Curtains for you, Dr. Horrible! Lacy, gently wafting, curtains.

I want it noted that, as I switched windows on my computer to begin this writing, the song that started playing on my iTunes shuffle just happened to be “A Man’s Gotta Do” from the Dr. Horrible Soundtrack. Is that noted? Good.  

Now, I’m going to start in on Miller’s list. As there are 10 items, I will do two a day until I run out of things to talk about (so, you’ll be done reading these blogs in a million years).

The list is auspiciously introduced with the declaration: “Here are some things to work on to lead a woman through a great love story,” which of course begs the question of “what is the goal of a great love story? What am I being led to?” But maybe Miller has some answers!

Want something. Every story involves a person who wants something, and you’re [sic] love story can’t be any different. First of all, you should want some kind of career or impact. You should want to make the world a better place and you should be very focused and dedicated to making this happen. This means going to college [editor’s note: not necessarily; some of the most world-changing people never went to college or even dropped out of high school], starting a company, coaching a team, or teaching a class. If you want to make a woman’s dreams come true, pick up your X-Box and throw it in the trash and start doing something with your life. Have you ever noticed that ancient paintings of women always have them draped over a bed or a couch, arms outstretched in rest? And yet the guys are yielding a sword or riding a horse or captaining a ship. That’s because men were designed to work. Want something. Work hard to become good at a craft. Get off your couch and move. … All that to say, part of being a leading man in a love story is being a dependable, action-oriented worker. (emphasis mine)

Oh, man, this started out SO WELL. I wouldn’t have a problem with what he says in the first half of this if it wasn’t so gender specific. Sloth and laziness don’t look good on anyone, but there's no particular reason why it's worse for a man than a woman. And, if Donald Miller’s writing life looks anything like mine, I’m pretty sure he’s not that active either, at least not as active as the men he proclaims as good in this piece. But let’s give him some benefit of the doubt – he’s clearly a career man, has established a name for himself, and does a pretty good job at it.

So, why, why, are DREAMS gendered here? Why must I, apparently, wait for a man to make my dreams come true? Read it again – those are Miller’s words: “If you want to make a woman’s dreams come true…” That statement implies that a woman’s dreams are centered around a love story. Poppycock. While I’m happy to be in a relationship now, like I said before, it’s the icing on the already awesome cake that is my life.

Let me tell a little story about a little girl named Dianna. Dianna didn’t play house, even though she had a dollhouse and Barbies. Her dolls almost always went off on great adventures, traveling the world, rescuing the baby doll that had somehow fallen into a pit of vipers, or some such. Her favorite movies growing up were ones that screamed adventure and action - Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Lion King, Hercules, Mulan. She dreamed of writing the next Great American Novel (this was before she realized that she’s not a fiction writer). She wanted to put down on paper all these great adventures she was going to have – she dreamed of traveling the world, of living within different cultures, of making friends all over the place.

When she got to high school and met girls who had been planning their wedding from the age of five, she was confused and wondered if there was something wrong with her because she’d never given it a second thought – she always pictured a husband after she had a career as a vet, lawyer, pastor, whatever, already established.

When she got to college, sure, she would like a husband, but the lack of one didn’t make her cry into her pillow at night. Instead, she signed up for a semester abroad in England, and got the traveling bug. She discovered academic pursuit; she chased philosophical concepts about God down the rabbit hole, discussing metaphorical, univocal and equivocal language, free will and the problem of evil, immutability and its relationship to the Incarnation. She was completely taken in by the ancient stone, by the mass of books at her fingertips, by the subtle and yet distinct ways English culture differed from her own, and by the way she could make sense out of the world by putting words on a page.

From there, she graduated and went to a top rated graduate school with full funding. She delved further into the world of literature, discovered an angle for social justice (that was already inkling at the back of her head) and boom, a full-fledged dream to be a writer was born. Without writing, she felt, she could never be happy. She traveled some more, hitting cities in the US and the countries of India, Japan, and South Korea. She could see how each of these experiences was turning her into who she wanted to be.

So, Mr. Miller, where are my dreams in your picture? How is my man supposed to “lead” me? Are all my dreams supposed to be wrapped up in him? Because…that’s simply not my reality. If I dropped my dreams so he could pursue his, I’d end up resenting him, and things wouldn’t end well. A great love story is not about one person’s dreams being fulfilled in the leadership of the other. It is about finding a way to make those dreams work together, and compromising so that both people can feel fulfilled, not only in their relationship, but in their vision for their life.

Oh, and your point about art and women being inactive, reclining, weaklings while men go off to fight battles? Caravaggio begs to differ.

[caption id="attachment_551" align="aligncenter" width="382" caption="Judith Beheading Holofernes. Caravaggio. 1598-99. Hangs at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, Rome."][/caption]

On to the second point:

Choose the right women to date. The book of Proverbs was primarily written to men, and while there is a great deal of advice in the book about work ethic and finances, a significant percentage of the book is spent warning men to stay away from certain women. Is she seductive? Stay away. Is she nagging? Stay away. Is she sexually promiscuous? Stay away. … Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date a girl with a past [editor’s note: I think his “for the girls” post may say different]. One of my all-time favorite girlfriends, a girl I consider amazing and will make a terrific wife to somebody some day, actually spent years of her life living with a guy and has a fairly liberal standard regarding sexuality. That said, though, she’s not seductive, and she’s completely honest about her philosophy. In other words, we may not agree about everything regarding sex, but the woman has integrity. I’d take a non-Christian woman with integrity over a Christian seductress any day, and I’d be a happier man for making that decision. You want a woman who is looking for a man, not a woman who is looking for men. Seriously, guys, just stay away from the woman who leads with her seductive side.

I have a quibble with his interpretation of Proverbs, and though it’s been a while since I’ve taken that class on “The Psalms and Wisdom Literature,” I’m pretty sure I remember Proverbs having a whole lot of symbolism. In other words, Proverbs isn’t LITERALLY saying “stay away from seductive women” but instead is using the image of a seductress to represent a poor decision. It’s a fine distinction, but that’s metaphor for you. It's like taking, say, a political statement describing a person as an “attack dog” as a warning to stay away from dogs. Might be a good idea on some level, but it misses the point. I mean, if one can’t see that a woman being the source of all bad decisions might be, y’know, a METAPHOR FOR BAD DECISIONS, then I’m not inclined to take the advice seriously.

The second thing I have a quibble with is his inclusion of “nagging” as being as bad as “seduction” (taking what I presume to be the bad definition of seduction seriously here, which I’ll get to in a minute). “Nagging” is such a caricature and is not a whole person’s personality. I may do what some would call as “nagging.” Does that mean that all men should stay away from me because I insist on answers for some questions? No, because my whole personality is not defined by nagging.

Nor is my whole personality defined by seduction. I hope I can be a seductive woman – I want to be able to seduce my husband! It’s part of sex! The definition of “seduction” here is one with which I’m clearly just not familiar. And I have to say, I laughed out loud at “Christian seductress” because…what is that? What in the world is a Christian seductress? The picture I’m getting is a girl in lingerie handing out Jack Chick tracts. Pretty sure that’s not what he meant, but the writing is so unclear that I can’t even address the issue.

Notice, however, that he says "choose the right women to date," but then simply says who not to date. Nothing is said about what sort of things the woman should have, what sort of goals in her life, what sort of spiritual practice or spirituality at all should exist. No, he chooses to define the right women by what they are not. What a short shrift that is for women - it teaches his audience to judge women based solely on one thing - how they perform their sexuality - and ignore all the possible things that could make them good. You could find a woman who has a clean sexual past, does not behave in a seductive or nagging manner, and still is a terrible person. Defining "the right women" by telling us all about the wrong ones functionally useless.

Take it this way: if I tell you I bought a new dress that's just right for me, and you asked about it, and my reply was, "Well, it's not purple," that tells you absolutely nothing worth knowing about my new dress. Likewise, you can't really say, "Choose the right women," and then say, "not these ones." That doesn't give us a clear picture.

Women are so much more than whatever it is we happen to not be. And we have a right to be seen as a whole person.

Sharing the Lead

Now that we’ve sufficiently wrapped up the girl’s side of the love story (lesson: don’t have sex before you meet your husband, and if you do, be prepared to grovel), it’s time to look on the guy’s side. No surprise, it’s vastly different, and not necessarily in a good way.  

I’m doing this in order to highlight the double standard between men and women – instead of blanket statements asking for purity from both men and women, Miller reflects a lot of common church teaching in that having sex outside marriage contains much bigger consequences for the woman over and above the man. In addition, Miller focuses on the "leadership" role of the man, encouraging women to be passive and silent in writing their own stories.

Miller has only one list for the guys, and it goes into a bit more detail than the “instructions” for women – it reads much more like advice and is considerably less shame inducing. But it still manages to make me have some rage moments when reading, one of which I’ll cover today.

He opens by talking about stories in general, mirroring the women’s side of the discussion. But here, the elements of a love story differ. He puts them as a sentence broken up into bullet points, so, a general [sic] over this whole thing, as usual:

Any great story contains the following elements: a person (or group of people) / that wants something. / And are willing to overcome conflict. / To get it.

Okay. After parsing that grammatical mess, what one comes away with is the idea that for a love story, the “it” in the sentence is whatever the main character is striving for - in the case of a love story, it's a woman. Miller writes, “In a love story, a guy, wants a girl, and is willing to fight the dragon, to get her. Or at least some variation on this theme.” (I remind you, a general [sic] over all of this).

A lot of people probably agree with that sentiment – I don’t, but that should be obvious by now. But I’ll allow Miller to expound a bit more before I jump all over it. So here’s the next half a page of what he wrote.

That said, though, men were designed by God to live a great love story.

But there’s a difference between men and women, here. Men were not designed to have love stories ‘happen to them’ as much as they were designed to ‘make a love story happen to a woman.’ Do you understand. You’re the writer of the story. You’re the guy who initiates and has the character to follow through. You’re the one responsible for how the love story turns out.

I think we all agree that we live in a culture of guys who couldn’t write a love story to save their lives. Honestly, American love stories suck. If you want a girl to be crazy about you, you’ve got so little competition that it’s easier than ever.

The only thing is, it looks nothing like the sappy stuff Hollywood is selling to our current culture of women who are, perhaps, lost in fantasy. Those kinds of stories have men stuttering about feeding women’s egos by falling all over themselves and practically peeing their pants. [Editor’s note: What does that even mean?] In real life, women think those guys are losers. A woman wants a man who is confident, who knows where he is going, and knows exactly where she fits into his life. Her preference, of course, is that she fits into his life as a best friend, love, wife and the mother of their children. At lest that’s the case in the love stories I want to talk about in this blog. [emphasis mine]

Rachel Held Evans already had a brilliant and effective response to this, so go read that.

I’d like to add a couple of things to what Rachel already said:

I am a partner in my own love story. I am an active participant in everything that is going on in my relationship. I am not passively waiting for him to act but am making an effort to work with him on our relationship.

[caption id="attachment_541" align="aligncenter" width="411" caption="Ellen Page reads an interesting love story. I'm betting there's a lot more "eh's.""][/caption]

A love story comprises an us. If both people in the relationship are not equally committed, are not following the same path, hand in hand, together, it will not be a great love story. If one insists on being active while the other passively waits for things to happen, it will not be a great love story.

Miller’s thesis here is advice for a disaster. It sets up women to be passive when it comes to their own life; it is in conflict with Biblical teaching. Jesus does not tell us to sit and wait for God to act. He does not say that we should be passive in what we do. He does not command that we sit by and wait for our life stories to happen – indeed, we should be active participants in the gospel story, we should actively go forth on what we know of God and work to bring the Kingdom closer. And the love stories in our individual lives are a part of that larger story. Miller effectively encourages an imbalance between activity and passivity in a love relationship, which is sure to bleed into other portions of a person’s life.

Let me take this a bit personally for a moment: the two sentences “A woman wants a man who is confident, who knows where he is going, and knows exactly where she fits into his life. Her preference, of course, is that she fits into his life as a best friend, love, wife and the mother of their children” could not be more wrong for me.

A few friends and I were having a long, ongoing discussion about marriage over the weekend, and I expressed a distaste for the idea that I am somehow required to fit into my future husband’s life, as though he gets to be the one who remains stable and unchanging while the world molds around him. In a relationship, both people’s lives change (and hopefully do so for the better), but for some reason it is almost expected that the woman’s life will be the one to change more – whether it be through giving up a career to have children, changing the last name to the husband’s, or whatever.

I get the message, not just from the church, but from society in general, that I am the one who needs to “fit into his life,” which could not be any clearer than how Miller stated it here. I’m not comfortable with that.

At 25, I am starting my career. I am making a name for myself. I, frankly, have a lot of stuff on my plate. To imply that I should give up that so I can fit into the life of my [future] husband is just ever so slightly sexist. And by ever so slightly, I mean a lot. In my view, it makes much more sense for both people’s lives to change to fit together, in a co-equal partnership.

I expect that my husband’s life will change. I expect that my life will change. But it will happen in a partnership, with as much effort as possible to make sure that both of us are able to be as happy with our careers outside the home as with what is happening inside the home. I am a career woman – what I do is just as important to me as who I am. As a writer, I can’t NOT write every day – I know that I am depressed and not myself when I am not itching to pull out my computer and write write write for at least some part of the day. It is as much a part of me as the fingers I use to type.

To imply that it is I who should give up more, that I should fit into my husband’s life rather than both of us fitting together, is to imply that my dreams are worth less, that I am, by being the passive one in the love story, less important.

My love story does not happen to me. It happens with me.

I know this is likely not what Miller meant, but if he is starting from the thesis that it is the man who is writing the love story, that the man, by virtue of being the one with a penis in the relationship, is the one in control, he is setting up for a disastrous and dangerous perspective on relationships. It encourages an imbalance of activity and passivity, and encourages one person in the relationship to have control over the other, which is a dangerous recipe.

And for points of clarification: what I am not saying is that men shouldn’t do the asking out, that men shouldn’t, when they like a girl, sometimes take the lead and go for it. In my own experience, sometimes the guy does have to step up and say something, but that’s mainly because I can be quite dense sometimes. But the guy taking the lead in asking out/letting the girl know that there’s interest depends on each relationship, and each couple – it’s different for everyone. I really don't care either way – I’m fine with a girl doing the asking, and I’m fine with a guy doing the asking. What I do object to is the implication that a guy should be the one to take the lead at all times, and be the one guiding the girl through the love story, as though a girl is somehow incapable of directing her own life.

I do not require a guide in my own love story; I require a partner.

I do not want a leader in my relationship; I want a friend who listens and discusses and compromises.

I do not want to fit into his life; I want us to fit together and create a new life.

I am not passive in my own life; I am an active participant in the story God is telling through us and to us.

I am not a me being led and taught by him; I am one half of an us. It is we, not he leading me.

After all, no one wants to read a story about a passive minor character who does nothing. How boring would that be!

"To be alive is to be vulnerable": Literature and Human Experience

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. - CS Lewis

When I examine my own book collection, which has been pared down to my favorites and “books I will re-read” in the past couple of years due to moving cross-country and cross-world, I turn up a not-so-surprising result. Without double-counting, of the six dozen books I own (that’s 72 for you less mathematically inclined), only 12 are by female authors. If we do count doubles, that only gives me about eight more books on the female side, as I own multiple copies of the first Harry Potter, in different languages (and, it should be noted, many of those translations are done by men).

We are fed, through our acceptable literature study and through marketing, a steady diet of literature by dead white men. And I love literature – I wouldn't have a degree in it if I didn’t – but I was amazed to think back on my literature experience and realize how quickly I gravitated to male literature simply because we had read almost nothing else in school.

I asked, at the end of my last post, what sort of authors you read in school. This question was also posed on facebook, and the responses were enlightening.

With my American friends, the literature read skewed heavily male – male authors writing about male things. The common books were The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, Hamlet, Animal Farm, and Death of a Salesman. Several authors appeared multiple times, though different works were studied – Twain, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Hemingway. The only major female author of note was Harper Lee, whose one novel – To Kill a Mockingbird – is considered a work of Great American Literature.

My friend Deb had the most diverse list, with a lot of contemporary female authors right alongside the dead white guys: Things Fall Apart, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Beloved, and The House on Mango Street. But her list was unusual, contrasting lists from both Americans and foreigners that were dominated by male names and male themes.

My own list is similar:

Ninth grade, I remember reading Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, and Romeo and Juliet. All men.

Tenth grade, we read Macbeth, short stories by Ray Bradbury, A Separate Peace. All men. This, luckily, was also the year we read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Eleventh grade, we read Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Death of a Salesman, and The Great Gatsby. I recall that we had book projects where we had to select a book from a list and read it, and that was the year I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (terrible book, by the way). Summer reading included In The Lake of Woods by Tim O’Brien and The Color of Water by James McBride.

Twelfth grade, we finally got to Hamlet. We also read North of Hope, Heart of Darkness, The Things They Carried (to this day, this is one of my favorite novels) and lots and lots of poetry, which had a more balanced male-female ratio. Again, we had a list of several books we could choose from – I recall reading 1984 by Orwell.

This is just going by books that I can remember (with the help of my friend Bryan, who went to the same high school and took many of the same classes). Bryan is currently a high school English teacher (or, is at least waiting to be hired as one on a permanent basis), and he offered this observation: Literature, in many ways, especially with female authors, has become a vehicle for learning vocabulary, not for discussing actual issues or themes present in the literature. So even when students encounter an author like Emily Dickinson, what they take away from it is that she wrote in “near-rhyme,” not that she broke down walls in poetry, offered interesting observations on the human experience, and wrote one of the most beautiful poems in the English language (“I’m nobody…”).

This is symptomatic of a much larger problem with education: rather than studying literature for the sake of literature, learning how it expresses human experience, how the reader connects with the author and vice versa, how the author uses words to highlight narratives of human life, we quantify it, test it, and standardize standardize standardize. And the unfortunate thing that happens when we allow such standardization to trickle in to the humanities is that we discuss examples of techniques, rather than how ‘x’ book expresses an experience different from our own. And when you’re looking solely at technique, vocabulary, and style, it’s no surprise that the codified canon of classics would be used in the classroom, and that this canon would be mostly male, as female authors weren’t allowed to publish under their own names until relatively recently.

With the focus on quantification and vocabulary, it makes it far easier to gloss over this idea: A literature focus on human experience that draws from mostly male authors (and a few token females) would show an immense gap in this coverage of life. In other words, with a male focus and a quantification method of assessment, it is less obvious that an entire view of human life is missing.

If men and women are raised on a diet of male authors as the “legitimate” authors to study and are presented with them not as a discussion of human experience but instead as a means to an end, should it surprise us when “male writing” is the preferred form?