Doug Wilson on The Gospel Coalition: How Christian Patriarchy Turns Sex into Rape and Pregnancy into Slavery

Trigger warning for rape and sexual abuse.

Jared Wilson unwittingly set off a flare in the spiritual abuse survivor network on July 13, 2012, when he posted the following quotation from Doug Wilson in a blog post on the Gospel Coalition website:

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

Sexuality Project: Romantic Relationships, Q. 3

This is an installment of the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project. You can read the full list of questions here and the posting plan here. The first six participants whose stories I’ll be posting are Melissa and Haley, Lina and V, Latebloomer and Katy-Anne.

Romantic Relationships

3. How did your fundamentalist upbringing or training impact your own sexual identity and/or experience of sex? (See, for example, Libby Anne’s post about her beliefs about sexual compatibility changing after marriage.)

Wifely Submission and Honoring, Cherishing and Loving Your Wife as Your Own Body

Leaders of the Christian Patriarchy Movement and their disciples (minor pastors who covet their attention) will say a lot of things to sugarcoat wifely submission.

Complementarians say that true contentment comes from submitting to your God-given role as an obedient helper to your husband. That women who feel unfulfilled need only to submit to their husbands and bear children, and all that unhappiness will go away.

There are also the scriptural benefits: God’s plan for the family includes protections and guarantees for the wife. If she submits to her husband, and he is keeping up his end of the bargain, he will love and care for her as for his own body; he will lay down his life to sanctify her, loving her as Christ loved the Church; he will be a “servant” leader who puts her wellbeing ahead of his own desires; he will protect her  not only from sin but from physical, emotional and spiritual dangers; he will “honor” her “as the weaker vessel” – in other words, treat her as carefully as he would fine china.

All of this flowery language masks the hard reality of Christian patriarchy. If you’re in a complementarian or openly patriarchal marriage, your life is in the hands of your husband and your only hope is that he’ll follow through on all of the above.

Sexuality Project: Peer Group, Q. 3

This is an installment of the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project. You can read the full list of questions here and the posting plan here. The first six participants whose stories I’ll be posting are Melissa and Haley, Lina and V, Latebloomer and Katy-Anne.

Peer Group

3. What did you believe about non-fundamentalists and their attitudes towards sex? Where did your impressions come from?

A Pro-Life Rally that Kills Me Inside

Today, I walked past a rally to take away my rights.

I walk past a group of people – whole families, with toddlers chasing each other and rolling in the grass, with little girls about to get their first periods, with mothers carrying newborns or putting their arms around recent graduates – who have gathered together to declare their hatred for women. They are cheering. They are yelling. “Amen!” holler the husbands. Wives thrust their block-lettered signs in my face with contempt written on theirs. They look ready to spit on me as I climb the stairs to the library

It’s a beautiful day today. This is the kind of day that leads me to worship. It tells me how perfect the creation is, even though I do believe it’s still evolving – ever different, ever changing, always perfect. It makes me grateful that I have eyes, and ears, and skin to feel the earth.  It makes me believe that Eden only disappeared because we stopped looking for it.

Their signs are bright; their robes are black. A young man with a camera phone silently glances at me and then returns to his task. They’re screaming about whores who want other people to pay for them to have sex. Whores who hate children, who hate life. Whores like me.

I’m a graduate student. I use birth control because I can’t afford to buy a bed for my child, let alone food, clothing or toys. I use birth control because religious fundamentalism made me suicidally terrified of pregnancy. I use birth control because I am a loving person, who would never subject a child to a life with a traumatized mother and an empty stomach. I would never bring a child into the world to show her what homelessness feels like. I use birth control because I would never use my example to teach my daughter that being a mother is a curse that truncates her dreams. I use birth control because I like children and I believe they deserve to grow up with freedom and opportunities.

I’ve never seen a Klan meeting, a lynching, a crusade or a Nazi rally. I’m too young to have stumbled upon any of that. If I had, I imagine I’d feel the same way I do today as I pick up my books from the library and try not to look at the frothing crowd as they cry out that my freedoms invalidate theirs.

“YOU WANT US TO PAY FOR YOUR SELFISH LIFESTYLE!”

You don’t know me.

“BABY-KILLING SLUT!”

I used to be one of you.

“YOU SHOULD MAKE A SEX TAPE SO WE CAN SEE WHAT WE PAY FOR!”

If you were dying today, would you record this rally for your children?

“AMERICA IS ABOUT LIBERTY-”

Yes, I grew up believing that, too.

“-AND YOU ARE TRAMPLING ON OUR FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE!”

What about mine?

“LET’S WIN THIS COUNTRY BACK FOR GOD!”

And take it away from women.

I stare at the mothers, wearing their long linen skirts and leaning on their strollers. Has your husband ever denied himself sex to save your health? I wonder. What if that young woman doesn’t really want another child? What then? I can’t see their eyes through their dark sunglasses.

I stare at the children. A cute little boy in a cowboy hat is straddling a railing like a horse.

If I say hello to you, you might tell me I’m dog meat.

He is exploring his world. A world that his parents have made so tiny. I wonder if he will ever tear down the walls and escape.

I’m not wearing a prairie skirt.

I am not a person to you.

I am wearing shorts.

You think I’m going to hell.

I remember the glory of the sun on the day the towers struck 9/11. I remember the birds singing against the odd silence of the downed airplanes. I can feel the hatred bubbling like a fog among the crowd. I look up, away from humanity, and try to breathe in the clear air instead. I try to feel the peace, wondering if the poisonous vapors will choke it all out by the end of my lifetime.

“FREEDOM!” yells the crowd.

They can take our lives.

Modesty, Body Policing and Rape Culture: Connecting the Dots

Definition: The “modesty doctrine” is the belief that women need to cover their bodies to prevent men from being attracted to them, because sexual attraction is lust that leads to sin and death for both.  The modesty doctrine is not the same as wearing conservative clothing. You can do the latter without believing the former. The modesty doctrine is found in fundamentalist Christianity, Judaism and Islam, with milder echoes in mainstream Western culture.

From Busty Girl Comics.

In my previous posts on the modesty doctrine, I’ve written about how, as a teenager, I believed that the only solution to the problem of male lust was to have a sexless body. This desire for androgyny contributed directly to my eating disorder, as I deliberately tried to purge myself of curves. Is self-starvation extreme? Yes. Is it illogical as a response to the modesty doctrine? Not at all.

I posted this excerpt from Feministe’s article on the Stuyvesant school dress code on Monday, but it bears repeating:

Beyond the treatment of young men as uncontrollable animals and the treatment of young women as rape-bait, the Stuy dress code enforcers also appear to fall into a common problem with dress codes generally — defining an “appropriate” body. As the students quoted in the Times article implied, some of them technically met the dress code but were still told they were “inappropriate,” not because of what they were wearing, but because of how it looked on them. I don’t know what those students look like, but I’m going to guess it comes down to boobs and butts. Flesh is what’s often considered “inappropriate” — B-cup boobs in a turtleneck are fine, but double-Ds are not; straight hips in a pencil skirt are fine, but curvy ones are not. It’s the body that’s being policed, not the clothes.

The modesty doctrine isn’t about clothes, it’s about bodies. It’s a method for punishing women who do not conform to an idealized, asexual, inoffensive body type. The “offenders” are women with large breasts, wide hips, or discernible “booty.” The modesty doctrine claims that the right clothes conceal a woman’s figure, and that the wrong ones expose her curves. The problem is, some women have figures that cannot be concealed. Even denim sack jumpers will reveal a curvy woman’s hips or breasts when she moves. When I was rebuked for my clothing as a teenager, it was often identical to the clothing all the other girls were wearing. The only difference was that I had “developed” first. The modesty doctrine defines some bodies as inherently problematic.

Bedroom Submission, Birth Control and Tokophobia

Like most fundamentalist churches, mine taught that wives were commanded by God to give their husbands all the sex they wanted. Technically, husbands had to do the same for wives, but it would have been a strange, transgressive woman who wanted more sex than her husband. (Jonalyn Fincher of Her.meneutics and I disagree.) The rationale behind this command comes from 1 Corinthians 7:4:

The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife.

It’s one of the most stunningly egalitarian verses in the Bible. How did it become so one-sided? How did it become about the negation of consent? How did evangelical-fundamentalist culture construct a model of sexuality and reproduction that implanted a deep-seated terror of sex and pregnancy in my adolescent mind?

Why I Don’t Use Bible Verses as Evidence

It has been noted that my writing comes from experience and is secular in nature. This frustrates some of my readers and gratifies others. Here is where I officially stand on the matter.

Bible verses are extremely soft evidence. Fundamentalists have taken them to “inherently” mean something they have made up for themselves. The notion of pledging your virginity to your father? Not in the Bible. The idea that birth control is evil? Not in the Bible. “Abortion is murder”? Even that isn’t in the Bible. If I were to quote Bible verses on these issues, however, I would be instantly dismissed as “misunderstanding” them. That’s because Scripture follows culture in fundamentalist and extreme evangelical circles. You believe something first, and find a Scripture to justify it later. How many evangelicals are allowed to read Paul’s epistles without having certain verses plucked out and spun into elaborate webs of meaning? Abortion, homosexuality, modesty, and submission – they find their way into almost every evangelical-fundamentalist sermon, but it’s a special occasion when preachers decide to expound on 1 Corinthians 13 (the “love” chapter). Interestingly enough, I have never heard an evangelical-fundamentalist sermon that made as big a deal out of giving to the poor (something that was, you know, a big deal for Jesus) as they do out of sexuality and marriage.

I will similarly not be convinced of a moral position with sole reference to Bible verses. This is because I am not so arrogant as to assume that anyone (myself included) has discovered the absolute, ultimate, true meaning of a set of words that have been disputed, dissected, translated, twisted, studied and stretched for two thousand years. Likewise, I am skeptical that most people who have undertaken to explain the Scriptures to me on the internet have read some or any of the centuries of debate that preceded them. I say this not to recommend blindly following Augustine, Aquinas or another father of the Catholic Church (especially as I’m not Catholic), but to cast doubt on the claim that modern American evangelicals can look at the Bible uncritically, through their own cultural lens, and claim that it appears exactly as it is with utter disregard for other interpretations. If you have not weighed other interpretations honestly before choosing yours, you are as objective an observer as a toddler trying to read a book that’s sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool without jumping in.

That said, I am now going to violate my own rule for the purpose of demonstrating that “not dripping with citations from the Bible” does not equal “unchristian”.

What Biblical claim do I have to write about Christianity, and to criticize fundamentalism? I give you two verses. (They’re even in KJV!)

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this;
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Galatians 5:14

Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Do men gather grapes of thorns,
or figs of thistles?
Matthew 7:16

I do not need to speak Christianese to see the blatant discrepancy between the words of Jesus and the actions of modern American fundamentalists. I also do not need to use Bible verses to demonstrate the disastrous, cruel effects of patriarchy on families and young people of both sexes. I can tell when a person is acting lovingly, and I assure you that “love” exists only in the most perverted way in fundamentalist culture. It exists between individuals in fundamentalism despite, not because of, its theology. Fundamentalist theology makes love so contingent, critical and controlling that it does not really deserve the name of “love” at all. Love is given freely. It is not bound up in ropes made of denim jumper straps. It doesn’t flee to high ground when a woman swallows a pill.

To me, Jesus’ core message was that love should be our moral compass. We don’t need the law to be our conscience for us. We are capable of making decisions that are good for ourselves and help others, based on our own sound intentions and thoughtful observations. Jesus never told anyone to turn off their brains.

The fruits of fundamentalism are crushed souls, mindless obedience, inflated egos, dashed dreams, limited spaces, cumbersome garments, financial ruin, neglected children, and, above all, fear. All of this is done in the name of love, by parents and spouses who usually do love their families. But they are carefully led down the road to believing that you show love by controlling, or by submitting to control, and that the freedom and affection they once had was “of the devil,” their inner voices wrong. If your beliefs are the cause of such cruelty, I assure you that they are as “Biblical” as a ham sandwich. By your fruits, I know you.

When Jesus spoke the truth, he didn’t cite the Torah. When Paul spoke the truth, he didn’t recite what Moses had said. While I am neither Jesus nor Paul, I condemn the idea that only what is said with the label of Scripture attached is moral or valid. Christianese is obfuscating, a masking device used to make abhorrent ideas sound like God’s. If love is written in your heart, your speech will be pure, whether or not your words are plagiarized.

When I write, it is not my desire to convince you to agree with everything I think. It is not to convince you that I’ve found more Truth than anyone else. Compassion is my compass and empathy my exegesis. If you are discerning, you will be able to see through the Christianese to reality, and through my common speech to some of the ideas Jesus gave, which I strive to follow.

So while I will, occasionally, use Scripture to point out the gaping chasm between evangelical-fundamentalist culture and actual things Jesus said, I have no plans to write windy exegetical posts that string together Bible verses only to be told that I “don’t really understand” them anyway, or that my “motives” are “selfish”. I do plan to write about the things I’ve seen, felt, heard and thought – as well as what I’m seeing now, from the other side of the fence.

The hypocrisy of “paying for other people”

I am fed up. Truly, deeply fed up. I’m fed up with the arrogance and hypocrisy of the fools who think there’s honestly any reason to oppose women’s free access to birth control other than to eliminate our ability to determine our own destinies. And so I’m about to say something uncharacteristically angry. I don’t apologize for it and I offer no overtures of respect for the Right Wing zealots who think they hold the moral high ground on this issue. Shame on you, America, for your failure to recognize your female population as a group of citizens with the right to self-determination. Shame on you for tolerating blowhards and pompous dictators with crosses on their chests.

I received an ignorant comment just now, and I haven’t posted it because there’s enough vile refuse floating in the public sphere as it is. But suffice to say that it boiled down to this:

“Don’t tell the government to stay out of your reproductive choices and then demand that everyone else pay for you to have sex.”

My commenter is far from alone in this sentiment. In fact, she echoes Rush Limbaugh and all the other drooling windbags who think “taxpayers” are somehow being bled dry for the pleasures of others, of women, as though there is something about “women” that sets them apart from the former category. I have news for you, self-righteous cowards.

Women ARE taxpayers. Women ARE workers. Women EARN their health care every day of the year. If you think for a hot second that a health insurance package is a mere courtesy bestowed on you by a kindly employer, I pity you for sipping the antifreeze so willingly. Do you realize who is really benefiting from that freedom of conscience you so raucously defend? It isn’t you, that’s for sure. You have just given away your rights to decent employment, by framing health insurance as a sort of largess sprinkling down from the corporate king. How easily you sell away your own labors, your own bodies, pretending you haven’t given up your choices because you pay “out of pocket.” Thinking you’re the harder worker because you’ve agreed to accept less than what you’re due. No, I’m afraid that doesn’t make you heroic. It makes you dreadfully, painfully gullible.

Health insurance is part of earned income. When a woman takes a job, she is offered a health insurance package in addition to her paycheck as compensation for her work. Do I hear you saying that’s “entitled”? How droll. A workman is worthy of his hire, isn’t he (1 Timothy 5:18, for those who like references)? Why isn’t a working woman worthy of receiving the fruits of her labor?

When I fill my prescription, I assure you that you aren’t the one paying for it. I am. When I go to the classroom and teach, when I grade papers, when I sit in office hours and coach your children on how to write, I am earning my own birth control. So are you. Whether you pay your own premiums or not, you are exchanging hours of your life for insurance. And if you don’t have insurance – how is that something to be proud of? It means you work for an employer who can’t be bothered to invest in its employees. It means you work for a corporation that finds you disposable, that tells you that you’d be a fool to expect your health to matter. Is that “freedom”? Really? Just because the all-seeing entity that wants to decide your fate doesn’t bear the stamp of the United States government? How utterly naive.

Health insurance is not a courtesy. It’s wages.

Furthermore, you might ask if I support universal health care. Yes, indeed, I do. But halt your crying about the horrible burden of the “taxpayers,” struggling against the weight of my supposed promiscuity (along with most of the women, married or not, in America). Because guess what. I am a taxpayer. You think your taxes are the ones supporting me, supporting the “lifestyle” you so hypocritically disdain. What, then, are my taxes supporting – yours? Shall I stop paying? If it’s you taking care of me one way or another, O mighty “taxpayers”, then perhaps I’ll withdraw my own support from the system since my dollars don’t seem to be doing much good. Good luck to you when you need ventilators, pain relief and open-heart surgery. I’ll be in jail, assuring that you can finally gripe about your taxes supporting me with some feeble shred of honesty.

The truth is, I’m willing to shoulder the burden for the young, the elderly and the disabled because I am a taxpayer who believes in the power of this nation to collectively care for itself. But apparently you aren’t, or at least you demand a paternalistic veto power over the medical decisions of those you claim to support. Again, I have news for you: whether I am receiving universal health care from the government or earning it as part of my own income package, I assure you that you needn’t trouble your heads about my moral choices. Because I don’t rely on your taxes any more than you rely on mine. I am a taxpayer, I am a woman, and I use birth control.

If you consent to let employers of any stripe deny you the insurance that you have worked for, then your blood is on your own hands. I am not so blind as to regard that “freedom” and “personal responsibility” you tout as anything more than corporate robbery. By your own standards, health care is my right. I have earned it. I have paid for it. Although I despise your selfish philosophy and condemn your willingness to see others to their deaths rather than part with a grimy dollar, I assure you that I will not accept your sneers or apologize for the things I do with what I earn. I use birth control. I pay taxes. I earn my health care and I believe in paying it forward to those who can’t yet. And, you arrogant fools, I owe you nothing.

Women’s Equality is Not a Pill

I support women’s access to birth control. I use birth control, value it and believe in its ability to protect women from unwanted pregnancies and allow them to live fuller lives while pursuing their own goals. In a world where preparation for a career can take a quarter to a third of one’s life, the ability to postpone childbearing is essential to ensuring economic equality for women.

However. There is an article floating around on AlterNet that makes the dubious, anti-historical claim that pregnancy is the source of women’s oppression and that birth control alone produces equality. I vehemently disagree. Here’s why:

First, birth control has been practiced much more effectively in past societies than we think. The contraceptive herb silphium was widely known in the ancient world and picked to extinction. If all women needed to achieve equality was birth control, Western history would look much different.

Second, arguments like this reduce society to two functional units, man and woman. Then they remove the woman by occupying her with childbearing. The truth is, no society has ever been structured such that the people on the bottom live the same way people on the top do. There is no homogenous “man” or “woman” in history. Underclasses like peasants and slaves have rarely had the luxury of rigidly defined gender roles. Those who lived on the land had to pull together to survive (and yes, that meant pregnant women working outdoors – God forbid!). Those who served others did many of the same tasks: washing, serving, mending, etc.  That is not to say that a gendered division of labor was wholly absent, but it was not nearly as well defined as it was for the upperclass.