Fewer female atheists? And why do religious women defend their submissiveness?

Hey everyone, so this video will be a response to two interesting and somewhat-related questions I received from my last video. The first question comes from bhig3, who asked why I thought there seem to be less atheist women than men. The second question comes from newstogod, who wondered why women whose religions require them to be submissive (specifically Muslim women and Baptist women) defend their role. I’ve thought about each of these questions a bit, and what I’m stating here will only be my opinion and include a crapload of generalization, so feel free to chime in with yours.

So why do I think there seem to be less female atheists than male atheists? First of all, I’m not even sure that this is the case – although there are clearly more men being vocal about their atheism on the Internet than women, I think that might be attributed to the general trend of women visiting and participating on other Internet sites besides discussion forums , chat rooms, and video sites that discuss religion. Most women of my age, including myself, spend a lot of time on the internet checking email, checking their social networking sites, reading the news, perhaps checking out gossip websites and blogs, and perhaps shopping online. While it seems like a lot of women are not shy at all about revealing intimate details of their personal lives to complete strangers on the internet – there are whole messageboards devoted to fertility or ‘trying to conceive’ where women will post about their menstrual cycles in excrutiating detail – I feel like most women in general, and myself specifically, are shy about making their personal lives an open book for all to read online. I would tell my closest female friends things that I would never discuss on the internet, even under the guise of anonymity that the internet inherently brings to your average Joe or Jane. And I think for many women, their spirituality, or lack thereof, is internalized, not something they wear on their sleeve, hence they’d spend hours browsing articles on religion online in the privacy of their own rooms, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel the desire to proclaim their views from the rooftops, or on random online messageboards, unless they were raised to do so.

Secondly, I feel like in many countries, including the United States, or in any location where a person is raised in a devoutly religious family or community, being openly non-religious can be a stigma that can impact how that person is perceived or treated in his or her family, at the workplace, and in the community. This is just a generalized assumption on my part, but many atheist guys I run across on Youtube seem to be of the high-testoterone male type – they do what they want when they feel like doing it, and they don’t care who they offend in the process. I can’t speak for all women, but I feel like I consciously reject this type of behavior, to the point where I choose my words carefully to try to not offend others and would prefer, in some cases, to avoid confrontation, which means to stay silent. On the whole, I don’t think atheist women would or do face substantially different degrees of discrimination than atheist men, but perhaps in some cases men care less about being outspoken among their peers while women are more sensitive to this.

Moving on to the second question – why do I think women whose religions require them to be submissive defend their role? I’ll start my answer with a bit of personal experience. I was raised Catholic, but thankfully, traditional gender roles were not enforced at home when I was growing up. My mom was a stay-at-home mom by choice, though she had a college degree and a career with which she had supported herself for years prior to starting a family, and my dad was fairly open-minded and never discouraged me from setting high academic goals for myself. I was also an only child; maybe things would have been different had I had brothers. In any case, I would get dragged off to church every Sunday, and around Mother’s Day every year, there would be this reading, which invariably turned me off every time I happened to be paying attention when it was read:

(this is from the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 5)
22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. (endquote)

And I understand now that if one were actually to read the Bible from cover to cover, rather than just focusing on the group of readings read at church or discussed in bible studies, one would could across many, many passages to this effect, especially when reading the ramblings of the old testament where women are routinely sold off like prize cows into matrimony.
And the sad thing is that many religious women actually take these words to heart and see themselves and their potential roles as defined, or rather limited, by their gender rather than their individual skills, abilities, wants, and desires as a human being. It seems like Michelle Duggar defines herself as her uterus, and I foresee one heck of a midlife crisis in her future once she goes through menopause and can’t add more babies to her current brood of eighteen children. And the even sadder thing is that she and her husband Jim Bob, or as we snarkers refer to him, Jim Boob, are pushing this same fate on their eight daughters, teaching them to do the family’s cooking, cleaning, and homemaking while leaving them woefully unequipped to ever work outside the home as anything other than a secretary or nanny. Essentially, these girls are being groomed to get married off young and start popping out babies every few years until they can’t have any more kids, or die trying. Even worse, thousands of kids raised in fundamental religions homes across the world are sheltered from the outside world with highly censored or no internet or TV access whatsoever such that they never get exposure to any belief system besides their own, or they get that exposure once they’ve ‘drunk the kool-aid’ and closed their minds to questioning their own belief system.

I know I personally have a visceral reaction to the thought of ‘submitting’ to a husband no matter what his demand might be. Sure, bondage and sex role play can be fun when consenting individuals who trust each other engage in it, but I can’t imagine living my whole life condemned to submit to my husband’s every whim because I happened to be born without a penis. I certainly didn’t reject religion on these grounds alone, but this certainly was one of the reasons that I began to critically examine the beliefs that I had been raised to accept without question. To be perfectly honest with you all, if tomorrow conclusive evidence was put forward that, say, the God of the Christian bible exists, or Allah of the Quran exists, such that to attain salvation and avoid damnation, I as a women would have to submit myself to males, abandon thoughts of having any career outside the home, and cover my body up with a burqa so that only my husband could see my body, I think I would be sick to my stomach.

But playing devil’s advocate here, isn’t it a fantasy of many women to be taken care of, to be largely sheltered from the harsh realities of the urban jungle and the drug- and violence-infested inner cities, to be treated like a princess by a bevy of potential suitors leading up to a lavish white wedding, to have beautiful babies and be able to raise them without having to go to work, to spend their days decorating their home and baking cookies, and to rely on a clean-cut, handsome husband for protection, monetary support, and to walk them down the aisle at church every Sunday? It’s not my fantasy, but I certainly don’t look down on women who choose this life for themselves, the key word here being choose. I pity any women who are so sheltered that any other path in life would seem foreign, who would feel forced to stifle their desire for a certain type of career, abandon the thought of pursuing any career outside the home at all, or perhaps deny their sexual orientation, because they’ve internalized and accepted their religious beliefs so completely that stepping out of their gender’s predefined role is unfathomable.

So essentially what I’ve implied is an idea that women who are raised to be submissive or conform to gender roles within a particular religion do so, and go as far as to passionately defend their roles, because they have been raised in a sheltered environment where their belief system was regarded as unquestionable and incomparable to other belief systems. I think this is just one potential explanation, and it certainly does not come close to fitting every case. It totally doesn’t work when considering women who convert to a religion later in life – Youtube and the internet are rife with testimonials of women who’ve converted to Islam, burqa and all, as well as women who’ve converted to Christianity, Judaism, and practically every other religion (or have rejected religion, like myself). Why would a woman who was not raised in a religious environment where submissive gender roles were pushed upon her decide to convert later in life to a religion in which she would be essentially inferior to men? Is it pressure from friends or a romantic partner? Is it the desire to engage in the fantasy I described earlier? Is it a search for herself that led her to be vulnerable enough to a group of religious folks who befriended her? Is it fear? Is it an emotional substitute for getting over a previous addiction or trauma? I don’t know, maybe there are good reasons that are grounded in logic and reason and backed up by hard evidence that would even convince skeptics like me, but I haven’t found any yet. Anyway, thanks for listening, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.