The Case For Early Marriage?: Confusing Is and Ought

In doing some research this past week, I came across an old article from Christianity Today. I remember reading it when it came out and being frustrated by the poor argument – and that was before I had my feminist framework in place. Reading it again as a nearly 27 year old still single person with years of research into feminist ideology and theory under my belt, I’m even more incensed by the proposals and ideas within the article. I thought it might be good to examine some of the ideas which undergird the framework for this piece. The piece is "The Case for Early Marriage," written by Mark Regnerus, for a 2009 issue of Christianity Today. It’s the cover story for that particular issue, and therefore is quite long.

But the article can be summed up in a few points:

1. Good family structure is good for society. Family, in the Biblical sense, consists of a mother, father, and kids (multiple, of course).
2. Secular society is delaying marriage further in people’s twenties, which turns the abstinence only dictate from evangelicalism into hogwash.
3. The problem, however, is not that abstinence only is a fundamentally bad idea, but that we haven’t done enough to promote marriage at younger ages – ages which would skirt that troublesome mid-20s sex drive and fertility push.
4. Delayed marriage is bad because people are having sex before marriage because of it (why this is bad is never fully explained). Delayed marriage also, evidently, encourages extended adolescence in men, resulting in women having to “marry down” if they want to marry at all.
5. Solution: we encourage people to marry young and work out their problems within a marriage relationship, rather than dating around. This way we can encourage the family structure as well, keep people from having premarital sex, and bolster society because … family’s the cornerstone and stuff.

There are several premises that go unquestioned throughout this piece. The first is that a family structure consists of man, woman, kids. The second is that extramarital or premarital sex is a society-destroying problem. The third is that marriage is less about right people than about right practices and hard work. And the fourth is that marriage is, of course, for the sole purpose of procreation.

All of these are tied up in a concept of marriage as a salvation tool, as The Thing that the church needs to be relevant and helpful to a dying society.

There’s a lot of hoopla that Regnerus makes here about women waiting to marry until they are past their prime years of fertility. Technically, prime years of fertility are a woman’s teens, but since that’s not socially acceptable (despite its undisputed place as the Biblical model), Regnerus has given a little ground and now advises that a good age for marriage is in the early 20s. 20-22, that range.

Now, before I get angry comments about how “I married at 20 and we’re 11 years strong!” (good for you!), I am not talking about your marriages or the marriages of those who decided to marry young and it’s still working. What I am discussing is the harmful teaching from the church that says people should marry at that age. It’s the universal rule that I’m challenging, not the individual cases.

Regnerus’ advice is harmful precisely because he imposes an “ought” onto a “maybe.” He makes the mistake of moving from the specific (in many examples, his own young marriage) into the general. This is an incredibly common error in logic, and unbelievably common when it comes to church relationship/dating teachings. I see people who made mistakes in their dating relationships – having sex before they were ready for it, to take one very common example – take that personal error and turn it into a rule, a black and white comment about when other people should or ought to do something.

This is most clear when he discusses objections to early marriage. He says of the idea of poor matches in early marriages:

There is no right answer to such questions, because successful marriages are less about the right personalities than about the right practices, like persistent communication and conflict resolution, along with the ability to handle the cyclical nature of so much about marriage, and a bedrock commitment to its sacred unity. Indeed, marriage research confirms that couples who view their marriages as sacred covenants are far better off than those who don't. [emphasis mine]

Oof.

While it’s true that couples who view their marriage in a way that takes divorce off the table will probably not get divorced, I hesitate to use the language the author does in calling this “better off," because that's an unquantifiable, vague idea. However, that’s small potatoes compared to the idea that a marriage is less about “right personalities” and more about “right practices.”

This is legalism. This is rules-based Christianity. This is blaming the problem not on the actual causes but on the victims of those problems. You’re encouraged by the church to marry your first boyfriend and to do so quickly and you discover the relationship was a bad idea because of fundamental personality clashes? You’re just not doing marriage right – there’s nothing wrong with the institution or with the push to marry early – it’s all on YOU, the person on the ground, for not performing it right.

It’s a version of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy – it conveniently pushes off the failure of numerous early marriages on those who divorced, conveniently implying that they just didn’t have the right practices for their marriage, rather than admitting a fault in the doctrine of early marriage itself. It's the "if your [x thing you were praying for] didn't work, you're just not right with God" approach.

But "right" practices mean nothing if you don’t have a person you’re willing to invest time and energy in. And while day to day feelings change and fade, there’s always a basis of love for the other person. If you don’t have the right person in your match, all of your "right" practices are going to mean diddly squat.

And this is the ultimate problem – Regnerus refuses to recognize the diversity of human beings and human relationships and seems to think that if a couple is having problems in their marriage because they married before realizing fundamental personality differences (differences that may only arise after both people have had chances and time to discover who they really are, which happens at different ages for literally everyone), then the problem is with them simply not trying hard enough. He doesn’t realize that it’s like trying to shove an elephant into a sweater meant for a cat – sometimes there is no right solution and no right way to fix a marriage that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. But instead of acknowledging that, yeah, people need time to mature and know themselves outside of a relationship and on their own, he proposes that people simply need to work harder – as though pushing really hard will somehow make the elephant's head fit into the sweater's neck.

Life doesn’t work that way. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for marriage. Marrying at 20 works for some people. Marrying at 40 works for others. We all mature in different ways and the opening up of choices for women in terms of careers and who they have the ability to say “yes” to has shifted the demographics and that is not de facto bad.

This doesn’t even touch on the extremely utilitarian view of marriage that Regnerus is pushing – early marriage is necessary because of fertility and Christians marrying earlier gives them the chance to have more kids, giving them a demographic advantage. This view, in fact, devalues marriage (and women) because it turns marriage into a means by which the next generation of (hopefully Christian conservatives!) is produced, rather than a glorious celebration of love and hope for renewal and desire to dedicate a life to working with a partner.

Perhaps it is not society’s view that is dishonoring marriage, but Regnerus’ utilitarian, baby factory one that erases the beautiful bright diversity of love within humanity in favor of brutal, cold demographic sustenance. I’d rather never get married than experience a marriage that has all the right practices but none of the right person.

Terrorism and Othering

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” – John Green, Paper Towns

I remember standing in line at an office on a Sunday in 2009, and reading a headline on the TV screen: “Kansas Abortion Doctor George Tiller Killed.” I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I remember being slightly surprised as the headline changed to discuss the location – Dr. Tiller’s church. But that was all that surprised me.

You see, the first headline told me everything I needed to know about the case: “Kansas Abortion Doctor…Killed.” Specifics didn’t matter because there were a number of things I could assume, just from a headline: the man was likely the only provider of abortions in the state, he had probably been harassed for years, and the person who killed him probably had a history of connections with pro-life groups and organizations.

And the story unfolded: Tiller provided late-term abortions, one of three people in the US at the time to do so, and was one of the only people in Kansas to provide abortions at all. And his killer, Scott Roeder, was a man connected at several levels to Operation Rescue, an organization which frequently held protests and vigils outside Tiller’s Wichita office (though Operation Rescue denies any connection to Roeder, he frequently attended meetings and had the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in his car at the time of the shooting).

(For more information about Dr. Tiller’s death, see this excellent documentary narrated by Rachel Maddow for MSNBC).

For me, Dr. Tiller’s death was just another sad chapter in a decades long string of clinic bombings, fires, and assassinations.

The latest came in the form of a failed bomb at a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood on Sunday night – the bomb went off, but burned itself out, causing damage to the building but luckily not injuring any workers as they were not in the clinic on a Sunday night.

This happened just a couple short weeks after Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ office was set on fire by a man with a Molotov cocktail. Davis was an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood who had recently entered the limelight by talking about how Planned Parenthood helped her out as a single, teen mother.

I was born in 1986. In my (relatively short) lifetime, Drs. David Gunn (1993), John Britton (1994), Barnett Slepian (1998) and George Tiller (2009), as well as clinic escort James Barrett [in the same case as David Gunn, above], receptionists Shannon Lowneyand Lee Ann Nichols (all three in 1994), and security guard Robert Sanderson (1998) were all killed for doing their jobs.

In my short 26 years of life, acid has been poured over the entrances of clinics in Miami (1998), clinics have been set on fire (including one in my hometown in 1999, as well as numerous incidents all throughout the 2000s), cars have been literally driven into clinic buildings (Rockford, IL, 2000; Rochester Hills, Michigan, 2006; and St. Paul, MN, 2009) , multiple Molotov cocktails have been lobbed through windows and doors (most recently being the incident at Wendy Davis’ office), and several clinics have been bombed or experienced attempted bombings (most recently in January in Pensacola, FL, excluding the already mentioned incident in Wisconsin on Sunday).

Additionally, numerous pro-life organizations have participated in harassment techniques, publishing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of “abortionists,” encouraging their followers to call them by the hundreds, though the content is up to the individual caller.

And yet, in recent memory (since I started paying attention in 2009), the incidents of bombings, of threats, of attempted arson have been reported as “isolated incidents,” done by “unhinged fringe members” of the pro-life movement – if their connection to pro-life movements is acknowledged at all. Even with a consistent pattern of attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics and Planned Parenthood supporters, each new incident of violence is treated as isolated, as fringe, as not representative of the movement as a whole.

And I’m willing to grant that it’s not representative of the movement to bomb clinics, but the lack of willingness to acknowledge ANY complicity in this form of domestic terrorism smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

I grew up in the pro-life movement. While my parents weren’t the “stand outside the clinic and protest” type, I frequently heard – at church, at school, at home – imprecations of those “sluts” who would “kill their babies.” I listened to my OBGYN uncles rant and rave about the irresponsible ladies who just shouldn’t have sex if they don’t want a baby, and talk about how they urged their patients to have more children (instead of adopting…?). I side-eyed the Planned Parenthood across the street from my high school, thinking bad thoughts about “free condoms” and low cost birth control – because, obviously, that was just enabling the sluts. And I financially supported the local pregnancy crisis center – the Abstinence Clearing House – by wearing a shirt with a cute dog on it reading “Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date.”

And then I met women who had abortions.

They weren’t the irresponsible sluts I’d been raised to revile – they were people who were already mothers, they were college freshmen who had to scrape together the money to pay for the abortion (it goes without saying that they did not have the money to pay for the medical care of a pregnancy, let alone a child), they were women who had taken every precaution they could. They were and are real people, with real, complicated stories and motivations and lives.

And the people who work at the clinics are real people, with real, complicated lives and stories – everyone from the doctor to the nurse to the receptionist in the lobby is a real person, just like you, and just like me.

The rhetoric of the pro-life movement (on the whole) doesn’t seem to think so, though. They like to talk about women who get abortions as “irresponsible,” without ever considering how abortion, in some cases, might just be the responsible move. They like to offer simple solutions, like women simply not having sex in order to avoid pregnancy – a solution that only works in a world where rape and incest are not reality. They like to characterize doctors who provide abortions as “baby-killers,” ignoring the numerous positive efforts they make in providing birth control and the hardship that is life as a doctor who provides abortions.

“I am a good citizen, and I am very real.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I’m not writing this necessarily to implicate the pro-life movement as a whole, or even necessarily to rail on about domestic terrorism,* but merely to point out this: Clinic bombings, terroristic attacks, Molotov cocktails, cars being run into buildings can be pinned down to one thing, and one thing alone: Othering.

We encounter a lot of people in our lives, many of whom we’ll disagree with, and most of us manage to disagree peacefully. But we create a toxic environment, a world that encourages violence, when we Other the people we disagree with – when we make them, in our minds, into something so unlike ourselves that we strip them of their humanity and dignity.

This is what the pro-life movement consistently and successfully does to abortion doctors and to women who get abortions. This is the stuff of hate crimes – when a teenager on the street becomes nothing more than a black kid in a hoodie. This is the lifeblood of a political environment that breeds shootings, and shouting matches, that leads pundits to rip off their mikes and storm off set, that props up figures like Rush Limbaugh and scares off any moderate criticism. Othering is how we get to absurd proclamations like “The entire Tea Party is racist,” or “Liberals are all atheist, god-hating scum,” “The GOP doesn’t care about the poor,” and “Liberalism is a mental disease.”

Othering is a bipartisan problem. However, it most consistently is connected with violence and terrorism within pro-life movement, likely because the stakes are raised so high. It is genuinely believed that they’re preventing a “holocaust,” that “the most dangerous place for a black baby is in the womb” (thereby playing on race war rhetoric), that abortion doctors are “heartless baby-killers.” Rather than being halted and questioned and asked to be more nuanced, the most flagrant mongers of this hateful rhetoric are encouraged, celebrated and awarded (think of the vans that drive around cities showing pictures of “aborted”** fetuses on the sides).

And then, when a bomb goes off at a clinic, when an abortion doctor is shot in the back of the head while standing in his church lobby, when a clinic is vandalized and bricks are thrown through windows, when a clinic escort is assaulted walking into work – all of these things extend from the ongoing and sustained practice of Othering.

I don’t have any practical solutions, other than to remind you to rebuke those in your life who Other people. Remind them that everyone has a story, that your enemies are men like you. And, little by little, we’ll regain some of the dignity necessary for civil discourse.

*I say terrorism because these attacks are the definition of terrorism – a violent attack meant to send the message to others in a community that they are in danger.

**This pictures are most often actually medical pictures of stillborn babies, not abortions as the campaigns frequently claim (warning: link contains graphic content).

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that the man who bombed the Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic on Sunday night was doing so explicitly as an anti-abortion move. He is quoted as asking the judge in his arraignment if the judge knew "how many babies were being killed in that clinic." "Baby killer" as Othering functions well in this situation.

Why I'm Finally Investing in Mace

Being new to Chicago, I’ve realized one thing, glaringly and in my face: It’s really hard to meet people organically nowadays. As a person who only really drinks if she’s out with a group (and even then, not much), I miss the organic nature of my relationships in Sioux Falls. One friend introduced another friend to another friend and so on. But in a larger city with a full time job, it can be very hard to meet people and make new friends.

I say that to say this: I get it. I get that it’s really hard to meet people outside of your social circle, and if you’re interested in a relationship or friendship with someone, sometimes the only way to do it is the in person equivalent of cold-calling: you tap them on the shoulder, you smile at them, you ask them what they’re reading. You do any number of things that I, as a polite Midwesterner, was taught were good conversation starters.

But, if you are a man, and the person you are approaching is presenting as female, it’s not so cut and dried.

Let me tell you a story. Last week, I went up into the Loop area of Chicago for a date and to see a friend. The end stop for my train on the return trip is in a suburb that’s not the greatest (though there are definitely worse areas). Still, coming back to this area after dark is worrisome, so I cut the time short with a friend in order to catch an earlier train.

I was one of maybe 10 people in my section of the train. By the time we got to my stop, I was one of three – myself, another woman who had headphones on, and a man who was not the cleanest in the world, with a big mustache and a trucker hat. A few minutes before the stop, all three of us, plus the train employee, gathered in the space by the door.

I made eye contact with the man, and he said something that I, honestly, didn’t really understand or catch. As I wasn’t particularly interested in a conversation, I just sort of smiled and nodded and pulled out my phone to check my Twitter feed, and scooted a little closer to the door.

He continued to talk to me, or rather, at me. I could only catch about every other word as he mumbled so terribly that he was literally unintelligible at points. I caught enough to hear that he was headed to Kanakee that night – a suburb near where my friend goes to college. At this point, I’d sort of given up on nonverbal cues that he clearly wasn’t picking up on, and so I mentioned the two things I know about Kanakee – that Olivet Nazarene is near there, and that Kanakee is a bad town. And that, literally, is all I said to him.

I was treated to a (kind of racist, to be honest) ramble about how Kanakee has been going downhill and is turning into an unsafe area, along with some cryptic warnings about how I need to worry as a woman alone. Gee, thanks.

I stopped making eye contact with him, turned my body away, and watched the train employee ready the stairs so we could get off the train. We were let off at the end of the platform, and had the entire platform to walk down.

I was the first person off the train, but it wasn’t long before the man matched pace with me and walked with me all the way to the parking lot. I was clutching my keys in my hand within the pocket of my coat, and when we reached the door of the station (leading to the parking lot), I wished him a good evening, and hung back a little in the lighted entrance (this parking lot is not well-lit).

I found myself breathing a sigh of relief when he went straight to his ride and did not continue to try to talk to me and hang back with me.

I’ll be honest: Even though the man probably had decent intentions, even though he might be a genuinely kind and friendly guy, I was scared.

And here’s why: He ignored my boundaries. He took me briefly making eye contact with him and offering a polite but non-committal reply as an offer to keep talking. He ignored boundaries that I thought were pretty clear (me playing with my phone, me looking away and even walking away) in order that I would listen to him. And by subtly signaling to me that he would ignore my boundaries in something as simple as a conversation on public transit, I knew I couldn’t trust him to respect my boundaries in any other situation. And when that happens in the dark in a bad neighborhood when I’m alone, I get scared.

In other words: by ignoring my boundaries once, he immediately put himself in a position where I would not and could not trust him. And that made me feel threatened, especially as a single woman going home alone.

Were a woman to do this to a man, the situation would not be received in the same way. I’m just going to make that clear now: Women live in a culture in which we are instructed every day of our lives that 1. Our bodies are not our own and men are free to judge them as they see fit, 2. We must do everything we can to protect ourselves, because if we do get attacked, we will be questioned on what we could have done differently, and 3. That saying no directly may give the complete stranger you’re talking to reason to escalate conflict, and that puts you in a double bind, so it’s best to just deflect and ignore.

I’m going back up to the city on Saturday night. And I just googled where I can find pepper spray near me. I’ve never felt the need to carry pepper spray before, but my encounter last Saturday was enough to convince me to buy some to take with me into the city.

It was, overall, a relatively tame encounter, but it was enough to remind me, someday, there might be a man who doesn’t have a ride waiting for him, a man who wants to follow me to my car, or a man who is more overtly threatening.

So, guys, this one’s for you:

See that cute girl on the bus or the train? You want to talk to her, right? You may even have legitimate reason to – you’re familiar with the book she’s reading, you think her shoes are cute, whatever. And you think, "I have to take this chance – if I don’t say something, I could miss out on an awesome relationship! Maybe, just maybe, she’s the best friend and wife I’ve been waiting for. I should say something, right? She is reading that book, and she seems pretty engrossed in it. And her headphones are in. But, dude, she could be my wife!"

But here’s the deal: Your internal monologue and hers are very different. While you're thinking about "nothing ventured nothing gained," she's wondering: “Is this guy a creep? Should I be afraid? He’s talking to me when I don’t want to talk to him. How can I tell him no without possibly setting him off? Is he going to get mad if I tell him ‘no’ directly? If I do tell him no, is he going to leer at me for the rest of the bus ride and follow me to my car or down the street? Why won’t he just let me read my book and play Words with Friends in peace? If I don’t shake this guy, what are my options?”

If the woman you think is attractive is clearly engrossed in something else – whether it be her book, her music, or her phone, and is not holding a posture that says “COME TALK TO ME!” – then don’t talk to her. Don’t be “that guy” who makes her feel unsafe for the rest of her ride home. Don’t be that guy who makes  her reach for her keys the instant she gets off the train in case she has to defend herself. Don’t be that guy who makes her wonder if she should break into a run and whether her shoes would slip on the ice.

For you, it’s an innocent little conversation with a stranger. For her, more often than not, it’s the incident that convinces her to finally buy some pepper spray.

Equality is Not a Zero Sum

Today at work, during some downtime while I was stuck on a particular writing problem (note: writing specialized English for an ESL audience can be very hard some days), I started reading articles on CNN.com, looking for ideas for new topics. This one in particular caught my eye – you can easily guess why, if you’re at all familiar with my personal philosophy.  

William J. Bennett, the author of the article, acknowledges that women have made huge strides in equality, but that these strides have come at the cost of men. Men are confused nowadays about what it means to be a man – apparently, the evidence of this problem is that they play videogames more than their teenage counterparts…who are in full-time school. Bennett’s solution to this masculinity crisis? Teaching children about the things that make you a man – in Bennett’s mind, that means going back to the “Founding Fathers” and their ideals of “industriousness, marriage, and religion.” He doesn’t say what religion, but judging from his biography, I’m going to guess he doesn’t mean Islam.

I started off the article ambivalent (as I do with all articles that profess alarmist theses about “men are in trouble!”). Bennett’s premise is a little weird – that with the rise of women, men have declined. The statistics he cite create a bit of a vacuum in that he neglects to note that, though women are, indeed, earning more college degrees than men, we are still paid 78 cents to every man’s dollar, for the exact same work. The dramatic increase in women’s pay that Bennett cites is not to be seen as a threat to men but rather a cause for celebration as it means our pay is equalizing – I’m willing to bet money that the 44% increase in women’s pay is a direct result of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It does not necessarily mean that we are taking good pay from men – we are simply, finally, getting paid a fair wage for the jobs we are already performing alongside men.

Similarly, Bennett mentions that 20% of men in the US last year were unemployed – while neglecting to mention that this number comes from one of the worst economic times since the great depression. His point of comparison is strange as well – he says that in 1950, unemployment for men was only 5%, compared to last year’s 20% - shocking! Let’s compare the 2010 unemployment to the unemployment rate from a post-war economic boom – a year, I might add, that probably had a massive decrease in the amount of men even available for jobs because…hello, war. It’s almost purposefully misleading – a manipulation of statistics to prove his point.

The deceitful manipulation of statistics is bothersome in of itself, but Bennett appears to be using them to manufacture a crisis where there is none. In passing, Bennett acknowledges that “Men still maintain a majority of the highest paid and most powerful occupations, but women are catching them and will soon be passing them if this trend continues.” This statement gives nod to the equality statistics he doesn’t cite: despite being roughly 50% of the population, only 16% of the approximately 535 members of the US Congress are female. We are behind Afghanistan, Pakistan, Rwanda and Uganda in terms of female representation in government. For CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, only 2.4% are women (that’s 12 out of 500 companies, for those of you keeping score).

I hardly think we have a men-in-leadership crisis.

But Bennett draws an interesting conclusion from all these scary statistics: that we have a "masculinity crisis" in the US. The reason that women are catching up and even surpassing men in several fields is not necessarily because, hey, equality, but rather, because men are forgetting how to be men. Apparently, 40% of babies are born out-of-wedlock, and therefore, there’s a crisis of men growing up without fathers.*

This “rise of women” is, for some reason, a bad thing, though Bennett is never quite clear on what the consequences of such masculinity crisis is – he never quite clarifies why we should be worried. The evidence is kind of thin on the ground in this part of the article – he cites some statistics about how men in their 20s play videogames more often, and some anecdotal evidence about how women complain “where have all the good men gone?” (as though this complaint is a new invention – if you go back to the Dark Ages, I’ll bet you can find a spinster wondering where all the good men are).

Bennett cites that work, marriage, and religion are the virtues our currently confused culture of men is lacking, but fails to create a good argument for it. He seems to be longing for a time when men knew that being a man meant working outside the home, meant going to church every Sunday, and goddammit, it meant being married and having 2.5 kids that your wife takes care of so you don’t have to.

The problem, Mr. Bennett, is that equality is not a zero-sum game, which seems to be the basis of your thesis. Women getting the vote means that women get their voices heard, which makes it harder for men to ignore us. Women working outside the home means that women get to be financially independent, which means we can leave our husbands if they become abusive. Women in politics means that women actually wield some power, which means misogynistic and harmful policies have a harder time passing.

If you're regretting losing the power to control women as we gain equality, it may be time to take another look at your priorities.

____________

*There’s another statistical problem here – “out of wedlock” doesn’t translate immediately to “single mother,” and 40% of all babies does not mean that it is all little boys.

Lady in the Street but a Freak in the Bed

[For those of you who have no idea what the title's referring to, here.]  

It appears that there are only two types of women in the world, according to Mr. Miller. And indeed, that isn’t anything new – there are a lot of different texts throughout literary history that play on the trope of the existence of only two types of women. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are famous for highlighting this idea in their massive work of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic, which is a feminist reading of Jane Eyre (one of the books Miller [ironically?] brings up, though he calls it “Jane Eyrie.”).

These two types? Gilbert and Gubar call it the angel/monster dichotomy: the idea that women are either angels in the house, keepers of all things domestic and pure, or monstrous witches, hellbent on destroying good men.

[caption id="attachment_527" align="aligncenter" width="237" caption="This is the Madonna we refer to, not the singer."][/caption]

You may have heard it posed as “virgin/whore,” “Madonna/whore,” or “angel/vixen.” In Miller’s world, it might be phrased as “pure chaste virgin who has never had a sexual thought in her life or slutty McSlutSlut.”

You think I kid. I really don’t. Miller all but stopped short of saying this directly.

But to be fair, let’s examine the text. Following his confusing mess of an opening, Miller launches into his lists (he has several; I think he might just like the way numbers look). The first list is answering the question: “How do we live a great love story? Here are some suggestions.” I’ve reproduced an abbreviated form of the list below, with a few choice quotes, and my criticism after each point (I figure it’s better to go into depth here and then talk about the wider implication, so bear with me). Oh, and it should be basically understood that there’s an overall [sic] on these quotes.

1. Don’t hook up. All they [the guys, I assume] want is sex. … If he thought of her with respect, he’d sit and ask questions about her life and her family. … In other words, guys don’t hook up with girls they would marry. They marry the girls they get nervous around and are made to pursue. [This next section is my favorite part. Oh boy. Brace yourself if you didn’t read his post before – my margin notes just simply have an ‘ARGH RAGE’ next to this.] When your husband finds out you were the ‘hook up’ girl he’s going to have to have a lot of grace, which is fine, it just puts you in the category of ‘charity’ in his mind and not ‘equal’ or ‘partner.’ He may still love you, but he will have questions about whether you’re in the kind of shape it takes to run a marathon. Unless you get over it and move on and do a period of time where you put it all behind you, he will and honestly should lose respect for you. Respect is not free. Respect is earned. Grace is free, but grace and respect are different.” [emphasis mine]

Whoo boy.

Just. Dang.

Take a few minutes for that to sink in. Sit back, go take a walk, think over his words, and then get angry. Get really, really angry. This is one of those situations where anger is perfectly justified.

If you don’t get why, let me explain.

The message he is telling women here is that you cannot want sex. You cannot, absolutely cannot, have sex outside of a marriage relationship, and if you do, you need to go say seven Hail Mary’s and do some major repenting before you tell your husband, and then it’s his job to decide if you deserve respect.

Bluntly put: ladies, if you want to have sex, and you do have sex previous to meeting your husband, you do not deserve respect and it is up to him to decide whether or not he still loves you when he finds out about your past.

That’s just sad.

Let me throw some statistics at you [sources here]:

A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers (PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 1 January 2009) found that teens who pledge to abstain from sex have just as much sex as those who don't, and that those who pledge not to have sex until marriage don't wait longer to have sex than those who don't make that pledge. Pledgers did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers also used birth control and condoms in the past year and birth control at last sex. She also found that five years after the pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged at all. Central to the information we're looking for, on typical use in a year, "pledgers reported an average of 1.09 past-year vaginal sex partners, 0.11 fewer than nonpledgers." In other words, on average, those who report using abstinence are not using abstinence perfectly each year. [emphasis mine]

Additionally, if you make it to 25 and are still a virgin (as defined by penetrative intercourse), you are in a 4% minority in the nation – that’s not just church-going folks; that’s overall population. Additionally, the average age of first marriage for men and women in the United States has been scooting backward to 26 for women and 28 for men, respectively.

Now do the math: If 96% of the population has “lost” (“lost” is odd vocabulary for me because it’s not like you misplaced it, by the way) their virginity by the age of 25, and, on average, most of us aren’t getting married until AFTER age 25…you have a distinct likelihood of marrying a non-virgin. Period. It’s just a statistic reality.

And apparently, finding this out about your future wife is cause for reflection on the part of the man. It’s cause for them to stop and think and wonder, “Do I really love this woman?” (Nothing, by the way, is said about whether or not the girl should have the same reaction upon finding out that her boy has been sullied - not even in the parts of the post I haven't talked about yet).

The protest and response here may be that he’s only talking about the “hook up” girl, the type of woman who has one night stands and sleeps with anything that moves, which somehow unnatural for women (the reference to a Scientific American article [which he fails to link to, by the way] reinforces this idea that it’s unnatural for women to hook up, which is total bunk).

But Miller makes no distinction about the type of sex he’s talking about. He doesn’t say that it’s okay if your history of sex was at the point of being in a committed relationship or whether or not it was a one-night stand. If you have had sex before meeting your husband, then he has a right to judge you for it. If you are not a virgin (which is a statistical likelihood), then your future husband has every right to decide to whether or not you are worthy of respect. You are no longer his equal, no matter how many partners he has had in contrast.

This means that, even before you meet your husband, you are already owned by him. You do not have the autonomy to decide what you want to do in the circumstances because you must always be thinking forward to your future husband and be thinking about giving yourself to him and him alone. Your desires don’t matter. Your sexual agency is always and forever will be tied up in what he wants and how you have kept yourself for him. You are, in no uncertain terms, his property.

And that’s screwed up.

Should your husband know about your time before he met you? Maybe. That is ultimately up to the two of you.  Should he have the right to pass judgment on those decisions? No. Absolutely not. The message Miller is sending here is, ultimately, a dangerous one – that your future husband has the right to retroactively pass judgment on decisions you made years before he met you, and that you must repent of those decisions to him, no matter how you personally feel about them. There is only way for a woman with a sexual past to behave: be remorseful, and then get a “born again” virginity, basically. There is no middle ground for a woman who is okay with her past, understands her own sexuality, and does not feel remorse for those decisions she made years before she met her husband and doesn’t feel that she should.

Miller’s next few points reinforce this idea:

 2. Make him work for it. When a guy is made to fight for a girl, he esteems her much more highly. She becomes more attractive in his eyes, and for that matter becomes more attractive to other men too.

3. Weed them out. Guys who are just looking for a hook up need to hit the road…. There are fewer girls with the strength to not have one night stands, and those girls become much, much more attractive to men. Those are the girls who present a challenge, and who are esteemed more highly. These are the girls guys recognize as the kind of woman they want to partner with in raising a family.

As if it wasn’t clear enough: Slutty sluts aren’t marriage material. If you have a sexual history, you aren't yet the type of woman who can be a mommy.

That’s news to me.

What is all this about “presenting a challenge” to the guy? Essentially, what this appears to be saying to me is that guys should have to work to get your sweet, sweet loving. Which is okay. But it still puts the focus on sex, as though a woman's purity or lack thereof is the most important qualification in a relationship. Newsflash: You can be a girl who wants to have sex AND be the type of woman he can take home to mom, whatever the hell that means. Girls who have sex before marriage are not undesirable in other parts of their personalities – they can be and are perfectly wonderful people and it is possible (indeed, quite likely) for a woman to NOT present a challenge to the guy and for him to STILL want to marry her. AMAZING.

People are complex creatures who defy categorization. You can be both the hook up girl AND the girl he wants to marry. You can be sexing it up every night and still meet his mom. The ideas of “not presenting a challenge” (read: being easy) and being the type of girl you can bring home to mom are not mutually exclusive.

Miller and much of the church operates as though these concepts are impossible to hold at the same time. And that’s a problem, based on the very fact that you are very likely not to marry a virgin, and you’re probably not going to marry the first man you sleep with. It’s just reality.

There is a lot more to cover and it will get a lot more in-depth in the coming days as we get into Donald Miller’s victim blaming double standards, and his focus on the girl’s “slutty” past. But I’d like to leave you with this sentiment – if you take only one thing from today’s blog entry:

You are worth much, much more than your unbroken hymen. Your partner has no right to judge you if you have sex before marriage, especially if it’s years before he even met you. If he does not respect you as a person, regardless of your experience or lack thereof, then he is an asshole and you should run far far away. Respect is not earned. Respect is something you deserve as a human being. Trust is earned. There’s a big, big difference.

[With] pious action we do sugar o'er the Devil himself

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  

Today, I decided to cover just the one point because it's a doozy. In fact, it's such a doozy that I had a really hard time deciding whether or not to even put an illustration with it (but, obviously, I decided to go with it). I can't exactly say 'enjoy' with today's post, but I do hope that you take something away from it and begin to reconsider your narrative.

Number 7.

…you think that a woman claiming to be raped is entitled to anonymity while the man she has accused should be tarred and feathered in the court of public opinion, because any man accused of rape must be guilty.

Whoa whoa there, buddy. Tell us how you really feel. As we saw in my post yesterday, if a rape case gets reported (remember, only 40% of rapes actually get reported), there is only a 1 in 2 chance of arrest. That sounds pretty high, but keep in mind that the chances of arrest in many large cities for a violent crime are usually 70% or higher. I probably don’t need to spend the time rehashing the unbelievably low instance of arrest, prosecution, conviction and actual jail time in rape cases. I want to focus more on your initial statement – the assumption that a rape victim isn’t entitled to anonymity.

Ask yourself this: Why do you want to know about a rape victim? What could possibly change the veracity of her testimony? Is it absolutely vital, for example, that we know that the woman Strauss-Kahn attacked was an illiterate immigrant? Would the case be any less tragic if she was a white working mom with a Master's degree? Does it benefit us to know that one of the three women Ben Roethlisberger has been accused of raping was a worker at the hotel he was in and his “entertainment” manager? What, specifically, would change about a person’s testimony if you knew that, for example, she (or he, as men do get raped) was a dancer at a club? Or a prostitute? Or a church-going virgin? Or any number of types of people who fall between the poles of the whore and virgin dichotomy?

Ask yourself this, if you find yourself agreeing with Mr. X here: How does it help your narrative if you know intimate details about the victim?

There’s this odd urge that we have to justify violent crime, especially when it is something so baffling as rape. Murder possibly has a motive – the killer likely has something specific to gain from killing that person. Robbery, too, has a clearly defined profit. Rape has no such well-defined motive. Rape is one person dominating another for the sole purpose of domination. As I’ve said before, rape is about power, not sex. In some cases of rape (i.e., when both parties involved are impaired in some form and the guy just refuses to listen to the girl’s no), sex is a factor, but that does not mean it isn’t rape and isn’t a violation, on the basest level, of a person’s sense of self.

So, in a way, knowing about the victim is a way for us to fix our narrative, especially when we know or respect the persons involved. We saw this quite clearly with the Julian Assange case: this man was held up as a hero by many for his work on promoting government transparency (whether or not the means were good is an entirely other topic). He also allegedly violated Sweden’s laws concerning rape by having sex with a woman, changing the conditions under which they’d agreed to have sex, and then not telling her. As far as I know from the specifics of the case, they agreed to sex with a condom, the condom broke, and Assange kept going. The reason that this is prosecutable (in Sweden, but not in the US) is that if the conditions under which you agreed to have sex suddenly change and your partner neglects to tell you, you are no longer consenting. If you agree to sex with a condom and your partner goes without, you did not consent to that sex. This is the statute under which Assange was charged.*

Now look at the press coverage: lots and lots of Assange’s fans jumped to his defense, complaining that the women involved had bragged about having sex with him and had gone home with him from a club, so those sluts shouldn’t be pressing charges. What this narrative neglects is that idea that Assange can both be a hero of the freedom of information and still be a douchebag in his personal life. The rape case does not remove the good work he (arguably) did, just as Anthony Weiner’s sexting with consenting parties does not undermine his political positions as a Congressman (and I have a post all set up for that debate if you want to disagree).

It helps us feel better about the man who allegedly committed the crime if the victim maybe might have done something small that makes her complicit in her own abuse.

That, my friends, is the ONLY argument against anonymity for victims.

We don’t argue against anonymity in other cases. We don’t hear that someone got mugged and demand to know everything about their behavior at the time of the mugging. We don’t hear about a body being found in the river and start wondering what sort of things they did that made them deserve that. We don’t hear about the victim of a drunk driving accident, for example, and say it’s his fault for getting in the car that night.

There is no cogent argument against anonymity in rape cases that does not involve attempting to find a justification that “she somehow deserved it.” We do not need to know that the woman Strauss-Kahn allegedly raped was an African immigrant who couldn’t read very well. We do not need to know if Julian Assange’s partners that night had 100 previous partners or none. We do not need to know if the cheerleader who got raped at a frat party had three beers or 10 or what her major was or whether or not she has a boyfriend or whether or not she had previously flirted with her attacker, or if she was carrying condoms in her purse or if she had never handled a condom in her life. It does not help her case and instead only serves to traumatize her further by the media picking through every inch of her life, looking for some way, somehow, this attack could have had a motive other than “this guy is just an asshole.”

We don’t like to find out that people we admire could be rapists. We don’t like to discover that our best friend wouldn’t listen to a girl saying no. We don’t like to think that, when we cheered for our favorite team in sports, that we were cheering for a man who sees women as less than himself and uses rape as a way to reinforce that. We simply don’t like to be confronted with a narrative about the people in our lives that does not jive with the narrative of reality. That sort of sudden readjustment of worldview where we have to consider that things are not as they seem is hard - kind of like the first time a kid runs into her teacher in the grocery store and realizes that he has a life outside of the school. It’s much easier to say that he was tempted, that the girl did something to provoke him, that she’s just “regretting” having sex with him because that’s easier to swallow than the idea that your best friend, your brother, your hero, heck, your lover, could be so brash as to disregard consent and commit what is possibly the worst of all violent crimes.

So we argue against anonymity. And at this point, this is not merely a feminist issue. This is a human issue. Men get raped too. Little children get raped. Nuns, coma patients, prostitutes, transgender, homosexuals and heterosexuals. People with no education, people with doctorates. People traveling in the developing world and people laying safely (or so they thought) in their bed at night. When we argue for anonymity of the rape victim, we are arguing for the chance for a teenage girl, a little boy, a grown man, a woman in her 20s, a man in his 30s, a grandma, a grandpa, a parent, or a childfree single man, to have his or her day in court and to not be victimized further by intense scrutiny in the media.

And again, as far as the second part of the statement goes: Open your eyes. Look, for example, at the reaction to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case– many French people would rather believe that a vast conspiracy was set up to bring him down and prevent him from getting power than that hey, maybe he actually raped a lady. Many people would rather believe in a huge government conspiracy to shut up Julian Assange than accept that maybe he’s just an asshole. Many would rather believe that Anthony Weiner was the victim of a right-wing attack than believe that he might just be sleazy.

Where is this “tar and feather” attitude in the media that you speak of? I’ve never seen it.

*It is also important to note that if sex is agreed upon with a certain method of prophylactic (condom), and one or the other partner changes that condition, it is not only a violation of the second person’s consent, but a bodily risk, as sex without a condom can lead to numerous STDs, and, for the woman, pregnancy, which is why many can and should insist on using protection in the first place.

Strange Things Are Afoot at the Circular Argument

Part 1 - Part 2 We are nearly at the halfway point in examining Mr. X's list of "You Might be a Feminazi If..." Today, we get into a confusing mess of arguments about what qualifies as sexism or misogyny, and an involved discussion of rape statistics. Also, language warning on this post. In giving examples of insults toward men, there are a few words that some of my readers may find offensive. You have been warned.

Number 5.

…you mistakenly believe that “misogyny,” which is a hatred of all women simply because they’re women, somehow applies to a man who just hates you for your sexist behavior.

This one is a bit of a hot mess and needs some breaking down. First, he is finally providing the definition for misogyny, which is good. But I already covered that misogyny is a severe category of sexism yesterday, so I’m not going to harp on that again. And it’s not the “misogyny” of the statement that mystifies me – it’s the idea that women are 1. Behaving in a sexist manner, 2. That this sexism is the real reason some men hate women, 3. That this hatred of women is a. somehow justified because of the man’s perceived slight of sexism, and b. unjustified because women accuse men who hate women of misogyny are actually wrong about it being misogyny.

Wait. What?

My friend Alan would likely refer to this point as the error of employing General Eye Zation in one’s debate arsenal. This point makes a number of unfounded assumptions about both men and women. I must presume that Mr. X is thinking specifically of his own interactions with women because I cannot imagine he knows the mind of every man who has been labeled misogynist nor even have a wide enough sample of these interactions from an objective basis to make this sort of conclusion. He also assumes that feminists who call men misogynist do so without provocation or in an extraordinarily mistaken mindset.

I don’t know about you, but if a man consistently declares that “all women are bitches” or that “feminism is so that ugly women can be accepted into society” or that we should “calm [our] tits and quit whining,” I’m not going to be very inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I’m not going to be inclined to think “oh, he’s just reacting to the sexist behavior of a few women.”

And that leads to the major part of this statement that confuses me. What, exactly, IS sexist behavior of a woman toward a man? Here’s a newsflash: pointing out that you’re being sexist isn’t sexist. Pointing out that you do not have the same experience as a woman isn’t sexist. Pointing out that a man doesn’t need to conform to proscribed societal gender roles isn’t sexist.

Sexism, in the dictionary definition sense, is “discrimination on the basis of sex, esp the oppression of women by men” (Collins English Dictionary). According to the American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, it’s “The belief that one sex (usually the male) is naturally superior to the other and should dominate most important areas of political, economic, and social life.”

The lack of solid examples really hinders Mr. X here. I assume that he is referring to typical things that Men’s Rights Advocates propound, like alimony, divorce courts favoring women, women’s studies in college without a mirroring men’s studies*, and the draft. HOWEVER, his phrasing indicates that he is referring not to systemic sexism perpetuated by the culture (of which alimony, divorce courts and the draft are a part), but rather individual acts of sexism perpetuated by individual women. Mr. X seems to be saying here: “You call out individual men as misogynist when, really, they just don’t like you for being sexist.”

At which point, I’m having a lot of trouble wracking my brain for examples of ways in which a woman can be sexist against a man which are not also evidence of what a feminist fights against. For example, maybe it’s sexist for a woman to expect a man to be the breadwinner of the family. This is a typical gender role that a mainline feminist wouldn’t espouse. So that doesn’t work. Maybe it’s sexist for a woman to make fun of a man for being weak, but, that, too, is an example of typical gender roles that feminists fight. Maybe it’s simply name-calling, but that doesn’t work either. Think of the typical insults you can call a man that would really hurt in society (you may want to quit reading here if you don’t like swear words): pussy, cunt, gay, sissy, weak, “throws like a girl,” etc. All of these insults are calling out men for being feminine. Notice, for instance, that "cunt" is possibly the worst thing you could call anyone, but “dick” is usually acceptable. It is the worst thing in the world for a man to be considered feminine and to be identified with female anatomy (most of the insults are slang terms for a vagina). Who is that sexist against, again?

This confusing mess of a point doesn’t work on a systemic or individual level. If a man hates an individual feminist for an abuse that is systemic in society, then he has a problem sorting out the individual from the larger issue, which is, indeed, a large part of misogyny. If a man hates an individual woman for individual acts of sexism, that woman is, most likely, asking the male to conform to traditional gender norms and is being anti-feminist in the process. Either way, this point is a mess.

*Note: I’ve touched on why this is bull in other posts, but in case you need a refresher, you can head back to this post and this post. We don’t particularly NEED men’s studies because everything already is men’s studies.

Number 6.

…you refuse to acknowledge that false rape allegations do, sometimes, occur, and accuse anyone of pointing out that false rape allegations sometimes occur of being a “rape apologist” or proponent of “rape culture.”

This one’s an interesting one because it actually forces us to get into the nitty-gritty of statistics. There is a lot of debate about how many reported rapes are actually found to be false, though consistently reliable studies put that number between 3 and 8%. The largest sexual assault/false allegation study was performed in England and found, initially, that 8% of rapes reported in the 2005-2006 study were found to be “false.” This number was revised when the official standards for what counts as a rape allegation were examined closely, and it was found that in many case the police officer involved had violated official procedure in determining the allegation as false when there was in fact grounds to believe the victim. A similar study done a couple of years before in the Victoria police district in Australia found that of 812 cases reported between 2000 and 2003, only 2.1% of those were false allegations.

In addition, the area of false allegations is rather hairy because there is not a lot published on the issues, and those studies that indicate a high incidence of false allegations are from an extremely small sample. The study that most proponents of the “false rape allegation epidemic” narrative is a 1994 study by Eugene Kainn, which had a sample size of 109 in a small urban town and found 45 of those to be false. The problem with that comes with extracting a general principle from an extremely small study. The study in Britain, for example, examined well over 2,000 cases. The study in Australia was 800. Dr. Kainn, also, did not examine how police officers followed official procedure in investigating rape cases and simply took police officer’s reports at their word, something the later British study proved to be a very bad idea – the police department Kainn examined threatened polygraph of the victims in nearly every case, an operating procedure that does not encourage victims to feel comfortable about coming forward.

The classification of false rape allegations is also sometimes confused with the FBI numbers for “unfounded” allegations. “Unfounded” does not, necessarily, mean false. Unfounded merely refers to not having enough evidence to prosecute, or may even be classified as such if the victim did not fight back (and therefore it somehow wasn’t rape), if the perpetrator didn’t use a weapon (it’s not rape then, either), or if the victim and her attacker had a prior sexual relationship (wives raped by your husbands? Out of luck).

The incidence of false allegations in other major crimes, according to the FBI, is 2%. According to the studies at our disposal, the amount of false allegations concerning rape cases is directly in line with those statistics, if not a negligible amount higher.

This doesn’t even take into account the estimation that only about 40% of sexual assaults are actually reported, and of that 40%, there is only a 1 in 2 chance of an arrest being made. And from that, there is a 58% chance of conviction, and a 69% chance that the rapist will spend time in jail.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="aligncenter" width="352" caption="Image courtesy RAINN.org."][/caption]

We have a fascinating court system concerning rape – because of the American system of “innocent until proven guilty,” a man accused of rape has a number of defenses on his side and his chance of actually going to jail when he is suspected of rape is rather low. This is not to say that, if you are a high-profile person accused of rape that your reputation is not at risk. But, before you make such allegations, I suggest you examine again the public reaction to such recent high-profile rape cases –Roethlisberger, DSK, Julian Assange, Kobe Bryant, Roman Polanski and so on. DSK, for example, has been an interesting case in point: many, many people have leapt to his defense, and, France, a popular theory has been that the entire thing is a conspiracy to sully his name, despite the fact that he had a well-known reputation as a womanizer and had been accused of rape previously. Roman Polanski, even, had sex with a 13-year-old girl and has not been able to return to America because of an outstanding warrant, and he is still in great standing in the film community and is still winning Oscars (not that the Oscar for the Pianist wasn’t deserved, but it seems that his great art has white-washed the statutory rape charge, to the point that when he was arrested in Switzerland a couple of years ago, a number of Hollywood A-listers pooled funds to help him out).

In conclusion, the statistics simply do not support an “epidemic” of false rape allegations, and to say that feminists willingly ignore them is to misconstrue the argument. Feminists acknowledge that rape allegations are very, very serious, and women should not toy with them. Feminists also acknowledge, however, that the statistical studies available do not support the idea that false rape allegations are at high enough proportions to be worrying. We tend to be much more concerned with the fact that 60% of actual rapes don’t get reported at all than with the idea that possibly, possibly a man is falsely accused.

In order to make your argument that 1. False rape allegations are an epidemic, and 2. Men are being wrongly convicted based on these false allegations, you have to provide me with more evidence than a mere assertion that this is the case. We still live in a society where the burden of proof is on the victim and the incidence of actual convictions (compared to numbers of sexual assaults that occur) is extremely low – less than 10%.

The burden of proof is on you, sir. And look, I debunked your entire assertion without ever once resorting to the scary words of “rape apologist” or “rape culture.” Would you look at that.