It seems author Jonathan Last thinks my IUD caused the fiscal cliff. And every other problem the United States is facing, for good measure. In this post I look at Jonathan Last and his new book, What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, with its prophesying of a demographic collapse with disaster to follow. Race suicide, a dismissal of ideas like paid maternity leave, and a suggestion that the solution to the coming demographic disaster is religion. Oh yes.
Christian author Jerry Jenkins has written a book on building “hedges” around your marriage to protect it, but his list of hedges focuses on restricting his activity around other women rather than building a deep and healthy relationship with his wife. I explain how evangelical ideas about sin and gender roles contribute to a focus on the outside rather than on the inside, and also examine how patriarchal gender roles affect male-female friendships.
As the leaders of Christian homeschool movement embrace the (supposedly) virtuous past as a contrast to our (alleged) hedonistic presence, they often seem to zero in on the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a sort of ideal era. And yet, this fascination with the Victorian era, along with the years immediately before and after it, often includes an embrace of literature that seems to run counter to the ideals they are trying so hard to promote.
I recently came upon a video from a few years back where John Piper discusses whether God requires married women to submit to abuse at their husbands hands. Piper recently clarified his views, though without really improving them. Honestly, the fact that this sort of question is still considered a weighty and complex matter by a figure as respected as John Piper shows the depth of conservative evangelicalism’s love affair with wifely submission.
This video is several years old, but I only just came upon it and I think it’s an excellent example of just how rigid many evangelicals make gender roles – and just how hard they work to police them. In this video Mark Driscoll explains not only that men who stay at home with their children while their wives work are, according to the Bible, “worse than unbelievers,” but also that men who stay at home are not “real” men and will never have the respect of their wives.
While at Sean’s parents’ house over the holidays, I made the mistake of asking Sean if he had started our laundry.“I’ve never done laundry in my life!” Sean’s father announced, leaning back and smiling as if his comment were funny. The atmosphere in the room tipped and I felt the brunt of everything that was going unsaid. I was being typed as the overbearing and selfish woman who forced her emasculated husband to do “womanly” tasks like laundry.
When a reader write evangelical blogger Tim Challies for advice, asking whether it was okay that he felt no physical attraction for his girlfriend, Challies responded by writing that this young man’s concern showed a massive character flaw. As we will see in this post, the idea that physical and even emotional attraction are irrelevant to marriage is dangerously common in evangelicalism – and has real consequences.
I’m afraid I rather made my husband Sean miserable during our engagement and early marriage. Because I was taught that men constantly think about sex and that my husband thinking sexual thoughts about another woman would be the equivalent of adultery, I quizzed him daily on whether he had “cheated on me.” One thing the purity culture doesn’t do well is trust.
I tried to avoid Suzanne Venker, but I’ve found I just have to say something. So, a few quotes and a few words.
For ages now,proponents of “traditional” marriage have been arguing that any gains in marriage equality were the products of judicial or legislative “activism,” pointing to the fact that every time marriage equality has been put to a popular vote it has been voted down. The people, they said, affirm the importance of “traditional” marriage. Yesterday that changed.
From his comment about “binders full of women” to turning a question about equality in employment into a discussion of cooking supper, Mitt Romney made it clear once again in last night’s debate that he is simply out of touch on women’s issues. In this post I will pull out three Romney quotes and discuss what they reveal about Romney’s views on motherhood, working parents, and poor women. I invite my readers to contribute additional quotations as well!
“Sex is the union of two complementary beings—a male, who God created with a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual bent to lovingly and self-sacrificially bestow and give, and a female, who God created with a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual bent to actively and joyfully welcome and receive.” Come along as I dissect this and more in an effort to look at how evangelicals and fundamentalists talk about the man’s role “giving” in sex.
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