Purity Culture is Rape Culture: A Case Study

[Trigger warning: rape, intimate partner violence] A few months ago, the feminist Christian blogging world had a collective shaking of the heads over Secret Keepers, a modesty movement aimed at girls 8-12 years old. The movement is founded by speaker and author Dannah Gresh. Those of you involved in the complementarian world will recognize her as a “moderate, mainstream” complementarian name – usually pointed to in order to balance out the extreme examples of Driscoll and Piper or even Debi and Michael Pearl.

I have to admire Gresh’s heart for young girls and people. She is really, truly passionate about what she does, and is clearly a good, strong woman, who has benefited from feminism in many ways.

But, I cannot see her work as benign, mainstream complementarian. Because if this is what mainstream looks like, complementarianism and purity culture have a real problem on their hands.

Dannah Gresh’s chastity movement is designed so that it can take a person all the way from childhood to puberty to adulthood firmly ensconced in purity teachings. Her Secret Keepers foundation speaks to girls as young as eight and explains to them the virtues of being modest. On their website (and, according to this video, at conferences on tour), the girls are instructed to conduct a “Truth or Bare” Modesty Test.

The test is framed in such a way as to make young girls hyper-aware of the masculine sexual drive years before they even know what sex is. Granted, the FAQ on the Secret Keepers website states that sex is never directly mentioned from the stage on the tour and though you can’t find a mention of actual sex on the website, this is a technicality. One doesn’t need to talk about intercourse in order to frame the discussion in a way that enforces and supports the male sexual gaze as prime.

Take, for example, these instructions from the Truth or Bare test:

Bellies are very intoxicating and we need to save that for our husbands!

Lean forward a little bit. Can you see too much chest or future cleavage? Your shirt is too low.

It all depends on whether God has chosen to bless you with breasts or not.

The Secret Keeper movement doesn’t even have to mention sex for it to be clear to these young girls that they do not have say over their bodies – at eight years old, these girls are already being told that they do not belong to themselves, that they are a threat merely by existing, and that their private parts belong to a future man. The language and framing within this set function to disempower these young women before they can even understand what bodily autonomy might mean.

As I said last week, the ownership of one’s body, one’s bodily autonomy, is vital to developing a healthy sexual ethic. By telling these children that their bodies are not their own and should be hidden, Secret Keepers – and Gresh, as founder – are reinforcing the idea that women’s bodies are provocative, seductive, things that are threatening (and “intoxicating!”) to men. They literally say they should hide themselves.

The implied consequence of this, as has been discussed ad nauseum in the feminist world (and will continue to be discussed until people get it) is that sexual violence is then, quite possibly, the fault of the woman assaulted.

Think that’s too big of a leap? Consider, then, Gresh’s sermon (audio file) to college students at Grove City College in Grove City, PA, this past Valentine’s Day (yes, Valentine’s Day).

First, she discusses the Hebrew “ahava” – slightly misinterpreted as dangerous, lustful, love-at-first-sight kind of love, though still close the original meaning of romantic love. She seems to be setting up romantic, sexually-tinged love as a dangerous type of love that should be avoided. She has this to say about the story of Dinah in Genesis:

We find in the Bible several instances in-where there are stories where people fell in love. See if some of these are familiar to you. Um, there’s Hamor the Hivite who fell in love with Dinah. The Bible says he was deeply attracted to her and he loved – ahava – her. Well if you know how that story ends, he ended up raping her, which promoted her brothers to seek revenge and started a terrible war.

[Editor’s note: Dinah was raped by Schechem, son of Hamor. And love – ahava – is spoken about after the rape occurs in Genesis, which is sketchy. You can find her story here.]

Within Gresh’s framing, sexual violence is a natural consequence of awakened lust. While she does not blame Dinah, it is not a hard leap to victim blaming here, as Gresh later cautions in her sermon that women are needy and looking for love and will often settle for ahava when they really need agape.

She sets up ahava and agape in contrast, even though in Proverbs 10:12, we see ahava used in a way that is similar to agape. But that’s a minor point, because the illustration Gresh uses to demonstrate agape love – ie, the type of love she wants men to have for women, the type of self-sacrificing love she believes God has for us – is violently abusive (forgive the long quote):

And here’s the thing, as I was looking over my dating years with my husband, as we were college students. I remember one very distinct time. I was thinking ‘when were the times that he expressed agape love to me?’ I could think of a lot of really neat ones, but I thought of one that was probably harder for him than all the rest. You see, we had recently gotten engaged and I was living in an apartment and going to summer school so I could finish up a little early – not that I was in a hurry to get married or anything. And he came to see me. And we hadn’t seen each other for months and we missed each other very much. And it probably took one fifth of a second when he was inside of that apartment for us to realize we were really in love. And we found ourselves horizontal on the sofa. And it really wasn’t okay. You get the picture. But it  lasted about a second and before I knew it, my fiancé picked me up off the sofa, threw me against the wall, and ran outside of my apartment.

[laughter]

Yes, I felt horribly rejected.

[more laughter]

But I brushed myself off and I walked outside and I said “What was that?”

And he said, opening the car door, “Get in, we need a chaperone. I can’t be alone with you. We’re going to Professor Haffy’s house.”

[more laughter]

and we spent the weekend in one of our professor’s homes.

That’s agape.

Taken as a whole, from Secret Keepers up to what she tells college students, the violent, abusive, disempowering vision of love that Gresh presents is truly frightening. It is a culture wherein women are told that their bodies do not belong to themselves, and that sexual and physical violence are both their own fault and part and parcel of romantic, sacrificial love.

This is deeply, deeply problematic. This type of speech - from little girls to college students - is evidence of a rape and abuse culture. It is the kind of culture where women feel like they cannot escape, where they feel like taking abuse is their duty. It is the kind of culture that promotes abuse and rape by telling women that they must think of themselves only in relationship to men, and not as autonomous beings who own their bodies.

Gresh is not some fringe. Gresh is frequently pointed to as an example of a moderate, mainstream complementarian. It appears that even mainstream, moderate complementarians cannot avoid the inherent problems in much complementarian thought – when you disempower women, love starts to look an awful lot like abuse.

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Note: you should read this Grove City alum's take at Wine and Marble. I also recommend this post by Shaney.

Mark Driscoll, Violence Against Women, and Missing the Point

Mark Driscoll published a post about violence against women. I’ll be honest, when I saw the post, I rolled my eyes a little because I really don’t trust the word of a man who was able to make his wife cry with just a look, yells “God hates you!” from the pulpit, and runs a church that has resulted in support groups for “survivors.”* But, since violence against women is, y’know, part of my purview, I read through the post to see where he is at on the idea. These are my thoughts. My apologies that this post is long - I couldn't find a good place to chop it. The Good Stuff

I was pleasantly surprised by a few things that seem to indicate growth on his part. He acknowledges, for example, that rape can and does happen within marriage. There’s no nuance beyond the two sentences he dedicates to it, but the fact that he said it is progress.

He also, at one point, acknowledges that men and women are not essentially different when it comes to human emotions. This, too, is good, especially as one of the most grating things about people who insist on gender roles is their repetition of the falsehood that men and women are different on an emotional level. Again, progress.

I like that he affirms a woman’s fear and distrust of men as a thing that exists. Sometimes, getting men to understand that women often live in a world of heightened fear is quite the battle, so I thank him for affirming, in his own way, that this battle exists.

I also appreciate that he does not address his article toward wives – “how you can deal with abuse” or whatever. This could have very easily been much more horrific than what it is.

For what good there is in the article and what progressive statements are made, however, they are entirely overshadowed by gender essentialist, paternalistic muck.

The Bad Stuff

For an article on violence against women, it seems to spend a lot of time not talking about violence against women – not talking about the church’s duty when confronted with an abusive relationships, how to resolve and understand what happens in an abusive relationships, etc. You know, things that would be useful in a conversation about violence against women – there’s not even a link to the domestic violence hotline/signs of an abusive relationship on the page, which would have been useful.

But this isn’t about how I think the article should look. After all, I come at such a thing from a framework of talking with abuse victims (through my blog) on a daily basis, though not a professional one. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m quite familiar with tactics that abusers use, what abuse does to people, and ways women in an abusive relationship can break free from it. And as it stands, many of the “ways to honor your wife” that Driscoll recommends are either abusive tactics in of themselves or encourage abusive thinking.

First, he seems to think that fidelity is the solution for abusive relationships: men must stop their wandering eyes and remain faithful in order to honor their wives and prevent abuse. I wonder that this is listed first, because men who are faithful to their wives are not necessarily ruled out as abusers. Many men who abuse never, ever stray from their marriage and look like perfect, faithful husbands on the outside. This is what makes abuse so hard to spot and to stop. Fidelity, while a good thing, is not a balm or a cure-all for an abusive relationship.

His second point, on honoring her physically, is the only place in the article where we get anything about a physically abusive relationship. But it lacks depth and merely gives us a checklist of types of physical abuse (including rape). This section’s okay, except for the fact that, because of who it is coming from, I have a lot of trouble seeing it as sincere. This is the man who, remember, wrote in a book about marriage that one look from him caused his wife to burst into tears. I am having a lot of trouble not seeing this section as hypocritical, for that reason alone.

Additionally, in this section is an odd assertion that a man who hits his daughter is committing the vilest of abuses. That is problematic because of the gender specificity. Now, I do a lot of talking about violence against women and rape and abuse. I do this because women are vastly more likely to be victims of abuse, but their womanhood is not what makes the abuse innately wrong. The abuse is wrong because it is abuse, not because of who the victim is. Gendering abuse in this manner runs dangerously close to normalizing violence against men – “it’s worse because it’s a girl” is highly problematic compared to “abuse of a child is bad under all circumstances.”

This paternalistic gendering, too, is why it’s very hard to get anyone to care about prison rape or rape that happens to men. It creates a culture in which abuse against a man is viewed as lesser, or somehow less damaging, because the victim is a male. This is highly problematic and functions to silence male victims of abuse because they sense that they will not be affirmed or understood in their testimonies of abuse.

The REALLY Bad Stuff

Because of his simplistic narratives about gender, it becomes impossible for him to affirm strictly conservative complementarian gender roles and avoid recommending things that are abusive in themselves. We’ll see this in a minute.

But first, his third point, about emotion. Now, above, I affirmed Driscoll’s acknowledgement that men and women both experience emotions. This is great! …if you ignore the rest of the paragraph. He affirms the emotional life of men, and then basically says that men need to provide emotional intimacy to their wives because their wives crave it, which completely erases that men need to be emotionally intimate because they are emotional creatures. It devolves into gender essentialist narratives yet again.

And it is here that the article begins to take a dive. With point five, Driscoll declares that it is the man’s duty to provide, and even that the proper family should be a one-income family. He also states that the reason to be a one income family is because the wife should be staying at home with children, which she “naturally” wants to have. This is a complicated mess.

It’s important to know that making a woman have children is a classic way to make her stay in an abusive relationship. This sort of theology that creates opportunities for abuse, even if it not outright abusive in itself. This sort of advice (have kids!) takes away the agency of the woman to have control over her reproduction in a not-so-subtle way – “God says that to honor you we need to have kids.” Because it is gender essentialist in assuming that every woman WANTS kids (regardless of concerns about financial stability, health, or other factors), it easily hands fuel to abusers to guilt their victims into having children, further trapping them in an abusive relationship.

Then we get to what is likely the most problematic section of the piece:

Many men are not generous with their wives. I know one guy who makes decent money, and he’s totally chintzy with his wife. She gets no spending money, can’t go out to coffee with the girls because he’s a total control freak and a tightwad. Honor your wife financially. I’m not saying you have to live a lavish lifestyle. Live within your means, tithe, save, invest, make a spending budget—and include some margin for your wife. I know it’s hard to live on one income. I know it’s particularly difficult in this economic climate, but that's no excuse to be irresponsible, selfish, or stingy. [emphasis original]

I’m going to give Driscoll the benefit of the doubt here and assume he’s never actually researched abusive tactics. Because if he has, and he still gave this advice, that is a horrifically misguided and evil thing to do. In almost every single tale from abuse survivors, an “allowance” of money is the beginning of the abuse and a tactic for keeping the abused person in the relationship. “Allowances,” “letting the wife have a margin of income” is a means of putting control of the money into the hands of the abuser, making it harder for the abused person to separate from a relationship because they do not have means to support themselves. Advising this as a way to honor your wife is well beyond the pale of human decency.

This paragraph alone drowns out any good things in the article. I would rather Driscoll had not written anything at all. And for that reason, my opinion on him has not changed – he is overzealous, misogynist, and unable to recognize abuse because he is an abuser himself (certainly of his congregation and staff).

Gender essentialism is not going to solve abuse. Men aren’t going to be magically better if they follow Driscoll’s steps to “honor their wives.” Indeed, it needs to be recognized that many of the views espoused here open the doors for abuse by painting women as weaker vessels that need to be protected, which encourages isolationism, lack of openness, and an inability to express emotion in healthy ways on the part of men. What is needed is to assure women that they are not alone, that they have the power to leave, that they are not weak. In this way, Driscoll's brand of complementarian theology fails miserably.

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*Pro-tip: If people leaving your church call themselves “survivors,” your church has a problem.