This is kind of interesting. I have a talk that I heard for the first time in Oklahoma by a brother who is speaking to a congregation in Monongahela. That was such a foreign word to my 11 year old ears that I thought he was giving a talk in Africa. I had two talks by this brother, the other one being on the subject of angels. I still have those talks, now on cd/iPod, and they are outdated, I know. The brother references the Aid book. What I can tell you is that as a young girl in the congregation, the talk on Jehovah loving a spiritual woman informed my conceptualization of my own identity. I can practically give that talk word for word the same way I can sing most of the songs.
Imagine my surprise when life brought me to Pennsylvania and we are heading to the newly renovated Coraopolis Assembly Hall and we see an exit for Monongahela. To top it off, Sister Scully tells me that she knows the brother giving the talks, that he was Brother Scully's CO and she checked up on Tom before marrying him by getting a reference from this brother. Small world in some ways.
Last night at the meeting, I told you about the brother who introduced the school with that historical overview of gender, that sisters did not join the school until 1959. Bip Sue emailed me afterwards saying she knows I liked that part! And she was right. I did. We had a CO in Arkansas for our last three years there named Will Gorham and he came into the truth in Pittsburgh. It was so sad for us to be leaving the same time they were. One of the funny things he did was on Saturday mornings with the big turn out for service, and he didn't know the names yet the first year (boy he got the names good by the third year, but anyhow) he would call on the friends and give them made up names.
And we would sit there in the Arkansas Kingdom Hall laughing at the names he was making up. Finally someone asks him where he gets them, and he says he had a paper route as a boy in Pittsburgh and those are all the names of the people on his route.
You can imagine the names he was using because they are about the same in Windber and East Hills. Now I can roll off Varmecky and Rickabaugh and Kosnosky and Katenhusen with the best of them, but the truth is, five years ago those names sounded like a foreign language to most of us in that hall.
What I really loved about Brother Gorham is that he always referred to his wife as his bride, and the brothers did not dare make any remarks about trading their wives in on a younger model in his hearing.
Anyway, here I am in Pennsylvania, a place I had no idea I would ever be for about 44 years of my life, and a brother from Miami made me happy because he said our sisters make the school beautiful.
I was thinking about that all day and about that talk about the only kind of woman Jehovah can love being a spiritual woman. I agree. A woman has to have the qualities of Proverbs 31, Titus 2, and of course, I could go on and on with the qualities we must all have to be acceptable to Jehovah.
But I also cannot discount the provisions Jehovah made for women physically. I know Jehovah really cares for women and wants them to be happy in marriage. My PhD is in gender studies, and I've spent years studying the way our biology affects our behaviors.
Mostly people think of gender as male/female, of the differences in the sexes. That is the typical definition of it. It began as a grammatical term to distinguish the sexes in language - he and she, his and hers. That's why there is that English rule that pronouns have to agree in gender and number. I don't know how many times I've corrected a sentence like this: Each one does their own thing, and said no, it should be Each one does his or her own thing. Each one is only one, there is the number. A gender problem with pronouns is less common, and usually the result of carelessness. Sheila is going to his car. I have to say is Sheila a guy? Because in all likelihood the proper sentence is Sheila is going to her car. Of course, I take this as evidence that English and biology are more interesting subjects than math.
Sex actually refers to the biological body that does not change in response to context. For example, boys start to get peach fuzz and their voices deepen. Other changes are not far behind. Girls, whether they are girls in Russia or Mexico or Japan, start to develop mammary glands which increase their breast size and they begin passing the eggs they were born with, about one per month, and discarding the egg and the preparatory uterine lining when fertilization does not take place in the process of menstruation. That is just how it works for boys and girls in Pennsylvania and Arkansas and California. It is constant.
Now, in Scotland, it is perfectly acceptable for a boy to wear a plaid skirt and he is not considered feminine for doing so. Here, they got names for that and they ain't pretty. In some Asian cultures, there are arranged marriages. In that culture part of being a woman is accepting your parents' decision regarding who your groom will be. Here, that is not part of being a woman.
In some countries/religions in the Middle East, the practice of female circumcision is common and part of what gender means in that cultural context. For one thing, I object to the term female circumcision. The technical term is clitoridectomy. It is the complete removal of that particular organ specific to a woman's anatomy. When a male is circumcised, only the foreskin is removed and the organ is left functional and intact. When a woman undergoes this process, the organ is entirely removed.
Ask me how many little girls have this procedure done at the age of five without anesthesia or sterilization of instruments. Ask me how many hemorrhage and die later, or how many suffer infections and after days of raging fever die from that? No, don't ask me. I cannot bear to think of it, but it is a substantial number of daughters and little sisters. And why do their mothers allow this? Because that's what it means to be a woman in that country. For the same reason Chinese mothers bound their daughters' feet. It was just what everyone did, what was done to them, and now they do it to their baby girls.
So I know what you're thinking. When a male has this procedure, and most do in America, he still has the ability to enjoy marital relations and to father children. When a woman has this procedure, she can still bear children. What's missing in that equation? Oh yeah, the enjoy part.
Now the male copulatory organ does provide his owner not only with the ability to father children, but also with enjoyment. Jehovah did not have to add that part. That's a bonus. A woman can bear children without this one part. That part is not necessary to bearing children or giving birth. And whereas many of our organs serve multiple purposes, this part of a woman's biology has only one function: to please its owner. Nothing else.
Men have no similar or corresponding organ. Now, why did Jehovah do that do you think?
Here's another biological note that fascinates me. One day in service we are asking the car questions you know, and I guess we had worn out the ones about what store in the mall do you want to loot after Armageddon, and so someone said if we fill the earth up to capacity and we do not get to move to other planets and we stop having babies, won't we stop having sex?
And I said oh heck no. And everyone looked at me like I was crazy, and why I seemed so sure and said it so quickly.
Jehovah is so logical. I love that about Him! So, the answer to this one is found in the animal kingdom. All animals reproduce. For some species of fish, the male and female never even see each other. The female lays eggs, and males come along and fertilize them. They have millions of them and most are eaten in the food chain, but you know. They are playing the numbers, a quantity reproductive strategy. Humans go for quality.
I dated a brother named Harley who was a dairy farmer. When they wanted the cows to have babies, they would give them hormones to bring them all into estrus at the same time so they could fertilize them all at the same time, and then they'd all calve close to the same time. Just more convenient for the farmers to schedule it.
In the natural world, deer will come into estrus in fall and all the bucks will rut and then in spring the baby fawns are all born. Now that makes sense, since that is when the grass is green and the mothers can have an abundant food supply to support their lactation. Lactation is very expensive in biological terms of what it costs the mother's body to produce.
My point is that all other species on the planet have that in common: the females are not sexually receptive to the males unless they are in estrus. They will only engage in sexual union if they can make a baby. Humans are the only species with concealed estrus and the only species to engage in such relations for any reason other than procreation.
So it seems logical to me that if Jehovah made it possible for us to enjoy that aspect whether a baby was the end product or not, then he would expect humans to do it if no baby was forthcoming.
Jehovah gave women concealed estrus and an organ that serves no function but making them happy. I know, these are matters that some of you find difficult to frankly discuss. On the other hand, I have spent years of my life studying how behavior is dictated by gender, so for me this is like having class. I'm not telling you anything you didn't know probably, but maybe you didn't put it together this way. My main point tonight was I think sometimes about what Jehovah must think about women, and the guidelines he gives us for our relationship with him and for maintaining our spirituality. But he also created our bodies, and I think it is useful and interesting to consider how wonderfully and how fear-inspiring we are made.
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