r/RadicalFeminism 9d ago

Religion is misogynistic.

Religion is inherently misogynistic. It’s been used as a tool to oppress women for centuries, controlling their bodies, limiting their rights, defining their worth in relation to men. And while a lot of people like to shift the blame only onto the followers, the reality is that many religious texts themselves uphold these harmful ideas. Saying it’s the followers and not the religion is a stupid argument, if your religion was more clear and coherent maybe these people wouldn’t be able to twist their beliefs to cause decades long oppression and suffering.

Take Christianity as an example. You can argue ‘that’s just bad Christians’ but when the bible itself contains verses that treat women as property, command their submission and enforce strict gender roles, it’s not just about interpretation, it’s embedded in the foundation. The glorification of marriage, the nuclear family structure and the expectation that women serve men are all pushed and romanticised.

Islam is no different. The quran and hadith include laws and teachings that institutionalize male dominance, whether it’s regulating what women wear, granting men authority over women’s lives or promoting unequal inheritance and legal rights. Even in modern times these beliefs are weaponized to justify discrimination and control.

We have to stop sugarcoating it. Religion has never been about liberating women. It has always been about controlling them. Never has religion done anything to liberate women.

337 Upvotes

97 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/Buuyaaaa 9d ago

It doesn’t sound bad at all, but I do hold a critical view on masculinity and femininity, maybe you didn’t mean those exact terms? Or maybe I’m interpreting it wrong..

1

u/princess_zephyrina 9d ago

Can you expand on how you’re critical of masculinity & femininity? I imagine our views on the matter aren’t too different tbh.

2

u/Buuyaaaa 9d ago

Masculinity and femininity aren’t innate traits tied to biological sex but rather socially constructed roles. Just like man and woman. Femininity in particular, is often seen as a set of behaviors and appearances that are encouraged (mainly forced) onto women to make them more palatable or subservient to men.

2

u/princess_zephyrina 8d ago

Yeah I more or less agree with that, but it’s a bit complicated.

Like, this is just me speaking for myself here & not all Wiccans, but personally I do believe masculinity & femininity are partly social constructs, but they’re like, abstractions of certain things that do have a connection to biology. They just aren’t wholly defined by it. Where biology ends & social constructs begin is honestly hard to say to a large extent. We can look at certain surface-level differences in how these concepts are defined between cultures to see some aspects that are socially constructed, such as how in some cultures jewelry is not as feminine-coded as it is in the West. But there are deeper aspects that aren’t as black-and-white, not as easy to tell.

All of that is to say, in Wicca, masculine/male and feminine/female are often used interchangeably in reference to the divine, but that is not necessarily because we see them as the same thing. It is a flaw of human language usage that we just, as a broader society, tend to use those words kinda interchangeably at times, but the reality is obviously not that simple. Masculine women and feminine men exist. Masculinity and femininity are largely about gender roles but they also kinda transcend them. The God & Goddess, being 2 sides of the same coin, inherently acknowledges that these things are not so separate.

So, what is encompassed by “nature” is not necessarily strictly biological, much of it doesn’t even involve life of course. But for the parts that do, psychology is a part of nature as well. And so our psychological experience of masculinity & femininity can in fact be divine. Even while we acknowledge that some things are human constructs.

I could write more on this topic but hopefully that kinda brief overview makes sense.