You Cannot Decenter Men While Still Kneeling to One
Women keep being told to decenter men as though it is a lifestyle preference.
It is not.
For many of us, decentering men is survival.
It is what happens when you finally understand how much of your life has been organized around male approval, male comfort, male authority, male desire, male entitlement, male violence, male moods, male stories, male godhood.
It is what happens when you realize men have been positioned as the sun in almost every system you were handed, and you have been expected to orbit. Spiritually. Sexually. Politically. Economically. Morally. Emotionally.
Decentering men is not a brand. It is what a woman does when she is trying to stay alive inside the wreckage of a world built to consume her.
And no, you cannot decenter men while you are still worshipping one.
You cannot build a liberated life while kneeling before a father god, praising a son, quoting male apostles, obeying male interpreters, and calling that freedom.
You cannot decenter men while your spiritual life is still arranged around sacred masculinity.
That is not liberation. That is patriarchy with incense on it.
That is male supremacy in a halo.
That is the oldest con in the book: take domination, make it holy, and then punish women for noticing.
Christianity taught women to romanticize our own diminishment.
To call obedience virtue.
To call submission beauty.
To call silence peace.
To call endurance holiness.
To call being erased love.
It taught women to swallow our rage and name it grace.
It taught women to mistrust our own appetites, our own knowing, our own bodies, our own authority. It taught us that power is masculine, leadership is masculine, divinity is masculine, and the highest female aspiration is to be good enough at surrender that men stop feeling threatened by our existence.
And people want to call that neutral.
People want to call that faith.
No.
It is political. It is architectural. It is a structure built to keep women spiritually disarmed.
Because once men are in the heavens, they are much harder to uproot on earth.
Once fatherhood is divine, patriarchy stops looking like an invention and starts looking eternal.
Once maleness becomes sacred, women are no longer merely arguing with husbands, pastors, institutions, or states. We are arguing with God himself, or at least the god we were handed by men who wanted a universe stamped in their image.
That is why this matters.
Because women are out here trying to heal while still dragging a sanctified male order around in our nervous systems.
We are trying to decenter men in dating while centering them in theology.
We are trying to reclaim our bodies while worshipping inside a religion that taught us our bodies were dangerous.
We are trying to recover self-trust while bowing to a system that trained us to distrust female knowing from the beginning.
We are trying to become free while still calling patriarchy sacred.
Best case: that contradiction will tear a woman in half.
I am tired of pretending it is a small theological difference and you should be too.
It is not.
It is the difference between a spiritual life that belongs to you and one that was built to keep you compliant.
It is the difference between reverence and captivity.
It is the difference between the sacred and the cage.
Women do not need a softer church.
They do not need better branding on the same submission script.
They do not need one more female pastor explaining why hierarchy is actually loving when done right.
They do not need prettier language for their own subordination.
They need to tell the truth.
The truth is that many of us were trained from girlhood to confuse male rule with divine order.
The truth is that Christianity has often functioned as an enforcement system for female obedience with a worship soundtrack.
The truth is that generations of women have been spiritually broken in rooms that called that breaking discipleship.
The truth is that a religion can speak of love while still teaching women to disappear.
The truth is this:
You do not decenter men by refusing to text them back while still building your inner life around a throne full of them.
You do not decenter men while your morality is still ventriloquized through male mouths.
You do not decenter men while you are still taught that the masculine is ultimate, original, saving, lawful, and close to God, while the feminine is derivative, suspect, tempting, emotional, secondary, and in need of control.
You do not decenter men while kneeling.
For some women, leaving men at the center of our lives will require leaving them at the center of our cosmology too.
And that is not bitterness.
That is not rebellion for rebellion’s sake.
That is not immaturity.
That is not being unable to submit.
That is a woman deciding that her soul will no longer be organized around her own diminishment.
It is a woman refusing to call the cage sacred.
It is a woman remembering that survival sometimes looks like blasphemy to the people who benefit from your obedience.
