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.

_________

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

Rejecting the Premise: Questions of Sex and Sin

When I was in high school, I attended a Bible camp out in the Black Hills every summer. It was always a good, fulfilling, fun time for me. Every year – like in many Bible camps across the country – there’d be one night set aside for the “sex talk.” The content varied from year to year, but the message was the same each time: “sex outside of a marriage is a sin and you must show utmost remorse for it. Forever. And it’ll probably ruin you for life. So don’t do it. Also, you will get pregnant and die.” Okay, that last part is from the movie Mean Girls, but you get the picture.

The narrative never shifted. There was always testimony from someone who had “done it” or come close and regretted it deeply. Usually, it was a guy or girl who got drunk and slept with someone at a party (consent issues were, of course, never addressed). But one year, one of the youth pastors took the mic.

This man was probably twice our age. He had been married since his early 20s. We settled in for his tale of woe, sure that he’d committed some too-early action with a high school girlfriend – that’s usually how these stories go.

But, no. He’d only ever dated his wife, he tearfully told us, and they had gotten engaged a few months into their relationship. After their engagement, they began to struggle with physical boundaries, and, a couple of months before the wedding, committed “the ultimate sin.” They both had been living with guilt and regret and shame for years.

Even at the time – I was in the midst of my purity craze, proudly wearing my ring every day and proclaiming to any who would listen that I was saving myself for my future husband – I thought this was a little weird. They were engaged at the time. They were in love. They’d only ever been with each other and had never strayed.

Surely, all this guilt and shame and regret were…disproportionate? Was sex before marriage seriously that powerful?

It challenged my prefabricated narrative about sex before marriage. These two had had done it – while engaged – and had spent much of their marriage feeling guilty about it. But they hadn’t caught an STD, they hadn’t developed totally unhinged sexual morals (eg, they didn’t start sleeping with everything with a pulse, which we’d been warned was a consequence of premarital sex), and their marriage hadn’t fallen apart.

It seemed like they were beating themselves up over nothing.

Of course, I didn’t allow myself to ask these questions until years later. At the time, I felt a sort of vague discomfort at the story, but didn’t connect it to the disproportionate shame or guilt. I simply didn’t have the tools before me to recognize that my narrative of “how things work” might not reflect reality, even in the face of a story that challenged my ideas of what would happen. I simply didn’t have the tools to recognize that shame and guilt were wreaking havoc, and unnecessarily so.

I have a feeling that the men at The Gospel Coalition are like the teenaged me. They simply don’t have the understanding or the vocabulary to grasp the difference between criticism of shame-filled rhetoric and the green lighting of (what they consider) heresy.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for this piece.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, writers Sarah Bessey and Elizabeth Esther kicked off an impromptu sex week in blogging that started up a firestorm. They discussed the shame that purity teachings had heaped on their heads – one for having sex before marriage, the other for idolizing virginity to the point that crushes were bad. Rachel Held Evans jumped into this and asked “Do we idolize virginity in modern evangelicalism?” Preston Yancey wrote a couple of posts about shame and grace. Emily Maynard discussed how virgin and non-virgin are insufficient categories for whether or not someone is a faithful Christian. Joy Bennett addressed the idea that “marrying a virgin” is probably not going to happen in this world of shifting demographics and "delayed" marriage. Leigh Kramer discussed the problematic nature of sexuality teachings for singles being determined by married folk. Sarah Markley talked about the difference between virginity and purity. Jake Meador talked about virginity as product. And Tony Jones hopped in with a confusing piece that had a provocative title but didn’t necessarily say anything more than a call for a new and different sexual ethic.

This is the narrative of what happened. This is the reality of what they were saying: a big, giant discussion starting with a call to stop shaming people regarding sex and evolving into a multitude of voices, all contributing variations on the theme of “what is a healthy sexual ethic?”

But, The Gospel Coalition decided to invent its own narrative. The piece, written by Bart Gingerich, refers to this collective diversity of voices as “commitment free critics,” and says, “The underlying complaint seems to demand that we accept different decisions without critique or even regret.”

Soon after this was posted, the comment section and Twitter erupted. And I began to see a common refrain from people supporting The Gospel Coalition’s piece: “If you believe that premarital sex is a sin, then why don’t you just say it?” As though one could possibly sum up these issues in a 200-word comment or a 140 character tweet.

The problem here is that the Gospel Coalition is trying to simultaneously cede our point – that the shaming of purity culture is a problem – and hold onto it. They are saying, “sexual ethics aren’t a salvation issue,” while also demanding that we meet their expectations of orthodox.

And that’s the wrong conversation, the wrong questions, the wrong discussion.

Asking “do you believe this is a sin?” is fundamentally the wrong approach. I refuse to answer the question (and I suspect the other authors cited in the piece would agree, though I do not speak for them) because defining whether or not something is a sin is not a conversation I’m interested in having. I reject the premise out of hand. Drawing rules and lines and definitions is not the way one moves toward a healthy sexual ethic.

Now, the Gospel Coalition’s piece also linked (subtly) to a post I made well over a year ago, in which I attempted to address (rather poorly) this question. It didn’t occur to me at the time of writing that the post would be so misread and galvanizing. Do I say in the post that I don’t think premarital sex is a sin? Yes, I do. But my larger point is that the portions of the Bible from which we draw conclusions about modern dating and “fornication” are so steeped in patriarchal and cultural mores that we have to have much more discernment in how we approach the topic.

Basically: I didn’t have the language then that I do now to realize that I was trying to have the wrong conversation.

The damage wreaked by the purity movement is the constant background radiation of my blog. Developing a healthy approach to sexual ethics is my goal. What that means for me, personally and professionally, is that I simply, fundamentally don’t care about the questions The Gospel Coalition is asking. Because when someone is having sex does not matter to me as much as whether or not they are doing so in a manner that is healthy, respectful, consensual, and gracious.

I told my mom on the phone the other day something I think succinctly sums up the issue: We spend so much effort and energy telling people to say “no” that we’ve not equipped them with how to say “yes.”

That is my concern; that is my wheelhouse. Healthy approaches and attitudes to sex first. Then we can talk about whether or not marriage is the ideal (it might just be).

We don’t achieve a healthy conversation by creating lines and drawing rules about what is or is not a sin – despite the Gospel Coalition’s professions, every time they tell us the Scriptures are clear, they are drawing a line in the sand.

We don’t help people by condemning them and saying they should feel shame – despite the professions of Mr. Gingerich, this is the theology of the body he propounds when he says, “For the longing singles among us, we have heard it said that love is patient. So go out there, date, and maybe get married. Just do not make allowance for lustful flesh.”

We don’t move the theology of the body forward when we invoke Gnostic imagery by implying that the flesh is something to be subsumed and tightly controlled.

We don’t create a healthy sexual ethic when we ask the wrong questions about sin.

__________

Graphic by the astoundingly awesome Dani Kelley. You can see more of her portfolio here.

A Monstrous God

[Trigger Warning: graphic description of rape, really godawful rape apologia] We don't know her name or even that much about her.

What we do know is that she was twenty-three years old.

What we do know is that she is a young woman who was simply trying to get home.

What we do know is that she died, sedated but not in peace, in a hospital in Singapore, after a group of men bashed her in the head and shoved an iron rod inside her.

What we do know is that it took this monstrously disastrous event to compel a government to take action, not the thousands of women and children raped on a daily basis through the sex trafficking trade that is rampant in New Dehli, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

A couple of days after this woman's death, I received an anonymous comment on this blog (that was trashed and banned the second I comprehended what it was saying) that did not just imply  but outright stated that rape exists as a corrective to female sin, and that "maybe more women should be raped so they can get good with God."

This unknown woman on a bus in New Dehli was raped because six men decided to rape her. They saw her as a woman out of her sphere, yes; at the heart of it, they hated the fact that she could exist in the same space as them. They hated her.

What possible sin could this woman have committed? In her attackers' minds, her existence was sin enough.

Rape is not the will of some sky-Being to teach us a lesson. I cannot even use "God" in that sentence, because one cannot call such a monstrous creature God. God does not ordain this pain. God does not will that people suffer. God does not hate women. And God does not punish women merely for existing.

It's the rapists who do that.

It's the men who support and apologize for the rapists by mansplaining that "oh, that wasn't rape; it was just sex you didn't want."

It's the journalists who hem and haw and talk about how an 11 year old gang rape victim "acted like she was 20."

It's the mothers who tell nine year old rape victims that no one will want to marry them now.

It's the magazines that plead for us to "hear the rapist's stories" while ignoring the cries of their victims.

It's the culture that gives women ways to "protect themselves" but refuses to teach men that "yes and only yes mean yes."

Evil is not a corrective from God to teach us a lesson. To believe so is to worship a devil.

Tea Time: A Lesson in Satire

Hello, Christian blogging sphere. Come in, come in. Don’t worry, there’s enough virtual space here. I’ve made some tea for the occasion – it’s Earl Grey, and there’s sugar and milk on the table over there, help yourselves. Now, I’ve brought you all here today in a possibly impossible attempt to correct something I keep seeing. It’s a pattern that seems to be the result of, perhaps, ignorance? Misunderstanding? Lack of adequate education on the topic? Regardless, a corrective is needed, and though I fully admit that I may not be the best person to offer this lesson, I’ve yet to see anyone else step up to the plate. So here we are.

Come on.  Put down the cat. You’re freaking him out.

Okay. Listen close. Today’s lesson is on: SATIRE.

Satire is a magical, mystical thing. It’s the unicorn of jokes – when you get it right, there are flocks of virgins who can- wait, no. That’s not right. Let me start again.

Satire is a genre of literary writing that is like porn – you know good satire when you see it, but it’s really hard to explain what, exactly, it is. It shares many characteristics with things that are plain old offensive, and so it can be easy to mistake merely offending people for writing satire, especially if you were trying to be funny.

This is a bad mistake to make. An offense is not a satire, nor is a satire always across the board offensive.

Here’s the skinny: a good satire does offend. But this must be done on purpose, and with an eye to whom you want to offend. Satire aims upward – it offends those who are in power, those who are comfortable. It discomfits them.

Think of the English world’s most famous satire – Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” I’m sure you’re familiar with it – Swift proposes, as a response to famine, that the rich simply eat the babies of the poor. It was offensive because it suggested that the rich were so heartless as to use the poor in that manner. It hit close to home, as it were, for the group who was in power by mocking their attitudes toward a vulnerable group. This is good, hyperbolic, offensive satire.

It is good because it mocks a group in power – it is meant to bring them down a notch. Good satire, in this day and age, is a tool of the oppressed.

Some so-called satire, as we’ve seen quite frequently in the blogging sphere, tends to go after marginalized groups. This is seen as edgy – poking fun at people who write about their fundamentalist past, perhaps, or women who don’t fit the mold of “good Christian girl” in church. “Let’s make a joke about them!” the thinking seems to be, “Because that’s something out there!”

But what you think is out there may not be so far out there in the lives of the people you are mocking. “Edginess” for you is often the stuff of their everyday life. Satire of marginalized groups is not, in fact, edgy or radical, but the day in day out offense that is every day life to the marginalized. This is not good satire. This is merely mockery of an already mocked group. This offense cannot be covered by the claim of “satire” because good satire calls out institutional wrongs. It does not reinforce them.

You may want to put down your tea for this next part – I don’t want any of my nice mugs breaking when you drop them.

Maybe, just maybe, you’re not good at satire. Maybe you’re just reallllllly good at offending people.

If you’re finding that a lot of people – a surprising amount of them – are calling you a douchebag for a piece of your satire, it’s entirely possible that what you thought was satire was just an offensive joke at the expense of a marginalized group and that you were, in fact, being a douchebag.

As I’ve written before, this doesn't have to be your undoing! But, this part is going to be really hard. Our temptation, when a joke goes south, is to dig in our heels, hide behind the slippery label of “satire” and claim that the other person just doesn’t get our sense of humor. But saying that someone doesn’t get your joke needs to be done with a lot of thought and care – sometimes, it’s entirely possible that someone just didn’t get it.

That needs to be our last resort, not our first. The first thing we need to do is take a long hard look at our joke, and ask who was the butt of it. And then we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and think, “did that come across clearly?” If the answer to the second question is a no, what we do then, my dear class, is apologize.

Recently, writer James Gunn came under fire for a satire he did that crossed the line from offending power structures to offending the marginalized. He wrote a thing about sluts and lesbians (I won’t get into detail because that doesn’t matter here) that was far too close to the language used to oppress women in everyday life. And when the criticism was brought up, he looked at what he wrote, realized it wasn’t as funny as he originally thought, and he apologized. This is a good example of how to apologize for poorly done satire; go read it. I've provided copies for you on the table by the door on your way out.

That apology, friends, is massively important. Sometimes, people don’t get your satire. That’s fine; it happens. There are always going to be people who believe that headlines from The Onion are real. But sometimes, when we cross the line from satirizing a power structure to actually being its enforcers by mocking the marginalized, we need to sincerely step back and apologize. This helps maintain trust with our readers. It shows personal growth, a willingness to admit failure, and a love of truth, not love of our own douchebaggery.

So I hope you enjoyed your tea and your lesson for today. Now get out; I have TV shows to watch and a book to write.

Checking Privilege: A Lesson in Pain

The other day, I was surfing Facebook (like ya do) and came across an argument unfolding on a friend’s page. The friend – who identifies as lesbian – had posted a picture and lamented that someone at her (Catholic) university had identified heterosexual marriage as “true” marriage on a poster in a public area at the college. The argument that ensued was not about marriage equality – rather, only tangentially – but it was enlightening when it comes to a form of false equivalence that pervades and halts the engagement of many evangelicals on political discussions. These discussions include not just marriage equality but extend to matters of race, slut-shaming, trans* acceptance, and religious tolerance. It’s a close cousin to the “you have to be tolerant of my intolerance!” argument, but is more closely summarized as “my feelings of discomfort are just as (if not more) important than your experience of oppression.”

It’s a false equivalence for the ages!

My friend’s FB debate was a perfect exemplification of this. The person arguing (seen in the screenshot below) claimed that her pain at being essentially called a “bigot” was just as important as my friend’s pain at seeing someone in her dorm invalidate her existence and right to love whomever she wants.

[image description: a facebook post reading: "This is what sucks about freedom. I think everyone has a right to feel what they feel, but no matter what, it is going to hurt some people. There are people who feel hurt by LGBTQ discrimination... There are some people who feel hurt that the LGBTQ can have marriage equality. The important thing is to recognize that we all feel...is there a right or wrong here? I'm not really sure. This is a bad analogy, but something like if a kid has a dad who was attacked by a dog when he was young, that dad is afraid of dogs and is always telling his kid, 'dogs are bad,' 'dogs will hurt you, etc,' when that kids best friend gets a dog his response is to be afraid for his friend and he might tell him 'you shouldn't have a dog' because that's all he has ever been told...and the friend may say he's jealous or he's mean, but really that friend is just confused or scared... When it comes to stuff like this, I think someone will always be hurt by it. It hurts when something your familiar with changes...and I think we just have to recognize that freedom and equality mean the freedom to express yourself and the right to like or dislike what's going on with the LGBTQ community."]

The simple and easy response to this is a laugh and a “hell no.”

But since this is a blog, and I like to explain things, I’ll expound for those in the back who may have missed the lesson.

First, I want to acknowledge for the privileged that, yeah, being called a bigot kind of sucks. A couple of months ago, I said something that caused a friend of mine to basically call me racist. It sucked, and my instinct was to lash out and say, “No I’m not and it hurts that you called me that!”

But, y’know, he was right. I’d said something incredibly stupid that amounted to white-splaining. It was bad and he was absolutely right in calling me out on it. But the only reason that I was able to handle that without an explosion of drama and fighting was that I realized a basic principle: my pain at having my privilege called out in no way trumps the pain of the oppressed. In fighting back against that simple scale, in the debate loses. Everyone.

The marginalized person you’re talking to? They learn that they can’t trust you to understand their pain with care.

The people listening in? Learn that you are unapproachable when it comes to matters of justice.

And you? You lose your credibility.

And here’s why: if you think your momentary pain at being called out as an agent of injustice in any way trumps the injustice that is happening, you have essentially proven the point. You are, indeed, an agent of injustice if you think your pain at being called a bigot, for whatever reason, trumps the pain of the person who won’t be able to visit her wife in the hospital, trumps the pain of the person forced to live every day as a gender they feel is not them. Your pain at being called a bigot is fleeting, temporary. Nothing in your life actually changes unless you want it to (you may lose friends for it, yes, but you can move on with your identity intact).

Basically: It's not about you. Your privilege as a part of an oppressive, patriarchal, racist, heteronormative, sexist, neurotypical and cis-sexist system? It is only about you insofar as you are acting as an agent of that system.

And this, ultimately, is why you are the one who shuts down debate when you demand, in the face of an oppressed person telling you of their pain, that your pain take priority, that your momentary bad feelings at being called a name is somehow bigger and greater.

At this point, I don’t care about being nice when it comes to injustice. I don’t care about the pain you have to go through to change – because giving up and checking your own privilege in a discussion is, in fact, a daily, painful process. If you are continuing to be an agent of injustice and intolerance, I will continue to call you on it.

And for God's sakes, don't respond like this:

[image description: a facebook conversation between two people. The first person says, "Cause, really, isnt' saying 'I don't like that people like gay marriage' the same thing as saying 'I don't like that people don't like gay marriage?'" The second person responds: "As a lesbian, my right to marriage infringes on no one else's. I'm not asking YOU to take part in gay marriage. And yes, I will freely say that people who don't 'like' gay marriage are no friends of mine. It's not a matter of liking or not liking. It's simply a matter of civil rights." And the first person responds again: "Yeah, but then isn't that discrimination, too? And if not, why isn't it?"]

The Magical Mystery Of Marriage

I was once told, after I said that I didn’t plan on changing my name if/when I got married and wasn’t all that sure about joint bank accounts, that I am what is destroying America. Huh. And here I thought it was terrible economic decisions, wars paid for by credit card, and an massive and increasing inequality gap.

But nope, women not changing their names so they have an “easy out” from marriage are what’s destroying America.

Congratulations, fellow America-destroyers! I think I should get a cool title, like “DIANNA: DESTROYER OF WORLDS!”

In all seriousness, though, it seems that in Christian America, marriage (particularly straight marriage, but we won’t get into that) is the answer to all society’s ills. Even Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney illumined this philosophy when he argued that marriage is a solution to gun violence and that “broken homes” are what leads people to commit gun violence. He of course stated in this in front of the son of a single mother, The President of the United States.

Indeed, “marriage” as an answer to societal ills isn’t a new phenomenon. Bush 43 was a fan of a welfare program that told women they should get into a stable marriage relationship to solve their financial woes. Rhetoric against marriage equality claims that the gays will destroy marriage, which will destroy society. In the mid-20^th century, when women gained more rights and it made it easier for them to escape from bad marriages, gloom and doom from the religious right proclaimed that society was now going to die. Interracial marriage was, like marriage equality, considered a threat to society because of the same sanctity of marriage rhetoric we see now. Indeed, even some arguments against women’s suffrage, way back in the 19^th century, argued that letting women vote would destroy the one-ness of the family (a man voted for his whole family because he and his wife were one).

Marriage as an answer to society’s ills (and the state of society’s marriages as a microcosm for society’s health) is rhetoric that isn’t anything new. And it’s just as bullshit now as it was then.

Now, I’m not saying that marriage itself is a sham, or that marriage as an institution is bullshit, but that Christians in America have placed marriage on such a pedestal that we can somehow say, unironically, that it is an answer to gun violence. This means we’ve got some serious, serious problems.

As a Christian feminist, I most often see this argument in relationship to premarital sex (mostly defined as anonymous one night stands, though that is not the primary form of sexual relationships even now). If people would just honor marriage and wait until marriage, there’d be fewer divorces, fewer abortions, fewer broken homes, and fewer problems in society! It all comes down to sluts and players not wanting to put a ring on it.

This kind of shallow understanding of the nature of both marriage and of premarital sex does nothing but cause harm. It gives Christians false expectations and ideas about marriage, and invalidates the experiences of those who have had positive sexual experiences outside of marriage.

In its most harmful, it conflates casual sex with sexual violence, as though marriage is the answer to sexual violence. In fact, marriage is often where society sees abundant sexual and physical violence, as a commitment to marriage is often used by an abuser as an excuse to commit and continue abuse. Marriage does not change a misogynist into a loving husband, and signing a piece of paper does not sanctify an unhealthy sexual life.

When we present marriage as a shorthand for committed, healthy relationships, we misunderstand and misrepresent marriage as it exists for many people today. We conflate the ideal with the reality. We turn marriage into a panacea for society’s ills, rather than an institution that is itself filled with broken and sinful people. When we say that marriage is the answer for the "consequences" of casual sex (which Christ and Pop Culture defines here as rape and babies), we erase the experiences of numerous married women who still fear pregnancy and numerous married women who have experienced rape from their husbands.

Presenting marriage as an answer to a broken sexual system does not go nearly deep enough. Fundamentally, it starts from the premise that commitment is what matters about sex, not consent, not a good partner, not healthy attitudes. It asks the wrong questions - we need not ask "why aren't people committing?" but "why aren't people having sex in healthy ways?"

What I’m saying here is not that sex without commitment is inherently healthy, but that commitment is not the only thing that has the ability to foster a healthy sexual life. We need to stop presenting marriage both as shorthand for committed sexual activity and as the solution for unhealthy sexual activities. We need to change the conversation from marriage vs. not marriage to “What is healthy? What does consent look like? What does readiness for sex look like? How do you communicate and talk about sex with your partner? How do you bring up problems about sex with your partner?” It is only after we have asked what healthy sexuality looks like – absent of labels like “casual” or “marital” – that we can begin to discuss how marriage is the fulfillment of that healthy sexuality for some people.

What we don’t need is an emphasis on marriage as an answer for society’s problems, but a conversation about why we view certain things as problems in the first place. It is only then that we can begin to make more cogent, philosophical and understandable arguments without resorting to dubbing others destroyers of society. Marriage isn't magic, and neither am I.

No is a Complete Sentence

[This is part 3 of a three part series on privilege. See parts ONE and TWO here. I also apologize for the delay - I was attending the STORY CHICAGO conference for work and it wiped me out.] When I posted Wednesday's post about how you should react to people calling you out on privilege, I got the expected pushback - that privileged people can't learn if the oppressed don't educate them! (this commenter had a much more creative way of phrasing it, but that's what it boils down to).

This isn't true. The oppressed are not obligated to educate you on what you did wrong. To invoke the common analogy: if you're standing on my foot, I'm allowed to tell you to get off my foot, and you should get off my foot! It doesn't matter if I say it nicely, tell you why, or educate you on how not to stand on other people's feet. The immediate, pressing need for the oppressed person in that situation is to stop being hurt. End of. Everything else about where the conversation may go from there is superfluous.

But, that doesn't mean that said commenter's words didn't make me think about all the different ways we try to police the oppressed into catering toward the privileged. We tell women that if they'd just say their argument in a nicer way, we'd be more inclined to listen (an idea my own experience and the experience of others has proven to be utterly false). We tell the oppressed that it's just a joke, ignoring the interplay between power and oppression that makes a joke about their plight not just bad, but downright scary.

This is the world in which the oppressed function. So, today, I wanted to put forward a few encouraging words to those who are doing the calling out.

First, there are a lot of people telling you not to. A lot of people (like the commenter) will try to gaslight you into thinking it's not that big of a deal and that you must cater to their needs over and above their own. This is false. It is only ever your decision to call something out, and how you do so is your choice.

Additionally, there are days I simply don't have the spoons (or energy) to call out the microaggressions of oppression that I encounter. Even a "hey, that's not cool," is sometimes too much to muster in light of what the damage control would entail. That's okay - you don't have to do everything. There's an odd pressure that you must call everything bad out all the time - I definitely felt it when I first got involved in social justice writing and online activism - but, first and foremost, self-care is important. If you are not up to the task that day, it is okay. It is okay to not be okay.

This doesn't mean you're letting things slide or that you're a bad activist. You are placing your mental and emotional health over and above an obligation to some larger force, and that, ultimately, will help you be a better activist - in other words, you'll learn to choose your battles wisely.

Second, there's no right way to do it. You don't have to fit within a narrow kind tone to let someone know that what they just did is not cool. Each situation is different, and, often, an angry, "HEY GTFO!" is all you need. Only you can judge based on your relationship to that person.

Remember that your feelings are valid. The first thing the privileged will try to do is say, "It's not that bad. Get over it." I've been tempted to say that myself as a privileged person. But your feelings of hurt and anger are valid and important.

Now, in a related strain, the privileged person may, too, feel hurt and offended. After all, as I said, it sucks to be told that something you did hurt someone else. And it sucks to realize that your world is shifting under your feet and you no longer have the expected power that you had before. But there is a difference between the distressing growing pains that the privileged experience as their privilege recedes, and your immediate, constant pain as an oppressed person, one upon whom aspersions have been hurled since day one. It is an interplay between power and pain - the pain the powerful experience as their power recedes is nothing compared to the pain they inflict upon others as they grapple for that power again.

Everything in the world tells us to prize the pain of the privileged over the pain of the oppressed. And calling out reverses that - it prizes the oppressed's pain, elevates the experience of the downtrodden, over the temporary growing pain of the privileged. But when you call out, everything in you will push back to acquiescence, to falling back in line to the hierarchy in which your pain is sublimated and ignored. But it is much more freeing and healing to realize that your pain is valid, too, and deserves respect too.

And if the person learns (hallelujah!), they may ask you to forgive them. Indeed, in the church, this call may come before any actual learning has occurred. As the wronged one, forgiveness is in your hands. No one else can make you forgive or push you to forgive. You may not want to, and that's okay, too. Things don't heal overnight and you don't have to heal on their timetable.

I wrote my notes for this entry while listening to writer Anne Lamott speak on Thursday night (I was exhausted and my mind was whirring in different directions), and was taken away from my note-taking when she said this: "No is a complete sentence." There is power in realizing that you have the ability to say no, and to have that be all you say. When a privileged person comes in and says something privilege, you have the power and the ability to simply say, "No."

And that, truly, is a great thing, though it may not feel like it at the time.

Privilege: Invisible Advantages

I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable conversations in my life. I’m the type of person who hates being told when I’m wrong (like 99% of the rest of humanity) and it’s taken me a lot of time and work to get to a point where I'm not so stubborn about it. It’s hard work, and it’s not something I expect people to learn how to do in a day. But, in my line of work, I also do a lot of telling other people that they’re wrong. Indeed, I end up throwing around the word “privilege” in these conversations a bit more than I would like, and it is usually about the time that “privilege” surfaces that things escalate beyond control and become utterly useless.

You see, people hate the word privilege. It can be a discussion-ender. But understanding our implicit privileges and the ways they cloud our thinking is vital for a discussion in social justice to actually get anywhere. So I’m starting a short series on calling out and being called out, in three parts.

Today, we discuss the concept of privilege. Tomorrow, on being called out on privilege. And the day after, on calling others out.

Part One: What is Privilege?

Most people think of “privilege” as Mitt Romney or Prince William type privilege. No one (well, almost no one) denies that those who are born with every monetary and familial advantage are privileged. But when I try to apply that label to Joe Schmo at the grocery store, people bristle. “I’m not privileged!” they cry. “I worked for everything I got!”

But that’s not what I or many others mean by privilege.

Privilege is an advantage I have but am not always aware of. It is something inherent to my self that has the ability to affect how easy or difficult my life is.

For example, I am a heterosexual white woman raised by a mother and a father in the breadbasket of the United States. I grew up in an area where most of the people I encountered on a daily basis looked like me and had similar experiences to myself.

I did not, for example, have to worry when I applied for jobs that I would be expected to make extra effort to disprove a stereotype or possibly be outright rejected because of my race. I did not have to worry that people might follow me around a store because of how I looked. I did not even have to worry that people would ask me to be representative of my race during a class discussion.

As a white person, I had the advantage of not having to worry about how my actions reflected on members of my own race. I could count, mostly, on being seen as an individual and not a representative member of a group. My minority friends do not have such a luxury.

That is a privilege I have.

Now, let me discuss a privilege I do not have. I am a cisgender woman. This means I have to think about a lot of things that my cisgender male friends and family do not worry about. For example, I do a lot of online dating. I always meet in a public place and leave a note at my home with the man’s name and phone number, just in case something goes wrong.

I highly doubt that my name is on a post-it on my date’s desk at home.

I make plans for things mostly during daylight hours if I can, and if I have to return home late at night, I walk into my building with my cell phone out and my keys in a position to swing at a potential attacker.

I know of no men who take the same precautions.

Not thinking about your safety and being able to go for a walk at midnight without concern: that is privilege.

There are myriad different ways that privilege affects a person's life, and I could not possibly catalog them all. But I urge you to spend a little time thinking - especially if you're white or a man (or both) - of ways in which you don't have to spend time worrying about your race or your gender affecting the outcome of something. That will give you a pretty good grasp on what your privileges are.

Privilege is not something you can necessarily control (except in the case of religious privilege in the United States). And I want to make this absolutely clear, because it is important for the subsequent discussion: Having privilege does not make you a bad person.

Saying that you have privilege is merely a statement of fact, not a value judgment.

For example, in American society, I have the privileges of being white, cisgender, straight, and Christian. I also am mostly neurotypical (minus an anxious-depressive disorder, which is managed with hormonal birth control). I am average height and relatively skinny, and above average in terms of education and intelligence.

These are just some of my privileges and they affect my life in varying degrees. Realization and acceptance that there are some things in your life that might function to make your life easier is vital to work in social justice and progressive movements.

Tomorrow, we’ll learn about what to do (and, more importantly, what NOT to do) when called on your privilege – which will, inevitably, happen.

____________

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

Can I Stop Being an Asshole?

Last week I explained that everyone – including you! – is an asshole, at least some of the time. Now I’m going to try to explain to you how to stop. Or rather, I’m going to let a writer better than I do it for me.

In 2005, writer David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement address to graduates of Kenyon College. It’s an address that I’ve referred back to time and again in my life, as its emphasis on empathy is one worth emulating. In it, he says,

Most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

…

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. (emphasis mine)

Essentially, what Wallace proposes is that our “default setting” is to be an asshole. And the only way to rewire ourselves away from that is to be intentional about it, to remember that each and every person has a story and a motivation behind their actions. We may never know what that motivation is, but we should still have grace in that moment.

When I was a sophomore in college, my parents gave me a car for Christmas. It was a white 1991 Honda Accord they’d bought of a friend of the family for $300. It was also a stick shift transmission. At the time, I didn’t know how to drive stick. It took me a month to learn. It was a tough month – I managed to stall the engine trying to make a left turn in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in town. I rolled back down hills a couple of times before I figured out the exact sequence between pulling my foot off the clutch and brake and hitting the gas quickly.

Needless to say, I spent a month getting honked at, flipped off, and screamed at by complete strangers. But it’s not like I could make myself learn to drive that car any faster!

A short time after this learning period, I was sitting in the car with my dad at an intersection. The light turned green and the car in front of us didn’t move. My dad expressed frustration and started honking.

“DAD!” I burst out. “Give them a minute! For all you know, it’s a new driver!”

Suddenly: empathy. Where I would have been inclined to get annoyed and start thinking the worst of the person in front of us, I understood that the driver in front of me could be dealing with his own issues and there was no need to start name-calling. Because I’d been in that person’s shoes, I was able to look at them with empathy.

Of course, this is a lifelong lesson. I’ve since lost a lot of that initial empathy toward other drivers, especially since moving to Chicago. I’ve become much more of an asshole – I’ve sworn at other cars more than once. It’s so easy to forget, so easy to slid back into that asshole-mode.

So what I have to do, and what you have to do is remember, on a daily basis, that everyone else has a story, everyone else deserves dignity and respect, and that everyone else might just be going through tougher things than you are.

Easier said than done, of course.

BJU and Injustice

This morning, I was contacted by a good friend of mine (wishing to remain anonymous, so we’ll just call her S) about some troubles going on at Bob Jones University. For those of you not familiar, Bob Jones U is a very, very conservative Christian college known for having highly legalistic rules – to the point that students can be put on something called “spiritual probation.” My friend, S., in fact, is a former student of Bob Jones who was expelled for having sex with her boyfriend – who is now her husband. And now they have unjustly expelled another student – Christopher Peterman – for exercising his first amendment right to protest, though, to hear them tell it, that’s not the case at all.

But before we get there, we have to go back up the injustice chain.

This all started with a girl named Tina Anderson. I heard about Tina a couple of years ago, back when this whole thing actually happened – it was a small story that appeared on Change.org, though it took another year or two for the national media to cotton on. Tina was 15 when she was raped by a 40-year-old member of her church. She became pregnant from this rape. She was forced – by the pastor of the church, Charles “Chuck” Phelps – to “confess” and apologize to the whole congregation for getting pregnant outside of marriage and for “being in a compromising situation” that led to getting pregnant. At the same time, the man was forced to confess to “adultery,” though no connection between the two cases was made for the congregation, and no criminal charges were brought (even though, at the very least, this was statutory rape).

Anderson was forced to move to Colorado from New Hampshire for the duration of her pregnancy, to the home of a family friend of the pastor's, and forced to give up her child for adoption when she gave birth. Last year, Tina was finally contacted by the NH police, and her rapist was charged, convicted, and sentenced (which is when the story made national headlines).

How does this connect to BJU and Chris Peterman?

Chuck Phelps, Tina’s pastor at the time who helped cover up her rape and could, reasonably, be an accomplice to a criminal act, was a board member in good standing at BJU.

Peterman, rightly, thought this was a very bad idea. My friend S writes:

A student at the school, Christopher Peterman, learned about both the case and Chuck's position as a board member, and organized a movement called Do Right, BJU (named after a famous saying from the founder of the school, "Do right until the stars fall!"). The movement was designed to pressure BJU to remove Chuck Phelps from his position on the board as well as to encourage them to start reporting sexual abuse cases as required by law, since the school has a horrendous history of covering up abuse and victim-blaming. Part of this movement culminated in the first-ever student and alumni led protest held at BJU. The administration threatened Chris with expulsion for his "insubordination," but when the media was alerted to the protest, a spokesman for the school stated that no one involved would suffer any administrative repercussions. Chuck Phelps resigned his position a few days before the protest (supposedly unrelated to the DR-BJU movement, protest, and a petition with over 1,000 signatures demanding his removal). This all happened towards the close of the fall semester of 2011

But things didn’t end there for Peterman. Even though BJU couldn’t really expel him for protesting – after all, that’s a first amendment right, and they’d had their hands tied by their own words to the media – they put him on watch.

You see, at BJU, students function on a system of demerits. You get a certain number of demerits based on infractions of the rules - 150 demerits, and you get expelled. These rules are detailed in the student handbook (PDF). The handbook itself is a piece of work, and well worth a gander – there are several sections reinforcing the idea that BJU students must submit to “God-given human authorities” (read: the BJU administration). You’re also expected to attend church twice a week in addition to Monday-Thursday chapel services (if you’re interested, you can check twitter for the hashtag #BJUHandbook, where I tweeted many of the rules).

BJU used this system of demerits to exact a punishment on Chris for protesting against Phelps. They monitored his FB and twitter feeds carefully, they placed an extra RA in his dorm to keep an eye on him. People started following him both on and off campus to look for him breaking the rules. S writes:

The dean of men would email, call, and text him at all hours, demanding to meet with him to discuss his spiritual status. I believe that he was technically on spiritual probation (meaning he had to meet regularly with an uncertified counselor for nouthetic counseling).

He went into this spring semester (2012) with 70 demerits on his record already. And it didn’t take long – of course, with all the careful watching, it’s not surprising – for him to chalk up to 145.

These violations?

He went off campus and watched an episode of Glee – 50 demerits. It’s not technically banned in the rulebook, but they did it anyway.

He posted the lyrics to Matthew West’s “Only Grace” on his Facebook – 50 demerits that were then rescinded.

Posting a FB status or a Tweet – they never explained which – during class – 25 demerits.

10 days before his graduation, BJU expelled Christopher Peterman. He only had 145 demerits, but because he had contacted the organization that oversees BJU’s accreditation – assuming, at the time, that he was going to be expelled and wanting to see what recourse he had – he was summarily accused by BJU of attempting to “intimidate” the administration.

This is a bad situation turned worse. This is misuse and abuse of authority. And this is wrong. The only way we can continue to stand up against these injustices is if we do not keep silent on the matter.

You can view Chris’ statement here, and you can sign a petition asking BJU to let him graduate here.