It’s tough being a woman at odds with maintaining traditional values and feeling (and being) attractive. Fashion has evolved and hysteria (the female disease) appears to have faded. A trend toward Christian Domestic Discipline is surfacing. It may seem like a joke but, for some, it could be very serious and dangerous. It’s hidden amidst maintaining traditional values.
In the past few centuries, industry, science and reason have countered traditional values bringing new freedoms fostering individual opportunity. Prior to that, maintaining traditional values were the core of group sovereignty supporting survival of the fittest. Those groups used the power of patriarchal faiths. Matriarchal faiths, dubbed paganism, were all but wiped out during the Dark and Medieval ages. The rise of female hysteria among the faithful helped science take several strides against maintaining traditional values and disciplines through neurological and psychological developments. Traditional values have been reawakening over the past 60 years as faith shifts to the right for preserving order. Might is right as Christian evangelicals bring forth domestic discipline.
Emerging in the United States is an idea of Christian domestic spanking of disobedient wives. They use biblical quotes to support this belief. As absurd as this notion might be, patriarchal religions have practiced this for thousands of years and discussed throughout the world. Is this abuse or is it maintaining traditional values and discipline between husband and wife in a religious marriage? Traditional values from back then don’t apply now. As certain representatives discuss the importance of traditional values in legislation, is domestic spanking an extension of those values? Frighteningly, there is such a movement, though small, in the United States.
Sometimes living feels that you’re balancing and moving along a tightrope that isn’t there. People need validity and reason for support amidst chaos and hysteria. Maintaining traditional values and discipline is a form of validation but, for women, is it productive? Not believing and maintaining traditional values may make life seem as shaky as a fiddler playing on your roof. Do women need guidance and discipline? Are they willing to accept them?
There are lots of political and social issues about traditional religious values and restoring them as dominant traits among families. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are patriarchal religions where men create the rules and women perform supportive family and domestic duties. If women didn’t follow customs, they were and are subject to ridicule and hysteria. We might source it as a form of sexual abuse. Arising in the new Christian families Christian Domestic Discipline is becoming popular among many Christian communities, with biblical support as an aid to maintaining traditional values in families.
If anything might be maintaining traditional values, hysteria might be it. It can be traced back over 4,000 years. Hysteria is the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud considered an exclusively female disease. Hippocrates is the first to use the term hysteria thousands of years ago as it appeared to stem from the uterus and, thus, a women’s ailment. In the beginning, it was perceived as a demonic ailment. It was cured with herbs, sex or sexual abstinence, punished and purified with fire. Women who rebelled against husbands were branded hysterical. They were subject to trials and public humiliation. As late as the 19th century, surgical procedures to remove the womb (hysterectomy) were common. The invention of the Vibrator in around 1880 was seen a therapeutic for hysteria. Freud was significant as he pioneered a talking therapy to seek out scientific roots. In some ways, hysteria remains evident but it best treated with antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications.
Comedian Milton Berle once said, “You can lead a man to Congress, but you can’t make him think.” President Abraham Lincoln once said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy” Religion is not democracy. It’s set by traditions passed through thousands of years as maintaining traditional values. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it. In the world outside of religion, when it came to democracy, women received the short end of the stick until the 20th century. Or are women receiving no stick at all? Or are they under the stick of their husband? What does the Bible say?
It is believed that through the development of patriarchal religions, female roles were domesticated to raising children and maintaining the home. She usually was not exposed to group meetings nor did the woman have any exclusivity in male’s sexual wanderings. In a sense, this feeling outside of the core continues to be masked as maintaining traditional values.
Fundamental Christians maintaining traditional values continue to prepare daughters as housewives, belittling ambitions of higher achievement. Do women need domestic discipline or submission in maintaining family values?
In most patriarchal societies, women are not treated as equals to men. Many are denied comparable education. Many are denied equality in prayer rituals. Many can not publically recite poetry or songs. Many can’t learn to drive. Many have female circumcision to prevent sexual pleasure, and many are treated as property to be traded and sold. These are practiced through old, accepted traditions that go back thousands of years. Maintaining traditional values toward female roles in western and eastern civilizations are grounds for hysteria.
In medieval times, Catholics gave confessions directly to the priests. Instead of saying Hail Mary several times, absolution was carried out by spanking the confessing parishioner. The practice was stopped by the 18th century. Were women, however, subject to discipline from husbands?
Religionists maintain that God proscribed this for women. There were once laws that allowed men to hold as many concubines and mistresses they wanted but women were not allowed to do so. Beyond the realm of the church, Christian fundamentalists realize and support that, in this modern era, women are proscribed toward maintaining traditional values for home stability. A movement is developing that supports domestic discipline. The goal is to retrain women to know and accept their religious placement in society.
Is there anger among women? Eastern societies maintain severe punishments for women who choose not to continue maintaining traditional values. Some are executed. Women must practice writing, art, and education behind closed doors with absolute secrecy.
In the United States, legislators are vowing to deny women to abort unwanted pregnancies. Some are cast from the mainstream and forced to become single parent families. Undoubtedly, this adds to the numbers living in poverty. It may also lead to children integrated with unconscionable rage. Trying to establish laws that deny women rights in body control isn’t wrong if you are maintaining traditional values. But is maintaining traditional values right? What are the traditional values in a scientific and a contemporary global economy? Can maintaining traditional values be wrong?
Bible swingers support maintaining traditional values that were written thousands of years ago. Women are forbidden the right to question or become hysterical? Throughout the ages, in maintaining traditional values, women did questions, did seek to improve, and became hysterical when confronting powerlessness. Gradually maintaining traditional values were moved away from in plight for free expression.
Men are fighting for maintaining traditional values and there are women supporting them. There are many women that readily accept pre-determined frameworks of how to live. Many women do not want to risk their lives and gamble for other lifestyles that cast them from their traditional communities. They would readily accept domestic discipline than be cut free.
For women that fight for equality and comparability, those women maintaining traditional values are undermining the cause. Traditional values and behaviors are hard to fight and win over.
Obsessive-Compulsive people rigorously defend their obsessions and compulsions as truths with value. While these are person-specific, validating one’s reality as normal seems reasonable. Maintaining traditional values also seem reasonable, especially with community and group support.
In the Unite States, the Christian right is an informal coalition formed around a core of evangelical Protestants that draws support from politically conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and academic secularists who share their goals. Their influence draws, in part, from grassroots activism as well as their focus on social issues and ability to motivate the electorate around maintaining traditional values. While relatively new, the Christian right is vehement in opposing abortion, gay rights, stem cell research and any arts that are contrary to biblical content. When living in a Christian-right, or Jewish-right, or Muslim-right community, it is difficult not to conform. You lose and gamble many things by not conforming.
Does domestic discipline over wives help women conform to maintaining traditional values within the community? Is it right? At what point does domestic discipline become domestic abuse? Women have suffered for many years in the name of God. Maintaining traditional values help to guide people correctly on paths that are well worn. Under penalties of being ostracized and detached from “normal”, many women accept inequality and discipline through maintaining traditional values. Is it morally right?
Moral correctness isn’t necessarily part of maintaining traditional values. Examine the Crusades, and the Grand Inquisition as two major pock marks in Christian history. Any husband perpetuating violence on his wife should not hide under the morality of maintaining traditional values. It should never be a traditional value. It’s outrageous that key religious figures discuss this as an option when psychology fails. It’s insane and crazy. Sadly, it is reaching many couples as a traditional value. Thank God that people aren’t generally accepting this concept of Christian Domestic Discipline but I fear those few that feel that it is a way to biblically maintain traditional values.
There are thresholds in personalities. Sometimes hysteria and reason clash at thresholds, especially within democracies. Dialog is always more beneficial than violence. When thinking women forced into accepting and maintaining traditional values and disciplines can’t take it any more, those beliefs explode. Maintaining traditional values and discipline is a way of avoiding chaos and mysterious unknowns. Without traditions, many would be as clumsy as a fiddler playing on the roof but they’ll seek and find their song.