An excerpt from 5 REASONS PURIM IS THE ULTIMATE FEMINIST HOLIDAY by Rishe Groner
1. The entire story stars with women’s rights
The story of Purim is one of topsy-turviness, where everything ends up “upside down” from how it was intended. So it’s fitting that we begin with the tale of Ahasuerus, rich and spoiled king over most of the known world of Persia and Medea, who decides to summon his beautiful wife Vashti to the feast he’s presided over for 180 days.
Drunk as a skunk, he asks his wife to show up and show off (some say he specifically requested her to be naked), and she’s not having any of it. She refuses adamantly, and thus arrives the “what if” brigade — the king’s advisors who are most concerned that this precedent set by none other than Queen of the Land might *gasp* encourage all the women throughout the king’s 127 provinces to rebel against The Man of The House.
The opening part of this saga ends not only with Vashti’s downfall, but a very emphatic decree written by the king’s advisors “that all men shall be sovereign in their households.” Sounds very 5th century BCE to me! Commentators say this piece of the story is paramount to the later narrative for the simple reason that a nation that subjugates its women and doesn’t allow them a voice is a nation that moments later sanctions and celebrates genocide. Because only when the women are suppressed does this kind of drama go down.
2. Vashti and Esther, the two powerful queens
Vashti is the queen who says no and shapes the future of the entire nation as a result, paving the way for Esther — a nice Jewish girl who lives in the suburbs of Shushan with her uncle and adopted dad, Mordechai.
An excerpt from Who is the real hero of Purim? In the #MeToo era, we should reconsider the Bible’s female icons.
By Ruth Balinsky Friedman
February 28, 2018
Esther’s role in the story is quite complicated. As a child I was taught that after Vashti was banished, Achashverosh (Ahasuerus) held a beauty pageant to find a new queen, and Esther was the most beautiful of them all. This all leads to Esther eventually saving the day, and the Jewish people.
But the text tells a different story. As part of this pageant, Esther was in fact one of the many young maidens who were taken against their will and forced to spend a night with the king. The text also tells us (Chapter One) that a new edict was established to force all women to submit to their husbands. To be a woman in Esther’s time was to live a life of total submission to male authority. It was into this new environment that Esther was brought. She had no choice but to submit.
We have to be very careful about how we talk about who is a hero in the story. Traditionally, Esther has been praised and Vashti rejected as a foil to Esther. A recent feminist response has been to flip the paradigm and to embrace Vashti as a symbol of female empowerment, and in turn to see Esther as a symbol of female submission. But we see now that this characterization is wrong. Esther was a victim of abuse. She was taken from her home and brought into an environment in which to submit to male authority meant she would survive. She knew from Vashti what happened to women who fought back.
The Book of Esther By Stacey Zisook Robinson
That blush on my cheek?
It's paint.
And I have glittered my eyes
and robed myself in the finery
of silk and gossamer,
lapis and gold—
and whored myself for your salvation.
You asked for no thoughts.
You merely offered my body
to the king—
my life forfeit
if my beauty failed.
You asked for no ideas
and I gave you none,
though I had a thousand,
and ten thousand more.
Diplomacy was played on the field of my body,
the battle won in the curve of my hip
and the satin of my skin,
fevered dreams of lust
and redemption.
That blush on my cheeks?
It is the stain of my victory
and my shame.
Excerpt from Consent Accidents and Consent Violations - Charlie Glickman, PhD
A consent violation happens when someone chooses to ignore or cross someone’s boundaries. People do that for a lot of reasons, including selfishness, arrogance, not caring about their partner, getting off on harming someone (which is distinct from the consensual experience of BDSM), or being somewhere else on the douchebag-rapist spectrum.
Consent accidents, however, are different because they happen because of error, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or not having all the information. That doesn’t make it less painful. If you step on my toes, it hurts whether it was an accident or on purpose. But how I approach the situation and what we do to resolve it might look very different.