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[lady_morgaine]

A few weeks ago, I saw the film "Knocked Up" and thought it particularly hilarious. When I told a new friend the other day that I enjoyed it, she seemed shocked, even though she hadn't seen it. "I heard it made a lot of feminists mad," she said

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[lady_morgaine]

The tension within feminism is that, on the one hand, it's about POWER - a very patriarchal word if ever there was one. On the other hand, though, it's about uniqueness - celebrating what is special about women. The "power" side wants to level the playing field, make women "the same" as men. The "uniqueness" side wants to assert that women are fundamentally different than men. The two sides engage in a constant dialectic - women want to have power in the sense of wanting to have a say in society, but they also want to expand the idea of power to include "feminine" ways of being powerful. Unfortunately, because that expansion of what it means to have power hasn't freed itself from its masculine tethers (i.e., power in society is still about who makes the most money, who "produces" the most, who "controls" other people), so many feminists become trapped in the power struggle side and find themselves being encouraged, for instance, not to have children because it will lessen their power, or to take a contraceptive that will rid them of their menstrual cycle so that they won't have to take days off work (i.e., "be less productive than a man").

Part of the reason for all of it is, I think, that feminists do agree on wanting women to have more of a say in society, but they can't seem to agree on what it is that makes a woman unique and special. Most feminists (on both ends of the political spectrum) insist that we take seriously the "embodiment" of women as structuring their unique experiences. How does the experience of menstruating, for instance, make us special? How does the experience of being pregnant and giving birth make us special? These questions don't directly lead one to a pro-life position, by the way, but feminists of all stripes take them seriously.

The problem is poignantly illustrated in the debate over female clergy. While I'm not particularly in favor of female priests in the Catholic Church, the arguments against female priests proffered by the Vatican tend to focus on what makes women different from men, and therefore enables women to take different roles from men in the church. I agree with the Church's position on those topics, but I think it's a bit naive to think the argument ends there. Women might very well agree that they are different and have a special role to play, but the fact that women aren't allowed to be priests effectively cuts them out of having any decision-making power in the institutional Church - and there we're back to the first problem again. I don't think the solution is to institute female priests, though - that solution would be to level the playing field, to make men and women "the same." But I do think that the Church needs to find a way to allow women more of a role in the decision-making processes that occur in the Church - to share the power with them, so to speak.

The problem is, the Church asserts that women have a special, unique function within it - but offers very few institutional ways for women to exercise that function. Thus, feminists clamor after the only thing they can see that would give them power - the priesthood. But, I think, we can be a little more creative than that.