“Oh, Hell. I’m a fan of all seven.” – Malcolm Reynolds Serenity
What if the sins enumerated in the Bible weren’t universal, but instead were formulated to describe a masculine perspective? If so then they would describe the negative aspects of men, not necessarily of women. I’ve found this concept fascinated for decades because it points to something I have found in my work, that women don’t tend towards the same sins as men, but are told that they do and so work to redeem themselves from something they aren’t doing.
I think Dr. Valerie Saiving describes it best in her article “The Human Situation: A Feminine View”, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion
“It is my contention that there are significant differences between masculine and feminine experience and that feminine experience reveals in a more emphatic fashion certain aspects of the human situation which are present but less obvious in the experience of men. Contemporary theological doctrines of love have, I believe, been constructed primarily upon the basis of masculine experience and thus view the human situation from the male standpoint. Consequently, these doctrines do not provide an adequate interpretation of the situation of women — nor, for that matter, of men…
…The temptations of woman as woman are not the same as the temptations of man as man, and the specifically feminine forms of sin…have a quality which can never be encompassed by such terms as ‘pride’ and ‘will to power.’ They are better suggested by such terms as triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus, dependence on others for one’s self-definition; tolerance at the expense of standards of excellence…In short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.”
