We Saw Your Sexism: Modesty and Rape Culture

When I was in college, I did a semester abroad in Oxford, England, at the university there. This semester was a life changing one, as most semesters abroad are. I was introduced to many different people with differing life experiences and life views and learned a lot about myself and treasure that time I was there. During this time, I had two roommates. One of them, while on vacation in Florence, Italy, exhibited some rather strange behavior. You see, there’s a lot of art in Italy. There’s a lot of art featuring naked people in Italy. Said roommate was apparently uncomfortable with the idea of seeing boobs and penises in an art museum.

So she carried a spoon.

When she approached pieces of nude art, she would carefully position the spoon to cover up the objectionable parts and view the art that way. It wasn’t that she objected to the art itself, but that, for her, there was no context in which nudity in the public sphere could ever be okay – not even in famous masterpieces of ancient art.

The principle that caused my roommate to carry a spoon into museums and galleries is the same one that produced the sexist ridiculousness that was Seth MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” song that opened the Academy Awards this week.

That principle? That nudity is only ever erotic.

That principle is a dangerous one, as Christianity Today and Think Christian* contributor Karen Swallow Prior demonstrated when she tweeted during the ceremony: “Are the actors who showed their boobs really pissed at having a song sung about it? That would be a bit hypocritical?” This was followed quickly by: “If you show your boobs, don't get on your high horse about someone singing about it.”

Prior’s point, as exemplified in the second tweet, is one you've heard before - what amounts of skin you show in public has a bearing on the perception of you as a moral agent. Mainly, the amount of skin you show has a direct inverse relationship to how angry you can be over people disrespecting you.

There are a number of problematic elements at play here and I’d like to try to tease each of them out. So let’s set aside Prior’s tweets for a moment and focus on why McFarlane’s song was sexist and wrong.

The first problematic element of MacFarlane’s work was the male gaze. The Academy that is responsible for the Academy Awards is 77% white men. Most studio executives are men. The majority of directors are men. Movies that fail the Bechdel test are far more prominent and more likely to be backed by major studios than movies that pass it.

Hollywood, and our subsequent movie-going culture, is built around what men want, what men see, and what men desire. Specifically, it is built around what white, cisgender, heterosexual, young men are supposed to see, want and desire, as filtered through the lens of advertising and marketing firms.

It is hard to be taken seriously as a woman in this environment. And it’s a common thread that women who push themselves for their art are often involved in roles that require them to bare some skin. It is, in many parts, the nature of the beast. Insofar as McFarlane’s song was meant to lampoon that part of Hollywood culture, I understand it.

However, MacFarlane is a white cis het man, surrounded by men, singing about how awesome it was that artists at the top of their field showed their boobs. Rather than a lampooning of the male gaze, MacFarlane’s song reinforced it – especially with the titles he chose to cite as titillating examples of showing boobs.

Hilary Swank was mentioned for Boys Don’t Cry, in which she plays a trans man who is violently raped and then murdered. The nudity in that movie occurs within the rape scene.

Charlize Theron was cited for the movie Monster – also a rape scene.

Likewise with The Accused and Monster's Ball.**

Scarlett Johansson was cited not for her art but for phone pictures that were stolen from her hacked phone and disseminated without her permission. She has never actually appeared topless for a movie role.

Instead of satirizing the male gaze, MacFarlane’s song reinforced it, informing women that all that matters in the world of Hollywood is whether or not someone saw their boobs, regardless of context.

By calling out specifically scenes that were depictions of rape (and photos that were not distributed with the consent of the subject), MacFarlane is espousing the idea that all nudity, regardless of context, is erotic – and reinforcing the idea that female bodies exist for the purpose of creating sexual reactions in cis-het men.

A song about seeing penises may have actually functioned to better highlight the satire, but that would have been far too subversive for the creator of Family Guy.

And this severance of instances of nudity and the contexts in which they appear is where we come back to Karen Swallow Prior’s tweets. Rather than challenging his satire, and challenging the male gaze of Hollywood which demands that female bodies be reduced to tits and ass, Prior’s tweets are pointedly directed at the actresses themselves.

Her point seems to be: if you are an actress who shows skin for the purpose of your art, and a man removes the context and focuses on the boobs, it’s your fault and you are not allowed to get mad, because you should have known that would happen.

In other, slightly harsher words: it’s your own damn fault you were objectified. Keep your clothes on.

Rather than respecting the art that these women are putting forward and responding to the sexualization of women’s bodies by attacking the very man who is doing it, Prior’s tweets and her framing of the issue blame the actresses for the way their art is treated. They are, in her words, “giving in to sexism” rather than acting in a subversive manner by treating their bodies as their own property with which they can make good art. (She also implies that these women - many of whom are Academy Award winners! - are not "serious artists.")

A female bodied person who appears nude for a rape scene in order to increase the impact of that devastation? It’s her fault when a man objectifies her.

It’s not a tough leap – indeed, no leap at all – to see the parallel to that within rape culture.

A female bodied person who wears a short skirt to the dance club because damn it gets warm under those lights? It’s her fault when she gets raped.

When we blame women for the reactions of men – whether it is to their art, to their clothing, to their “unladylike” behavior like riding public transit after dark – we reinforce rape culture. Prior’s tweets are a smaller example of it, couched in modesty culture, but they show how much modesty rhetoric – don’t show your skin because MEN – is on the same spectrum as rhetoric that blames victims for their assaults.

More disturbingly, when I challenged Prior on this point, she informed me that the reactions of people like MacFarlane should make these actresses think twice about their art. These actresses’ pieces of art – which included nudity that must and always should be taken in context – are what need to be examined and revised and redone in order that they may not fall into the trap of the male gaze. Once again, the gaze of the patriarchy must be accommodated and bowed to, rather than challenged. If I wear a low cut top and a guy on the street catcalls me for it, I am the one who must change, rather than he.

It is not hypocritical to expect that one’s art be honored within its context - it is the baseline of respect. It is not hypocritical to expect that one’s body is respected regardless of modesty or immodesty. It is the baseline of human dignity.

It is not hypocritical to expect that, because you are a human being, you will be treated like a human being, not as a set of boobs or whatever genitals you sport.

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*Full disclosure: I write for Think Christian on occasion.

**For more about these scenes, read this excellent piece at Salon.

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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.

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No Touching: Consent As the First Step

So after Tuesday’s post, I thought it worth examining, in brief (though I’ll definitely return to this topic), what a healthy, holy sexual ethic might look like for the church. As Fred Clark observed this week and as Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism has observed in the past, we have a very simple sexual ethic in the modern evangelical church. In fact, it might be the only “ethic” that can be summed up in one word: “no.”

There’s a massive discussion in the history of Christianity about what sexual ethics for a Christian are and should be, from celibacy for the most devout to procreation only to sex is fun and holy. But the past 40 years – possibly as a response to the sexual revolution of the mid 20th century – the ethic has simplified into bumper sticker thoughts for much of the modern church.

We have a literal sloganized version of sexual ethics. Here are some oft-repeated ones (contributed by many of you via Twitter!):

“Pet your dog, not your date.”

“Leave room for the Holy Spirit.”

“Boys are blue, girls are red. No making purple.”

“No one buys a cow when he can get the milk for free.”

“Flies spread disease so keep yours closed.”

When I bring this up, I’m often pointed to academic theologians who have been doing a lot of legwork on the issues, and I appreciate their work. However, the fact is that this work is not being translated to the laity. 400 page books discussing the topic do exist, but we’re missing something in the modern church discussion when Purity Bears and balls are what the laity take away. Part of this is the divide between the ivory tower and the peasants in the field, but part of it too is the legalistic desire for black and white, yes and no thoughts, rather than an actual ethic that helps you make good, healthy decisions.

That is, as Clark says, exactly what an ethic is supposed to do. And, as Preston Yancey said on Monday, ethics are not memory verse we can point to. They are a system of guiding beliefs.

Right now, we have rules – labels under which sex is good and sex is bad, and not much variation or grace for the gray areas.

So how do we start developing a new, healthy ethic?

I propose that we start with what consent looks like.

A healthy sexual relationship has much more room to happen when everyone involved is doing so enthusiastically and with full knowledge and agreement about boundaries.

Consent is not “well, he didn’t say no.”

Consent is not “I guess so.”

Consent is not given from someone too drunk to stand.

Consent is not something wrung from someone after weeks of badgering.

Consent is not “giving in.”

Consent is an enthusiastic, unequivocal yes.

Consent is asking at every step "Is this okay? Does this feel good? Can I touch you here?" and getting a unequivocally positive response before proceeding.

Consent is asking permission every, single time because consent given once is not consent given for all of time.

It needs to be assumed that people’s bodies are in a state of “don’t touch” until they give you the green light to do so. This is the first step toward a healthy view of sexuality.

This basic understanding of bodily autonomy is – no surprise – frequently shunted aside in narratives of the purity movement. The fear seems to be that if we teach people how to say yes in a healthy manner, they’ll start doing so outside of the contexts we think are best. But, that’s the thing about education: if you really, truly want people acting of their own free will and owning their decisions, you really, truly have to let them.

We have warped our thinking to the point where we think people are unable to make good decisions if we equip them with the right tools to do so. So we empty their toolbox and tell them no and badger them into being terrified of sex. But teaching consent teaches people that they own their bodies and empowers them to make decisions about what they do with their bodies. It also empowers them to make healthy decisions about how they treat other embodied people.

And that, after all, is what Christianity is centered upon - living with embodied people in a community that reflects the goodness of a loving God. Consent is central to that ethic.

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Notes from my...: Further Thoughts on Modesty

This last Saturday, Rachel Held Evans tweeted out a link to an older blog post of mine, and quoted the line “Lust is not about sexuality, but about power and control.” Evidently, this struck a chord with a whole lot of cisgendered, heterosexual men in her audience, because no fewer than six of them decided to explain to me what lust ACTUALLY is about. Three of them even wrote blog posts (one of which called me a Mrs. and said in no uncertain terms that I want men to burn in hell, which was fun). Needless to say, since this one sentence is getting me called an apostate, repulsive, and proselytized to (evidently one’s doctrine on lust is salvation issue, who knew?), I’m guessing it needs a little clarification.

It's important to remember context here. The line about lust came from my friend Emily Maynard's article about modesty, which prompted the whole discussion. Maynard says:

Don’t get me wrong. Lust is serious, and lust is a sin. But lust is about control, not just sex.

Lust dehumanizes a person in your own heart and mind.

It is the ritual taking, obsessing and using someone else for your own benefit rather than valuing that person as an equal image-bearer of God.

Lust is forming people in your own image, for your own purposes, whether for sexual pleasure, emotional security or moral superiority.

In lusting, you are creating a world where every other person exists for your approval or dismissal. Lust reduces the complexity of each individual and their story to something you get to manage.

Lust – sexual lust, financial lust, emotional lust, whatever kind of lust one has – is about the desire to use and control other people for your own benefit. That is what I meant, plain and simple. When you make someone else an unwilling participant in your ongoing fantasies, that’s much more about using another person so you can get off than it is about “unbridled sexual attraction.”

The problem – and this is where modesty codes and church teaching enter the conversation – is when men view the world as a minefield in which a bodily reaction to an attractive person is mistaken for lust, rather than the normal biological reaction it is.

Are you taking the memory of that fleeting glimpse and filing it away for a spank bank later? That’s lust.

Are you just getting a boner when you see an attractive lady? That’s a biological reaction.

Lust is a deliberate act, a deliberate desire to use another person for one’s own benefit, to dehumanize them so that – even if in your fantasies they are consenting - they are still existing for your pleasure, to, yes, overpower and control them for your own satisfaction. It is this desire that Jesus is speaking to, not your boner.

No matter the source of this desire to dehumanize through sexual lust – whether it’s social conditioning or cultural training or “sex sells” advertising – the sin is still fundamentally your responsibility. And it is your responsibility because no one else can control or speak to your thought life.

This is why we say that modesty codes objectify in the same way hyper sexualization does – it is the mindset that says “other people exist for me” that is the problem. Is the fight a bit harder because of cultural norms? Yes, but that’s no excuse for it. And the fight isn’t a struggle only men have, and it isn’t a solely sexual desire. We are a culture of users, yes, but that doesn’t mean we lack the ability to see each other as human.

And this is why modesty codes don’t work. Because asking me to cover up so you don’t make me a player in your sexual fantasy doesn’t even begin to get the root of the issue, which is that you don’t view me as fully human.

I’m going to get real with you: lust isn’t a solely male issue and the idea that men struggle with it more because they’re more “visually stimulated” (or “prone to polygamy,” which is apparently a thing now) is utter, complete bollocks. Male fantasy is both expected and sanctioned in culture – it’s also called “the male gaze” in feminist theory.

But, your friendly neighborhood Christian feminist struggles with it too, and is hella visually stimulated. And you know how I stop myself? I remind myself that that person is a human being, not an object for my consumption. And I recognize that some reactions are perfectly normal biological process.

That’s why we need to shift the conversation about lust away from solely sexual behavior and attraction, because it blurs the bright line between unhealthy dehumanization and healthy sexual attraction.

The discussion about the commodification of women’s bodies in culture is an important one to have, but we need to recognize the nature of what lust is and why it is important before we can tackle that problem. Until we do that – until we recognize that lust is about the desire to use another person and that modesty codes actually reinforce this commodification of female bodies – we will forever be treading the waters of a rape culture in which a man can rail against the porn industry and then ask women not to wear spaghetti straps in his presence. They are two parts of the same objectification standard, and it is the objectification that causes us to see other people as things rather than human beings that is the problem.

Thus, making lust about a problem that is sexual in nature is intensely problematic and cannot begin to cover the issue. The issue is not the sex. The issue is the commodification of bodies for our own uses – the issue is power and control.

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Admin Note: The Account and Countenance series will begin next Monday and run every other Monday through the year. If you're interested in being interviewed/guest posting, there is still room on the schedule. Send me an email!

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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.

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People as Moral Agents

On Christmas Eve, my friend Preston tweeted an article at me, with an accompanying joke about how some blogs seem to try to sneak their controversial-yet-terrible articles in on December 24th. This piece was no exception – it’s a terrible amalgamation of every bad argument against feminism. It’s so bad that I half-asked myself, “Is this a parody?” Nope, it’s not. And in that regard, I think it’s worth examining the arguments as they represent a lot of what people say about feminism and about humanity.

The article appears on Thought Catalog, an online magazine of sorts aimed at white, 20 something hipsters, and is titled “Why We Don’t Need Feminism.”

You see why Preston sent it to me.

The piece is shallow, jumping from one argument to the next, as though the whole of a multi-century movement  can be brought to its knees by 2,000 words of survey-class-level arguments on the internet (spoiler alert: it can’t, and it devolves into transphobic reductionism on its way down).

In the first point, the author – Emily Matters – starts out by talking about male apes who violently rape as part of their chimp tribes. No, seriously. That’s her argument – that apes show us that violence, aggression, and yes, rape, are hardwired into male humans because TESTOSTERONE and that fighting it with feminism is useless because misogyny isn’t the whole cause.

You balk, but this is an actual argument people make.

If you’re a cis-man reading this, you should be insulted by Ms. Matters’ argument – she is literally comparing you to an ape. What a low, base view of men* – that they can’t help but rape, that they are slaves to their testosterone and “natural” aggression, that violence is an inherent part of the masculine being, rather than an aberration. Not to mention that this is a rather horrific view of what makes someone a man or a woman – as though gender is biological sex, which it is not, and once again defines masculinity in violent terms.

But even if violence is “natural” in apes, it does not begin to excuse it in humans, because – again – that basically says that human people don’t have brains with which to make decisions, that they are unable to reason things out and become moral agents in their own lives.

Matters’ argument is based in an incredibly low and narrow view of masculine identity. She glosses this over by talking about male on male violence, and how this is evidence that cis-men are just inherently violent. But rather than say that this is a masculinity problem that emerges from a desire to prove that a man is defined by that which is not womanly, she chalks it up to biology and a shrug.

We need feminism because people are moral agents with a conscience, not slaves to questionable biological instincts.

Matters’ second point is a confusing mess that is a prime example of how not to read statistics and studies. She cites the wage gap, and says that it’s not discrimination that cis-women are paid lower than cis-men because they choose fields that are naturally low-paying, as though it’s simply coincidence that fields historically dominated by cis-women – like education or nursing – are also some of the lowest paid career choices. She also ignores that the studies on the wage gap account for career choices, benefits, children, education and other factors. Even with all those things accounted for, for cis white men and cis white women working in the same job with the same skill level and education, the men are still paid more than women. There is a gap that is not explained by anything but systematic discrimination.

And it’s important to note that this applies to cis white men and women. Once you factor in race, the gap increases even more. White women don’t make a lot compared to the white man’s dollar, but they’re still more likely to make more than a cis black man, and it’s almost assured that a white woman will make more than a cis black woman for the same work. And all of them likely make more than trans* people.

Socialization seems to mean nothing here – on the one hand, cis-men are driven by their “natural” aggression to commit terrible violent acts, and on the other hand, this “testosterone driven” aggression is a good thing because it makes them good at business and innovation. Social conditioning isn’t even acknowledged – the idea that workplaces are socialized to reward male aggression and punish female acts of the same isn’t even in the thought catalog here.

It is here that Matters says something utterly baffling: “The answer here isn’t that we need more feminism or coddling, it’s that women must learn to embrace more conventionally male traits of assertiveness and dominance (and to try to produce more testosterone?) if they really care about making more money.”

I’m so confused. Feminism is coddling? Not the gender roles that call women weaker vessels and tells them not to worry their pretty little heads about things like finances?

We need feminism because people are individuals and need to be embraced and viewed on the merits of their individual characteristics, not on their conformity to some larger ideas of aggression and submission or masculinity and femininity – however the larger culture defines it.

I am a feminist because I believe people are better moral agents than apes, because I believe we, as a society, can rise above deterministic, transphobic, crap that passes for social argument. I believe that people are people and men and women can both be better than the “roles” society hands us.

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*It should be noted, too, that this kind of biological reductionism is quite transphobic – people who identify as men are men regardless of the level of testosterone in their body and women who identify as women are women regardless of the level of testosterone in their body.

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On Anger and Injustice

An underage girl passes out at a party, and members of the high school football team rape her. Pictures are taken and shared around the internet via social media. The girl finds out about her rape the next day from these photos. The attorney for the defense calls social media “a gift” because the girl was already in the habit of exposing herself and thus had no reason to object to  non-consensual photos of her being taken and distributed. And people wonder that I’m angry.

A woman comes to terms with the idea that she has been raped, that her rapist called it rape, and that this rape has ruined her approach to sexuality for a good chunk of her life. When she tells her story, she is told that it wasn’t really rape, that she should take some responsibility for what happened, that it’s useless to drag his name through the mud – despite her not using it or any identifying features.

And people wonder that I’m angry.

An 11 year old girl is raped by 18 men, and a town excuses it by saying that “she dressed older than her age” and “brought it on herself.”

And people wonder that I’m angry.

I find myself, day after day, wondering why I seem to be alone in my anger about these things, why so much of the world seems to find my anger more offensive than those events at which I am angry.

Christian culture doesn’t do a good job of handling anger. Such emotion scares us and make us uncomfortable, and if there’s one thing American Christians don’t want to be, it’s uncomfortable. Discomfiture and angry words are unwelcome, upsetting, and somehow a moral wrong. Often, the offense of being angry is weighed as more important than the cause of the anger itself.

And I see this happen most often in cases of sexual assault and rape. The survivor is told that they must give up their anger, that being angry at how a sexual assault case is handled is refusing to let God work, that anger is somehow a deficiency in personality or grace.

But I’m beginning to wonder if the person who is deficient is not the person who is angry, but the person who seeks to erase the anger.

How is it that, when people can hear of sexual assaults, of people who were violated and made to feel less than, that they can brush it off without anger or even explain it away?

I find myself asking, more and more, “Why aren’t you angry?”

When I am told that I need to “tone it down” and “not be so angry,” I find myself asking, “No, why aren’t YOU angry about this?”

Anger is good. Anger is important. Anger is valid. Feeling angry in the face of injustice is how things should be, not a deviance from the norm. And yet, somehow, those of us who get outraged are “bitter angry feminists” and “clouded by emotion.”

But again I ask, “Why aren’t you angry?”

The only conclusion I have is the old adage, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

So here is my request: start paying attention. Read the stories of survivors, listen to the ones that are surely in your midst. Find out why they are angry.

And then, get angry. Be angry with us. Allow yourself to understand that anger is helpful, it is clarifying. That sometimes, anger is the only valid response.

So tell me, in the face of all this injustice, why aren't you angry?

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Sympathy for The Devil: The Good Men Project and Rape

When, last week, the feminist blogosphere broke out in a furor over a rape apologia article from the Good Men Project, I’ll admit – I cried a little. One of my closest male friends had just sent me a long screed about “grey rape,” and how his analysis of a woman’s experience of rape – one in which the rapist himself admitted that it was rape and this experience had affected her for over 30 years – wasn’t actually rape and that she was at least partly to blame. Needless to say, the parallels with the Good Men Project’s rape apologia and my current real life discussions were far too much for me to handle at the moment, and decided I could let others take this one. And they did, in ways better than I could.

But then GMP posted a story in which a rapist tells his tale (I won’t link because I refuse to give them the traffic anymore).

If there was any doubt that Good Men Project was anything that could be called good, that should have been washed away when they allowed the posting of rape porn a couple months ago. And that good will should have been entirely gone when they posted a story justifying the rape of an unconscious woman because she was “flirty.”

And if that wasn’t enough? Then you are part of the problem if you still think of the Good Men Project as “good.”

The post appearing on December 10th, written anonymously, is written by a rapist, and opens with a justification: “I swear to God, it is only after the fact [of living a party lifestyle] that you start figuring out that one of the tradeoffs you’ve accepted is a certain amount of rape.”

That is the thesis statement for the article. I’m not kidding. The idea is that “if you want to have a good time with alcohol/drugs, rape is just sort of a natural consequence of it, like a businessman paying fines for minor infractions of business rules.”

This sort of “testimony” is sickening, disgraceful, and morally reprehensible.

It is unconscionable that GMP would give voice to this man, even anonymously – in fact, anonymity makes it worse, because he never has to answer for what he said. For all their lip service to “having a good discussion about rape,” the GMP doesn’t seem interested in finding ways in which this discussion can be conducted and remain healthy.

There’s a perverted fascination in our culture with “hearing both sides” of a crime, that somehow, by knowing the mind of a criminal, we can turn them into the Other and say that it could never be us. We see this in the History Channel’s fascination with Hitler, in the high ratings of crime procedurals, and the money brought in by journalists scoring “exclusive interviews” with famous criminals. We, as a culture, have a pretty fucked up craving for understanding the minds of a criminal, if only so that we assuage ourselves that we are better than they. There is no “there but for the grace of God go I” here.

But, when it comes to rape, this fascination feeds into a culture that is more sympathetic to rapists than to their victims. Personal testimonies and justifications of rapists do nothing to add to the discussion beyond providing sympathy for an act that must be seen as beyond the pale. There is no place for the rapist’s voice in such a discussion because including his voice necessarily takes primacy away from the victim. We buy into his perverted view of the events, hook, line, and sinker, because we have been trained as a culture that hearing both sides of a crime is necessary for a just and fair narrative to be introduced.

Anyone who works in the prison system can tell you that this is a laughable farce of realistic discussion, a parody of actual change, an idea which only gives the zombie-like semblance of progressive life.

As I’ve mentioned before, a close family member works in the prison system. When you’re hired to work with inmates, one of the first things they train you on is guarding yourself against sympathy for them. This is partly a safety issue – emotional distance from the criminals keeps you from being conned into bringing them contraband and putting yourself and your fellow prison workers at risk.

But it has a second reason – sympathy toward criminal thinking tends to encourage further criminal thinking. Giving the criminals a platform does nothing to help them “realize the error of their ways,” and can actually feed into their sense of injustice at being put away for something they didn’t feel was necessarily wrong in the first place.* Where prison is supposed to rehabilitate criminals into society at large, one of the major ways to make this change is to enforce for them that their narrative of events is, first, not the only one, and second, wrong.

Where this sympathy for criminals goes horrifically wrong is when the criminal has not yet been caught. Within a prison system, the person has a massive environmental shift that clues them in to the idea that what they did was wrong – being in prison is a pretty big change. But many of them are still convinced that what they did was somehow justified, and that’s why not giving their stories primacy is so important. Even when in prison, a sympathetic ear from an authority figure can function as justification and prevent rehabilitation.

Imagine, then, how much worse it is when the criminal is a rapist who has not been caught, who is writing in such a forum that he never will be caught (anonymously), and admits that he will probably continue to rape.

When we give him a platform, when we defend his posting, we’re not opening up a discussion. We are lending a criminal a sympathetic ear and allowing ourselves to be conned into bringing him contraband. When we hand rapists the microphone, we not only silence survivors, we engender the potential rape of more victims [reddit link, warning].

This is why such a piece is unconscionable. A rapist needs room to tell their story, yes – to a therapist, to a counselor, to someone who can help them. Not to thousands of internet users anonymously, and not to an audience that includes rape survivors.

We can talk day and night about whether or not the situations in which the anonymous author committed rape and the “complexity of consent” and all that bullshit, but what we cannot and should not do is hand him a platform in which he can justify his behavior and then claim in an “apology/defense” that “we hope he seeks help.” The damage is already done, and future rapes that he performs are on the hands of the Good Men Project for enabling and encouraging him.

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*This is not to say that sympathy for those in the prison system is across the board a bad idea, but it is important to understand that, quite often, a criminal’s view of events are not the complete story and are often eliding certain details in order to play on sympathy.

[Edited to add: for further critiques of The Good Men Project, simply click the "Good Men Project" tag here on the blog.]

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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.

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