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Recently I heard a feminist Christian seminarian preach a sermon on the account from Judges 11 of Jephthah and the sacrifice of his daughter. The general idea of the sermon was that Jephthah was the "biblical metaphor" for, specifically, domestic violence, white slavery and child sexual abuse.
The Dutch have a phrase for treating things like they are all the same: they are één pot nat. As this was a Dutch sermon, I could say my first problem with it was its één pot nat approach: everything was jumbled together. On the one hand categories such as domestic violence, forced prostitution and "child sexual abuse"--the latter already a jumble of, among other things, incest, sexual acts compelled by abuse of authority, violent rapes and murders, and sexual encounters involving teenagers who know and choose what they do--all get tossed into one pot and stirred up--and then transferred to the Biblical pot, where they are equated with child sacrifice.
Now, the story of Jephthah is troubling enough as it is, without dragging in extraneous elements which have absolutely nothing to do with it. There is no ground--or at best, very little--for linking issues of domestic violence or sexuality with Jephthah at all, or for suggesting that the scripture writer intended him as a "biblical metaphor" for these things. He simply isn't.
In the course of the sermon, the preacher suggested two grounds for this "it's all more or less the same thing" approach. Jephthah was, after all, a military leader--and that is violence. And all these other things--especially domestic violence--are also violence, so they are all of a kind. And secondly, they are all male violence--war, domestic battering, abuse of power by male authority figures, pimps, pedophiles: in all these things we are talking about men; and Jephthah is a man. We can consider him a metaphor for all these things because he is a male, who committed what in our eyes is a terrible crime, which only a male could have committed--or would have had the power to commit.
Here we suddenly land in the most serious problem that the sermon had--and that our own thinking today has: the idea that the categories of perpetrator and victim can be easily defined, and that they are mutually exclusive. Certain kinds of people--women and children in this case--are naturally "victims"; others--males, pedophiles--are naturally "perpetrators". To know which category somebody belongs in, all one needs to know is who one is dealing with; they then fall neatly into a category, which is moreover a moral category, and one need not bother thinking about an unpleasant situation any longer.
A "victim" is always passive and "innocent;" a perpetrator is always "guilty" and malicious--and never, never with any justification for his actions, or even any reason aside from innate evil, for to admit that there might have been a reason would be to justify his (and I do mean "his") crimes, and question the moral status of his victims. And once one has pigeon-holed the individual involved, they cannot shift identity: one must be purely victim or perpetrator, one or the other, and ne'er the twain shall meet. It keeps situations simple, and makes our moral responses easier.
The first problem is that life isn't like that. It is interesting to note what the sermon did not choose to talk about. The examples used were all sexual, or domestic. It would have complicated things if, for instance, economic examples had been used. What would have happened if the example of sweatshop labor had been introduced? Most of it is performed by women and children, and controlled by males, who control the international economy--so we would still be safe ground that far. But then comes the question--who buys the soccer balls sewn by children in Bangladesh? Who plays with or wears the brand name products made in third world sweatshops, and who buys these products for them? Who wears the sports shoes made by young women in Asian sweatshops? Ah, now the matter becomes ambiguous--people who are naturally "victims" become "perpetrators," as first world women jog in their designer trainers, and buy toys for their children to play with--and we can't have that sort of ambiguity. Better let's not talk about it.
Not all pedophiles are perpetrators; not all are even potential perpetrators, but in the present hysteria all are potential victims. Women and children, "natural" victims, can also, in the right perspective, be per-petrators, even against other women and children. But surely, enough of the time men are the perpetrators, and women and children are the victims, that we can generalize? Don't males hold the overwhelming balance of power in our world, and thus aren't they responsible for the evil done with this power? Can one deny the power of the patriarchy? No, one can't.
But there are enough other nuances--race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, social status, income--that the picture is not that simple. At each level, males may oppress women (and other males)--but women at the top of the pyramid also sit on top of males--and other women--at lower levels, who may in turn sit on top of still others. The categories of perpetrator and victim are not mutually exclusive, and they are not inhabited by people who fall "naturally" into one category or the other, and stay there immovably.
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