Dominion Orientated Femininity: Part Two

The first part of Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin's podcast "Dominion-Oriented Femininity" was a fun little ramble through their minimal understanding of the lives of Pilgrim women interspaced with fantasies about how much everyone will adore them when the US is destroyed by God.   In my Bible reading right now, I just finished the major prophets and am moving into the minor prophets of the Old Testament.  Unlike Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, the prophets were not excited on any level about the suffering and destruction that comes when their people were conquered.  I assume the prophets felt fear and desperation about the judgement that God told them was coming because the prophets did not want to see the people they know go through pain and fear.

Anna Sofia/Elizabeth Botkin  (AS/EB) shares their views on the effects that feminism has had on women...kind of...sort of...

Feminism has separated us from the historical legacy that we had and has left us desolate and confused. Two or three hundred years ago a young lady would be taught to act like a strong woman by her great-great-great grandmother, great-great grandmother, great-grandmother, mother. We don't have that legacy any more. Feminism just broke that link. So now I kind of feel like we're living on an island. We don't have examples to look to; we have our mothers but most of our mothers did not have examples to look to. They didn't have mentors. They didn't have grandmothers and great-grandmothers that they could look up to.

I've met very few young women in their late teens or early twenties who are desolate  and none of those were desolate because of a lack of female role models from their own family line.   I've met far more who are confused - but I think that's a normal state of affairs when people are actively deciding important items like who they are attracted to, what they want from a career and what they want from the world.

"Two or three hundred years ago" is a huge time period.  That's the difference between 2018 and 1918.  If the Botkins sisters had even a rudimentary understanding of American history, they would recognize that the US looked very different in 1600, 1650, 1700, and 1750.   And, you know, some women lived to be great-grandmothers in 1600 or 1800 or 1900 - but a lot of women counted themselves as blessed to survive to be grandmothers.  Many more women died in the process of becoming mothers or before their children were grown.   It's been quite rare in human history for a young woman to have an unbroken line of three older maternal relatives alive - let alone an unbroken line of 4 or 5 women.

Huh.  I missed the geography module that discussed how islands lack cultural continuity.   That's really ironic from two young women who lived in New Zealand.  Under that model, I would expect that Iceland, Japan, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, England and Ireland all have identical cultures - and yet 30 seconds with an encyclopedia shows the Botkin girls to be wrong.

I actually see this as a great opportunity because when you think about it it's going to be up to us to rebuild the culture of strong, real womanhood in the world. And we have the chance now to build it afresh on the foundations of sola scriptura. And this will require examining every stereotype, every picture, every example, every image. We can look at them. We can disregard the bad and learn from the good but this really is an incredible opportunity and when you think about it when we live in a culture that doesn't understand what womanhood is you young ladies are going to be the models of this next generation. They're going to be looking to you to set the new standard. This is an incredible opportunity. And what Elizabeth and I will be doing in this lecture is that we will be examining 10 characteristics that constitute the kind of strength and character that our generation will need to face the hardships that are coming and we'll need to rebuild what we've lost.

Well, I now understand why Anna Sofia and Elizabeth have dropped off the face of the planet.  They are cataloguing every stereotype, form and example of womanhood from all of history.  Every_single_one.  This means that we will never see them again.  Becoming comfortable with one much more narrow humanities subject at the PhD level takes an average of 12 years to complete.  If AS/EB started on all cultural images and stereotypes of white, upper class women who lived in the US from the time of the Pilgrims to modern day, they would each use up their entire (God-willing long) lifetime and still not be done.  Multiply this by each socio-economic status and each minority status in the US - then by all of the culture in written history. 

Vaya con Dios, queridas.....

Number One: A dominion woman is a woman of God.

When it comes to becoming the sort of woman that we want to be the first thing that we need to understand is that what we want really doesn't matter. Around the time that we started writing our book - and I'm sure that you young ladies have experienced this as well -people would be asking us, "Ok, so what do you want to do? What are you going to do with your life? What do you want to do?" And I actually know that that's a loaded question. It... it doesn't just mean what kind of career do you want to have; it really means what causes will you be giving your life for? What God are you going to serve? What are you going to live and die for? What is your life going to count for? That's really what the question means. And it comes down to this ultimately: are we going to pursue what we want for our lives or what God wants for our lives?

There is nothing that I enjoy more than when young people inform me that a question that is truly a form of small talk is actually deeply loaded.   When acquaintances ask, "So what are you going to do now that you've left school?", they are simply giving a young person a chance to discuss their near-to-the-future plans.   Believe me, responding with "Well, I've decided that God has called me to protect the future of narwhals.  I'm certain that that's the cause I'm supposed to live and die for" will stop the other person dead in their tracks - and not only because they're not 100% sure what a narwhal is.

Most religions do not imbue using the aptitudes or skills given by God as being selfish or turning away from God.   Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin have abdicated all responsibility for choosing a career onto their father.  Oh, sure, they wrap the idea in a lot of flummery language about authority and protection - but they've essentially decided that they have no responsibility to determine how their skills could be used to further God's kingdom.  Likewise, the girls behave like girls in that they will not challenge their father on his failure to find them a spouse.  The Botkin family believes in a courtship/engagement/marriage series that is much closer to an arranged marriage than couple-initiated style of the US.  That's fine - as consenting adults, if the Botkin sisters want arranged marriages, I support their right to do so.  The problem facing Elizabeth and Anna Sofia is that the trade-off in an arranged marriage is that the children give their parents the right to arrange a match in exchange for being presented with one or more suitable option of spouse.   Geoffrey Botkin has utterly failed to hold up his end of the bargain and needs to either find spouses for the girls or free them to choose their own spouses.  That will not happen unless the Botkin sisters stand up for themselves.

There's an ancient saying that I first read in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" which goes like this, "What every woman wants most is to have her own way." I think that's true. And I think this statement captures the essence of feminism. It's a desire to be a law unto ourselves. It's a desire basically to usurp God's authority and to determine what is right and wrong for ourselves. It's a desire to be God. Or to be a goddess. And it's stands against God's Law his law of hierarchy and authority and ultimately against God Himself. And the dominion oriented woman is submitted to God. And she's submitted herself entirely to what his will for her life will be. She said, "I am not God; you are God. Not my will be done but your will be done." And the way that she know what His Will is is that she seeks the Scriptures diligently on her own for herself. She doesn't wait for someone else to tell her what to do or how to live and the principles that Elizabeth and I are about to bring to you today really aren't going to make sense and they're not going to work if you don't have this attitude.  If you don't fear God. And they might sound like good ideas, they might sound romantic, they might sound practical, but if you don't have the right attitude, if you don't truly fear God as your sovereign, as your head, then they are really not going to work for you. So dominion oriented femininity requires understanding that we've been bought with a price we do not belong to ourselves it's not our way it's God's way. And now I think Elizabeth's bringing us number two.

I hate how the Botkin Sisters drop quotes from famous works into their speeches and books.  The intended implication is that Anna Sofia and Elizabeth are educated to standards that far exceed public school education.  The problem occurs when someone who knows the work hears the quote.  Anna's point in this section of the speech is that feminism over turns God's Divine Plan for humanity which is that women are subservient to men.  To support that theme, she picked lines 111-112 from the Wife of Bath's Tale which I have as "Some say the things we most desire are these / Freedom to do exactly as we please".  (I'll assume that they have a very different translation that ignored meter and rhyme....)  And that's the issue.  If Anna Sofia had really read "The Wife of Bath's Tale", why didn't she pick lines 214-216 " A woman wants the same self-sovereignty / Over her husband as over her lover, / And master him; he must not be above her." Those verses are spot-on for the overall theme - but they would require having read the work since the second set of verses don't have the wide appeal that the first set does.

What really kills me is that "The Wife of Bath's Tale" is an easily accessible piece of literature.  It was written in Middle English so reading a Modern English translation is perfectly acceptable outside of advanced post-secondary studies.  The story is relatively short and snappy.  There's not a lot of obscure references or ideas that need to be ferreted out; the Wife of Bath is a breezy, bawdy old woman who is reminiscing over her husbands, her choices on who to marry and how to live in marriage, and what women inside a patriarchal society really want.   It's an easy, fun read for high school students - so why didn't the Botkin Sisters read the Tale?

The idea that a dominion-oriented woman doesn't wait for other people to tell her what to do is deeply, though unintentionally, ironic.    A dominion-orientated woman will spend her entire life doing what a man tells her to do.  She will follow her father's orders prior to marriage and her husband's orders after marriage.  Sure, AS/EB will expect women to so completely absorb their father's or husband's goals that the women can act independently to fulfill that goal - but that's not really the sign of independent thinking. 

I think I'm going to start adding the caveat that any advice I give other humans will only work if the other humans are right with God.  That's such an amazingly universal cop-out that it will cover any horrible advice I give.  My advice caused the engine of your car to seize into a ton of solid metal?  No, that happened because you weren't right with God.  Your boss fired you when you responded to a normal office request by screaming, "I am not in submission to you!  THIS is the hill I'm going to die on!" as I told you to.  No...you'd still be employed if you were right with God.   

The next post on this topic is long - and it's not my fault.  From this point on in the podcast, AS/EB are expounding on the 10 characteristics of dominion women.  The issue is that point number two is discussed for an insanely long period of time....and in the process they skip point three entirely.  Whoops.