rape as a crime committed by nice boys from good homes? None that I can see. Nor do I see where she gets “sugar-coated Shirley Temple nonsense”. (P.S. Maybe she thinks that nice boys won't commit crimes of violence,but will commit crimes of sex?)

The second sentence of that paragraph is not only false, it’s the opposite of the truth. Since the 1970s at least, feminists have been arguing (with evidence from empirical studies) that most rapists are not dark-skinned brutes leaping from the bushes to ravish white virgins, but ordinary men like any others, and that most women are raped by people they know, not by strangers. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975) argued the point at length, as I recall (it’s been close to 30 years since I read it).

Feminists were vilified for supposedly sowing discord between the sexes, for allegedly teaching young women to regard every nice young man as a potential if not actual rapist. Paglia herself attacked the concept of “date rape,” not on the ground that rape is rape regardless of the status of the rapist, but … well, I admit I’m not sure. Maybe because if a girl goes out with a boy, she should expect to put out? Paglia is not known for the coherence of her thought.

As for the second paragraph, it’s not even clear that those girls actually do get drunk at fraternity parties and go to guys’ rooms “without anything happening.” What they seem to be saying is that going to a guy’s room does not, in itself, constitute consent to intercourse, whether the girl is drunk or sober, let alone passed out. This is a less controversial doctrine than it would have been, say, forty years ago. But at the university where I work, female students are advised not to drink excessively, to be careful where they go and with whom, to stay alert and aware. Male students are advised that a woman’s presence in their room, drunk or sober, is not in itself consent to sex.

That’s not to say that idiotic things don’t get said at times. One earnest male student, working under the head counselor at the dorm where I work (notorious on campus for its “political correctness”), put together an alarmist information sheet which advised that since most rape is acquaintance rape, you shouldn’t go on a date with someone you don’t know well. How, I wondered, would one get to know another person well, if not by spending time in their company? The student evidently interpreted “acquaintance” to mean “someone to whom you’ve been introduced but don’t yet know intimately,” as though women weren’t raped by boyfriends and husbands too.

I wouldn’t put an absolute divide between rape as violence and rape as sex: I would expect that rapists are no more consistent in their motives than anyone else. But I can’t understand how anyone could deny that men do sometimes rape women (or men, for that matter) as punishment (for being in the “wrong” place, for daring to say No to their importunings, and so on), not just because they’re overwhelmed by lust and have to have an outlet. The use of words like “violation” for forced sex is itself an indication that it is traditionally seen as an act of aggression, even to the exclusion of desire.

Consider this passage from chapter 16 of the book of the prophet Ezekiel, in the Authorized (King James) Version. Yahweh is addressing Jerusalem metaphorically as a “harlot”:

³⁶Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which thou didst give unto them;

³⁷Behold, therefore I will gather all thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

³⁸And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

³⁹And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

Uncovering nakedness in the Hebrew Bible is often a euphemism for sex, as in the prohibitions of uncovering the nakedness of near relatives in Leviticus 18:6-7. This passage, like others in the Bible, is a maelstrom of sexual violence. Yahweh does not propose to strip Jerusalem naked before her lovers out of erotic desire, but to shame and punish her. Similar fantasies appear in Hosea chapter 2, and in the New Testament Revelation 17, and they recur in later Western literature. Feminists didn’t invent the conflation of sex and violence – men did. Considering that Paglia made her name as a literary critic, she can hardly be unaware of this.

Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer purported to have shown that rape is not at all an act of violence. When I get back to the US, I plan to read the rest of their Natural History of Rape, to see just how they manage to do it.

Surrender the Pink(er)

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