Coffee room hock about agunos and halacha

Mislaibeled and Flatbush Girl have at it. Neither knows what they are talking about.

I am not usually into podcasts, but I found Mislaibeled’s latest podcast fascinating, and I suspect many of my readers will as well:

“The Boys” (gross) interview Flatbush Girl (also gross, why cant anyone be adults?) about the aguna crisis. It devolves into a full-on fightfest.

What I found fascinating about this is two things:
1) Laibel and Co come across as quite sexist and misogynistic. They cite lock stock and barrel classic yeshivish perspectives on women in halacha and it does not come across well. Even more so, they admit they don’t know anything about halacha! It’s just coffee room hock! But anyone who is familiar with a yeshivish coffee room would recognize the perspectives.
That said, they are generally correct about some things - but they express it quite misogynistically, with lots of mansplaining. They are mostly correct on is…

2) Flatbush Girl knows zero about how halacha works. Zero. It is like listening to an armchair quarterback who doesn’t know the rules. She may have an extensive library, but halacha requires shimush and internal understanding for a reason. She does seem to recognize it however, and as she points out, the Bais Yaakov system (and, lets be honest, really, halacha) is designed not to allow women to learn halacha from the internal understanding perspective. Girls aren’t allowed to learn gemara and this creates an unfair advantage in this debate. I personally think that many of the perspectives not allowing women to engage with this halachic material stems from ancient biases and perhaps should be allowed, as many in the Modern Orthodox world allow. That said, because she doesnt have this halachic background, Flatbush' Girls’ perspective that the rabbanim aren’t trying to give heterim because of sexism is ridiculous and unfounded.

My take? Agunos require real solutions, not ridiculous ones expressed by obvious amaratzim/os, but we should allow women to develop real understanding in halacha to avoid misunderstandings such as Flatbush Girl’s.