There were 2 threads, the second one was split especially to give focus to the concerns of women
Hmmm…maybe have another look. The title of the thread is: Contemporary women’s concerns about apparent sexism in the EBTs
Several women voiced concerns about the threads. Two women messaged me privately. One of those said she was so upset and offended by responses and comments and the general attitude of men on the forum that she was considering leaving the forum altogether. This has happened in the past, where women have left the forum because they feel that sexist comments are made without considering the impact this has on users of the site and they don’t feel that their contributions or concerns are valued. The other person who contacted me said was grateful for my contributions because she doesn’t feel comfortable engaging in discussions about gender here because it ends up in horrible responses from men and it is unproductive.
It’s not that they
it’s just that doing so makes them a further target for vitriol, sexism, more mainsplaining, and also requires a great deal of energy and emotional labour of having to deal with the same sorts of arguments and opinions over and over again, without really getting anywhere.
The reason I spoke up was directly in response to several heartfelt messages from one of the women. This was an an act of allyship. Being an ally is where people who have some level of safety and privilege advocate on behalf of others. This is different from speaking for others.
Several people thanked me in this thread for raising these issues and five people (men and women) also messaged me privately to express their thanks.
Great! Stick with that perception then.
[Edit: if you have further comments or any feedback for me regarding your concerns, can I suggest a private message rather than derailing this thread. Thanks! ]
I am pretty sure some women liked some of the things written there by the men too.
As i see it, pleasing everyone isn’t a good idea and just because some men or women criticize the EBTs or the Buddha we have to remember this verse
No person can be found
Who has been, is, or will be
Only critized
Or only praised.
I think if people don’t like it, it is too bad but i personally don’t see anything bad in those texts.
There is that line where Ananda says ‘women are foolish’ and we can talk about why he might have said it and whether he really thought women are foolish but this hardly makes the Sutta pitaka sexist.
I can see how a radical feminist might not like the texts or how a Brahmanist might not like them, doesn’t mean that we should change anything to accomodate them.
Can’t please them all.
I personally think calling the sutta pitaka sexist is offensive and distasteful. Let’s call it what it is, these are the utmost holy texts held in the highest regard by many men & women and talking them down is very offending.
I’ve heard In some places it is considered bad manner to put these texts down on the floor.
It isn’t clear to me what exactly is this ‘sexism’ but it seems to be some terrible bad and wrong thing found in the sutta pitaka.
It seems like participation in this discourse about gay or women’s issues with the texts requires one to accept that there is something inherently & systematically wrong with the texts as they are and if we don’t accept this premise we are guilty of that very sin.
This can of course only create an echo chamber where dissenting opinion isn’t allowed and the only thing that will come out of it is an attempt at reforming the texts.
I wouldn’t even care if feminists and lgbt+ make their own texts but something tells me they won’t be content until they destroy the originals. All this effort & drama instead of just meditating and overcoming identification like everyone else.
Imo straight men don’t have it any easier in the grand scheme of things, the differences are miniscule and we’re all essentially stuck with ourselves.
For me, saying “there’s sexism in the Pali texts” is very different to “calling the sutta pitaka sexist”.
I see what you are saying, but I strongly disagree with your conclusions and the manner in which you are currently expressing them. For me, everyone here has great respect for the EBTs. That’s our commonality, that’s our starting point.
If i woke up as woman or gay tomorrow, i really don’t think it would change much and i certainly wouldn’t think any less of the texts or think that they were less for me. The impact on my training would be little to none.
@inb4dead This thread is about the erasure of women’s, queer and trans voices.
You are doing a very good job of showing the problems that have been raised in this and other threads on this issue. You are insisting on your own straight male view and refusing to accept the validity of others who have a different view, (again the whole point of the thread) you’ve been responding using highly emotive language, which seems like you’re trying to silence the conversation by claiming that people here are being offensive and denigrating the holy texts (not true), or that they are just creating “drama”, and you are being incredibly dismissive of the issues raised. The way you have generally engaged in this conversation has been quite hostile. The tone of your responses will make it harder for women and queer people to contribute to this thread.
There are so many things that could be said about your comment but it’s clear that you are speaking from a position of ignorance and not listening anyway. I just hope that you reflect on it and don’t miss any further opportunities for empathy, understanding and knowledge.
Wow.
I won’t be responding to you any further in this thread. I would suggest you give some space to this thread too so that the people whose voices you don’t seem to think matter can continue to engage. And maybe give some thought to your obvious attachment to your own view and strong identification with your own identity before you judge others as bad Buddhists.
Yes, everyone has it difficult. But my observation is that some straight men (me, for example) can easily underestimate and misunderstand the problems of those who are different from them. This makes us much less effective at helping them with their difficulties.
I remember once watching a presentation by an American convert who ordained as a Korean Bhikshuni. She said that there was an implication that nuns “give up” their womanhood by ordaining, but the monks don’t give up their manhood. I found that really sad.
She said that there was an implication that nuns “give up” their womanhood by ordaining, but the monks don’t give up their manhood. I found that really sad.
Might you be able to link the original presentation if you have it?
I apologise that I don’t know the precise context of the American bhikshuni and whatever she has experienced was undoubtedly real for her. Some sharing from my own experience:
The injunction to nuns to not be so feminine is very common in East Asian monastic circles (in the words of my own teacher, “nuns are not strawberries”). Every time I have heard this it’s been in the context of nuns not knowing how to look after themselves or always going back to men for help. In Australia, we’re not so used to this sort of behaviour, but um, I know some healthy women who lack the skills to even get up a ladder (this sort of thing is more common in urban East Asia). This is why the nun teachers have to push the nuns to actually develop a little independence (not a stereotypical Confucian female quality)- because their gender socialisation (as opposed to their gender itself) is not appropriate for monastic life. Especially in Korea, monastic colleges have historically involved agricultural labor (although I hear this is getting less since the 80s) and nuns have to work. The flip side of this is that (especially prior to the 1980s) sometimes nuns in the past were given work that was genuinely too difficult for them.
If the American bhikshuni had heard a statement about being less feminine, the chances are that she has probably heard it from her nun teacher or senior nuns in a didactic context. If your students’ previous gender socialisation had been that women are good for having children and cleaning, I imagine it would be important to get them out of that way of thinking fairly quickly. This is why nuns from Taiwan are on record saying things like “I am not a woman”. Sure, the approach might be a bit rough-and-ready, but from my limited degree of 2nd-hand exposure to these systems, I can appreciate that these type of statements are often a reaction against Confucian gender norms & may express an actual felt experience of social liberation for the women who make them.
"Whether now or after I have passed, any who shall live as their own island, their own refuge, with no other refuge; with the teaching as their island and their refuge, with no other refuge—those mendicants of mine who want to train shall be among the best of the best.” SN 47.9
and why compassion for one another can help us to understand that we all seek refuge in these teachings and why for some it may be more difficult to navigate the terrain than for others.
…when men ordain they do not lose their masculinity socially. They are still recognized as men socially. When women ordain we lose our femininity and become a kind of neuter. And this brings some other powers, because you are no longer in the feminine paradigm, or the female paradigm, but you also lose what power women do have. In Korea…In Korea, you know, women do have their own power; it’s not obvious and operates in back channels, but it’s there. Korea is a very strong patriarchy, but it’s not like women don’t have their own avenues, it’s just generally not public and happens very much behind the scenes. So men don’t lose their masculinity in the same way that women lose their femininity when they ordain, and the result is that monks continue to act like men — you know, the posturing —
to be honest, when we got full ordination, the nuns ordain first in their own ceremony, then the monks ordain, then the nuns have to receive a second ordination from the monks platform. And then we have a general assembly and do the dedication of merit. As as we were doing the general ceremony, the monks were all on this side, all the fully ordained monks, and the nuns were on this side, and I was in the isle, so I was about 5 feet from the monks so I can sorta see them. And one of the announcers said, “now that you’re Bhikkhus you are all Great Monks now.” And saying don’t be like that….and you can see they were swaggering, “Now, NOW we’re monks.” But all the nuns, we just perceived full precepts, now I have to go home and bow to 50 older sister nuns, then I have to go attend to my teaching…our lives are so different. So monks, that posturing, that masculinity, it’s an allowable part of their lives.
While a nun, she acts feminine? Because as you know you cannot attain enlightenment in a female body — I’m sure you’ve heard, you pay any attention to Buddhist stuff in East Asia you’ll know this is a standard argument — so we don’t want to act feminine because we already have the misfortune of being born in a woman’s body. We don’t want to add to that misfortune by creating more female karma that might propel us into another female birth in a future life. We want to do everything we can to have a masculine rebirth, and that includes dropping a lot of the feminine posturing, the [?], the feminine habits that are part of a socialized female identity. We want to drop as many of those as possible. While as men are encouraged as monks to stay men.
We’d (I assume) all agree that it depends on how we choose to define those two words. Someone people choose to say, “There’s no difference between sex and gender, they’re synonyms.” But other people attach them to two different concepts, thus:
Sex and gender are different concepts that are often used interchangeably. The UK government refers to sex as being biologically defined, and gender as a social construct that is an internal sense of self, whether an individual sees themselves as a man or a woman, or another gender identity. They encompass many different identities and may be non-binary (that is, not a man or a woman).
Source:Sex and gender within the context of data collected for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - Office for National Statistics
When I was growing up, as a cis, straight woman, they were assumed to be the same. Homosexuals and “hermaphrodites” were acknowledged but considered anomalies. Other possible identities had no sort of pubic acknowledgement at all: this was 20th Century erasure in action. The Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s changed the status of gays and lesbians. and I remember a period in which lesbians, gays, and straights were all “OK” because their sex and gender lined up in what was considered the “correct” way. But here is an explanation of why I find it necessary to think of sex and gender in the same way that the UK Government Census does. …
I became a mother right at the end of the 70s and was involved in some co-operative child-minding initiatives in the early 80s, a major concern of ours being the sexist attitudes being conveyed to young children in more official centres. We had a small premise where we left babies and preschoolers for minding and play, in return for volunteering a number of shifts each week as carers. There were two babies whose nappies I changed regularly who had ambiguous genitalia. Although I went overseas and lost touch with this group, I was permanently affected by knowing them and their mothers.
The traditional idea was to provide surgery to such babies, based on the ease with which their genitals could be converted to look like one sex or the other, and there seemed to be an assumption that the child could then be socialised to grow up conforming to the results of this surgery. I’ve often wondered how those two kids went (they’d be over 40 years old now) and whether their inner feelings about themselves aligned with the external appearance the doctors chose for them.
Thinking through the possible logical outcomes for them, I find it absolutely necessary to accept that sex and gender are different categories that do align in various ways, including ways that are different from the cis, straight, norms that society has preferred to accept as “normal”. And when I listen to modern voices describing individual paths and experiences, I weep for those people in the past who were denied their own voice and forced to keep quiet and disguise who they really were.
People who are intersex or people with variations in sex characteristics (formerly referred to as “hermaphrodite” but not only was that an incorrect usage, it has since been rejected by intersex people as an outdated slur) were subject to medical erasure in modern times, through coercive and invasive surgeries which (apart from impacting the person in many horrific ways) also had the effect of erroneously cementing the binary notion of gender in our modern minds. But in fact about 3 % or 4% of people are born with variations of sex characteristics. An often mentioned statistic is that number is the same number of people with red hair.
In the time of the Buddha, people with diverse sex characteristics would have been more widely known about. They seem to have faced discrimination and prejudice then just as they do today.
Returning this thread to the topic of erasure in the EBTs, I think there are probably analogies with the erasure of indeterminate genders from modern society and how we see throughout history that concepts of what is “normal” ends up pushing out things that don’t fit neatly into rigid boxes.
