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Last night, I read pages 834-850 of Stephen King’s The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. Yesterday, a topic that came up in my reading was feminism.
On page 836, Nadine Cross tells a kid named Joe, whom she took care of for some time: “You have Larry and Lucy. You want them, and they want you. Well, Larry wants you, and that’s all that matters, because she wants all the things he does. She’s like a piece of carbon paper.”
Nadine looks at Lucy with contempt because she thinks Lucy does not have a mind of her own, but rather wants whatever Larry wants. And yet, in what I read last night, Lucy can be adamant when she wants to be, for, when people at the Free Zone meeting are recommending the Judge for the legal committee, and the Judge is nowhere to be found (since, unbeknownst to most there, the Judge is going West to spy on Randall Flagg’s people), Lucy expresses strong concern about him.
On page 842, Fran, Stu, Nick, and Susan are talking about Dayna, whom they’re also sending as a spy to Randall Flagg’s region. Dayna’s background is that she played tennis and swam in college, and she went to a small community college in Georgia, where, for the first two years, she kept going steady with her high school boyfriend. Sue says that the boyfriend “was a big leather jacket type, me Tarzan, you Jane, so get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.” Then Dayna’s roommate, a “big libber type”, dragged Dayna to some female consciousness meetings, and Dayna became an even bigger libber than her roommate. Dayna dumped her boyfriend and successfully disarmed him when he came after her with a gun, then she became a lesbian, after which she went the bisexual route. (Note: I’m just saying what the book says, and I’m not going to get bogged down in a debate over whether homosexuality is a choice or not. Can we even speak in absolutes on that issue? Maybe it’s a choice for some people, but not for many others, who are born that way.)
I was thinking of an evangelical I knew a while back. He said that his Mom could not stand his fiancee, who was submissive and tried to serve others. The Mom probably felt about this lady what Nadine thought about Lucy: that she was a door-mat who did not have a mind of her own, or at least the strength to be independent. But it was interesting in college to see the more conservative women stand up for themselves. I remember one feminist lady giving a presentation in which she argued that Paul was a sexist for barring women from church leadership, and some conservative women in the class were fighting back and saying that Paul’s attitude did not give them a second-class status—-that God had different roles for men and for women, but that this did not mean that women were deemed inferior to men.
And then there is the burden that is placed on men—-to take charge, to be the leader. The evangelical I was talking about above said that being a godly man in a relationship is difficult because it entails being a servant, and women want a man who is a leader. This is probably true in the evangelical and the non-evangelical world, but there are plenty of women who are open to a degree of equality—-to 50/50, to men and women both having opinions in a relationship and compromising, or giving and taking. That’s the relationship I hope to have.
