by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given October 20, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Welcome and good morning!

It is a joy to give thanks,

To sing praise,

To acknowledge that life is good.

Come now, and let us worship together.

Asking the question "What do women want?" and then attempting to answer it in a 20-minute sermon is an impossible and one might even say foolish and presumptuous task. I look out on the congregation today, and I see a 30-year-old woman who wants to get into grad school, but hasn’t found the right program—or the funding. I see a woman who has been recently widowed, and is bereft. I see an elderly woman who is losing her sight. I see a young working mother of two small children who doesn’t have enough time in the day to feel she’s meeting any of her obligations very well, and who hasn’t had a romantic weekend with her husband in two years. I see a lesbian woman sitting with her partner, and they are wondering about having a baby. I see an African American woman whose color makes her all too visible in a sea of white faces, but she is a person who feels invisible, because her true needs are not known or recognized. As Audre Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist writer, said, "Beyond sisterhood is still racism." How will I speak to all of you women—and to your partners and lovers and spouses and friends? I cannot.

So those of you who come here this morning seeking answers—hard answers—to this question will go away disappointed. What I hope to do is to provoke you, to stimulate you to think about gender issues, to cause furious conversation between you and your partner on your way home from church, and three days later, for you to say to your friend over coffee, "You know, I’ve been thinking . . ."

The other thing that we must acknowledge is that the thoughts you hear expressed today will be filtered through the experience and consciousness of a white, heterosexual, middle-class professional woman. I must tell you that my experience with men has been a mixed bag. On the one hand I have had wonderful male mentors in my professional life, and I have good male friends. On the other hand, I was molested by my maternal grandfather. My paternal grandfather, with whom I grew up, was judgmental and rejecting. My father, whom I adored, was a hopeless alcoholic who died in a mental hospital with a diagnosis of alcohol dementia.

With a background like this, I wonder sometimes how I have ever been able to trust a man or allow myself to come close. But I have taken that leap of faith over and over again. Why? I think it can be largely explained by a cartoon I once saw. An elegant woman enters a bar, and a man sitting on a barstool turns to her and says, "What’s a woman like you doing in a place like this?" She answers, "Girl juice." I’m attracted to men; I like male energy.

I married a good man whom I did not love, but whom I knew would never leave me. Instead, I left him. It was the 1970’s, at the height of the feminist movement, and I grew stronger, and I came to know that I was a person in my own right. Since that time I have dated many men, almost all younger, some much younger than myself, and have had four serious and relatively long-term relationships. Why all these younger men, these men who were still growing up in one way or another, still unfinished? Well, because I didn’t have a mother, I learned to mother myself, and to mother others, and I believe I have—unconsciously, of course—chosen men who needed mothering. They were men I could take care of, men I could love in certain ways, but men who were never peers, and therefore men I could not love in any ultimate sense. That phase—that 25-year phase—is about over. I hope.

So I might say that the men in my intimate life have been disappointing, never being able to give me what I needed and wanted. What are men for, someone asked me recently, and I had to think carefully about my answer. When I married, I chose a surgeon. I married for security, for home, for status. Then I learned that I was the one who was making the home, and that second-hand status was not very satisfying. I learned how to make money, at least enough to survive on. So what do I need a man for? Men are for sex, I concluded. But cynicism is unhealthful, and of course sex is not enough. Like most women, I believe, I want friendship, companionship, a sharing of values, and the ever-elusive intimacy. I want a strong man, a masculine man, and a kind and gentle man, all in one package.

Last Sunday I asked you to send e-mails to me answering the questions "What do women want?" and "What do men want?" from your perspective. I’m going to share a couple of those with you today. This first one comes from a young woman, who is incidentally very slender. She says: "As a woman, I want the media to stop treating me like I’m just a body and a face . . . Every day, women are bombarded with ads—on TV, on the radio, on billboards, on pop-ups on the Internet—telling us just how imperfect we are . . . The reason this bothers me so much, other than the obvious fact that I am much more than my physical self, is the culture of discontent that it creates. The first problem is that it creates a society where eating disorders . . . flourish . . . Eating disorders are on the rise, and younger and younger girls are developing them. The second problem is that it creates a society where women are constantly unhappy. Do we really want women to be wasting their energies on goals they cannot attain? Aren’t there far better things for us to be doing? They say that women have reached the status of equal, but I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s not true. Until our worth is measured by what we do and who we are as human beings, rather than our looks, we’ll never be equal. So, look at me for who I really am, not what’s on the surface. That’s what I want."

This next e-mail opened with the salutation: "Dear Office God/ess, Please get this to Marilyn ASAP. Many thanks; blessed art Thou." And the message read: "Marilyn, don’t leave us [lesbians] out! As lesbians, we have been rendered invisible and inaudible, discounted both as women and as sexual minorities. We want to be seen; we want to be heard; we want to be counted as persons with whom to be reckoned . . . So what do lesbians want? Number one on the list: a good woman to love and be loved by, passionately and steadfastly and everywhich way good love goes. That’s the bedrock, so to speak. But we wouldn’t mind the brotherly love of a few good men. Especially if they were kind enough to offer to help us move, or provide child care, or offer a decent-paying job. We want the love and support of our blood families and our religious communities. We want to be able to keep our children and raise them in an open atmosphere of love. One other thing to tell everyone: if a woman says she’s a lesbian, please believe her. I realize this might be difficult if you’re a heterosexual man who wants to date her, or if she’s your daughter, or maybe even your grandmother. But we lesbians don’t accept that label without a period of self-scrutiny; sometimes this takes years, sometimes decades. In the end, most of us wouldn’t trade loving women for a million bucks. As lesbian singer-songwriter Alix Dobkin said long ago, ‘We ain’t got it easy, but we’ve got it!’"

Some of you know that I conducted a focus group a couple of weeks ago, as a way of researching these sermon topics on women and men. About 15 men and 15 women attended, and the first thing I did was to ask them to go into separate rooms and brainstorm the answers to the questions, "What is a woman for?" and "What is a man for?" focusing on the messages they learned as they grew up. The men, of course, did not follow my instructions—but instead talked about both the messages of childhood and also their experience as adults. Let me share with you some of what was said about what a woman is for. The women said such things as: taking care of others; homemaker; supportive of a man; careers such as nurse, teacher, secretary; sex, to satisfy a man; embody sex, they are sex; accommodating; smart, as long as they are polite; don’t threaten male ego; self-sufficient; loyal; patient; forgiving; look nice; provide core strength in community. And the men? Note the similarities: taking care of kids; provider of social grease; intimacy; friend, companion; cook; remembering anniversaries; pretty; provider of sexual pleasure; listening ear; interior design; reliever of tension; tenderness; holding the boundaries; booster of ego; incubator of embryo. That last one I found a bit on the mechanical side.

Now obviously I couldn’t mention nearly all that was said, and I’ve looked for patterns that turned up in both sexes’ remarks—but notice the clarity about who is serving whom. Most of what was said was not about mutuality, but about what women do for men—and for children and for the larger social fabric. Very little was said about how men support women, care for them, see to their needs. What do women want? I believe we want an egalitarian relationship, in which both men and women give and receive, in which both men and women listen, in which feelings are seen as a valuable human dimension, not just a female liability. Women are still the "second sex." This is the title, of course, of the classic feminist work by Simone de Beauvoir, first published in the 1940’s, in which she explains in beautiful, incisive prose, that in our culture men are at the center and women are at the periphery, circling round the men and seeing to their needs. The power of this book still rings true.

For the second exercise, I used the fishbowl technique in which the women sat in a circle facing inward, and the men sat in a circle around them, as the women held a conversation with one another, starting from questions the men had written down on cards. After a time we reversed. One of the questions was "What is it about men that irritates you the most?" At this point one woman in the group went a little berserk. "Why," she said, "why can’t they give us flowers? What’s so hard about that? I love flowers. I hint that I want flowers. Why can’t I get flowers?" All the women are smiling and nodding, and the men looking sheepish—probably thinking, "On the way home tonight, I’m going to get the little lady some flowers." And the women said that when they had a problem which they wanted to share with a male partner, the man always wanted to give solutions, always wanted to "fix it." "You don’t need to fix it," one woman said. "Just listen, and care." One thing that all the women seemed to agree on is that their men have a hard time when the woman wants to talk about her feelings. A lot of men seem to hunker down into a morose silence when women want to discuss their feelings—which is a very alienating experience.

Now some people in the focus group questioned why I was taking us back to the lessons of our childhood. My answer is that these lessons are still with us. Should you doubt what I’m saying, I suggest that you go as I did to any magazine stand and take a look at some of the current titles of articles in men’s and women’s magazines. We may not read these magazines, but we’re all a part of the culture that produces them. For women, we get articles about how to please and how to tease, how to cook and how to look, how to reduce and how to seduce. Some titles: "Show Stopping Cleavage: It’s Not About Size"; "Escape Bad-Skin Hell"; "Read His Mind in Bed"; "The Male Brain Explained"; "Rub Him the Right Way"; and "Six Satisfying Weight Loss Recipes."

Whereas men’s magazines—well, I have to tell you that if you would believe these magazines, men are totally obsessed with their abs. I’m not even sure I know what abs are, but men apparently want their abs to be hard. There are dozens of articles about abs—titles like "Get Washboard Abs Fast and Easy." Don’t men know that sex is in the head? Apparently not. Other titles which have clear implications about male attitudes: "Get Naked, Save Your Life: 18 Health Benefits of Sex"; "The Red Meat You Must Eat"; "Women Rate Your Ride: Annual Car Review"; "NFL: Make Your Girlfriend Monday Night Worthy"; "Seduce Her in 60 Seconds." Good luck, guys! All articles about male ego and male need.

And the lessons that come to us in popular form in these magazines—the lessons about what a woman is for and what a man is for—originate not just out of the air, but from the canon of both religious and secular thought. Just a few quotations from some of our seminal male thinkers:

• Aristotle: "While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male, for the soul is the reality of the particular body."

• Paul the Apostle: "The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God."

• St. Augustine: "[God] made a wife for man, to aid him in the work of generating his kind, and her He formed of a bone taken out of the man’s side. . . ."

• St. Thomas Aquinas: "As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex . . ."

• Sir Francis Bacon: "Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses . . ."

• Darwin: "Man is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain in absolutely larger . . ."

• Freud: "The castration complex [in girls] is started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. [Girls] at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance, too. They feel seriously wronged, [and] often declare that they want to ‘have something like it too,’ and fall a victim to ‘envy for the penis,’ which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character . . ."

We may have moved on intellectually, even in some of our behaviors, but the old voices, the old ways pull at us. In my own case, oh yes, I’m a different woman now—but am I? The culture, as well as my own past, has encouraged my caretaking—but has never encouraged the question, "What about me?" I’ve begun at last to ask that question. I’ve begun to ask, "Do you have anything to give in return?" And I think I am not unlike many women. I no longer need your money, your status, your help in getting a credit card or a bank loan. But I desperately need your tenderness, your willingness to share your fear and your pain and your joy, your support when I am sad and weak. When you make love to me, I want not just your body, but your soul. I need you as a true partner and friend.

What do women want? So much could be said. We want to be free of fear of physical injury and abuse from men. I would guess that half of the women sitting in this congregation today have been raped, or sexually abused as children, or harassed at work, or battered or physically intimidated by men as adults. We shouldn’t have to live with this kind of fear.

Women want economic equality. In 1999 women earned 71.7 cents for every dollar a man made. I’m talking here about women with a comparable education doing the same job as a man. What would it be like for you men, if the situation were reversed? What if you were told tomorrow that your salary was going to be reduced 30% because you are male? No other reason. Just because you are male. For a while women’s wages went steadily up in relation to men’s, but it is telling that in 1993, women with college degrees earned on average 73 cents for every dollar a man earned, so we are losing ground. But women on the bottom of the pay scale are the ones who are hurting the most. In 1998 approximately 16 million women, or 39% of female workers, toiled for no more than $7.91 per hour. When they labor and labor hard, women want enough money to live on.

All feminists don’t agree, of course, about what feminism really is. I hold with Gloria Steinem’s statement that a feminist is a person who believes in the radical notion that women are people. We are not sex objects. We are not perpetual mothers to grown men. We are not patient Griseldas when we are being misused. We are not happy to sit in the shallows and watch admiringly while men swim in the depths.

We are whole human beings, with longings and needs of our own. We want a true partnership of spirit and mind and heart. We want to love greatly, grandly, and we want men or women as partners who are worthy of that kind of love. We want to give ourselves freely, without fear. We want to grow as we are able, with someone who revels in that growth and cheers us on. We want to become what is in us to become, and to have a partner who stands with us and as the two of us look out at a hurting world, says, "I’m glad, I’m so glad, I’ve found you. I’m so glad we’re in this thing called life together." So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Mother God, Father God, we know you love us equally, and we are equally made to serve your holy purposes on this earth. We pray that we might be true to ourselves as men and women, while being true to our partners and friends. We pray that you would guide us through the thicket of cultural expectations to our true, authentic selves, and that you would help us keep our hearts open to love, always. Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place, consider your lives. Speak to one another frankly, live authentically, love deeply. Go in love and go in peace. Amen.

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Copyright 2002, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.