First off, I want to mention how retarded that title is. It's incredibly hard to take a paper with the name "Sacred Vaginas" seriously because it feels like some weird satire on femcels or something.
Right off the bat, the argument being presented can be hold with less objective weight because a bias that would imply the information found and presented has been slanted in an attempt to be against what she hates, that being other religions, more specifically those who follow the Bible like Christianity and Catholicism. When you're trying to present something that's meant to be an interpretation, saying, "These people are wrong because I say so," isn't the way to go about an argument, it makes you look childish. I also find it dumb how you bring up scholars, theologians, and other such people with education accreditment, yet seems to fail citing any of them. Citing people who know their shit better than you do, especially if they have scholarly background, fortifies an argument, and you end up not doing so. At the very least though, she does present the upcoming contents of what she's writing about, so she knows some of the essentials of writing a paper, so it at least does that. A flawed, but coherent introduction, which is impressive for Melinda.
The meat of the essay, aka Part II, talking about the passage in Deuteronomy itself is a bit hard for me to go as in depth about in terms of what she's arguing rather that how she's arguing it. I know about as much about the Torah as Melinda seems to, so for the sake of not looking like an ass I won't touch much on that.
Reading through this, not too sure why the Hebrew was included there, especially when you don't really give definition to all of the terms used. A nice touch probably would've also been throwing in the transliteration so people reading this don't fall out of sync with the random Hebrew thrown in, it can get kinda disorientating. Besides this, my main issue with this is that you only cite the Torah, nothing else. While this is forgivable to an extent as this is partially an analytical essay, a good argument brings up outside sources to help argue something, whether it fortifies your point or if it can be used in the case of a counter argument, which leads into my next bit.
When making an argumentative or analytical point, you need to not only address the counter-argument, but also make sure to do your best to prove that isn't the case. You never really bring into light a counterargument, which I expected you to given your burning hatred of other religions than your sect of Judaic belief. It comes off as having a pretty narrow understanding of why other people thing the Torah sees rape as just, which isn't a good look for an essay like yours.
Besides the following, I don't wanna touch most of it because I'm not a religious guru, and I'm not gonna try to present myself as one, and I want this analysis of her writings to be based on what I understand, so looking up bits of the Torah out of context isn't exactly stimulating a debate.
Part III of her paper, "Treating a daughter of Israel like a slave," kinda doesn't really need to be separated in it's own part in all honestly. It kinda falls into the same pits as Part II, but it at least gets to the point a bit quicker and brings up some kind of different context and scenario in her presentation, so it's the best part of the paper.
Finally, her conclusion, which is where it all sort of falls apart again, like a Sloppy Joe if you replaced the buns with baked wads of toilet paper. The first paragraph basically caps off her argument in a decent enough and coherent manner, saying that the readings have been misinterpreted and that the Torah doesn't approve of rape. Fine enough. It all falls apart when she brings her biases back into play, going on about evil pagans and the patriarchy twisting the words of the Torah, and that only the hyper-intelligence of scholars will truly understand what the Torah says, bring up her stupid little buzzwords like, "patriarchy," and, "fairy tales," which comes off as condescending and tops off an argument with impotence. Saying those who don't understand or have misconstrued these passages is a use of collectivism, which you usually want to refrain from in a paper.
Overall, some of this surpassed my expectations, others fell right into what I expected, especially her introduction and conclusion. While the rest of this is structured mostly coherently, it's hard to shake off that she has clear biases that are influencing her in her writings. While I do agree that the Torah doesn't seem to approve of rape, what seems to be her motive makes this crumble the more you think about them and read it, and your presented motive can affect the tone of an essay big-time, whether you intended to make it seem like that was the motive or not. Text isn't as subject to objectivity as oral speech is, you need to make such a thing presented if you want your argument to have an audience and/or seem more transparent.
. You really are wrong and you know it.
