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Stasi Eldredge

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: 44-47, "Haunted by a Question"

haunted

This is the chapter when Stasi starts obviously contradicting what she told us on the first page; she started out assuring her readers that “this is not a book about all the things you are failing to do as a woman.” She was unable to live up to that promise even in the first chapter, but by chapter three she’s slipped into the familiar pattern of these “biblical femininity” books: she paints a picture of exactly what she thinks a “godly woman” is. Although her description is lovely, it’s also incredibly limiting.

Eve was given to the world as the incarnation of a beautiful, captivating God– a life-offering, life-saving lover, a relational specialist, full of tender mercy and hope. Yes, she brought a strength to the world, but not a striving, sharp-edged strength. She was inviting, alluring, captivating.

That’s a list of “all the things you’re failing to do as a woman,” by the way. Striving? Not a godly woman. Hard-edged? Not a godly woman. Lacking tenderness? Not a godly woman. Unalluring? Not a godly woman.

The problem is that these words, although they might seem vague, have pretty particular meanings in American evangelical culture. When Stasi and John go on at length about how “disturbing” a “striving woman” is, they’re letting their (probably) evangelical reader fill in the blanks with what they think that is, and our definition has been given to us by dozens of other “godly femininity” books.

There’s a lot of assumptions spinning around in the following pages– like how Stasi assumes that “career women” aren’t married and don’t have children on page 46. We already know how Stasi feels about feminism, and her attitude toward women who don’t conform to the American middle-class white stay-at-home stereotypically-feminine mold is usually either bemusement or hostility.

She goes on to insist that every single woman’s “deepest doubt” is about whether or not we’re beautiful, which is a claim I have mixed feelings about. Knowing my partner finds me beautiful is . . . yup. I enjoy that. A lot. I love the way he looks at me, and I’ve come to feel much more confident about my body since I met him. Knowing he finds me drop-dead gorgeous helps me to see myself that way. However, I spent the majority of my life not giving a rat’s ass whether or not I was “beautiful.” I purposefully cultivated frumpiness in order to avoid appearing beautiful (although the reasons for that are, admittedly, complicated).

And if a lot of women in America today struggle with seeing themselves as beautiful, I don’t think it necessarily follows that it’s because we were supposedly created to “be like Eve” and might have everything to do with our culture’s ridiculous and impossible-to-meet beauty standards. Have to be thin, but not too thin. Have to be one of the guys, but not masculine. Have to wear makeup, but not too much.

When she says this:

Little girls want to know, Am I lovely? The twirling skirts, the dress up, the longing to be pretty and to be seen– that is what that’s all about. We are seeking an answer to our Question . . . I wanted to be captivating. We all did.

Uhm . . . nope. I wanted to be noticed and appreciated, sure– I was constantly coming to my parents and grandparents with stories I had written, music I had memorized. I wanted my skills and my work to be recognized. If my parents had said “oh, Samantha, you’re so lovely!”  instead of “oh, Samantha, you’ve worked so hard! You play that so well!” or “this is a well-written story!” I would have been . . . well, frustrated, bordering on angry.

When I was about eight, I wrote a story in a form a bit like one of Aesop’s fables, about a turtle outsmarting a fox, I think. When I showed it to my mother, her reaction– at least to me– was to be blown away. She bought a little illustrated book-kit, and helped me write it all out neatly and illustrate it and bind it. That she went to all that trouble to show me how she valued my work is still one of my best memories from my childhood.

That has nothing to do with me being lovely, and I’m a little sick that Stasi thinks that affirming our daughter’s “loveliness” is the most important thing we can do for them. I disagree. Affirming their abilities and their development is far more important, and when our culture stops seeing “beauty” as a necessary element for womanhood the better of we’ll all be.

Also, this is the third time I’ve had to write a post responding to Stasi and John’s all-consuming interest in “beauty,” and I’m getting more than a little fed up. Next week we’ll be able to talk about the ramifications the Fall has on womanhood, and it ain’t going to be pretty. There’s whole sections on “Desolate” and “Dominating” women. Whee.

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: 34-43, "Why Beauty Matters"

beauty standards

[unrelated author’s note: my cat, Elsa, has eaten 1-2 feet of yarn sometime early this morning, so I spent the last few hours at the vet. My hope is that she chewed it up into sections so it could pass safely– if not, we’re facing some pretty steep costs for emergency surgery. Posts may be a little sporadic over the next few weeks as I’m watching her like a hawk now, and might be taking care of a recovering kitten next week. Positive thoughts and prayers appreciated.]

Up until this point while I was reading Captivating, I was staying pretty optimistic. John and Stasi were saying some problematic things, some things I disagree with, but there were things happening to balance some of them out.

This is where my marginalia changes from “I wonder if they’ve thought about ____” to “GAH” and “WTF. NO, SERIOUSLY, WTF JOHN.”

I start off this section essentially agreeing with John; he spends the first few pages talking about beauty in general terms, in nature, as part of God’s creativity, and as something that feeds the human soul– beauty, according to his argument, is a vital part of all God’s creations. As someone who grew up in a hideously ugly fundamentalist church that started going to liturgical Presbyterian and Episcopalian services almost entirely because the beauty of those churches took my breath away, I agree that American evangelical culture has a tendency to overlook beauty as inconsequential and supercilious instead of something that feeds a soul craving. But then . . .

But in order to make the matter perfectly clear, God has given us Eve. The crowning touch of creation. Beauty is the essence of a woman. We want to be perfectly clear that we mean both a physical beauty and a soulful/spiritual beauty. The one depends upon and flows out of the other. Yes, the world cheapens and prostitutes beauty, making it all about a perfect figure few women can attain. But Christians minimize it, too, or overspiritualize it, making it all about “character.” We must recover the prize of Beauty. The church must take it back. Beauty is too vital to use.

Long, dramatic sigh.

This note is a bit of an aside, but I don’t like how he uses the word prostitute here. I’ve learned a lot from listening to sex workers of all types, and I’ve learned how important it is to listen to these people instead of talking over them and assuming we know more about their lives then they do.

But moving on: Beauty is the essence of a woman.

I… am having difficult responding to that. I understand where John is trying to go with this argument, but the reality he’s trying to ignore is that words mean things, and when you say something like “beauty is the essence of a woman,” you can’t escape how a very specific definition of beauty has been ingrained into Americans practically since birth. When he says this, he is also saying thinness is essential to a woman, and so is whiteness, and so is subjectively large breasts and clear skin and red lips. I’m positive John and Stasi would never openly endorse these sentiments, but they do absolutely nothing to recognize these shortcomings in using a phrase like “physical beauty.”

He goes on to support this by showcasing how Western art has supposedly chosen the cisgender female form to represent beauty. I’d ask how familiar John is with the Renaissance, but the most irritating part of page 37 is that John goes to Santa Fe, sees women represented in art, and uses this to support his conclusion that beauty is essential to womanhood. I don’t think it would have ever occurred to him to ask the question why he might have seen women overwhelmingly represented; aside from how women are sexual objects in our culture, there’s also a lot of homophobia spinning around, even in the “liberated” art world– anything that might appear homoerotic (which is basically anything that doesn’t center the straight male gaze, and ignores the existence of bisexual and lesbian women) makes some people uncomfortable. Ergo, using the cisgender male form to represent beauty isn’t going to happen that often.

There’s a bit of that homophobia happening here:

For one thing, men look ridiculous lying on a bed buck naked, half-covered with a sheet. It doesn’t fit the essence of masculinity. Something in you wants to say, “Get up already and get a job. Cut the grass. Get to work.”

Two things: John needs to get out more. Go look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling, maybe. And when I see my partner lying on a bed buck-naked, half-covered with a sheet, I am most definitely not thinking “Go cut the grass you look ridiculous.”

Second: John can’t get away from how our culture identifies beauty. Women are portrayed as passive, and that is part of what makes them “beautiful.” They are depicted as languid, as restful, as reclining, and ultimately, as receptacles. Portraying women as “doers” would acknowledge that we actually are capable of action, and that would upset the gender narrative. He even already knows this:

[A woman at rest] is enjoyable to be with. She is lovely. In her presence your heart stops holding its breath. You relax and believe once again that all will be well. And this is also why a woman who is striving is so disturbing. (emphasis added)

However, John blatantly insists that “There is no agenda here; no social stigmatizing or cultural pressure. This is true across all cultures and down through time.”

Really. All cultures through all time. No exceptions. Ever.

And then he just really takes the Samantha-has-no-time-for-this cake.

There’s a touching story told from the hospitals of WWII, where a young and badly wounded soldier was brought in from a hellish week of fighting. After doing what she could for him, the nurse asked if there was anything else she could do. “Yes,” he said. “Could you just put on some lipstick while I watch?”

That was the second time I threw the book across the room. I started shouting, and it inspired a twitter rant.

That is sexual objectification.

That is the female body limited to male consumption and the male gaze.

Also, that soldier is creepy as ever-living fuck. And sexist. That John thinks of this story as “touching” is … horrifying. This is the moment when I could no longer mentally engage with John with respect. Not only is he ignorant, not only does he rely on confirmation bias out the whazoo, I cannot trust him to understand basic human interactions and what “creepy” and “sexist” looks like.

But, oh no, it doesn’t end with that. It gets worse.

One of the deepest ways a woman bears the image of God is in her mystery . . . God yearns to be known. But he wants to be sought after by those who would know him . . . There is a dignity here; God does not throw himself at any passerby. He is no harlot.

God dammit.

Shit.

Third time the book flew across the room. I almost hit my cat.

This isn’t just ignorance now, or confirmation bias, or not understanding sexism. This is him either not reading or completely ignoring huge portions of Scripture.

John 3:16 is in there. So is the Parable of the Lost Sheep. And “I am come to seek and to save.” And I dunno, the whole God is love part, and that bit seems mighty important.

Apparently that makes Jesus a slut.

 

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: 21-31, "What Eve Alone can Tell"

Eve

Stasi tries to start off this chapter on slightly better footing than her first. After asserting (again) that all little girls are desperately wanting to be princesses, she says this:

Rather than asking, “What should a woman do–what is her role?” it would be far more helpful to ask, “What is a woman–what is her design?” and “Why did God place Woman in our midst?”

These are the questions that she is going to attempt to orient her book on (although, as we’ve already seen, she can’t get away from the “what should women really be doing” question). As I’ve pointed out, these questions assume that something called gender essentialism is true and unchanging. Stasi and John believe that there are essential attributes and functions given to men and women (there are no transgender, demigender, bigender, non-binary, or agender people in their world), and these things cannot and will not change. These qualities are true for all men and all women, regardless of culture, ethnicity, class, or time– because God made us all, and he made us all with the same basic ontos.

Crown of Creation

In order to make this argument, John gives us a re-telling of how Eve was created (23-26), and caps off his description with this:

She is the crescendo, the final, astonishing work of God. Woman. In one last flourish creation comes to a finish with Eve. She is the Master’s finishing touch (…) Eve is . . . breathtaking.

Given the way creation unfolds, how it builds to ever higher and higher works of art, can there be any doubt that Eve is the crown of creation? (…) Not an afterthought. Not a nice addition like an ornament on a tree. She is God’s final touch, his pièce de résistance.

That is a beautiful thought. Wrong, but pretty. The prideful part of me would like to believe this, but everything I know about Genesis 2 from both Judaic and Christian perspectives compels me to acknowledge how wrong he is in trying to argue this. What he’s done is no better than what complementarians do when they argue that the “creation order” means that men are intended, by God, to have authority over women. Everything about Genesis 2:18-35 is about mutuality and equality, about ezer kenegdo, not about who was created in what order and what we could force it to mean for all people for all time.

Romance and Relationships

John argues here that women are more “relational” than men are– that women pay more attention to relationships than men do, and this is entirely due to the fact that they’re women. Neither John nor Stasi, as far as I can tell, will ever acknowledge that at least some of what they’re asserting about women might be “true” because of how kyriarchy/patriarchy enforces gender roles. They also do nothing to to overcome their confirmation bias— they look around the world, see lots of men and women acting exactly how they’d expect them to act based on gender essentialism, and that becomes more evidence for how they’re right.

If you want to know how people are doing, what’s going on in our world, don’t ask me– ask Stasi. I don’t call friends and chat with them on the phone for an hour. I can’t tell you who’s dating whom, whose feelings have been hurt– ask Stasi.

This is not true of me and my husband. He spends more time talking to his friends than I do, and more consistently. He is more aware of how people are feeling than I am, and what the relationship dynamics are like in our group. He knows about the relationships important to his friends– whether those relationships are romantic or not. I’m pretty oblivious to all of that, and some of that obliviousness is intentional.

Most women define themselves in terms of their relationships, and the quality they deem those relationships to have. I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. Or I am alone. I’m not seeing anyone right now, or my children aren’t calling, or my friends seem distant. This is not a weakness in women– it is a glory. A glory that reflects the heart of God.

This needs to be re-worded: women in American culture are frequently defined by their relationships. This is not necessarily something they are doing to themselves, but something that happens to them by the expectations of our culture. I’ve had a few conversations with my mother about how she realized that she’d poured everything she had into her children and that hadn’t been healthy. She acknowledged that she had let herself be defined by motherhood, and she regretted it. My mother is a fantastic, interesting, brilliant person, and I know our home would have been richer if she’d had something to Be besides “wife” and “mother.”

But, John baptizes this culturally-mandated gender role by saying that being totally defined by our interactions with other people and not by our own interests, desires, dreams, or actions “reflects the heart of God.” I don’t wholly disagree with the argument John goes on to make about God wanting relationships with us. I’m in the middle of a theology class on Trinitarianism, and the whole “God exists as three persons in relation to each other, but One” thing seems rather important to the doctrine. There’s also Ephesians 5 and “I have loved you with an everlasting love” from Jeremiah that points to God loves us. God wants to know us, and for us to know her.

That, I’m not going to argue with.

That God’s desire for relationships is either represented strictly by women or almost entirely by women (which seems to be the argument John is making here) is ridiculous, especially since “It is not good for man to be alone” appears in Genesis 2.

The first year I was in grad school, for a variety of reasons most of the friends I made were men. One night, three of us were hanging out watching zombie movies, but by 3 or 4 in the morning the conversation turned to relationships. I didn’t really have a lot to add, so I listened to two men talk about girlfriends, and singleness, and loneliness, and after about half an hour I couldn’t keep the laughter in any longer. Suddenly, I was laughing so hard I was crying, and it took me a while to respond to their confused faces. I eventually explained that the conversation they were having sounded exactly like conversations I’d heard my entire life when it was just girls, just women– and I’d always believed that men would never have conversations like that.

In the few years since then, I’ve had that experience a few dozen more times. Women aren’t the only ones that are concerned about their relationships– romantic or not. Men don’t sit around and talk about nothing but concrete, like John would have you believe.

I believe that men are just as “relational” as women– and that every person will have slightly different attitudes about relationships. We’re all just trained by our patriarchal culture to act on the need for relationships in gendered ways.

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: 13-20, "Beauty to Unveil"

broken heart

Remember to put “Book Club” at the top of your comment if you’re reading along with me!

I left off last week before I’d finished chapter one– I don’t think I’ll do this that often, since I want to get through this book, but since this chapter is dedicated to explaining the thesis that Stasi and John are going to be arguing for the rest of the book, I thought it was worth to spend some time pulling it apart.

Beauty to Unveil

What Stasi is doing in this section is pretty typical of evangelicals; in an attempt to be subversive, she tries to re-define beauty. The world tells women that they need to be physically beautiful, but God says that women need to be inwardly beautiful– after all, man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. It’s what’s inside that matters.

A lot of people– religious and secular– have been saying this for a long time, and American culture doesn’t seem to be any closer to liberating women from the oppression of sexual objectification. One could argue that it’s gotten worse in the past decades, and exponentially worse in the last few years– tumblr and instagram and pinterest have created a delivery method for “thinspo”  and “pro-ana” to be a huge part of a teenage girl’s experience online. I would argue that conservative evangelical teachings about “modesty” are just as oppressive and degrading as anything people can see in Vogue or Seventeen.

What Stasi is trying to ignore in this section is that beauty doesn’t mean what Stasi is trying to make it mean. Beauty can be discussed in a lot of different ways: Edgar Allan Poe wrote a treatise on how beauty was going to save the world in Eureka; The Lake Poets used reams of paper to explain how beauty can be transcendent, divine– how it can be the doorway to sublimity.

When we’re talking about women being “beautiful,” however, it’s important to at least acknowledge that physical attractiveness is a part of what it means for us to be beautiful, and “physical attractiveness” is almost always defined by white supremacy and sexual objectification in American culture. Trying it ignore the overwhelming pressure that women feel when it comes to feeling beautiful is only going to weaken anything else you say, because you’re not being honest about what it’s like to be a woman today.

Notice that I’ve said that Stasi is trying to ignore this– she actually can’t get away from the physical component of beauty and how American culture has informed her view. In order to make her point about how all women want to be beautiful, and how this is a good thing, she gives an example of attending a formal ball:

For weeks– no, months ahead of the affair– I like every other woman who attended, asked the all-important question: “What will I wear?” (As the special night drew closer, I also wondered if it was possible to lose twenty pounds in seven days.)

Above the sound of the splashing water from the fountains, even above the music that floated through the air, was the sound of delighted exclamations. “You look beautiful!” “You are gorgeous!” “What an amazing dress!” “How lovely you are!” We were delighting int each other’s beauty and enjoying our own. We were playing dress-up for real and loving it.

Stasi does not say anything– not a single thing– to critique this experience.

To me, reading this passage was a little painful.

First of all, I don’t think I’d spend months ahead of time trying to figure out what I was going to wear unless I had to wear something expensive and that meant budgeting for it (as if I’d ever be going to something where I’d have to budget for a dress and not wear something I already own). I also think it’s possible that at least one women who went to this didn’t really care that much.

Second, as facetious as Stasi might have meant this, it’s not a good thing when you want to lose 20 pounds in a week– that is dangerous. If you want to lose weight, 1-2 pounds a week is a realistic, healthy goal. The fact that Stasi felt pressure to be “skinnier” in order to attend a black-tie event is a problem, and she should have said so or said nothing about it at all.

Last, she talks about how women spent the night complimenting each other on their appearance. I enjoy being complimented– there are times when I put a little extra effort into my appearance, and I appreciate it when someone notices. It feels nice, no lie. However, I’m pretty sure the men at this event were all wearing tuxedos and I’d bet you that they didn’t wander around this garden saying “I love your bow tie! So fetch!”

Women, in order to make small-talk, frequently fall back on complimenting each other on our appearance, and this starts when we are incredibly young. This isn’t the amazing, wonderful thing that Stasi is trying to  make it out to be. It’s the positive flip-side of how women enforce white supremacist, fat-shaming beauty standards on each other. It’s an example of how our culture has utterly failed women, because we are still locked into recognizing each other as physical, consumable objects first, instead of as human beings with dreams, opinions, problems, and joys.

Stasi seems to be blind to how she hasn’t escaped what our culture has to say about beauty and women– she’s included three separate things our culture teaches about beauty in two paragraphs!

She continually falls back on a stereotype about girls– that we enjoy playing dress-up, and the way that little girls play dress-up is lightyears apart from how boys play the same exact game:

Little boys play dress up, too, but in a different way . . .  they never once dressed up as bride-grooms, fairies, or butterflies. Little boys do not paint their toenails. They do not beg to get their ears pierced. Little boys don’t play dress up with Mommy’s jewelry and high heels. They don’t sit for hours and brush each other’s hair.

One question, John and Stasi: if they had wanted to, would you have let them?

Pretty sure the answer to that one is “heck no.”

Little boys, just like little girls, absorb how our culture genders people starting from a very young age, and they are aware of these stereotypes as young as 3 or 4. They know what boys and girls are “supposed” to do and say, and they know that they can be severely punished for not conforming– they’ve seen it happen with older children. They’ve overheard their parents say bigoted, homophobic things. They hear sermons like this one:

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up! Give him a good punch. OK? ‘You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male.’

And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play ‘em. Play ‘em to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you’re gonna be beautiful, you’re gonna be attractive, you’re gonna dress yourself up.’

To be absolutely clear: Sean Harris (who later claimed this was “a joke”) was talking about four year olds.

Anyway, that girls sometimes play dress-up and that playing dress-up does sometimes look like princesses and fairies is not a good argument for why all women want to be seen as “beautiful,” but it’s essentially all that Stasi has based her argument on.

I want to close out this post with a really good example for exactly how oblivious Stasi is to the fact that not every single woman on the planet wants what Stasi wants, and thinks the way Stasi thinks.

During the midst of a talk I gave on the heart of a woman last year, one of the women in the audience leaned over to a friend and said, “I don’t know what this whole thing is about– twirling skirts and all.” The words had barely left her mouth when she burst into tears and had to leave the room. Little did she know how deep the desire ran, and how much pain it had caused. Many of us have hardened our hearts to this desire, the desire to be Beauty. We, too, have been hurt so deeply in this area that we no longer identify with, perhaps even resent, the longing. But it’s there.

This paragraph made me want to scream, so I did. I also threw my book across the room and Elsa looked at me funny.

What Stasi has done here is infuriating. Instead of even considering that this women who she made cry might have been reacting to how she’s been made to feel deficient and abnormal in a Christian culture that exalts femininity at every turn and humiliates the women who don’t conform, Stasi assumes that this women doesn’t understand the “twirling skirts” picture of femininity– not because she’s just not the kind of woman who likes that sort of thing, but because she is broken. She has a “hardened heart.” She “resents” it. There is something wrong with this woman, for her to be hurt by Stasi’s reinforcement of a stereotype that might have been used as a weapon against her for her entire life.

If I’d been sitting in that auditorium, listening to yet again another woman telling me that “all women” have this bizarre need to wear ballerina tutus and tiaras, I might have walked out crying, too. But it wouldn’t be because of anything Stasi had to say— no, if I disagree with her because I’m damaged in some way.

That is . . . frustrating. This is not the first time that Stasi has made this argument– that women who disagree with her are damaged, broken, hurt, or scarred– and it’s not the last.

 

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: 1-12, "The Heart of a Woman"

broken heart
[art by papermoth]

I am working with the “revised and expanded” edition of Captivating. If you’re reading along with me, remember to write “Book Club” at the top of your comment.

One of the most frustrating things about the early chapters of this book is that Stasi does what a lot of other conservative evangelical women are required to do if they start saying things that could, at all, be interpreted as slightly femininst: she makes feminism the enemy. I’ve written about this phenomena before, so it wasn’t exactly surprising that she said this:

To be told when you are young and searching that “you can be anything” is not helpful. It’s too vast. It gives no direction. To be told when you are older that “you can do anything a man can do” isn’t helpful either. I didn’t want to be a man. What does it mean to be a woman?

She’s done a few . . . interesting . . . things in this paragraph. The first is thinking there’s a problem with women having too many options because it’s just too overwhelming for us. Women, apparently, need direction. We can’t be left on our own, to make up our mind on what we want for ourselves without the guiding light of Gender Roles.

If women can’t “be anything,” what can we be? What is beyond us? What are we not capable of? What should we not try to be? She answers this question when she conflates the statement “you can do anything a man can do” with becoming a man. These are not the same– and, I would argue that this is an extremely reductionist approach to feminism. However, she says that “you can do anything a man can do” isn’t helpful because doing what a man does is synonymous with being a man.

Stasi is assuming that gender is somehow based on our actions.

Enforcing this idea– that gender is tied to action– is one of the ways that patriarchy is self-perpetuating. There are currently many “signifiers” and “gender-coded behaviors” that are assigned either masculine or feminine labels, but this assignation is completely arbitrary, and subject to frequent and inexplicable change over time. When men perform an action thought to be “feminine,” they are punished– they are a sissy, a pussy. When women perform an action thought to be “masculine,” they are also punished– they are bossy, or a slut.

Stasi doesn’t really get into the meat of her chapter until page nine, when she begins laying out the thesis for the rest of the book:

All women have three basic desires that were given to us by God; we want to be romanced, to have a great adventure, and to be beautiful.

belle gif
in short, every woman on the planet is Belle

To Be Romanced

Stasi insists that all girls grew up wanting to play some version of damsel-in-distress because we all want to be fought for, and “This desire is set deep in the heart of every girl– and every woman.” If a woman like me were to pipe up with “uhm, no– actually, I hated being forced to play that game, and I don’t like being fought over,” Stasi would dismiss me by saying that I’m only “downplaying” my desire, that I’m “ashamed” of it and “Come now, wouldn’t you want to ride through the Scottish Highlands with a man like Mel Gibson?”

Uhm . . . no.

I’ve also been “fought over” by men, and it is not pleasant. It did not make me feel “wanted.” It made me feel used and like less than a toy. The men who were “fighting” over me had no interest in what I wanted– which was, in reality, neither of them.

But, apparently, in Stasi’s world, I don’t exist. Or, I’m deluding myself and I don’t understand my own life.

An Irreplaceable Role in a Great Adventure

This section starts off well:

I sensed that the men in these [WWII] movies were a part of something heroic, valiant, and worthy. I longed to be a part of it, too. In the depths of my soul, I longed to be a part of something large and good; something that required all of me; something dangerous and worth dying for.

There is something fierce in the heart of a woman . . . A woman is a warrior too.

So far, so good, but this is where she changes course again:

But she is meant to be a warrior in a uniquely feminine way.

Just . . . ugh.

I wish I could even understand what Stasi means by this. She tries to explain by referencing pop culture, and cites The Lord of the Rings (the films, not the book) as an example. She talks about how Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn are “valiant” and that they had “irreplaceable roles in a Great Story.”

I think you could only possibly argue that for Eowyn, since film-Arwen is literally a replacement. After the scene when she slays the Witch King of Angmar (with Merry’s help, notably), Eowyn is immediately shipped back to being a stereotypical woman by both Tolkien and Jackson. In the book Eowyn declares:

I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.

Another one of the significant problems with this book is that neither John nor Stasi engage with the media they are consuming critically or with awareness, which becomes glaringly obvious in the next chapter. I absolutely adore The Lord of the Rings, but I am an aware and conscientious reader, so I know I need to keep in front of me as I watch and read that Jackson and Tolkien incorporated tropes and stereotypes about women in their work– things which Stasi claims to think are “damaging.”

She also finishes this section by asserting that while yes, women “want adventure in the great wide somewhere,” we all want to be in this adventure with someone.

We want an adventure that is shared . . . Made in the image of a perfect relationship, we are relational to the core of our beings . . . We long to be an irreplaceable part of a shared adventure.

This is a stereotype. Many conservative evangelicals set up women as being more “relational” than men– that we are “nurturers” and “caretakers,” that we are more naturally given to fostering relationships and communities. Because this is our assigned role in our culture, women tend to do it– but not every single last woman in America is a nurturing mother-figure who desperately wants to be in a relationship, just like not every man is a power-hungry risk-taking ladder-climbing suit.

However, Stasi again tells women who don’t fit this mold that the only reason why we don’t fit it is “because we have been hurt, or are worn out.” Which, ok, yes, sometimes people want to withdraw from relationships because they’ve been hurt. That’s a human thing. However, I’ve met a lot of people– men and women– who just didn’t really need relationships the way that Stasi is describing. But, again . . . they don’t exist. They can’t exist, or John and Stasi’s entire premise for writing a book like this would completely evaporate.

I’m going to stop before we get into the section “Beauty to Unveil” because heavens is there a lot to unpack in that section.

 

Feminism

"Captivating" Review: ix-xii, the Introduction

broken heart
[art by papermoth]

Today, I’m covering pages ix-xii from this edition of Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, the introduction.

Last week, some of you said that you’d like to read along with me, which I think is fantastic. When you comment with your own thoughts on this section, write “Book Club” in the first line of your comment, then hit return/enter, just so it’s clear who’s commenting on the book  itself and who’s commenting on my post (although your comments can be a mix, of course).

It is obvious, all throughout this book, that John and Stasi are trying, diligently, to avoid the pitfalls of other Christian gender-specific books. Stasi makes it clear that what she wants to communicate to her readers isn’t another “book about all the things you’re failing to do as a woman,” that she doesn’t want to give us another list of things to do in order to achieve “godly femininity.” She acknowledges that there isn’t only one way to be a woman, that there are Cinderellas and Joan of Arcs and neither one is necessarily the way to go.

However, struggle as they will to avoid those pitfalls, they can’t help falling into them:

Writing a book for men was a fairly straightforward proposition. Not that men are simpletons. But they are the less complicated of the two genders trying to navigate love and life together. Both men and women know this to be true.

How do we recover essential femininity without falling into stereotypes, or worse, ushering in more pressure and shame on our readers? That is the last thing that a woman needs. And yet, there is an essence that God has given to every woman.

I’m sorry, I do not know any such thing. My partner, a cisgender male, is exactly as marvelously complex as I am. He is interesting, dynamic, full of nuances and surprises. He is a human being, and that makes him complicated. Over the brief two years we’ve been together, I have found that every single element that could possibly be attributed to the “men are simple, women are complicated” stereotype is due to American culture.

His interactions with other men may seem to be more “straightforward” and “less complicated” because a) anything that could make male interaction “complicated” is read as “feminine” and thus suppressed, and b) we are trained to see male interactions and male behavior as normal, and female interactions and female behavior as deviant and abnormal. Being male is the standard through which we evaluate whether or not something is “simple” (and thus male), or complicated (and thus female). Because of this reality, it’s not that our interactions, feelings, and lives are more or less complicated, but that we are taught to evaluate all of these things through the lens of the male experience. Our dominant social narratives have been constructed, almost exclusively, by rich, white men– and because that male viewpoint is the one we absorb on a daily basis, of course it’s going to seem “simple” while viewpoints that differ from it are going to seem “complicated.”

For example: men simply “duke it out” in order to solve conflict, right? Of course, I’ve never actually seen that in action– in my experience, boys and girls were equally as likely to get into a physical tussle. There were girls who did not like violence, and there were also boys who did not like violence. The difference was, the girls were culturally rewarded for this dislike, while the boys were punished for being a “sissy” (a word that derives from “sister”).  As mature adults, men solve their differences the exact same way women do– through communication. I’ve seen people approach conflict resolution in a stereotypically “feminine” way, and I’ve seen it done in a “masculine” way– but the people involved could be men, women, neither, or both. Both approaches, however, had the same elements if the situation was resolved and relationship restored– the communication included honesty, humility, and respect from all parties.

By embracing gender essentialism, Stasi and John have set themselves up for inevitable failure. If your basic assumption in beginning a book is that men and women are inherently and drastically different from one another and that these differences are not caused (or even exacerbated) by culture, then you cannot escape the conclusion that at least some of the “stereotypes” that Stasi finds so damaging are true, and based in an unassailable reality. If you believe that God has given every single last woman on the planet the same “heart” and the same “desires” regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, upbringing, sexuality, social class, and education, then you are working from a list of “10 things to be the woman you ought to be,” which Stasi condemns as “soul-killing.”

Sometime between the dreams of your youth and yesterday, something precious has been lost. And that treasure is your heart, your priceless feminine heart. God has set within you a femininity that is powerful and tender, fierce and alluring. No doubt it has been misunderstood. Surely it has been assaulted. But it is there, your true heart, and it is worth recovering. You are captivating.

It is paragraphs like that one that show me exactly why this book has been compelling to so many women– as a thought, it’s beautiful. She’s telling me that I am fierce and powerful and beautiful– it is a similar sentiment to what I tell my friends in order to encourage them. I like thinking of myself as fierce (and since Fascinating Womanhood, “competent” has become one of my favorite compliments).

But there’s a problem, even here. Not all women are feminine, and this is not because their “femininity” was lost, damaged, or assaulted– or that they’re burying it because they’ve been hurt, as Stasi will claim later. I am a cisgender woman– I identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Most of the time, I “present” or “express” as “femme.” These things, my supposed “anatomical” sex, my gender identity, and my gender expression, are not the same thing. While I have never struggled with my identity, I have often struggled with my gender expression.

For example, these two images are of the same person, Gwendolyn Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth on HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation of Martins’ A Song of Ice and Fire:

gender expression

On the left, playing Brienne, Gwendolyn is shown with a host of Western-culture masculine signifiers– armor, sword, short “undone” hair, grimness, and the masculine parts of her stature/musculature are exaggerated. On the right, though, she is wearing glamorous makeup, her hair is long and angelically flowing, and her facial expression is evoking something more stereotypically soft and feminine.

Then there’s things like Meg Allen’s photography project. As far as I’m aware, all of these women are cisgender (please correct me if I’m wrong), but none of them present as femme. It’s even possible for a non-binary person to choose to present as femme if they/ze want (see @themelmoshow and @awhooker –they’re incredible).

Insisting that there is something “essential” about a cisgender woman’s heart, and part of this “essentiality” is femininity is problematic in a variety of ways, but it contributes to the culture that allows transphobia to flourish. It’s part of the culture that allows trans women of color to be arrested for walking down a street and for trans men and women to be one of the most vulnerable populations in the world.

It also perpetuates the kyriarchal systems that force men and women to conform to a rigid set of gender-coded images, signifiers, behaviors, and interactions and refuses us all the ability to explore who we actually are.

Feminism

Captivating: Introduction to the Review

captivating

I finished my review of Helen Andelin’s Fascinating Womanhood a few weeks ago, and started reading John and Stasi Eldredge’s Captivating. I also have Wild at Heart, although I won’t be going through Wild at Heart the same way I did Fascinating Womanhood and will be going through Captivating, but I might allude to it every so often. My fantastic partner will be reading Wild at Heart, and will occasionally be chipping in with his thoughts on it.

I’m excited to start digging into Captivating because it is the exact opposite of Fascinating Womanhood in every possible way. Fascinating Womanhood was . . . well, I hate to say “obviously ridiculous” because so many people still believe what it says, but it was far too easy to mock– and it was far too easy to show how she was wrong about almost everything she said. When all you’d really have to do is put up a post with a list of quotations to show how awful a book is, that’s not really a review.

Captivating, on the other hand, is far more subtle, and it’s obvious from the opening pages that John and Stasi are going to be straining with all of their might to make what they teach seem palatable. That makes it more interesting to discuss– and I’m looking forward to having posts with more nuance and less open annoyance. The best thing about engaging with Captivating, I think, will be showing how a lot of what is going on in Captivating is unconscious– it will be much closer to pointing out how sexism operates in modern evangelicalism, which I think will be much more useful for me– and us.

If you’re not familiar with Captivating, this is what appears on the back of the book:

Every woman was once a little girl. And every little girl holds in her heart her most precious dreams. She longs to be swept up into a romance, to play an irreplaceable role in a great adventure, to be the beauty of the story. Those desires are far more than child’s play. They are the secret to the feminine heart.

And yet―how many women do you know who ever find that life? As the years pass by, the heart of a woman gets pushed aside, wounded, buried. She finds no romance except in novels, no adventure except on television, and she doubts very much that she will ever be the Beauty in any tale.

Most women think they have to settle for a life of efficiency and duty, chores, and errands, striving to be the women they “ought” to be but often feeling they have failed. Sadly, too many messages for Christen women add to the pressure. “Do these ten things, and you will be a godly woman.” The effect has not been good on the feminine soul.

But her heart is still there. Sometimes when she watches a movie, sometimes in the wee hours of the night, her heart begins to speak again. A thirst rises within her to find the life she was meant to live―the life she dreamed of as a little girl.

The message of Captivating is this: Your heart matters more than anything else in all creation. The desires you had as a little girl and the longings you still feel as a woman are telling you of the life God created you to live. He offers to come now as the Hero of your story, to rescue your heart and release you to live as a fully alive and feminine woman. A woman who is truly captivating.

It’s just the back of the book, and already I got problems.

As far as how it’s been received: it’s got about 230-240 reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble each, most of which are overwhelmingly positive, and there isn’t a single negative review at ChristianBook; most of these reviews have something along the lines of “I want every woman to read this book!” Out of the 18,000 reviews on GoodReads, 11,000 gave it 4 or 5 stars. It’s been well-received in the evangelical community– my own church regularly uses Captivating and Wild at Heart for both the married-couples and segregated men/women small groups and Bible studies. I’ve had it recommended to me at least a half-dozen times by different people, each person claiming that Captivating is a different sort of book– it’s not those other books that I don’t like. It’s better.

I’m going to be working with the “Revised and Expanded” edition that was released in 2010, but the book was originally published in 2005. It’s got 12 chapters, so I’m hoping to do this in about three months, although it might take a bit longer than that since I’m anticipating having to more thoroughly parse out– or put in broader contexts– what the Eldredges say in order to show how what they teach is problematic or unhealthy.

Also, can I comment about how I’m more than a little annoyed that the authors are John & Stasi Eldredge when Wild at Heart was just written by John? Why does John get to be one of the authors of a book subtitled “Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul”? Oh, right, I forgot. Silly me, thinking women were capable of writing books about our own gender on our own.

(A possible alternate explanation is that Captivating quotes Wild at Heart pretty heavily, which comes with another set of problems.)

*edit: I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier, but this would be fantastic. This doesn’t just have to be a review– we could also make it into a book club. If you already own Captivating or don’t mind spending money on it, we could read it together. I’ll post my review every Monday, and then whoever’s read it can pitch in with their own perspective. Brilliant, no?

Feminism

Fascinating Womanhood Review: Happiness

mother

So, it’s been a little while since we’ve delved into Helen Andelin’s world. We’re about halfway through the book, and we’ve reached the point where we’re going to start seeing a lot more ridiculous statements. On one hand, it makes it easier for me to demonstrate the absurdity of her beliefs– at times, all I’d have to do is quote what she says and even the most die-hard Vision Forum devotee would roll their eyes– but on the other hand, that makes it seem that what Helen’s promoting is so outdated that no one accepts it anymore.

That is, unfortunately, not true.

Helen might say it much more directly than Mary Kassian or Dannah Gresh or Stasi Eldredge probably would, but all these conservative women are advocating for the same principles and in very much the same way that Helen does. They ignore the same types of people that Helen does, they dismiss the realities of many women’s lived experiences like Helen does, and it all results in a set of teachings that condemn at least 40% of the American population– and that’s just America! Forget about the global church– if you’re not at least an upper-middle-class white evangelical stay-at-home mother . . . well, you might not even be a  Christian, so there. The principles and the message haven’t really changed that much. Whether it’s a Mormon woman writing in the 1960s, or an evangelical woman writing in 2005, we’re still hearing the same things.

~~~~~~~~~~

First off, she tells us what happiness is, taking an approach of defining by negation. She has a hard time explaining what happiness is, so she talks mostly about what unhappiness is and what happiness isn’t. First of all, unhappiness is totally our fault. Unhappiness “arises from a failure within–weakness of character, sin . . . We are unhappy when we are doing something wrong.”

That is a statement I am familiar with. I grew up in fundamentalism, and the appeal of fundamentalism could probably be wrapped up in the promise “follow all our our rules and you’ll be happy!” Which made the converse true: “not following all of our rules makes you miserable!” Happiness became totally defined by whether or not we were following the rules, period. Even if we thought we were happy, if we weren’t following the rules, we were mistaken.

She then moves on to setting up a false dichotomy between happiness and pleasure. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an argument for conflating these two, but she makes the argument that good little rule-followers are happy, and people who don’t care about “eternal laws” can’t possibly be happy. They can find pleasure, and they are so ignorant they mistake that for happiness. It’s the same sort of statement that she made on the first page– “You may think you are happy, but in reality you are not.”

Then comes the bulk of the chapter: what you need to do in order to be happy. Since happiness is “earned,” there are specific things we can do to make ourselves happy. Some of these things are pretty solid ideas– she encourages charitable volunteering, which some researchers have connected to happiness. She also tells us to “accept ourselves” (although she limits that to “don’t rip yourself to pieces for burning dinner or breaking something” which doesn’t really fall into the typical understanding of self-acceptance), and to “appreciate simple pleasures.” I’m all for appreciating the simple things; however, even while telling us to be rose-smellers, she takes the time to demonize many women.

I’m one of those women that jewelers like to say have “exceptional taste.” I like the sound of a silver fork tapping the side of a crystal water goblet. I think London blue topaz stones are some of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen. The feel of angora, the luxury of silk . . . the  enthralling moments of a Puccini opera threatening to burst through the ceiling of the Kennedy Center. . . those are all amazing, glorious things. That doesn’t mean I also don’t appreciate snuggling up in my polyester blanket in my sweatpants with a cup of tea I microwaved in the $1 glass mug I bought at Wal-Mart, but I think it’s totally fine if you appreciate both. That’s not permissible in Helen’s world, though. While there’s something to be said for the cost of “keeping up with the Joneses,” that’s not what Helen is saying here. Enjoying and appreciating nice things is the opposite of enjoying and appreciating “simple” things, and enjoying the luxuries renders you incapable of enjoying the “simple” things.

So, once again, even when the basic idea (“accept yourself!”) is a good one, she obliterates it in a wave of vitriol.

But most of what she argues will guarantees happiness is– do I even have to say it?– horrifying.

The first one, surprise surprise, is “fulfill your domestic role.” You have to do this “wholeheartedly,” or you’re a failure, and you’ll be miserable. If you break the “eternal laws” of not playing out patriarchal, Victorian gender roles, “you must suffer the consequences.” And since you’re a woman, if you don’t adhere to 150-year-old stereotypes, you are “failing in life.” And not only that, if you do not “succeed in all three duties– wife, mother, homemaker,” you are a failure.

This is one of those times when Helen is completely ignoring a whole spectrum of people. Today, almost 40% of women are the primary breadwinners in their households– and that doesn’t even count how many women aren’t “homemakers,” but work outside of the home either part-time or full-time. They’re all failures, according to Helen. And, many women never marry, so they’re failures, too. And even for women who are married, they might be infertile– or their husband might be. Failures, failures, failures, all of them.

That isn’t that far off from the message I’ve heard in dozens of evangelical churches all over the country. Not a wife? Well, what’s wrong with you? You’re too selfish, that must be it. You’re one of those bra-burning feminists who values a career more than what GOD wants for you. Not a mother? Or, you’ve been trying to have children for years and haven’t been able to? Have you prayed for God to reveal hidden sin in your life? And, sometimes, the message isn’t that direct, but every Mother’s Day you’re sitting there without a rose while all the mothers are exalted and praised while you’re completely ignored.

And, on top of all of that, she throws in this: “You must fist find happiness before your husband can love you. Men all over the country are turning from their wives to someone else because their wives are unhappy.” So, if you suffer from clinical depression (which “sinfulness leads to depression and mental illness”– also a dominant message in American evangelicalism), guess what, you’re husband is going to cheat on you unless you do exactly what Helen says.

If you don’t do what I say, your husband will cheat on you, unfortunately, is such a common threat. Debi Pearl’s book is laced with it, and I’ve heard, seen, and read Nancy Leigh DeMoss and Mary Kassian make similar threats. It’s troubling to me that this is the way evangelicalism seems to have unanimously decided is the best way to make sure women toe the line. Instead of saying “y’know what, if your husband cheats on you, he’s an ass,” women are taught that if our husbands cheat on us, we should immediately start looking for all the ways we’re responsible for it and he’s not.

This is why feminism is such a necessary conversation to introduce to American evangelicalism. Because feminism makes people responsible for their own actions. Feminism takes away the need to control women with threats. Feminism removes the ability for men not to face their own problems head-on. Feminism removes all the false guilt and shame that women bear for the sins of their husbands. Feminism means that we do not show favoritism.