Things You Won't Learn in Church

I’ll try to understand You’re out lookin’ for a man But you’re fightin’ ‘em off Just as hard as you can Girl, what you gonna do When I don’t run away with you Maybe finally realize That I’m just passin’ through --Reckless Kelly, “Passin’ Through”[1] It’s often been said that “clothes make the man.” To a certain extent this is true. But it really doesn’t tell the entire story.[2] Assuming this is the case, it can easily be said that I’m not the man I was three years ago. To wit, I’d like to present to you a triptych of images. First, Geds’s closet today: Second, Geds’s closet, circa January 2007 (a dramatization): Third, Geds’s functional wardrobe, circa January 2007 (a dramatization): Now, it’s important to make a few notes on these images. First, some of the clothing in the top image stretches back as far as high school. Every single shirt in that image is “in the rotation,” as I say, to one degree or another. The important thing is, though, that about half of the items in that image came in to my possession in the past year (for my next trick, I’ll be burning my Kohl’s card. Seriously, that thing gets me in trouble). Second, for the final image it’s important to realize that it was pretty much the t-shirts, fleeces, and sweatshirts that mattered, as this was right after I graduated from college and was working at a job that had absolutely no dress code. The few nice shirts depicted were often in a wrinkled heap in a hamper somewhere. Also, there were a few more t-shirts in the rotation at the time, but I have no idea where any of them are now. The point you need to take home from this is that I wasn’t exactly a snappy dresser three years ago. Or, for that matter, a year and a half ago. All of this is what I would call “hard won wisdom.” I was thinking about it today due to a confluence of thoughts on clothes. First, there was my realization yesterday that I could wear a different shirt every day for two months based on what’s in my closet right now.[3] And that just represents the shirts I like. I have a bunch of other stuff that will probably soon be on its way to Goodwill or something. Second, there is this post from yesterday over at Forever in Hell (warning: bewbs), which is a response to a particularly intellectually twisted post with the spectacularly paternalistic title of “How Modesty Helps You” by a guy (more precisely, a sheltered teenage guy) who claims “I am internationally recognized as an expert in the area of how guys see girls (well, not me specifically, but my gender in general)”[4] that gave me any number of bad purity talk flashbacks. Third, I’ve spent a bunch of time around a particularly fascinating (in the train wreck sort of way) member of the female gender since I moved. Let me see if I can bring all of these threads together. I’ve sat through an awful lot of dreary, cookie-cutter sermons about how women should be modest in my life. They often came down to, “Now, girls, don’t wear tank-tops, two-piece bathing suits, or Daisy Dukes, because they’ll make boys want to have sex with you. And when they want to have sex with you they’ll sin and Baby Jesus will cry and it will be your fault.” Let’s leave aside the standard objections people who haven’t spent a lifetime in Evangelical circles usually come up with. Yes, it’s paternalist blame laying. Yes, it ignores the fact that men and boys should be in control of their own urges. Yes, it makes women in to nothing more than sex objects. Yes, it completely ignores the possibility that the female gender might enjoy sex and have their own lust issues to deal with. Yes, it ignores that sex and lust is simply a part (a rather important part, really…) of the human condition. My problem is that the simplistic reasoning of the sermonizer in this case has fuck-all to do with observable reality. There exist in this world women who could parade around in their underwear all day long and never invite lustful thoughts in to my head (there are some who could even go so far as to create disgust). There also exist in this world women who could wear nothing but baggy pants and shapeless sweaters and leave me continually…excited. For that matter, I’m reasonably sure that Shirley Manson will always be one of my Top 20 Sexiest Women of All Time, not because she’s hot (but, seriously, in the ‘90s…day-um. And I’m just gonna go ahead and say that even at, I believe, 44, she’s still got most, if not all, of “it”), but because of the fact that the music created by Garbage drips with sex and it’s Shirley Manson who sells it. Between “Queer” and the last minute fifty of “Hammering in My Head,” let’s just say that I’m Shirley Manson’s for the taking. And the thing is, if you pick another guy at random there’s a reasonably good chance he won’t agree with me. Hell, one of my best friends, with whom I have a running joke that we think with the same brain (because on many, many issues we do) has completely different opinions on the subject of women than I do. It’s actually a running thing. If you name two women we both know/know of who are similar, then ask both of us to pick one, odds are really good that we’ll each pick a different one every single time without discussing it beforehand or hesitating. That’s just how it is. Which brings us to a Tale of Three Girlies.[5] I’ll call the first one Li’l Sis. She was one of my friends out at college. When I first met her I realized that she was pretty much her own worst enemy and tried to help her figure herself out. There was also a bit of the ol’ Christian mentoring going on, so, y’know, there’s that. I never found her to be romantic partner material, but plenty of people did. She was pretty much always on the prowl for a boyfriend, as she was a serial dater and, as I said, her own worst enemy. But in the process she also received an awful lot of unwanted attention from a particular type of guy I’ve taken to referring to as “creepy guys.” They’re generally harmless, clueless, sad sacks who decide, for reasons I could never figure out, that this one particular girl likes them. The part I could never quantify was the way it seemed like some girls like Li’l Sis had a new one every three days while other girls never seemed to get a creepy guy following. Let’s take, for instance, the second girl in my little triptych[6] of profiles. I’ll call her, well, Her. The one thing that always confused me…erm, one of the things that always confused me about that particular relationship was the fact that knowing Li’l Sis often gave me keen insight in to what was going on in Her head (also, that’s a grammatically incorrect sentence, since in this case Her is a proper noun. It should read “in Her’s head.” But that just looks weird). I tended to simply chalk it up to the fact that I found Her attractive while I didn’t find Li’l Sis attractive. This is reasonable enough, but there was the small matter of the creepy guys. There weren’t any following Her around. I always suspected it was based on a single variable. That variable could best be summed up with the notion that Li’l Sis invited the attention, however unwittingly, while She most certainly did not. I had to prove, for all intents and purposes, that I belonged on the same continent as Her before She even bothered to remember my name. That actually worked to my advantage, as I never really had to get particularly jealous. I took Her to a Local H concert one time. After the show I wandered over to the merch table to pick up the demo CD that had recently come out, leaving her alone for a good five minutes. When we re-joined She was smiling. Upon getting in to my car She told me what had just happened. While She was waiting a guy apparently swaggered on up to Her and said, “Hey, I’m Brian.” She looked back at him (and I swear I can still see this exact look to this day. I wasn’t there, but I know exactly what the look was. I call it “smoldering contempt”) and said, “So?” I’ve tended to assume that the main thing that kept me going back to Her was the intoxicating aroma of what I call The Crazy. Because She had it in spades and, for that matter, it was that particular quality that she shared with Li’l Sis. What I now realize is that far, far more than The Crazy, the thing that kept me going back was that air of inaccessibility. She didn’t even notice most guys and took joy in shooting them down with one word and a testicle-shrinking glower, but She claimed to love me. That’s a big effing deal. The problem is that I only had two real data points to work with, so I couldn’t come up with a unifying theory of The Crazy and creepy guys. Then I moved to Dallas and met Carrot[7]. It’s hard to describe, but Carrot is a walking disaster. She’s almost exactly average in appearance and while she’s not fat no one would ever call her thin. She does – to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Tom’s mistress – manage to carry her extra weight sensuously, as some women are capable of doing. Most importantly, she’s what I have come to refer to as “Garbage sexy,” which will make sense if you just go back up and read my description of Shirley Manson. Oh, and she has The Crazy in spades. Let me see if I can paint a picture in broad strokes. I’ve known Carrot since the beginning of December. In that time she’s had at least one boyfriend who she moved in with sometime in December and broke up with in January when she found out he was cheating on her. She has one stalker that I’ve seen and with whom she’s on surprisingly friendly terms (given that he’s the harmless “creepy guy” variety, but, still, he creeps me out and I’m reasonably certain that, all else being equal, I could break him if I had to fight him). While telling the tale of a different stalker she casually dropped in the phrase, “I had a girlfriend at the time,” then when I forced her to elaborate on that comment she said, “Yeah, I was with her for about two years. She was crazy, though.” There’s approximately a 103% chance she’s pregnant at the moment, which came up when she casually mentioned she had sudden craving for onion rings, which she usually hates, and was eight days late, but she wasn’t too worried since she’d been stressed out. My best summation of the idea of dating Carrot is this: It would be like buying a crotch rocket. The ride would be an absolute blast for that first quarter-mile until you ended up flying head-first in to a wall and killing yourself. The thing is, there is a definite part of me that wants to take that ride. The logical part of my brain says, “No. Fucking. Way.” But the lizard part of my brain says, “Aww, hell yeah!” And it has nothing to do with the way Carrot dresses. It has everything to do with the fact that she throws her sexuality out in to the public spaces for all to see. So now we have three data points. All have The Crazy, all three get their own amounts of attention from guys, but all of them are different in quantifiable ways. And what I’ve realized is that it has to do with is control. She kept (keeps, I suppose) a tightly controlled, unapproachable public image. It was the sort of thing where the vibe She gave was basically, “Back off if you know what’s good for you.” Your average creepy guy is a sad sack who’s looking for a girl, any girl, who makes (or appears to make) the first move. She wasn’t gonna do that. Li’l Sis didn’t control her public image. But, by the same token, she was unaware of the messages she was giving off to guys. As such, she had her fair share of creepy guys. Carrot controls her public image. But her public image pretty much revolves around sexuality. She knows what she’s doing and, to be frank, she’s damn good at it. The only problem is that she’s going to end up with a long and unsatisfying string of loser who want nothing more than to take advantage of her or sad sacks who will gladly let her drain them of their resources. And something tells me she won’t be aging quite as well as Shirley Manson. And, again, clothing has nothing to do with it. Of the Three Girlies there’s absolutely no question that She was the best dressed and the one who most understood what proper dressing meant. The thing is, it was always about appropriateness. Not “appropriate” as in “appropriate for a church picnic,” mind you, but “appropriate for the situation.” And the weird thing is that I owe that two months worth of shirts in my closet to the things I didn’t realize I was learning from Her. The reason I chose January 2007 for my former closet wasn’t arbitrary. There are three stories that explain it. I always assumed I could wear anything I wanted and it wouldn’t matter. I mean, I knew that there was a general sense of appropriateness in clothing. You wear a suit to a job interview, you don’t wear a Hawaiian shirt to a funeral. You know, that sort of thing. But, as I said, for the most part I wore t-shirts or hoodies and complained about dressing in anything more formal. This, for the record, frustrated my mother to no end. But who listens to their mother, really? But, as I said, I have illustrations. 1.) At some point during the first summer, a.k.a. “The good months,” we were going to go mini golfing. I was wearing cargo shorts and a spectacularly not presentable t-shirt when she arrived. The shirt in question is no longer in my possession, as it’s apparently below the level of work out gear in terms of presentability now. I still have two high school gym shirts in my workout gear, if that tells you anything. She was dressed, um, slightly better. As in, skirt, nice top, y’know, like she was about to go out on a date with a guy who wasn’t a slob. At some point during that evening we ended up at my sister and bro-in-law’s house. My sister took one look at us and said to Her, “So do you feel a little overdressed right now?” 2.) At some point I pulled a random red, short-sleeved oxford shirt out of my closet (that can still be an oxford, right? I mean, it’s about the button-down and collar, not the sleeve length, right?). At one point She said, “I’ve never seen that on you. It looks good.” This, I now realize, is what is known as a “hint.” And by, “I now realize,” I literally mean, “About three hours ago when I was taking pictures of my closet I remembered this little vignette and realized, ‘Oh, that was a hint.’” The point may well have been, “You should wear red more often,” too, but, in general, I suspect, “You should dress like a not-slob more often,” was the general gist of the hint. Subtlety is not my strong suit. 3.) Towards the very bitter end of the sad affair something was going on that was really important to her. She wanted me to go and informed me her parents would be there. Now, I’d never met her father, but she pretty much worshipped the ground he walked on. She said – repeatedly, as I recall – that I could not wear jeans to the event. Such was the state of my wardrobe at the time (and, in an entirely unrelated note, I’d put on a couple pounds) that I could find one clean pair of pants and one clean shirt that counted as wearable for the event in question. The only problem was that the pants and shirt in question did not, by any stretch of the imagination, go together. I was also an anti-social snot that night and later attempted to blame it on her, so, y’know, there’s that. But we’re limiting it to a story about clothing right now. A message was sent by the clothing in each of these stories, and it did not at any point have anything to do with sex. The message in stories number 1 and 3 was simple, direct, and to the point. And it was sent by me. I was basically telling her, “I don’t give a shit about what you think or how you feel about the image you’re giving off in public.” This, in fact, reminds me of a fourth, bonus story. At some point the subject of pink shirts came up. I said, in no uncertain terms, that I’d never, ever wear a pink shirt (and, to be fair, even though I have two months worth of shirts I still don’t own a pink one. But I did buy a violet shirt this past weekend). She pointed out that the popularity of the pink shirt was that it was a neutral color and so girls liked it when their guys wore pink because it went with anything. When I scoffed at that idea and said that it just reduced men to an accessory she said, “Well, yeah, that’s what you are.” The reverse objectification, it burns.[8] In the larger context of the discussion of clothing, however, that comment makes a hell of a lot of sense. Because I received three messages from her relating to clothing that all boiled down to, “Could you dress up, please? Y’know, put some effort in.” The crazy thing is that each of the shirts in my closet fits in one or two specific categories. There are about ten that I’d never, ever wear to work. There are only about five or six that I’d wear with a suit and tie. There are eleven (yes, eleven) that look real good with jeans and a blazer. There are about five or six that I consider my go-to shirts, where if I know I need to look and feel good I’m pulling one of those shirts out. A couple of those are from the non-work category, a couple from the suit category, and a couple from the “wear to work on a Tuesday” category. And, when it gets right down to it, I still own a whole bunch of t-shirts I like and I’ll wear if I’m just hanging out. I’ve got some hoodies and fleeces I can throw on if I’m cold. The reason for all of this is because I’ve learned that I send a message with the clothes I wear. That message has nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with appropriateness. -------------------------- [1]On the subject of “passing through,” I notice from Reckless Kelly’s website that they’re going to be at Shank Hall in Milwaukee on April 14th, the High Noon Saloon in Madison on the 15th, and Joe’s on Weed Street on the 16th. I saw Mike Doughty at Shank Hall in October, RCPM at High Noon Saloon at the tail end of Rogtober, as well as Jessi Lynn in August. I’ve seen RCPM at Joe’s, um, four times, I think. I’m suddenly feeling homesick… [2]This is an example of the second-lowest form of the high school paper introduction, close behind “Webster’s Dictionary defines [word] as [semi-cogent dictionary definition of word].” The introductory paragraph of this post exists entirely to justify this footnote, because the idea of tossing this in amused the hell out of me while I was walking to the mailbox. [3]Ironically, I spend a lot of time doing laundry. [4]The only thing worse than that being true (at least in the mind of the guy) is if my suspicions that it’s a terrible, terrible joke that falls completely flat are correct. I mean, as an internationally recognized expert in the area parenthetical thought, I know one of the most important aspects of writing a good parenthetical is to make sure that the subject in the parenthetical at the very least refers back to the subject of the overall sentence, since if it doesn’t your reader is just left wondering things like, “Does ‘my gender in general’ refer back to his use of the word ‘guys’ or is he admitting to a sex change operation (since the other option is that his parents took one look at him and said, ‘That’s one ugly baby girl we have. Let’s call her Benjamin and hope no one notices)?” [5]Offense and/or belittlement not intended. That’s just the only way the title flows. Trust me, I settled on that after three other tries… [6]Apparently “triptych” is the word of the day. My TV and loveseat just started jumping around and screaming. [7]That’s a joke fake name that requires one to know Carrot’s nickname and understand the Byzantine humor of the Geds. But, trust me, I find it hilarious. [8]Also, there are points when I drop the whole “capitalized pronoun” convention when discussing her. Those points are extremely specific. I think it has something to do with re-humanization.

WTF?

Holy shit. I just watched Mike Huckabee try to argue that we need to make abortion illegal because he doesn't want to teach his kids it's okay for them to pull the plug on him if he gets senile and they don't want to deal with it. Mike Huckabee: moron, super moron, or lying liar who lies? Discuss amongst yourselves...

The 28 Year-Old Virgin

So I’ve never had sex. Hell, I’ve never been in the same room as a member of the female gender who wasn’t more or less fully clothed. And I’m not gay, so, y’know, no loopholes there… There are good reasons for that, I suppose. For the first twenty-five or so years of my life I believed that sex outside of marriage would result in god being, like, really really mad. Then when I hit the point where that stopped being an issue I was still with Her. And nothing would have happened there, due to her still being pretty serious about the no sex outside of marriage thing, me not being willing to do anything manipulative, creepy, or otherwise indecent, and us being in a position where we were pretty much starting to despise each other, anyway. There was the time spent dealing with the fallout of that whole thing when I really wasn’t particularly interested in relationships anyway. And, of course, with all the need to run around and constantly freak out over Obama turning our country in to a Homosexual Islamofascist Socialist police state it just hasn’t come up lately.* Anyway, now that I’ve got that admission out of the way, I’m sure that everyone is going to stop visiting my blog. After all, anyone who has made it past his 28th birthday without having sex must be somehow defective as a human being. I’m certain that my lack of experience at the horizontal hokey-pokey also means that I don’t have any valid things to say on the subject of history, religion, baseball, or music. Oh, shit. I just realized I’d better hope I don’t piss off any nutso right-wing bloggers, either. They might track me down, tell everyone my real name, then call my company to tell my secret. I’ll get fired when HR realizes that this one detail about my sexual background completely negates all my skills and the work I’ve done over the last year. See, from what I’ve been given to understand by the larger world, there’s something wrong with me. We all know that a “boy” becomes a “man” the moment he first bumps uglies. So any guy who has made it deep in to his twenties without doing so must still not be a “man.” Then, of course, there’s the whole premise of the movie The 40 Year-Old Virgin. It starts out with this whole picture of Steve Carrell’s character as a deeply socially awkward loser who can’t seem to get anywhere with his life and doesn’t seem to try. His friends discover he’s a virgin and immediately set out to change that over his protests. Meanwhile, Carrell’s character is an avid collector of action figures. What happens over the course of the movie? He sells his collection off. I’m pretty sure the only way the metaphor could have been more obvious was if he traded in his closet full of Garanimals for suits. The thing is, I highly doubt that I could walk up to most of the people I know and say, “I’ve never had sex,” and get a, “Yeah, I’d always assumed so.” I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s some sort of virgin vibe or scent that I’ve never been able to detect. Or maybe it’s something I don’t recognize because I don’t really care that much. I don’t know if it’s me, but I really don’t care about anybody else’s sex life. I’m not ashamed of it, either. Maybe it’s a glitch of growing up fundagelical, when it was assumed that no one was having sex. Then again, Christians can be pretty obsessed with the sex lives** of others. And I’ll bet that a lot of people were sneaking off to have sex on retreats and missions trips, too. Chances are I’d be surprised to find out who it was and who it was with if I ever found out. But chances are I never will. It’s none of my business. I suppose you’re wondering why I’m telling you all of this. I’ve got an ongoing joke that I’d be in really big trouble if I was gay, since I don’t have a gay-dar. This isn’t true. I’ve actually got a pretty good gay-dar, it’s just rarely turned on. My basic theory is that the only reason to give a flying crap about someone else’s sex life is if I’m planning on trying to get myself involved in their sex life. And, well, that doesn’t really come up too often… The whole issue of gay rights and the involvement of LGBT people in society has been around a lot. I’m sure everyone has noticed. I was thinking about this the other day and realized that the conversation, at least from people who are against things like gay marriage and gays in the military and whatnot really don’t get it. There’s far more to a person than sex, regardless of who he or she wants to have sex with and how. Yet to hear the rhetoric, you’d think that all a gay guy does all day is try to find places to put his penis, whether or not the owners of those places are in to it. Honestly, I don’t get it. I think it’s stupid. I think it would be fantastic if we could figure out how to get past that. Sadly, though, I think the fact that my own attitudes about the sex lives of others is probably a glitch among the deeply religious means that it will take a while for that to happen. -------------------------------- *And Geds makes a really subtle impotence joke at his own expense… **Good. Fucking. Night. The link on this one popped up when I decided to see what would happen if I Googled "women sex god." I honestly cannot figure out if it's a Poe, but it's so very fucked up that I figured I'd share it anyway. First of all, the link I put up commits the standard logic fail of claiming that having anal sex with a girl is okay because she's still a virgin afterward. There's no breaking of the hymen, after all. And we can totally ignore the fact that guys only have one penis through the power of double-standards and not mentioning simply biological facts. There's the threesomes link, in which we learn that it's okay to have threesome as long as the only gay shit is between two chicks and there is a marriage involved. Then there's the oral sex link, wherein we learn that's a-ok because (are you ready?) Jesus wanted to give "living water" and "living water" is "semen" and all men have "living water" to give. Through their penises. But only to women. This thing has to be a Poe. Especially the question they publish about whether it's okay for guys to drink each others' semen and the accompanying proof text from the David/Jonathan story. Although, for the record, it doesn't take much reading between the lines to think David and Jonathan were more than friends, if you catch my drift. I have officially emailed the people who wrote the site and said, "Is this a joke? Please let me know." However, I link to it for your amusement. Especially since I've seen plenty of wacky justifications for Christians having all the sweet, sweet blow jobs and butt-loving they want, regardless of their marital status... Also, it totally does get that subtext of, "Women are only here for the sexual pleasure of men and really should spend most of their time figuring out how to look pretty and pleasure their man," down. If this is a Poe I've got to give them props. Honestly, I hope it is a Poe. I would totally hang out with the people that came up with this thing.

Things that Make Me Angry

There are three big news stories in the corners of the internet I habitually inhabit. Be prepared for a large collection in links on this one, because lots of people have more on this than I can possibly say. We all know, I’d assume, about the death of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday. He was killed by an anti-abortion activist while attending church. The cognitive dissonance is amazing. Truly amazing. Now, the thing that’s absolutely horrible about the rhetoric surrounding the killing of Dr. Tiller is that he was one of only two or three doctors in the country who performed late term abortions. No one engages lightly in late term abortions. They are always performed in a position where the life of the mother is at stake and there’s something horribly, horribly wrong with the pregnancy. By the point where late term abortions occur the effect of the procedure is devastating. Just go over to Feministe and read some stories. It’s not my place to speak for those who can speak for themselves on a topic about which I know and understand very little. Meanwhile, there’s the Silence is the Enemy campaign. There’s no other way to describe the situation than by saying that there’s a culture of rape in parts of Africa. It’s an atrocious thing. Greg Laden added to the conversation by illustrating a situation in which someone who might have been able to help didn’t. That’s the biggest problem and the string that connects these two atrocities, separated as they are by an ocean and that thin line we call “civilization.” In both cases we’re talking about people operating with no accountability and a sense of entitlement. It’s fairly clear-cut in Liberia. Men think that women and young girls are there for their sexual gratification. It’s vile and disgusting. Rape is bad enough, but systemic rape of girls as young as five years old is beyond unconscionable. It’s the sort of thing that leads us to realize that as far as humanity has come, we haven’t come nearly far enough. We’re still animals. The Tiller case is slightly less obvious. But the lack of accountability and sense of entitlement is absolutely there. Scott Roeder, the man in custody for murdering Tiller, walked in to a church in broad daylight on a Sunday morning and shot a man. Tiller and Roeder presumably professed a faith in the same god. But Roeder possessed a faith that allowed him to say that Tiller was somehow less than human. It also allowed Roeder to say that he was the chosen instrument of god and hand out justice. At least, I assume this is how it works. I never hit the point where I believed god thought it was a good idea for me to kill people. The lack of accountability, meanwhile, is cut and dry. In the mind of someone who can do such a thing they have not sinned. Or if they have, they just have to repent and it’s all good. Tiller is the one who has sinned and is going to hell. I suppose it would be easier to swallow that logic if Dr. Tiller hadn’t been killed in the foyer of a church. But that’s an easy enough issue to weasel around. That ECLA isn’t occupied by real, true Christians. They couldn’t possibly be godly if they allowed an evil person like Dr. Tiller in to their congregation. Therefore Dr. Tiller is going to hell and the people in his church had better get right with god, too. Isn’t that beautiful? Blame the victim. You don’t have to learn anything that way. Fred Clark is one of the few Christian voices who has said anything of value on the topic:

Now here we are again, 15 years later, as the arguments of the anti-abortion movement are again being proved disingenuous by their own self-refuting statements condemning the latest lethal fruit of their rhetoric of "mass-murder" and "Holocaust." Once again some sad, disturbed man has committed the error of taking their rhetoric more seriously than it was ever meant by the people who supposedly believed it to be true.

I’ve briefly written on the topic of abortion before. My conclusion is that the sort of people I used to go to church with just don’t understand what they’re talking about. My belief is that they intentionally miss the point in order to get the politics right. And that is why Scott Roeder ultimately has no accountability. In 2012 when we’re gearing up for the next Presidential election Obama will once again be a baby killer, the abortion will still be the American Holocaust and a large number of the Christians who were led about by the nose in 2000, 2004, and 2008 will be led about by the nose yet again. I tend not to make sweeping statements like this, but the culpability for the death of Dr. George Tiller does not rest on the head of a single deranged man. It rests on the heads of all Christians who somehow think that abortion is the only issue that exists and that only horrible, evil doctors perform them and loose, slutty women have them. How many times can you say this is all that matters, how many times can you say we’d be a Christian nation were it not for this before someone decides to take that rhetoric seriously? This is the world I come from: pastors and politicians who attempt to gain power by trumpeting an unsustainable message of hate, then feign ignorance and shock when their words lead to horrible deeds. Although at least the feigned ignorance is better than the gleeful hate speech offered by some. The only thing Scott Roeder forgot to do was kill himself in the process so he could get to heaven and get his 72 virgins. Oh, wait, wrong crazed group of terrorists. Scott Roeder still gets to go to heaven, he just doesn’t get all sexed up. Sounds like a pretty lousy trade-off to me, really. Then again, no one asks the virgins. Which, I guess, brings us back around to the poor girls in Africa. It’s hard to come up with a solution to either issue. Both require education and standing up for what’s right. But it’s too late for Dr. George Tiller just as it’s too late for the little girls of Liberia. Can we do something about these things before the next big atrocity? One thing’s for sure, though, god doesn’t have time. God’s too busy making sure the Orlando Magic win the NBA Finals. Did I mention, “Fuck you, Dwight Howard?” He might have done the impossible and convinced me to cheer for Kobe Bryant and the Lakers. I hate the Lakers and couldn’t even cheer for Kobe in the Olympics. That third bit, though, is the missing piece of the puzzle. Yeah, Dwight Howard is a young, rich, entitled celebrity and we all know that young, rich, entitled celebrities have a bad habit of talking out of their asses. But I can tell you that this phenomenon is not limited to Dwight Howard. My former variety of Christianity was built around exactly the idea that no matter what else was going on in the world god had nothing better to do than stop everything to help the individual believer. I’ve written about this in the past, too. Sure, the Christians I used to know would say that god doesn’t care whether the Lakers or Magic win the Finals. But then they’d turn right around and say that god helped them get that new job or pass that test they hadn’t studied for or made sure they avoided that fender bender. What’s the difference? For the life of me I can’t figure it out. All I know is that I’m glad I quit the whole Christianity thing. I’d hate to have the death of Dr. George Tiller on my head. Oh, and seriously, Silence is the Enemy. Read up on doing things to help in Africa.

W@H: Hot Man-on-Man Action

Why do lovers choose others To mirror their pain Yeah, slow down stranger You know that you're in danger --Richard Ashcroft, "Why do Lovers?" We here at Accidental Historian like to mix things up every once in a while. As such, we're pleased to present a one act play in one part called "John Eldredge Makes Shit Up." CHARACTERS: John Eldredge Darrell, a man born with only half a brain Ralph, an innocent ficus plant SCENE: JOHN has a great idea. DARRELL, a ward of the state who works in JOHN'S office licking envelopes then stuffing them with live crickets, is the only one nearby for him to bounce it off. JOHN ELDREDGE: Darrell, come in here. DARRELL: (Looking around, confused) Who's Darrell? JE: You are. Come here. D: Okay, Mr. Patterson. JE: It's Eldredge. But whatever. I've got an idea and I want to know what you think of it. D: I only really know envelopes and cickets Mr. Patterson. JE: Yes. And you're doing a great job of...whatever it is you do. But so far you haven't cost me more than that tax write-off, so just keep doin' it. Anyway, here's my idea. You know how I spend a lot of time on the Father Wound, right? D: My father gave me a dollar and dropped me off at the bus stop. JE: Yes. I know. D: The next thing I knew I was here. And the man at the door said I couldn't leave. Ever. JE: Focus, Darrell. Anyway, here's my idea. I'll tell everyone that guys who are gay do it because they didn't get important affirmations from their fathers. And since they didn't get those affirmations from their fathers, they look to get them from other men. More specifically, other mens' penises. Y'know. Inside them. Like those videos my pastor keeps accidentally finding on the internet. D: (Thinks about the idea for about five seconds.) My friend Steve likes having sex with other men. He says it's because they're hot. He also says that he really likes the cock. But I don't know what that means. JE: (Leans forward, excited.) And I'll bet he has a terrible relationship with his father. D: (Shakes his head.) No. His dad's a great guy. He used to take us all for ice cream after our basketball games back in high school. And he calls Steve's boyfriend Adam, "The other son I never had." JE: Well obviously your friend Steve in in deep denial about his Father Wound. D: I don't think so, Mr. Patterson. JE: Get back to work, Darrell. DARRELL leaves. JOHN stares at his desk for a long time, a look of confusion on his face. Finally he looks up and sees RALPH, the ficus plant, in the corner. JE: You think it's a great idea, right? Ralph: (Talking, but JOHN can't hear him.) Oh, god. Why does he always drag me in to this? I knew I should have listened to Carson Daly when he was talking about that Karma thing... END SCENE Unfortunately for everyone involved, any discussion of Christianity and manhood eventually has to work its way around to that thorny issue of hot man-on-man action. I really don't feel like delving in to issues of why this is. Nor do I want to spend a lot of time discussing why so many Christians are freaked out by homosexuality. There are a lot of theories out there about the topic, ranging from an entire religious sect of closeted homosexuals to theories about how a guy who likes to take the traditional role granted women in sexual congress is a threat to their gender stratification scheme. The reason I don't want to spend a lot of time on the theories is simple. I'm almost 100% sure that most of the ones I've seen are wrong. See, they're generally presented by people who are completely outside the tradition and haven't spent a lot of time having honest discussions with people on the inside. So they make up motivations. This is, not surprisingly, very similar to the way people inside evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity have a bad habit of inventing motivations to explain why outsiders think the way they do. For the average believer the issue of homosexuality is a completely teleological argument. The Bible says (they say, since lots of things in fundagelical Christianity are covered by the blanket statement, "The Bible says") that god created man and woman to have sex with each other. You don't even need to go to the verse in Leviticus about men lying with other men or that place in the epistles where Paul puts butt sex on the same level as murdering and stealing to see the problem. Boys have tabs. Girls have slots. Tabs go in slots. It's all crystal clear. Men who like other men completely ruin that image. Women who like other women probably do, too, but let's face it, for as long as men have been able to conceive of the idea of two women in the same room together, they've pictured those two women ripping each others' clothes off and making with the intercourse. So as long as we've had a patriarchy, women who want to diddle other women have had a more or less free pass because it's hot and, quite frankly, men want to believe that a woman who has never once thought of another woman in a sexual light is actually constantly about ten seconds away from going down on every other woman in the room. It's a double standard, but dammit, it's a great double standard... Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Homosexuality is outside of "god's plan." Now, we all know that god's plan was screwed up by the whole eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil thing. Since then sin has been a conscious choice. Therefore, if a guy wants to sin by, um, engaging in sin with another guy, it has to have been his choice. This is what leads us to things like ex-gay ministries, wherein one can "pray the gay away" or whatever. That, by the way, is a part of a much larger misunderstanding of the sexuality of humans. Put a bunch of teenage boys in a room with a bunch of teenage girls and tell them to keep their thoughts pure, avoid masturbating, and not sneak off to feel each other up and try to get to third base. It ain't going to happen. We have libidos and biological clocks for a reason, and it's not so we can learn to have stronger prayer lives by asking god to help us keep our hands out of our pants. There's an associated phenomenon wherein it's apparently the boy's job to push the boundaries and the girl's job to say what is and isn't allowed. Because, you know, girls never actually want to have sex and have to be forced to do it by, um, apparently marrying them and making it part of the pre-nup. Now, I will fully admit that the different genders generally have completely different ideas about what sex is and/or should be. But that doesn't mean that both don't want sex. I, uh, I didn't learn that in church. And so but anyway:

What's fascinating to note is that homosexuals are actually more clear on this point. They know what is missing in their hearts is masculine love. The problem is that they've sexualized it. Joseph Nicolosi says that homosexuality is an attempt to repair the wound by filling it with masculinity, either the masculine love that was missing or the masculine strength many men feel they do not possess. It, too, is a vain search and that is why the overwhelming number of homosexual relationships do not last, why so many gay men move from one man to another and why so many of them suffer from depression and a host of other addictions. What they need can't be found there. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart (94-95) [emphasis his, bold mine]

Now, leave aside the fact that a man with some sort of graduate level degree in psychology just called depression "an addiction." Actually. don't. Dwell on that for a moment. Let the unintended consequences of that construction of "depression and...other addictions" roll around in your mind for a moment. I'll wait. We're back? Good. Now, then, this is a perfect place for a little game I like to call "Damning Eldredge with his own words." For, you see, this sequence comes three pages after Eldredge uses Bly's imagery of the Golden-Haired Woman to explain why a man will fall in love with a woman across a room, reach her, realize she's normal, then fall in love with another woman in yet a different part of the room. I guess it's perfectly normal for a man to move from one relationship to another if it's always with women and not so much if he's doing the same thing with guys. Also, let's pretend for a moment that he actually has statistics to back up his "overwhelming number" of broken homosexual relationships. First of all, it's fascinating the way he apparently uses "gay men" and "all homosexual people" interchangeably. Either he doesn't realize that gay men and lesbians may well have different relationship dynamics (um, I developed this weird idea that it might actually be way easier to set up homosexual relationships. My theory is that men look for "man things" in relationships while women look for "woman things." So if you've got two women they're both looking for "woman things" whereas if you've got a man and a woman one is looking for "man things" and the other for "woman things." Bear in mind that it was early in the morning when I came up with this, I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and I never even bothered to suss out the difference between "man things" and "woman things." So, please, take it with a planet-sized grain of salt), or he's conveniently ignoring lesbian relationships in his wild theorizing. Either option works. Second, um, I have no statistics to back this up, save old re-runs of Seinfeld, but I'm pretty sure that an overwhelming number of ALL relationships end badly. That's why on the ninth day god invented gin and tonic and that dive bar down the street from the Garden. But, again, it's not worth mentioning that it happens to heterosexuals, too, if it can ruin your wild accusations and help maintain that general idea that homosexuality is a special variety of bad. Either way, the root of the problem evangelicals have with homosexuality isn't that they're some entirely closeted subculture. It's that they have to call homosexuality a sin. In calling it a sin they have to make it a choice. And in making it a sinful choice, they have to make sure everyone knows that it's fraught with pitfalls and will never bring satisfaction. This, in turn, requires a lot of time spent making shit up. I had a friend tell me once that he thought people went gay because they just really wanted sex and didn't care where it came from. I asked, "So why don't they have it with people of the opposite gender? Or animals?" That pretty much stopped him dead in his tracks. It created one of my many, many theories, too. Basically, if someone makes an argument against homosexuality that can be countered by asking why they don't just stay straight or asking why straight people do exactly the same thing, it's probably not a good argument. But I think I'll leave the final word here to Daniel Radosh, who ran in to a competing theory while at Cornerstone in the process of writing Rapture Ready! The theory in his case was that men turn to other men after they've been disrespected by a lot of women.

"A man's greatest need is to feel respected, and if a man doesn't feel respected he'll go anywhere." [said John Smid, the ex-gay speaker] My jaw dropped. This is what turns people gay? Because before I met my wife, I often felt disrespected by women, and it never occurred to me to remedy that by sucking cock. --Daniel Radosh, Rapture Ready! (181) [emphasis his]

Ah, hell, I can't resist getting in the last word... If it's an issue of disrespect from women, someone needs to call those guys who are looking for dominatrixes* and tell them they're doing it wrong. And someone needs to call all the guys who are being disrespected by their boyfriends and tell them they'd better just give up. I mean, where do you go when neither gender respects you and that's the only reason that you could possibly have for being in a relationship? --------------------------- *And, yes, I know that should probably be "dominatrices." It looks weird, though.

W@H: Sister Golden Hair Surprise

I thought I was done with the Golden-Haired Woman. Then I had to go and run across something while looking for a completely different quote.

What else is it we are seeking from the Woman with the Golden Hair? What is that ache we are trying to assuage with her? Mercy, comfort, beauty, ecstasy -- in a word, God. I'm serious. What we are looking for is God. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart

Eldredge, as I've said, echoes Bly's suggestion that the man who constantly chases the Golden-Haired Woman needs to go see about himself, first. This I will agree with. He goes a step further, though, and says that the man needs to withdraw from the woman. This sounds like it says the same thing, but it doesn't, not really. Having read this in light of Fiat Lex's comment that Eldredge's interpretation of the Biblical creation myth reduces the woman to a spectator in the struggle between Adam and god, it takes on a more, shall we say, insidious appearance. It's why I keep going back to Berger when re-evaluating this book I once so loved, I guess. Before we leave women behind and head in to real man territory I think we need to take a look at three inherent problems of the Christian self-help book genre. Now, Christian publishers would probably take issue with that phrasing. It's a "Christian Living" book, a book about the life of a Christian. Self-help is for those evil regular bookstores. Also, I think self-help would imply that Christians either (a.) need help or (b.) are capable of helping themselves without their good buddy Jesus. I'll leave that to people who care about such distinctions, though. Either way, three problems: 1. Excessive use of the personal story. We hear a lot about John Eldredge in Wild at Heart. We hear a little about men John Eldredge has worked with. This is not scientific. See, if you're writing a book about people and you're a psychologist and you fill it with stories that say, "I am like this. The people I work with are also like this," then you're doing an extremely bad job. Let's say you decide to submit a column to a fashion magazine on the hot trends today and say, "I and everyone I can see is wearing a McDonald's shirt. This is the hot new look for '09." The fashion magazine will laugh at you, even if you think you're right, just because you're a McDonald's employee and you're writing your column during a slow period at work when there are no customers in the store. This leads to the next problem. 2. Overgeneralization. You know how there are those TV show promos that let you know that "everyone's talking about" last week's episode? Have you ever noticed how no one is ever actually talking about last week's episode? This is an attempt to create (a usually unwarranted) buzz. Combine excessive use of the personal story with overgeneralization and you've got a book about how everyone in the world is exactly like you. Now take those two and combine with the third. 3. Authoritarianism. Eldredge has a degree in some sort of psychology. He wrote a book. What else do you need to know about his ability to tell you what's what? Not to overgeneralize, but this is a problem with most, if not all Christian self-help books. It goes back to that one size fits all attitude of what people are and who they should be. Therefore, the reasoning goes, if I search for validation in the Golden-Haired Woman, every other man does, too. If I realized that my search for validation in the Golden-Haired Woman is actually my search for god, so it goes for everyone else. And, by the way, you need to listen to me because I wrote the damn book. There's a chicken and egg problem with every Christian self-help book. I have to draw a line here between Christian self-help and the general Christian Living category, since it's too big and generalized to have any real meaning. Christian Living contains Wild at Heart, Every Man's Battle, and Too Busy Not to Pray, which are self-help. But it also contains books like Phil Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace?, one of the few Christian books I once loved and still respect, and Max Lucado's line of schmaltzy, uplifting crap. Basically, if it's Christian, non-fiction, and isn't a devotional guide, a book about how to run a ministry, or some crap about Christian "science" or "spiritual warfare," it gets lumped in to the Christian Living category. Anyway, chicken and egg in Christian self-help. Right. It's almost impossible to discern where the writer's bias comes from. Wild at Heart is, bascially, a misogynistic text. However, since it's Biblically based self-help, I don't know if Eldredge brought his misogyny to the text or read the Bible, thought, "Hey, this is the way the world is because the Bible says so," and brought a Biblical misogyny to the text. There's also the problem of misogyny as isogesis or exegesis. Does the reader bring it to the Bible or take it from the Bible? Drop back a level and it's a question of the writers and editors of the particular translation used and so on and so forth back to some poor schmuck two thousand years ago who was just trying to write a book. We must, I feel, tread lightly. It's one thing with LaHaye and Jenkins of Left Behind, since they created a fictional universe in to which they poured their ideals and can be rightly excoriated for it. It's one thing for the guys who wrote Every Man's Battle, since they seem to be pretty overt assholes. Eldredge, however, is a more complicated writer to analyze. He seems like a genuinely well meaning but misguided individual. This is complicated greatly by the fact that his advice is generally fairly sound and the structural difficulties are more foundational than anything else, but then peppered with the generally good ideas are some astoundingly horrifying thoughts.

Because so many of us turned to the woman for our sense of masculinity, we must walk away from her as well. I do not mean leave your wife. I mean you stop looking for her to validate you, stop trying to make her come through for you, stop trying to get your answer from her. [Emphasis Eldridge's]

This is good advice. It's fundamentally a different way of approaching the concept of the woman making the man something v. the woman seeing something in the man that he himself has a hard time seeing. I have a problem with the use of the phrase "walk away from her," though. The fact that it requires and emphatic, "Don't leave your wife," should, really, be a warning sign. We need to jump forward a page, past a mishmash of initiation rites and quotes pulled from Bly, to this little gem:

What I am saying is that the masculine journey always takes a man away from the woman, in order that he may come back to her with his question answered. A man does not go to a woman to get his strength, he goes to her to offer it. [Wait. It gets better.] You do not need the woman to be a great man, and as a great man you do not need the woman. As Augustine said, "Let my soul praise you for all these beauties, but let it not attach itself to them by the trap of love," the trap of addiction because we've taken our soul to her for validation. [Italics his, bold mine.]

Following this mind-boggling, bright, multi-colored fuck you moment, Eldredge then puts in the quote I started this entry with about how the search for the Golden-Haired Woman is actually the search for god. So let us sit and reason together. There is a deep misogyny in Christianity built on a simple structural problem. The Jewish patriarchs were, generally, the sorts of guys who had multiple wives. Jesus was single. Paul was single and advised everyone else to be single, too. Guys like Augustine and Origen were, I'm pretty sure, single. Women are, in short, an afterthought in classical Christianity. The Bible and the church histories are filled with stories of the great men who shaped the world. So it should come as no surprise that the default assumption would be that great men don't need women, that men who do need women are, necessarily, weak, and, taking that a step further, that women just get in the way. Not only that, but notice how Augustine equates love of beauty with a trap, then Eldredge equates that same love with addiction. Since we don't have the context of Augustine's quote I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this one. Love of beauty for its own sake can be a trap. Eldredge gets no such slack. I don't remember why this came up, but I was once talking to a girl -- who I may or may not have been dating at the time -- and in a moment of bombast said that I thought I would never get married. "Yeah you will," she told me, "You're not good enough on your own." I disagreed with her then. I also thought Wild at Heart was a great book back then. She was right. I was wrong. Eldredge is dead wrong. Greatness is not an inherently masculine trait. Strength isn't, either. It's not something that the man finds on his hero's journey, then takes back to the silly, weak woman who has been sitting around in her silly weakness waiting for the man to give her strength. Men and women generally have different kinds of strength, or at least different ways of manifesting strength. It is that combination of strengths working together that makes for greatness. It's why mammals have a tendency to pair bond, to gather together in families, tribes, cities, and nations. Eldredge here deviates from a general understanding of human history and basic mammalian biology to make an unsupported, deeply misogynistic claim. Again, though, the question must be asked. Is that a result of his thinking itself, or is it his thinking as informed by a book that makes god in to the groom and all humanity the bride and makes it clear that in the god/person dynamic god's the one with all the strength and all the person can offer is abject surrender and worship? So in the spirit of this little detour, before I go out in to the wilds of adventure and battle, first we're going to take a walk through a garden with Bly and Eldredge. Then we're going to answer the eternal question: if the Golden-Haired Woman is such a big deal, why did Bly devote the first half of the golden hair chapter of Iron John: A Book About Men to a story about a golden-haired boy?

W@H: 27 Jennifers

Saw you in the subway station Shining with a strange light Girl, you’re like a weird vacation How am I gonna make you mine? Make you mine. --Mike Doughty, “Like a Luminous Girl” It’s a story as old as time. A schlub with a dead-end job who’s still mourning the crappy things that happened to him five years ago accidentally ends up getting a secret CIA computer downloaded in to his brain. All of the sudden he finds himself at the center of a project, protected by a beautiful secret agent who is the former girlfriend of his greatest enemy but seems to be falling for him. Happens all the time, right? It took forever for a friend of mine to convince me to watch Chuck, but now I love the show. I forgave Chuck’s endearing nerdiness and obvious Mary Sue-ness because I enjoyed the show at first. Now I realize that the very nature of Chuck as Mary Sue is what makes it a beautifully pitched bit of modern mythology. For, you see, Chuck is everyone who is wondering what the purpose of life is while Sarah, his beautiful CIA protector, is none other than the Golden-Haired Woman. Eldredge first gave me the notion of the Golden-Haired Woman after he lifted it from Robert Bly. Not only did he lift it, he cherry-picked the idea. This is Eldredge’s introduction of the Golden-Haired Woman, using the words of Bly:

He sees a woman across the room, knows immediately that it is “She.” He drops the relationship he has, pursues her, feels wild excitement, passion, beating heart, obsession. After a few months, everything collapses, she becomes an ordinary woman. He is confused and puzzled. Then he sees once more a radiant face across the room, and the old certainty again.

Eldredge introduces the quote with the idea that the man sees Juliet and suddenly assumes he must be Romeo. He then follows it with a diatribe against, of all things, pornography. I mean, on some level it makes sense. The purpose of the nude, whether in magazines or movies, is to give the observer that sense of fantasy. But the nude is not the same thing as the Golden-Haired Woman. She has almost nothing to do with sex, and the integration of sex for its own sake in to the equation diminishes the Golden-Haired Woman while the entire purpose of the nude is to present the fantasy of sex. In introducing the Golden-Haired Woman as simple object, then moving in to a diatribe about porn, Eldredge completely missed the point. See, Bly starts with an acquaintance’s recollected story of a bunch of fifteen year-old boys who see a beautiful sixteen year-old girl. Day by day the boys talked about the girl without actually talking to the girl. He then says this:

The girl, on her side, is equally confused. She may in reality be lacking in self-esteem, be insecure, shamed, even victimized, but on the outside, in the radiance from her face, she is queenly, self-possessed, golden, and invulnerable... If the boys had been eighteen, one of them might have spoken to her, and courted her. He might even have made love to her; and in the course of all that he would have realized that she wasn't "she." What a disappointment! "How could I have been so wrong?" he says to himself. When she asks him why he has lost interest, he may even tell her of his disappointment. We are looking at the source of a lot of desperation in certain men here, and a lot of suffering in certain women.

He then goes in to the part Eldredge sampled. Now, in the middle of his anti-porn diatribe, Eldredge did throw in Bly’s sentence about desperation in men and suffering in women. And, for the record, Bly and Eldredge do come to a similar conclusion. Eldredge, not surprisingly, says that the man obsessed with the Golden-Haired Woman must go to god. Bly says that he must search his soul, figure out what it is that he’s trying to find in the Woman and work on that. In this Bly and Eldredge, I believe, are motorists driving side-by side in the middle of the night. At the edge of the cone of radiance provided by their headlights they see a woman standing in the road. Both swerve, one right, one left. Both avoid the Golden-Haired Woman in the road, but in avoiding her both miss the point. (Also, that’s a horrible analogy, but I’m leaving it, dammit.) For this we need to go back to Chuck and Sarah. See, what Sarah does when she arrives in Chuck’s world is pull him out of his normal, everyday existence and make him look at the world differently. In doing so, she forces him to look at himself differently. Chuck doesn’t become something different, though, he simply begins to believe in himself and become what he is. His older sister, playing the role of the mother/goddess (also played by the amazingly attractive Sarah Lancaster, might I add), tries to tell him the same things Sarah does, but he won't listen to the mother, he'll only listen to Sarah. This is the true magic of the Golden-Haired Woman. The man who approaches her expecting to be given something will not get it and eventually end up disappointed. But his disappointment won’t be in her, it will be in himself. Chuck is, for a while, content with a fake relationship with a woman he doesn’t know. As time wears on, however, he grows discontent, wants to know about her, wants things to become real. This is the point where the Golden-Haired Woman becomes the woman. And this is why the story has absolutely nothing to do with sex, with fantasy, with pornography. The mistake of the man in the presence of the Golden-Haired Woman is to assume she can give him something that he himself does not possess. It has nothing to do with a search for some archetypal Eve like Eldredge would say or the Freudian search for the mother like Bly would say. There’s a different, Occam’s Razor answer to the problem. A man looks to a woman for validation. His assumption, in finding the Golden-Haired Woman is, basically, “If she’s awesome and she loves me, then I must be awesome, too.” Tossing in Eve or Oedipus only complicates that simple mental progression. Some men don’t have a particularly strong need for validation and don’t worry about the Golden-Haired Woman. More power to them, I say. Some men do have a need for validation and seek her out to give them something they feel they lack in themselves. This is where it ends badly. Quite simply, after a while even the most inebriated by worship discovers that her shit does, in fact, stink. The Golden-Haired Woman becomes human. Sometimes she even becomes sub-human, as she becomes clingy, or has abandonment issues, or brings up a past that the man would rather not deal with. I wonder, too, if there are certain unfortunate women who are predisposed to become Golden-Haired Women, just as there are some unfortunates with no gaydar who have a string of relationships that end with her man admitting he likes other men. I have no proof of this, but I have noticed that there are some girls who seem to be creepy stalker magnets and some who really should be, but aren’t. I also think that there’s a high correlation between the creepy-but-harmless stalker and the guy who needs validation from a woman. But this is all conjecture. All of this, meanwhile, isn’t designed to undo Bly’s (or, I guess, Eldredge’s if you’re the strongly religious type) advice for the man constantly running after the Golden-Haired Woman. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, “If she’s awesome and she loves me, then I must be awesome, too,” attitude. The beloved should be, on some level, amazing. And if the beloved, in turn, sees something in the lover that the lover strives to be (and vice-versa), then this is a good thing. Moving in to the other’s perspective and seeing one’s own potential can be a powerful inducement to self-improvement. But this should not be confused with being awesome because of the other. No one can make us what we are not already. They can only bring out qualities that already existed. Sometimes, too (as I’ve learned the hard way), this works in reverse, where the beloved actually brings out negative qualities and encourages the lover to wallow in a non self-actualizing state. All in all, though, the important thing to remember is that the Golden-Haired Woman does not exist in a vacuum. The man who constantly chases her across the room will never find her. In the process, he’ll break the hearts of a lot of real women. And real women are fully capable of being, in and of themselves, amazing. They can be, in their ordinariness, great. The issues that certain men take to the Golden-Haired Woman are taken to real women who are really hurt by it, not to women who take their clothes off for money. Bly seems to get this. Eldredge does not. That’s the real tragedy of the search for the Golden-Haired Woman and how it's presented in Wild at Heart. It goes back to the way we see things. I went to school with 27 Jennifers 16 Jenns, 10 Jennies, and then there was her You might be the one that I’ve been seeking for You might be the strange delightful You might be the girlie who shall end all girls You might be the sweet unspiteful --Mike Doughty, "27 Jennifers" Berger points out in Ways of Seeing that the painter or the cameraman is, in a way, interacting with an audience. Out of the millions of things a painter could paint, out of the infinite number of places a camera could be pointed, the observer is presented with this one, single scene. Similarly, out of the infinite number of other women, all of whom are fully capable of being great in their own way, there is her. The beloved. The Golden-Haired Woman. The ordinary woman who wakes up with bed-head, loses her temper, and whose shit most definitely stinks. They are the same person. It just depends who is looking and how. Up next, the battle to rescue the sacred from the jaws of the mundane begins…

W@H: In the Beginning

We begin, as is most sensible, at The Beginning. They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart There are also three desires that I have found essential to a woman's heart... ...every woman yearns to be fought for... ...every woman wants an adventure to share... ...And, finally, every woman wants to have a beauty to unveil... --John Eldredge, Wild at Heart This is, in essence, the manifesto of Wild at Heart, the point of this adventure in to manhood. I had an odd experience with a girlfriend that I wrote about during The Mythology Project. She basically told me that she was surprised I like Wild at Heart so much, since the guys she knew who read it didn't know how to treat women. I understand that now.

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. --John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I've already discussed the issue of the Genesis account of the creation of Adam and Eve. To my two previous accounts -- the perfection of women and the subservience of the same -- I now add a third. It's one that caught my attention at the time as being relatively progressive. At the moment of the Fall, Eldredge points out: Adam isn't away in another part of the forest; he has no alibi. He is standing right there, watching the whole thing unravel. What does he do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I took this, at the time, as a refreshing condemnation of Adam in a world that's all too quick to blame Eve for the sins of the world. He was there, after all. He saw it, he did nothing. The sin is on his head just as much as it's on hers. Take that, men. But that's not actually what this says. What this says is, "Eve isn't capable of fending for herself." If Eve failed and we're out here, it's because Adam failed to realize that Eve is just a silly little woman, willing to be swayed by pretty, pretty words. This is where the fun starts. See, god shows up, says, "What the hell is going on here?" and punishes Adam and Eve. We focus mostly on the whole getting kicked out of Eden thing when this story comes up, but there's another part of it. Eve is punished, it says, by being made subservient to Adam, and so shall it ever be, world without end, amen.

What is striking about this story? They became aware of being naked because, as a result of eating the apple each saw the other differently. Nakedness was created in the mind of the beholder. The second striking fact is that the woman is blamed and is punished by being made subservient to the man. In relation to the woman, the man becomes the agent of God. --John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Eldredge, in discussing the Garden of Eden, initiates a conversation about how things are, how things should be. Berger initiates a conversation about how things are perceived, how we think they should be. This is a key distinction and at the core of the problem with evangelical Christian interpretation of gender roles. In the world Eldredge attempts to frame, there is a static purpose for a "man" and a different, equally static purpose for a "woman." In this, Eldredge really has no specific man or woman in mind, but instead a sort of ideal of each. It constricts women to what I term the second-choice agent. Yes, he states that women have their own desires which are not to be ignored, but that desire is to become an object for a man. This is entirely fitting with Berger's estimation of the woman as the nude. See, the nude is different from being naked. To be naked is to be without clothing. To be nude is to be objectified as an ideal representation of something. The perfect woman, whether clothed or not, is a nude in the world of Eldredge.

Durer believed that the ideal nude ought to be constructed by taking the face of one body, the breasts of another, the legs of a third, the shoulders of a fourth, the hands of a fifth -- and so on. The result would glorify Man. But the exercise presumed a remarkable indifference to who any one person really was. John Berger, Ways of Seeing

And here we have the problem. The woman in the Eldredge story is Sleeping Beauty, simply waiting for Prince Charming to arrive and plant that kiss on her lips to bring her to life. It is true that none other than Prince Charming is capable of fighting through the various obstacles to reach her, but that hardly matters. Until he arrives to give her meaning, she has nothing, wants nothing except to be awakened. This is the story that we have told to little girls. While we tell little boys that they can be Prince Charming, all the girls get to be is the one who is asleep until that man arrives to bring her in to the world. So of course Eldredge would tell Christian boys who would be men that women want to be fought for, want to share adventure, want to unveil beauty. Sleeping Beauty has no desire for her own battle, her own adventure, to enjoy her beauty for its own sake. This would give women agency, force men to admit that women are people, too.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure. The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight. --John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Art, as they say, imitates life. Art, however, has far greater power. It illuminates life, even those parts we'd rather not admit to. By examining the ways we see things, by stepping in to the metaverse and observing the observer, we confront truth. Art imitates life. Art also creates life. That simple story of Adam and Eve, that story of a silly woman and a man who wouldn't be a man and protect his silly little woman created over a thousand years of art built around Adam and Eve realizing they were naked. In time we realized that we were more interested in Eve, but realized, too, that we were objectifying her. We had to bring Eve in on the joke, make her watch us as we watch her, make our puerile interest in her curves match up with her vanity at being looked at. Eve, then, is no longer a woman. A woman has agency, a woman has choice. A woman is a person with her own interests, her own desires, her own rights to personhood. A woman fully realized is a threat to the status quo. We know this by looking at history. Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I and II of England, Queen Victoria, Joan of Arc, Margaret Thatcher, hell, Hillary Clinton. These are simply the ones that come immediately to mind. There are many, many other women who have risen to prominence in their chosen fields. Some, like Catherine the Great, did so in spite of the fact that every chip on the table was stacked against them. Men, I think, see a formidable, capable woman and become scared. We know how to deal with other men, even the formidable ones. There are rules that men suspect women don't follow, don't know about, or don't much care for. There are also other rules, like the one that says, "Don't hit girls," that hold men back. Men feel powerless, I suspect, in the presence of a formidable woman. It is here that we must pause. For it is here that the Golden-Haired Woman enters the picture.

Malthusian Gender Economics

So I have this bad habit of overestimating fundamentalists.

I’m guessing it’s because my personal experience with them was borne out of time spent with a more moderate branch thereof. Yeah, they were fundamentalists in the strictest sense of the word, but they weren’t the raving lunatic fringe variety.

I followed a link almost immediately after writing my Sarah Palin post and ended up on a comments thread for Touchstone Magazine. And there I found out that Palin’s place as veep candidate is not a sign of a woman being in her proper place, but a sign of the times. Specifically the times when there are no good, strong leaders among men and women have to step above and beyond their god-given duty and take the mantle of leadership.

Sadly, this is not a joke. In fact, as I recall, the lingo was plenty there in my moderate brand of evangelical fundamentalism. It was actually that very language that was one of the key questions I kept coming back to in my journey away from the religion of my youth. That ended up being one of the key places where I said, “Why do we have to keep living in a world built on bronze-age values just because a self-referentially authoritative book says so?”

Since I can, since this pisses me off, and since it’s actually a clear and present issue, let me see if I can walk those who haven’t had to deal with such stupidity through the morass of traditional morality (fundamentalist Christian version). Beware, it’s double-thinky.

Anyway, here’s the general thinking: god made man to be the head of the household and woman to be number two. This is the natural order of things because god says so. And how do we know god says so? It’s in the Bible. Right there from god creating man first in Genesis through Paul saying women shouldn’t be given authority over men or allowed to speak in church, it’s all over the Bible. Except for the places where women do really cool or useful things, at which point they are held up as exemplary women of the Bible.

It’s interesting, however, to take a note of how the exemplary women did things.

Deborah: judge, called her general Barak a wimp, he went out and killed a bunch of Philistines in response.

Jael: killed Philistine General Sisera with a tent peg through the skull after promising to hide him.

Rahab: prostitute from Jericho, hid some spies, specifically Joshua and Caleb.

Ruth: Moabite, married Israelite, got abandoned, stayed with her stepmother, eventually got the attention of another guy by dolling herself up, waiting until he got drunk and crawling in to his bed.

Esther: child bride of a Persian king. Said Persian king was tricked in to letting his subjects kill all the Jews. Esther got all dolled up and went to the king to get him to make up for that bit of stupidity.

(Side note: Western civilization utilizes two main sources of information on the Persians: the Greek historians and the Bible. Both of these source sets basically paint the Persians as being utter fools, incapable of telling their ass from a hole in the ground. Nothing could be further than the truth. No one as incompetent as the Biblical/Greek Persian kings could possibly have held together one of the world’s largest and most successful empires for three centuries. For that matter, the conqueror of the Persians, Alexander the Great, admired them and was often accused – correctly, too -- of becoming too Persian. Xenophon also rather liked them and held up both Cyrus the Great and Cyrus the Failed Usurper as exemplars of kingliness. I’m feeling the need to write about this at length at some later point in time.)

Mary Magdalene: young, unmarried, followed Jesus around. Church tradition later turned her in to a reformed prostitute in spite of the complete lack of Biblical evidence (basically, there was an unnamed prostitute who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears. She was later conflated with M-Squared).

The message, then, is that women can be remembered as great if they attach themselves to the proper man. Well, except for Jael, but she drove a tent peg through a dude’s skull, which is pretty friggin’ cool. Also, she never did anything else. And there was kind of a sense of, “Hey, why don’t you come on in to my tent there, big guy,” in her conversation with Sisera.

Meanwhile, and this is the lesson we get from Deborah, Ruth, and Esther is that they had to step up and do their thing when the men around them failed. Barak was a wimp. Ruth’s husband abandoned his family in a time of famine. Esther was married to an idiot king who could be duped by a bunch of idiot courtiers. But in this failure of male leadership, these women stepped up and…got men to do the things men are supposed to do, anyway, presumably by having sex with them, although that’s never explicitly said.

Which is how the selection of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate can be taken as a sign of the failure of male leadership. Now, there are any number of reasons to dislike the selection, but this isn’t one of them. Although, on some level, if this keeps enough of the base the Republicans are aiming for at home, then, hey, let’s let them think it for another month or two. The last thing I want to see is this allowing Sarah Palin to vault past Olympia Snowe and Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the Republican hierarchy. It seems like the sort of thing that would only lead to bad times.

Anyway, as I’ve said, the issue of the treatment of women by my fellow church folks was one of the big sticking points that ultimately helped me out the door. I just plain didn’t get it. I grew up with a mother and sister who didn’t take crap from anyone and didn’t wait around to see what the men around them were doing. I’d been in corporate America working in teams and departments led by women and didn’t see them as being incapable or somehow worse than a man in a similar position. Some of the women I’ve worked for have been better than others, but I could say the same thing about men I’ve worked for.

The problem is the language and the attitude.

A woman in leadership is a sign of a lack of leadership from men.

Think about that. This is zero-sum thinking. It says that there is a finite amount of leadership out there, say 100 Arbitrary Leadership Units. So if a woman takes a leadership position of, say 5 ALU, that means that men now only have 95 ALU.

It is completely inconceivable that, say, we’re now dealing with a total of 105 ALU by adding the talent of that woman leader to the existing pie. Nope. Not possible. She’s only taking away from men’s god-given leadership pie.

This is Malthusian Gender Economics at its finest. See, Malthus basically believed that there was a finite amount of food and land out there and eventually we’d over-run our capabilities and people would die. He was right in short-run situations, say famines or situations where population explosions far outstrip technological advances in food production. He’s wrong in cases of long-term growth and innovation (well, the line might curve back around and a far point on the graph, but we haven’t gotten there yet). We don’t cut the pie in to smaller and smaller pieces; we consistently find ways to make bigger pies.

So I will defend Sarah Palin from anyone who wants to tell me she can’t or shouldn’t win because of her gender. But I will agree with anyone who wants to tell me she can’t or shouldn’t win because her political stances are abhorrent.

Just throwing that out there…

Oh, in addition: The call from the Palin end of the spectrum in the presence of a career oriented woman generally is, "Shouldn't that woman be at home taking care of the kids?" Compare and contrast with Obama's constant call over the course of the election for fathers to be more involved in the lives of their children. There is one part of the responsibility and authority pie that cannot be increased. No matter how post-Malthusian we get, there are only 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 365 days in a year (well, at least according to the Gregorian calendar. The metric calendar of the French Revolution said differently. But it was still governed by the same natural cycles). In order for women to have more opportunity outside of the home, men do have to take more responsibility inside the home than they traditionally have. But, really, is that such a bad thing? At least, is that really such a bad thing if you're not trying to pedal some crap about how the man makes the money while the woman stays at home because that's how god says it should be?

One Man Rebelution

In his last Every Man's Battle entry the Cynic Sage reminded me of the existence of the Rebelution and it's absolutely amazing* Modesty Survey. For this crime I will be sure to punish him. I already wrote about the Modesty Survey here and my opinion hasn't changed much, so if you care for a larger opinion on the topic, read that. What I want to focus on, instead, is the reason Cynic Sage pointed to it. See, Fred Stoecker, writer of Every Man's Battle and progenitor of the 11 million follow-up books that have come since (proof that it's far more profitable to beat the same dead horse than to try to come up with a new idea) supports the Rebelution and its bastard offspring. His glowing testimonial is right here if you want to read it. Now, it starts out well enough, with a kind of a moderate and understanding view of the theoretical difficulties faced by young girls who don't want to entice lust in the boys around them. In fact, in saying, "We expect the women to protect us from our own visual nature by dressing modestly, while doing little to rise above that nature ourselves, allowing them to be penalized twice over for our nature," he almost looks like hes about to decry the nature of the Modesty Survey. Then he kind of completely and totally falls off the track, slides down the embankement and bursts in to flames on the borders of Crazyland. "We must take care of our own responsibilities first by disciplining our eyes and our minds to line up with scripture if we expect our women to line up in modesty. We are men. We must lead in all this." (emphasis mine) "Our women?" Really? When do I get mine? Was there a sort of general handout of women and I just happened to be hanging out at the coffee shop acting snarky at the time? Or is there, like, a woman pound somewhere where I can go and pick one up who was found abandoned on the side of the expressway? Or are those the ones who come with all the discipline problems? As much as I'd love to try and be charitable in my interpretation of this, I simply can't. Especially in light of this quote: "We can honestly help train our sisters in Christ about where those boundaries lie[...]" The words "help train" are a bit, shall we say, condescending? And in light of the part where we find out that they're "our women," well... It would be one thing, I suppose, if this were simply the opinion of a single, misguided fool. The fact that it's the opinion of a single, misguided fool who just so happens to be a bestselling author is a problem. Especially since he's one of those specific brands of bestselling author who has no qualifications in "his" field but is treated as an expert due to the fact that, um, he wrote a bestselling book. I'm not going to go in to details. Cynic Sage has spent a lot more time on this than I have, so go read his stuff if you care. Making things worse is the fact that he's using his influence to attempt to further influence (really, indoctrinate) high schoolers. This is a very, very bad thing. I would like to hope that we're at the point as a society where we're trying to teach the coming generations that women are NOT second-class citizens and NOT chattel. Sadly, in the world of Evangelical Christendom, that seems to be far from the case. Take Willow Creek's 2008 Leadership Summit. For those who don't know, Willow Creek Community Church is the Ur-megachurch. It has a massive main campus and several satellite churches in the Chicagoland area. I dated a girl many years ago who dragged me to their Thursday night services on a regular basis, so I'm fairly familiar with them. The thing that I just learned recently, however, is that there's way more to Willow Creek than their Chicago operations. Apparently they run an association of churches that counts 12,000+ congregations in 45 countries in its rolls. Really. It's on their website. Anyway, the Willow Creek Association's annual Leadership Summit goes from August 7-9 in 2008. On August 6th there is a separate Women's Leadership Forum. The name of the Women's Leadership Forum is, I kid you not, "Help! I'm a Leader Trapped in a Woman's Body." So what have we learned today, kids? Women are property to be trained by men to conform to their arbitrary definitions of what is appropriate and women who are leaders should feel ashamed, or, at least, uncomfortable in their roles. The scary thing is that if you go back to the Fred Stoecker link, you'll find a bunch of girls replying in the comments thread and thanking him and the Rebelution folks for so magnanimously telling them how they should behave. In ten, twenty, or thirty years the leaders among those same teenage girls will undoubtedly be perfectly suited to think they're trapped in their own skin. It's sad, really. *"Amazing" isn't necessarily a good thing...

Preference

This is an old topic, but I feel like revisiting it. In my entry titled “Context,” I mentioned an article called “Soy is making kids gay” on World Net Daily, mostly as an intro. Kelly pointed out, and possibly rightfully so, that soy does cause problems. He asked: Does that "make" them gay? That's a bit inflammatory--typical of WND. But the real question is what impact are such hormones having that throw off the balance of a child's developmental hormones? What do you think? I honestly have no idea what to think. There’s been interesting research done on this topic, most of which I haven’t seen, or only seen the edges of. My problem isn’t actually with the idea that soy could be wrecking hormones in children, because if it is then we need to do something about it. My problem is with the massive amounts of intellectual dishonesty in the simple phrase, “Soy is making kids gay.” Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. First off, I want to know where the writer gets the information that there is a “rise in homosexuality.” I know of no statistical proof that homosexuality has been on the rise. I do know that homosexuality is now more accepted than in times past, but that does not mean it’s more common. However, the writer offers an indefensible statement as proof of his point. It’s a classic example of “begging the question.” I also want to know where the statistics come from that show soy reduces penis size and increases sexual confusion. Since the first sentence is connected to the second, it further reinforces my belief that he’s simply begging the question. Stating your hypothesis as proof does not credibility make. Furthermore, at no point does he address two key issues. First, gay men existed before soy formula. Where did they come from? Second, it doesn’t address the issue of lesbianism. Assuming the writer’s theory that estrogen causes sexual orientation is correct, wouldn’t giving massive amounts of extra estrogen to baby girls reduce the number of lesbians? Wouldn’t we be seeing a rise in the number of gay men and a concurrent reduction in the number of gay women? Then there’s the fact that the rest of the article wanders off in to issues like puberty, leukemia, obesity and infertility. That, too, might be the case and it might be something to look in to. It, however, has nothing to do with homosexuality. Over the course of an article entitled, “Soy is making kids ‘gay,’” the author devotes exactly two sentences to the idea. They’re also his two weakest sentences. This is what I like to call “intellectual dishonesty.” The fact is, there is no clear-cut explanation for why anyone is attracted to anyone else. And I mean that in every possible way. Historically speaking, I tend to be attracted to brunettes in the 5’4” to 5’8” range. Yet I within that broad category, there still aren’t that many girls I’ve been really attracted to for any number of reasons from physical appearance to facial features to personality. Meanwhile, I’ve been known to run in to the occasional 5’10” blonde who I find immensely attractive. I’ve also met girls I should be attracted to, yet am not because of personality issues or a simple feeling that she just isn’t that interesting to me. Meanwhile, for the life of me I have no idea why Angelina Jolie is considered the hottest woman on the planet, nor do I understand why anyone would be attracted to Kirsten Dunst. It’s simply a matter of preference. There's a mechanism in there somewhere that has to do with psychology, personal history, genetics and hormones. I assume that if one of those things were changed, I might have a different opinion of Ms. Jolie. I think it would take a lot more than that to cause me to throw off the idea of being attracted to a Ms. at all. And this is the problem I have with assertions such as the ones in the article. There is no binary “I prefer girls/I prefer boys.” I am heterosexual, but that doesn’t mean I like “girls.” That means I like certain girls. If I can’t even figure out why someone would think Angelina Jolie is hot, I doubt I can understand why Orlando Bloom is, either. Moreover, I highly doubt adding lots of soy to my diet will change that.