Objectified.
When I was younger I thought I was cherished. I was a beautiful daughter of God. When I grew older, I began to recognize the grimy undertones of what this meant. It didn’t mean being valued; it meant being admired…. [Women] are taught to guard virtue, rather than be virtuous. And perhaps the most harmful outcome of this word choice, is that it inadvertently tells young women that any use of their body by another without consent, is due to an inability to guard themselves.
~ Amber Haslam
a sexuality series, 1.
I heard this week of a small group that was meeting to discuss spiritual formation. Two of the male participants evidently assumed it was an all-guys group and promptly withdrew once they realized the intent was to have both women and men. They were concerned that having spiritually transparent conversations would be too intimate and a threat to their marriages. When I heard this, I was both sad and mad.
The church has not served us well, in my view, in equipping men and women to cultivate rich, healthy, and faithful relationships across the sexes. And since sex and money are topics usually avoided in the church (outside the occasional, badly interpreted, self-serving sermon on tithing), I’d like to explore some perspectives related to sexuality here (and maybe money next).
I think that one of the most damaging tactics the church takes is actually consistent with our culture at large: It objectifies women. How is that, you might think, with all the evangelical attention on sexual purity, modesty, and marriage in general? Here’s what I see:
On the one hand, women are idealized and seen as objects to be protected. Beautiful but fragile, physically and emotionally. Trophies to be won and showcased by men.
On the other hand, women are often cast as dangerous and subject to doubt. The theological foundations are not subtle: Woman was the one deceived in the creation story; Paul ostensibly wanted them to stay silent in the church; and the church fathers were almost universally, impossibly misogynistic.
On both sides of that paradox, whether women are set on a pedestal or demonized, the result is de-humanizing. Women are reduced to a role rather than a soul.
While it’s easy to prove the long history of suspicion, diminishment, and outright violence toward women in both culture and church, my interest here is in exploring the obstacles to healthy inter-sex relationships. Why does the church make this harder rather than easier?
It begins by making a massive distinction between the sexes. It’s not just biology, the church says, it’s a radical bifurcation between the way women and men think, act, what they want, and the authority given. Book after book perpetuate this mythology with titles like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus… Men are like Waffles, Women are like Spaghetti… or even the innocuous-sounding Love and Respect, which pigeon-holes women as objects of love and men as objects of respect. As if men don’t equally need to be loved and women don’t equally need to be respected.
All these caricatures generate enormous harm and reinforce both manhood and womanhood as a pre-determined role rather than an entire spectrum of possibilities. Both men and women who fall outside the bell-shaped curve are subtly shamed and coerced to fit the mold rather than celebrated as original and worthy creations with their own divinely-breathed personhood.
In this series we will continue to explore the unnecessary and unhealthy obstacles to full fellowship among men and women, but to start with, despite genuine distinctions, men and women are enormously more alike than different. This is an important start.
finding our way home
What has been your experience of sexuality in the church? Where has it been helpful, where unhelpful?
takeaway
We belong together.