Part 2 – Sex
As I stood in the bookstore, from part one of this series, browsing through Harvey C. Mansfield’s Manliness I was reminded of several things I’d read earlier. Like I said before, with books like this, I usually skip to the index, look up the entries on homosexuality and read them before I decide whether to proceed further or not. It’s a kind of preemptive peek on my part, so I know what I’m getting into before I go too far. (For example, what little the author says about it suggests he thinks gays are basically disordered, and our relationships a pale, pathetic imitation of heterosexuality.)
From the beginning, the author says he omits the subject for the most part, and he does. But that only served to make it stand out even more when he does bring it up. It reveals the bee in Mansfield’s bonnet, which started buzzing in his preface.
Thus the true, the effectual, meaning of women’s equality is women’s independence is women’s independence — which in turn, so far as possible, means independence from men and from children.
This, the potential independence of women from men and child bearing, is a particular bugaboo with this guy. I mean it really bugs him, if statements like this are any indication.
Love is a dependency, even an enslavement. This view of love, the true one, is hardly ever discussed by feminists, but one sees the effect in their distrust of love when felt by women. A woman in love justifies and invites the oppression of the man she loves by giving him power over herself; better to have the “autonomy” of an open marriage with many lovers, or homosexuality, or — well, not celibacy.
And a bit later
Another answer is homosexuality, so that one gains control over one’s body by keeping it away from men. Men bring anxiety and heartache, and their big muscles add to the problem by magnifying both their means and their presumption. Add to this the solid mahogany they offer instead of brains. Why then ask for the trouble of sleeping with men? It’s better to find a substitute.
If lesbians make him this uncomfortable (so much for that straight guy stereotype) it’s no surprise that he doesn’t seem to even mention gay men (of course, I’d have to buy and read the whole book to be sure of that). But he seems downright threatened by the idea of lesbians, or of women living without men; and the control of women by men seems, to some degree, inherent in his ideal of women living with men. It’s assumed that is and should be the case. (I was tempted to wander into the fiction section of the bookstore to find a copy of Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which weaves into the plot an abusive husband who keeps control of his wife and keeps her from leaving him by getting her pregnant.)
His anxiety reminds me of the many chest-beating of the Promise Keepers, who were all over the place in the late 90s (including a gathering on the mall in D.C.), but whose stadium-filling days seem to be behind them. Never fear, for they’ve been replaced by the testosterone-infused GodMen and the equally macho Church for Men, which are both concerned with the possibility that religion has become “too feminine.” I haven’t seen it summed up any better than this.
If the Church wants to recover its losses, we’ve got to draw the knuckle draggers back to church. Masculine men are pretty easy. Toss in reason, competition, initiation, struggle, fun and a problem to spiritually throttle, and we?ll be there like stink on a monkey. Blow off, suppress, and spiritually emasculate the environment of these holy testicular necessities and your church, as far as men go, will be more empty than an Oktoberfest in Hialeah.
My ClashPoint is this: if concerned conservative Christians want to improve our nation biblically, then the Church has got to eliminate its effeminate drift and re-establish a masculine base. Our times demand strong men: the Church must produce them, not repel them. The Church needs men, who start a ministry, start a business; get involved in politics, the arts and education, and who are not afraid of the secular thugs and pimps who try to keep Christians marginalized in a religious ghetto.
That may be due to the greater range choices that women have about how to live their lives, which is why Mansfield’s concern about the same reminded me of something I’d read on the Christian Alliance for Progress Blog, back in October around National Coming out Day. It’s since disappeared from the site they linked to, but the Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy live on elsewhere on the web.
… God reveals Himself as masculine, not feminine. God is the eternal Father and the eternal Son, the Holy Spirit is also addressed as “He,” and Jesus Christ is a male.
… God ordained distinct gender roles for man and woman as part of the created order. Adam’s headship over Eve was established at the beginning, before sin entered the world.
… A husband and father is the head of his household, a family leader, provider, and protector, with the authority and mandate to direct his household in paths of obedience to God.
… Male leadership in the home carries over into the church: only men are permitted to hold the ruling office in the church. A God-honoring society will likewise prefer male leadership in civil and other spheres as an application of and support for God’s order in the formative institutions of family and church.
You get the general idea of where this is going. But just to make things clear, back in January, Jill at Feministe linked to a rather interesting piece on Feminism and Biblical Roles. I saved it, thinking I would blog about it the, but it didn’t fall into place until now.
From a Christian perspective, the development of such a movement is entirely predictable. In the book of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 16, after sin enters the world for the first time, God says to the guilty Eve: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
This word “desire” is properly translated as, “a desire to conquer”, and implies that Eve would have a wrongful desire to usurp authority over her husband. Furthermore, the word “rule” as used in the phrase, “he shall rule over you,” is a strong term usually used to refer to monarchical governments and containing nuances of dictatorial or absolute, uncaring use of authority.
The feminist movement understandably responded to this type of male dominance, but with an unwavering tendency towards female usurpation—a Biblically predictable scenario. At its core, however, feminism seeks to promote equality and combat harsh male dominance, two necessary and worthy goals.
… The Bible predicts that if the feminist movement reaches equality, it will not stop there. Instead, woman will replace men as the dominators—and perhaps that is their true goal. But the feminist who is truly concerned about equality would do well to consider the biblical argument, which, when fully embraced, sidesteps both male dominance and female usurpation by emphasizing distinct roles—recognizing that both men and women are irreplaceable due to the parts they play.
What’s interesting about all three of these perspectives is that they hold a kind of inequality (or “inferiority,” to use Mansfield’s term) to be not only essential, but a virtue unto itself, and not really inequality at all if you think about it. All three argue that men and women are meant to rule different spheres; men rule the public sphere, and women rule the private sphere, the home. But none of the three seems to consider that their own assertions that a man should “rule” his home, his wife and children is in direct conflict with “separate but equal.” (Except, of course, that God values both man and woman equally, but for some reason favors men when it comes to authority.) According to some religious conservatives, like Phyllis Schlafly , married women shouldn’t even have the right to decline sex with their husbands. [Via Crablaw.]
What does all this have to do with a gay guy like me? For that I have to go back to something I referenced when I blogged about a moral context for homosexuality. If guys like me make guys like Mansfield and the others quoted above nervous, it’s because they’ve got a pretty good picture of the way things ought to be, and we actually fit into their scheme in a way.
But the specter of gay marriage still serves a function. Every Christian man-guide emphasizes the claim that women play just as important a role in the maintenance of what evangelicals view as society’s all-important unit, the family, and it’s more than dishwashing, suckling, and sex (though what else they are to do is not often discussed). Women must submit to their husbands, but their husbands in turn must commit to “serving” their wives. The phrase that comes to mind is “separate but equal.”
But with Christian womanhood restored and redeemed, a crucial character in the Christian conservative morality play has gone missing: the seductress. It is no longer acceptable to speak of loose women and harlots, since sexual promiscuity in a woman is the fault of the man who has failed to exercise his “headship” over her. It is his effeminacy, not hers, that is to blame. And who lures him into this spiritual castration? The gay man.
Of course, as discussed above, it’s not anywhere near equal. And that’s where faggots like me can fuck it up for them (not to mention Phyllis Schlafly’s son, and those independent women Mansfield obsesses over).
… Gay marriages demonstrate the possibility and desirability of gender equality in any marriage by modeling a relationship where the parties to the marriage do not distribute roles and responsibilities based on gender.
… That is, marriage is being transformed from a utilitarian arraignment grounded in the idea that women are sexual property to an egalitarian life journey with a partner who one chooses to develop and share mutual love, affection, respect, and support.
… One of the most obvious issues to which gay marriage speaks is gender equality. One of the strongest and most relied upon objections to gay marriage from the Right is that it violates the concept of gender complementarity. Gender complementarity is the metaphysical claim that men’s and women’s social functions in the world are determined dichotomously by their biological sex, such that where men are convex women are concave.
… Undergirding the concept of gender complementarity is the assumption that men are metaphysically meant to rule over women (ideally in the spirit of love, of course) and women are metaphysically meant to serve men.
You won’t here it from them, but — and this is funny — we’re just finishing the job that heterosexuals (heterosexual women in particular) started. As I posted earlier, the changes heterosexuals made to marriage made gay marriage a possibility.
Whether one is for or against legalizing same-sex marriage, we must understand that it is heterosexual couples who have been tampering with marriage for the past 200 years. Heterosexuals repealed the old laws mandating wives’ subordination to husbands and prohibiting divorce. It was a lawsuit involving a heterosexual Connecticut couple that led the Supreme Court to overturn laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives, thus giving married people the right to decide not to have children.
… Once marriage came to be seen as an institution bringing together two individuals based on mutual affection and equality, without regard to rigidly defined gender roles or the ability to procreate, it’s not surprising that gays and lesbians said, “That now describes our relationships too, so why can’t we marry?” If you don’t like these changes in the institution, blame your grandparents, not the gay and lesbian couples seeking entry into this new model of marriage.
And if their power, in the public and private sphere, is God-ordained, then sissies like me are carrying the world to hell with us in a hand-basket as we go skipping along that last mile down the road to Sodom.
Because some women — and some men — might get the idea that things don’t have to be the way all the fellas above (and, with the exception of Schlafly, all the people referenced and quoted above are men) say they do. That’s the real seduction alluded to above, notwithstanding one in ten straight men actually having gay sex. After all, original sin had nothing to do with sex. It was about knowledge. People might learn there’s another way. People might forget their places.
And if that happens, well … they’re fucked. And, as I said before, that’s the absolute worst thing a guy could be.
He might as well be a woman. And that’s not what God intended. Why else do men thank God they’re not women and praise God that their not faggots?
[Next up: Salvation]
