Sexual Politics of Esther: Harem

'He’s the king, of course he has a sleepless night. He’s got a lot of responsibility, hundreds of women that he’s married.'

I'm not entirely sure why the thousands of women should give him sleepless night's he has clearly no concern for them. Similarly his responsibilities didn't prevent him from having a six month party.

Harems are a sickening manifestation of women as property. Xerxes may well have worried about any number of people making political moves or assassination attempts, but somehow I can't imagine he ever worried about rebellion from the women he had locked away - they were far too powerless.

Anyway that's not the point of this post. 

For a brief moment I'm going to agree with MD. He made a very good point that we must not be too quick to judge Xerxes. As we are all capable of and do act in similarly indulgent and oppressive ways. The only difference is the level of power he exerts. 

I have always had a problem with the phrase 'power corrupts' - it lets people off too easily and there are demonstrable people through history with significant power who used it for good. But people with great power if they choose to, inflict more harm on a greater number of people. 

MD also made the excellent point that there are many people with harems today only they keep them on their hard drive. You can find my rants about porn here. People, we need to stop seeing porn as primarily an issue of personal purity and start seeing it as a justice issue and an issue of sexist, degrading, dehumanising abuse.

But there's another kind of harem that occurs in churches. You know the classic male leader, female church members running around doing everything. In his book 'The Resignation of Eve' Jim Henderson imagines what it would be like if all the women in church went on strike one weekend. It's a question worth contemplating.

And in many complementarian churches the language used about women in the congregation implies a level of ownership, certainly their behavior is constantly policed. Joining together repeatedly the word's women and children, calling women Ladies, constantly talking about single women as not yet married. All of these repeated little words and phrases adding together to create a situation where a large group of women jump when the male leader says to. 

We are all capable of and guilty of treating others as property. Using people for our own ends, without acknowledging their equality and common humanity. We develop instead transactional relationships that are often fairly one sided. We all do it on a daily basis even if its just not bothering to smile back at the cashier last time you got your groceries. People can become functions to serve us. Christs example is that we become a servant of all and if we were all trying to pursue this, harem would become impossible.