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.

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.

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.

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

Worth Reading This Week

In a completely unexpected way, the blogging world exploded this week with a discussion of virginity, purity, and the sexism and damage it contains. Thank. God.

For me, these things that are new discussions for a lot of the mainstream blogging world have been the background radiation of this blog for a while. And when I got a comment a couple weeks ago asking why I seemed so okay with premarital sex if this is a faith based blog, I realized it may be time to revisit the topic, which I’ll be doing over the next few weeks.

To kick it off, Worth Reading This Week are a couple barn-burner posts from my friends Sarah Bessey and Emily  Maynard, just in case you missed them.

First, Sarah wrote about shame over at A Deeper Story and broke the internet (emphasis original):

Over the years the messages melded together into the common refrain: “Sarah, your virginity was a gift and you gave it away. You threw away your virtue for a moment of pleasure. You have twisted God’s ideal of sex and love and marriage. You will never be free of your former partners, the boys of your past will haunt your marriage like soul-ties. Your virginity belonged to your future husband. You stole from him. If – if! – you ever get married, you’ll have tremendous baggage to overcome in your marriage, you’ve ruined everything. No one honourable or godly wants to marry you. You are damaged goods, Sarah.”

If true love waits, I heard, then I have been disqualified from true love.

And then Emily posted at Prodigal about losing her v-card and made me yeah “HELL YEAH”:

I’m done standing apart from my brothers and sisters who have been abused or manipulated or coerced or had their ability to choose taken away from them. I’m done adding to a culture that humiliates victims who are walking out healing in their own way. We’re quick to offer platitudes of grace, but oh so slow to engage the individuals or social structures that perpetuate abuse.

I’m done blanketing all sexual experience outside of marriage as sin and never acknowledging that abuse can happen within a marriage. I’m done with Christians enforcing oppression in the name of purity.

I’m unbelievably glad that the mainstream blogging world is beginning to pick up the torch on this topic, not just because it’s a major part of my book project, but because moving toward a conversation about healthy sexuality is massively important if the church really wants to make justice a part of their agenda.

Account and Countenance: My Own Story

Before we get into the deeper theological waters of examining the image of God as presented to us in American evangelical Christianity, we must examine what our individual images of God are. So today, mine is on display. When I sat down to think about what my image of God had been through my formative years, I realized that the picture of God I had was not one of love and grace, but a God who keeps records of all my sins, who sits back and judges, and who is waiting for me to screw up. Luckily, through intentional study and relationship, that image has shifted in the past few years, but it still influences a lot of what I see in various theologies and beliefs. Growing up, my God – the God of my Baptist church – was white, and American. I remember when I was five or six years old, the preacher talked about the Rapture, and I was very concerned that Jesus would forget about the United States, his “natural” home. How could go cover the whole world and still be here?

My father patiently explained that everything would be okay if I just asked Jesus into my heart. So I did. That was the first of many times I prayed that prayer.

But by the time I hit twelve, my God had shifted. He was now intimately concerned with my development as a woman – I knew I shouldn’t be wearing v-neck shirts before I even had discernible cleavage and that men were different, alien. My task was to guard them and myself from an as yet unknown threat.

This God – the all powerful, all knowing, all sovereign God – was infinitely concerned with not only the state of my soul, but the state of my dress. I read the Left Behind series around this time, and the God who knew my soul was just as concerned with how women tempted men (I mean, Rayford wouldn’t have been thinking about cheating on his wife if that flight attendant didn’t wear such short skirts, right? Maybe he could have gone to heaven if she’d been a better steward).

I could still be considered a strong, brave woman if I kept myself pure, though. I took a pledge at 14 and was given a diamond ring my parents bought for me at WalMart the day before. I pledged before my entire congregation and before God that I’d wait to do anything until marriage – despite never having considered kissing anyone at that point in my life.

I would wear loose fitting clothing that could tempt no one, because I didn’t want anyone else to get left behind, as I was sure I was going to be because I was too much of a sinner. I yelled at my debate partners in high school, I had crushes on boys, I swore, out loud, when I got angry.

These were the sins that would keep me from Jesus.

So I prayed. A lot. I prayed that Jesus could forgive me for thinking about wanting to kiss that boy I liked. I prayed Jesus would forgive me for saying “shit” when I dropped that portfolio full of research. I prayed that He would cleanse my mind of liking that one song by Eminem my debate partner forced me to listen to when he gave me a ride to the tournament that one time.

I prayed without ceasing, but every Sunday, I’d sit in church and be scared that I wasn’t doing enough. My best friend was still an atheist, after all, and I made her my personal project for evangelism. I remember spending an agonizing night trying to fall asleep, racked by guilt over neglecting my eternal duty to bring her soul to God. When I got to school the next morning, I told my mom to pray for me during the day because I was finally going to talk to her about Jesus. I went straight to her locker and nervously explained that I was concerned about her soul and that if I didn’t say something then I was guilty too. Through the day, I kept pushing, eventually shutting up when she turned to me and yelled, “No, fuck you, I don’t want to hear it!”

I was devastated. Not only had I failed in what God wanted me to do, but I had alienated my best friend.

This was my life. Sunday and Wednesday, I’d feel close to God during worship at youth group, and then do something during the week – forget to read my Bible, forget to take that opportunity to witness, not be careful about how I sat down when hanging out with my guy friends, think about kissing my crush of the week for a moment too long – these were the things my spiritual walk was made of.

God, to me, was someone who I could push away with my sin at any moment. Because Paul had told us that free grace didn’t mean we could keep on sinning, I thought that I had to do my best not to sin so that I could be with God. Everything came back to whether or not I was sinning.

What’s more, God was especially concerned about potential sexual sin.

I literally had none aside from my own thoughts. In an effort to keep pure, I avoided movies with sex scenes, and wore the most modest clothing I could find without appearing Hutterite – though I still had the sense to avoid the denim skirts that would have been social suicide at my high school. But, I was, for all intents and purposes asexual and androgynous. I shopped in the men’s section at Old Navy and wore clothing that hid my shape.

And it was in this place that I lived for years – fearful of a God who watched my every thought, who judged my femaleness and my treatment of the men in my life, who would, at the end of my life, play back all these moments of sin for an audience of my peers and regard the state of my soul.

This judgmental, vengeful God and the loving, glorious Jesus were one and the same, of course. It was the face of the white, European Jesus, sadden and burdened by my sin that I pictured alongside an amorphous Father God in heaven – God the Father was merely two large hands in my imagination, nothing more.

Putting my nose to the grindstone was the only way out, the only way through. I had to at least show that I was putting forth effort in keeping myself from sin or God would not consider me – I never would and never had done enough.

In my freshman year of college, Calvinism became very attractive to me – not because of the depravity and sin, but because of the doctrine of perseverance of the saints. Here, finally, was something that said I was always and would always be saved. Here was an element of comfort that I didn’t have to keep trying, that I could try being womanly for once.

But this doctrine came with a God who elected some to heaven and some to hell. The idea that I could be one of the non-elect needled at me, until I rejected Calvinism altogether. Surely, I was too depraved, too sinful, too much for the sovereign God of the Calvinists – surely, if I was Elect, this whole spiritual walk would be easier?

Relief would not come for years yet.

We’ll return in two weeks with how I began to see God in a new light, in a new way, when the Account and Countenance series continues.

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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Modesty and Hating Oneself: The Darker Side

“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” – Matthew 5;28 (NRSV) “I hate myself every time I look at a woman's ass, which is hard not to do sometimes.” – A commenter on this post.

It’s that time of year again – time to discuss the idea of modesty, responsibility, and lust. A fellow writer, Emily Maynard (no, not that Emily Maynard), wrote an article that appeared on ChurchLeaders.com discussing the concept of modesty and lust. She talks eloquently about how lust is different from sexual attraction, and how reducing lust to being exclusively sexual in nature removes it from the idea that lust is about control, not attraction.

It’s a good article; you should go read it. But, I’d advise you not to read the comments.

The above quote was left on another article about the controversy raised by Maynard’s article. The line stuck out to me because it struck me as “the other side of the coin,” so to speak, of the modesty issues.

Heteronormative modesty codes not only objectify women by making them responsible for the thought life of every man they encounter, but make men feel weak, guilty, and vulnerable for experiencing basic sexual attraction.*

And this, too, is a major problem. Modesty codes not only negatively affect women by informing them that their bodies are public objects to be commented upon and used at will, but they also create an attitude within men that is twofold. First, they abdicate responsibility for a problem with lust to that which exists outside themselves , perpetuating an immature “blame others” attitude. Second, the lack of definition around lust makes men hate themselves when they cannot control a perfectly normal reaction.

This second is the problem I’d like to focus on here. We’ve so perverted the definition of lust – narrowing it and broadening it at the same time - that we have created a paradigm under which no human being could function and come out as healthy. We’ve narrowed lust to be solely about sexual issues, ignoring that one can lust after a person’s car, a person’s position, or marriage. Lust is not about sexuality, but about power and control, as Maynard so eloquently points out.

And we’ve broadened it so that any sexual thought, any sexual inclination is “lust” and therefore sinful and to be avoided. As Libby Anne points out over on Love, Joy, Feminism, this sort of thinking creates an atmosphere of repression and inability to understand sexual attraction within a relationship, as good little Christians are told to flee from it in order to remain pure. Many, as Libby Anne points out, end up fleeing from anyone they are sexually attracted to, figuring that this is the best way to avoid the temptation prior to marriage.**

Modesty codes – and the wrong thinking about lust that surrounds them – is harmful to both men and women (and that doesn’t even touch on the erasure of people who do not identify within a gender binary or heterosexuality). When we demonize biological functions, we set people up for failure. Instead of creating a world in which lust is understood as wanting to control another human being and that basic sexual attraction is healthy for romantic relationships*, we create a world in which people are mentally separated from their own bodies, and each interaction is fraught with the possibility that one’s spiritual walk could be derailed by the sight of cleavage.

I cannot repeat this enough: modesty codes set people up for failure. In the heteronormative, anti-woman way that they are taught, women are taught that being modest and asexual is the best they can be, while men are taught that they are unable to control themselves and are blameless for this inability, while also taught that they should hate themselves for it.

We, as a church, need to change the conversation. We need to first teach men that blaming women for boners is not a healthy way to go through life, and that sexual attraction and not feeling sexual attraction are natural and acceptable identities. We need to broaden the conversation to talk about control and objectification rather than how one person is sinful for having a perfectly normal sexual reaction to attractiveness. We need to talk about how this thinking fuels a culture of rape.

We need a better conversation because men should not be hating themselves every time a woman walks by.

___________

*Note: not all people experience sexual attraction, which is also damaging as those who don’t feel like they’re fighting lust all the time are made to feel like they are abnormal, when asexuality is a perfectly valid identity.

**This is not to say that love does not exist in these relationships or that these relationships should not happen, but that these relationships are missing a crucial element of compatibility, undiscovered until it is far too late to leave.

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.

With Friends Like These...

“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.” – bell hooks

My parents have been married for over 40 years. At their 25^th wedding anniversary celebration – we had a giant to-do with a dance floor and a DJ and everything – I remember looking through their wedding album. In it, I found a picture of them staring at a car that had been somewhat mutilated . A much younger version of my father had his hand out, wiping shaving cream from the hood while my much younger mother watched.

“Dad, what’s this?” the ten year old me asked.

“Oh, we knew this girl who was a feminist and she didn’t believe in marriage. She put ‘suckers’ on the hood of our car during the wedding ceremony.”

This was 10-year-old Dianna’s first introduction to the word “feminist.” I avoided the label for years afterward – even though I was functionally feminist in many of my dealings – because I didn’t want to be associated with the woman who called my parents “suckers” for getting married at the age of 21 in 1972.

I wonder, sometimes, if theologian and Truett Seminary professor Roger Olson had similar encounters that left a bad taste in his mouth about feminism. For all his talk of egalitarianism, he seems to have a specific bone to pick with what he calls “radical feminism” – which bears no actual resemblance to the radical feminism as I, a member of the feminist movement, would characterize it,* but rather as it means people like me, people who bother to claim the label of “feminist.”

He has written previously about how “Christian feminists” – something he seems to insist is an oxymoron – are destroying orthodoxy by questioning whether or not God is male and inserting such gender neutral labels in worship songs. At the time he wrote this last year, I’d attended some pretty liberal churches, and none of them (with the exception of a Unitarian Univeralist church, which is hardly mainstream) had anything but traditional, orthodox (male) language surrounding God.

When I pointed out that he had taken the fringe of the academic Christian feminist movement and turned it into a spectre threatening mainstream worship, he told me that if I don’t agree with these theologians he quoted, I should drop the label of feminist.

After that infuriating encounter last year, I dropped Olson from my radar, and didn’t pick him up again until his review of Rachel Held Evans’ new book, The Year of Biblical Womanhood, came up this weekend. And boy, I should not have been surprised, but I was.

Here’s what I know: Roger Olson is a smart man. He knows what he is talking about when it comes to theology, and I appreciate him as an egalitarian and Arminian. But I cannot call him my ally in the feminist movement (and I think he would not want to be), because he fails magnificently to enact a basic academic principle in his arguments about feminism: a gracious definition of terms that would be recognized by the group about whom he is talking. Put more simply, he fails to define his terms in a way that is universally recognizable as correct. He changes the definition to suit his bias, which is anti-academic, ungracious, and misleading. Worse, he doesn’t seem to care.

In his review, I was clipping right along with his discussion of the inconsistency of Biblical literalism in the complementarian camp, until I got to this weird, absurd claim:

How about A Year of Consistent Feminism? Maybe one month would be devoted to lobbying congress to change the law to require young women to register for the draft! I don’t see it happening.

Um, wait, what? Where did that come from? Where does he get the idea that feminists aren’t fighting the draft? Certainly not from reading actual modern-day feminists and discussions that are happening, re: the draft, like this one, this one, this one or this one.

(What’s worth noticing here, as well, that the leap to the draft as an “inconsistency of feminism” is a very common tactic used by Mens Rights Activists, which makes me instantly distrust Olson’s definition of feminism.)

After this small, weird hiccup, Olson’s review takes a left turn into WTF-ville. Olson is unaware, evidently, that he just spent most of this post praising a book by a woman who has, on many occasions, featured feminist writers (yes, me) and claimed the name of feminist. Regardless, Olson launches into a screed against feminism, saying:

On the other hand, I’m no fan of feminism. Of course, much depends on what “feminism” means, but far too often these days it means implicit, if not explicit, belief in female superiority and requirement for men to become like women in order to be acceptable. It too often means the total obliteration of masculinity (I’m not talking about “machismo,” but non-threatening male ways of relating).

I am both familiar and unfamiliar with the feminism with which he is discussing. Usually, the “changing gender” argument goes the other direction, but I’m not surprised to see him characterize feminism as emasculating for men. I am … annoyed? infuriated? …to see it coming from Roger Olson, a man who insists on being able to define “evangelical” as a label for himself but refuses to grant that same grace toward men and women who claim both Christ and feminism.

Without support or substantiation (and, when pressed in the comments by myself and others, still refuses to provide support for his broad claim, citing instead book titles), Olson claims, essentially, that feminism is about the domination of women over men and that male allies in feminism must have been emasculated. The spectre of feminism in his mind is the woman who wrote “suckers” on my parents’ car, not the woman who spends her evenings counseling rape victims on a crisis hotline that it’s not their fault, or the woman who advocates for the poor in her neighborhood on a national television show, or the woman who fights for her right to go to school and gets shot for it, or the numerous feminists arguing against drone strikes in that same neighborhood, or the feminists who argue for the inclusion of the marginalized in every sphere, or the male feminists who spend time advocating for the rights of the women around him.

My feminism – the feminism of today – is Christlike.

It advocates tirelessly for the poor and the hurting. It speaks truth to power. It calls for the recognition of all of God’s human creation to have equal rights under the secular state. It is intersectional and inclusive in its advocacy for those abused and downtrodden by the evil action of dehumanization.

The feminism I know argues for the rights of men not to be raped in the prison system and to have more support in being believed in incidents of abuse.

The feminism I know argues for the rights of children to be with the parent who is best suited to care for them, not for it to be assumed that they would automatically go with their mother.

The feminism I know argues for the recognition of and halting of discrimination toward all genders and races across the spectrum of humanity.

The feminism I know advocate for paid paternity leave as well as maternity leave.

The feminism I know includes Stay at Home fathers as well as Stay at Home mothers.

The feminism I know doesn’t give a rat’s ass about “having it all” but rather making sure we all have what we need to live.

The feminism I know advocates for access to welfare, food stamps, and universal health care because women are more likely to be living in poverty than men.

The feminism I know advocates not only for equal pay for women, but for equal pay for men of color, women of color, trans* people, and LGB citizens.

The feminism I know wants the best representatives of Jesus Christ in the pulpit, whether they be women or men.

The feminism I know rejects the characterization of God in abusive terms and, yes, the characterization of the Spirit as male – because it’s unbiblical, not because it’s sexist.

The feminism I know more closely resembles the community vision for God’s church than a lot of churches I’ve encountered in my lifetime. My feminist friends spend their weekends volunteering to help victims of rape, raising funds to support women in poverty, finding ways for these impoverished women to access medical care, advocating and pressing their legislators to reject anti-woman measures and to pass measures protecting women from violence. My feminist friends represent a greater diversity of races, genders, backgrounds, and sexual orientations than any church I have stepped foot in over my 26 years of life.

My feminism is wrapped up in the identity of Christ as an advocate of the marginalized, as an advocate of equality, and as an advocate of the poor. I advocate as a feminist because I am a Christian, not in spite of it.

My feminism is Christlike and far from matriarchal. I suggest, Dr. Olson, that you acquaint yourself with actual feminism and actual feminists before you talk of what you do not know.

___________

*The definition of radical feminism – or radfem, as they themselves call it – is a feminism that views gender as a set binary (meaning trans* men and women are to be hated) and views all heterosexual relationships are inherently unbalanced and therefore women must be lesbians to be true feminists. Most mainstream feminists you speak to today will tell you that radfem activism flies in the face of the necessary intersectionality and inclusion that characterizes modern-day feminism.

Feminism is Not the Enemy

I have a love hate relationship with Christianity Today’s Hermenutics blog. They post some good stuff, but they also post some real tripe. And some of the stuff they post is outright hurtful to women and a poor portrayal of Christianity. This last is my complaint with Her.menutics’ latest post about hook up culture. Ever since Wendy Shalitt published the definitive reactionary Christian guide to hook up culture, the phrase has become a dog whistle for sanctimonious pearl clutching about women who *gasp* have sex! WITH MEN! And do so without commitment!

OH MY GIDDY AUNT!

Here’s the thing: complaints about hook up culture from conservative Christianity usually follow two lines, both of which we see in the Her.menutics article. The first is that “hooking up” is not God’s plan for sex. That might have some meat to it, and I’ll get to that in a minute. The second, however, is the devastatingly off base “hook up culture and the sexual revolution is about making women act like men.”

That’s not a new argument. “Feminism is about turning women into men” is about as old as it gets. While hook up culture is not synonymous with feminism (there are all sorts of reasons a girl may “hook up,” and plenty of them have to do with reinforcement of patriarchal expectations of women as sexually available public property), feminism – or the movement for women to be seen as human beings with their own desires and agency to act on those desires – enabled the normalization of such a hook up culture.

The culture itself, however, is not anything new. There’s a reason prostitution is called the oldest profession. If you look at the newsletters of The Advocate For Moral Reform from the 1830s, you see early feminists decrying the idea that men can “hook up” (or be libertines, in their parlance) without consequence, but women cannot. Indeed, one of the first issues tells a fictional story about a woman who had been employed in a house of ill repute who finally managed to work her way out of that life and get a respectable job as a servant in a kitchen. The woman had to hide her past as a prostitute in order to maintain her employment and her job could be in jeopardy if a former customer happened to recognize her. The customer – the libertine man – would face no consequences while the woman would likely be back out on the street.

Yes, even in 1834, women were complaining about the sexual double standard. And these were church going Methodist women, to boot.

The sexual revolution of the 20^th century, then, was not about “making women act like men.” Rather, it was about removing the double standard that surrounds sexual activity – the double standard we find replicated again and again in rules about sexual activity on private Christian campuses and on Sunday mornings from the pulpit (stories about this will be appearing in my upcoming book; they are too many to list here).

The removal of the double standard does not, in fact, make women act like men, but instead removes judgment for the use of their sexual agency. After all, in order for “men to act like men,” as these arguments presume, they kind of had to have women to sleep with, did they not?*

The sexual revolution, then, removes the stigma that these women faced, and normalizes the culture of uncommitted sexual activity.

And here, Christians of America, is where the first point about “God’s plan for sex” comes in. When you whine and lament hook up culture “turning women into men,” you ignore the much larger significance of sexual ethics. Complaining about women acting like men laments that women have agency to make sexual choices, which is a step way too far.

Instead, I think you have a better argument if you acknowledge that women have the agency to consent and will – quite often – make choices you disagree with. Removing female agency or lamenting the presence of it is not going to make a lot of people happy about your sexual ethic.

I propose a different tactic: acknowledge that women have the same sexual agency that men have. That women have just as much right as men to consent to sex and to experience and explore their sexuality. And then examine why women AND MEN are “hooking up.” Why do we have a culture that prizes unfettered sexual encounters? Have we placed too much baggage on the idea of sex that we created a false dichotomy of unattached or totally married (yes, church, you have)? What role do we play in both minimizing and elevating a biological function?

I think much of the fear and pearl clutching about “hook up culture” and the sexual revolution of women – it’s always lamenting over the women hooking up, always – comes from a desire to have a spectre to blame. If we can simply say the problem is women being encouraged to be “independent” and “act like men,” we have a villain – those “anti-Christian feminazis.” And if we have a ready, available villain at which to hurl our accusations, we don’t have to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we got it wrong, maybe, just maybe, our scare tactics and strict God Forbids-God Allows sexual ethic isn’t translating and never really has. If we have something else, something outward, to blame, we don't have to look at how we might be doing things wrong.

Because God forbid we figure out how to present sexuality as healthy, consensual, AND committed, rather than just saying women who express agency are sluts and virgins are totes better.

God forbid we actually think about how our rhetoric makes women think about themselves and how our current elevation of virginity and purity isn’t translating to a culture that doesn’t get married until their late twenties and faces patriarchal sexualization and objectification day in, day out.

God forbid we actually examine how to make our own sexual ethic work without shame or guilt heaped on the party who expresses sexual agency.

God forbid we actually look inside, rather than just blaming the Enemy.

_____

*Note: This is in heteronormative terms because this is how the original article sees sex, so I'm going off of that. Naturally, there exists an entire realm of sexuality that is not man-woman relationships.