Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) and Senator Peter King (R-New York) decry “‘hysterical women” at the Kavanaugh hearings.

An outrageously disproportionate penalty against Serena Williams is called by the umpire at the U.S. Open.

Yesterday’s text from Mark about the Syro-Phoenician woman is spun as if Jesus were playful and the woman respectfully, demurely, politely requested that he reconsider.

Time for this feminist, and this feminist theologian, to blog about bitches, and I take my cue from Jesus.

Here’s the first part of the text from last Sunday:

²⁵…a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about [Jesus] and she came and bowed down at his feet. ²⁶Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. ²⁷He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’”

To.

The.

Dogs.

Both because of the diminuative form of the word “dog” as it’s used in the Greek text here, and because Jesus is addressing a woman who has had a child, effectively, Jesus called her a bitch.

Yeppers.

Why yes he did.

Even if you take that out of the picture, the slur of calling a woman a ‘dog’ in that day goes far beyond our imagination: dogs did not get Happy Trails Organic Nuggets with a nice fresh bowl of water next to them.

Dogs got carrion.

Rancid, stinky, reduced-to-nothing-but-stringy-guts leftovers that no one and nothing else would eat.

So let’s re-read and re-phrase these words that Jesus said not just to a woman, but to a non-Jewish woman, and a non-Jewish woman whose daughter was fighting for her life and so who was fighting for the life of her daughter:

“Jesus, a man who held all the cards and therefore all the power, said to this desperate mother, coming to a man, and a respected man, who clearly had all the authority and therefore all the power, ‘Let the wanted children, the children who really matter in my eyes, be fed, because it isn’t fair for the good food to be taken from the privileged children, rotted, and then given to the bitches.”

That’s what a feminist hermeneutic can see going down here.

It can see male privilege, male power, and male condescension by way of an insult geared directly to the woman as woman.

And you know what else a feminist hermeneutic can see here?

Not quiet submission in her retort.

Not a polite engagement with Jesus.

Not an earnest opportunity to teach him another way of thinking about it.

Nope.

It sees a mama who is desperate to heal her daughter.

It sees a woman who, verbally slapped by the man she was forced to trust with her daughter’s life, takes a breath, sets her jaw, sets her eyes straight on Jesus, and seethes, rightly and righteously seethes, when she slowly, and with measured tone and between clenched teeth and with incredible audacity and chutzpah, takes that insult and redefines it, and the entire exchange, when she, a mama fighting for the life of her child, fighting back tears of rage and grief, says to this man who had hurled insult and thereby hurled away her daughter: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Even.

The.

Bitches.

And we see Jesus getting owned by an outcast mama.

“You want to talk bitches?” she says.

“We can talk bitches.”

“Pull up a chair.”

Why is this text so rarely preached in this way?

Why are we so used to the notion of this woman taking the insult, metabolizing it as if it were acceptable, normal, and even due?

For the same reason that, looking down from positions of power and authority at the female protesters at Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, at women who are fighting for the right to care for their bodies, their pregnancies, their personal life, their family life, their medical well-being, the medical well-being of their families’, and the same for their daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters (for the stakes are this high for the Supreme Court), at these women who have the audacity to get loud about their self-advocacy and advocacy for their daughters, men like Sens. Ben Sasse and Peter King found it acceptable, normal, and even due to call their protests “hysterical.”

Hysterical.

Hysterical, a word which…wait for it…is an insult geared directly to women as women.

Hysterical, “the nervous disease originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus; literally ‘of the womb,’ from Latin hystericus “of the womb,” from Greek hysterikos “of the womb, suffering in the womb…”

We don’t hear about men being hysterical.

Nope.

We don’t because it’s a slur intended to be hurled against women, women who become animated and emotional not least of all because they are speaking up for themselves and for those whom they love and are compelled to protect.

So from their tables, they throw the women some crumbs, and expect women to be thankful.

Sirs, even the bitches.

And then there’s Serena Williams.

Right.

Have you seen the news about this cartoon?

Scores off the charts for putting almost all the stereotypes of women, and black women, to hard work.

So Serena was told that she was cheating.

She wasn’t cheating.

Her coach may have been sending her signals but if so, she was neither looking nor taking heed.

The umpire, sitting up high, in a position of power and authority over a woman, and a black woman at that, insulted her by besmirching her integrity, and threw down the crumbs of “But it’s the rules.”

But Serena—gasp—had the audacity to stand up for herself and for women in general and say, “No. I am not a cheat. In fact, you are a thief for stealing my game and my reputation. Moreover, you do this to female athletes and not to male athletes and that is a fact and that, Sir, is not fair.”

Sirs, even the bitches.

Now, I don’t know what was going on in Jesus on that day, because elsewhere the man was nothing but radical in his affirmation and welcome of women.

But we deny the truth of this woman if we deny the truth that in this text, what he did was not o.k.

Passing it off as if it were a test of faith (how manipulative and passive aggressive can you get?) or with a twinkle in an eye (how many women have been insulted, abused, or assaulted, and had a man say, “I was just playing?” #metoo) does not make it better, and one could say makes it worse.

We need to acknowledge rather than dismiss the discomfort that this text and Jesus’ behavior causes us, because if there’s any behavior that needs to be called out in this exchange, it’s Jesus’.

I do know what is going on with Sasse, and King, and this umpire Ramos, however.

They are troubled by women who have wearied of thanking people for the crumbs thrown from the table when these women should be at the table, and even at its head.

They are troubled by women who have wearied of their advocacy, self-or-otherwise, quiet or loud, within our outside of the bounds, being belittled as “misbehavior” (Cue “Well-behaved women rarely make history,” a quote actually originally stated by a Pulitzer Prize author named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich).

They are troubled by women who cause trouble to existing dysfunctional power structures, sexist and misogynistic rules and laws, and the arbitrary application of the rest of them.

They are troubled because they are beginning to see this:

Sirs, even the bitches get the crumbs from the table, and, in fact, more than that.

The bitches—the disempowered ones, the exploited ones, the vulnerable ones, the strong ones, the outcast ones, the raped ones, the ill ones, the black athletic ones, the weeping-women-at-the-border ones, and the mamas-who-love-their-children-far-more-than-they-love-power-structures-that-harm-their-babies ones—they get those crumbs.

If you watch closely, they are gathering together to gather those crumbs together into a new bread by which more are fed, at far more tables, with far more people gathered around them to eat and to share.

For we know that we aren’t bitches and you aren’t barons.

We are all humans who deserve respect, equity, and a comforable seat at the table’s spread.

Pull up a chair.

_______

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