The Link between the Inbox and the Brothel

Today I read two things that have me thinking, and at first they seem worlds apart.  This morning I was alerted by a friend on Facebook to a blog post.  It discusses the risks that feminist bloggers take when they share their opinions and observations with the internet.  They are subject to violent and vitriolic threats that, frankly, ought to warrant legal attention, although they usually don’t.  The second reading I did today was from the autobiography of Somaly Mam, an incredible and courageous Cambodian woman who not only survived being sold into sexual slavery as a child, but then has gone on to be a heroine to thousands of other girls whom she has rescued from brothels.

Both readings troubled my spirit.  As I say, at first, they seem worlds apart.  But when I reflected on it, I realized they are a part of the exact same problem.  What begins with a coward spewing offal into an email meant for an unsuspecting blogger ends with an eight-year-old girl chained to a pipe in a Cambodian brothel.

Both the hater and the john/pimp have one thing in common: they treat women as objects of violence and scorn.  As the recent “rape joke” Facebook scandal has revealed, so-called “humour” about violence-against-women is “just a part of culture” and therefore ought to be free of censure.  But it boggles my mind that the people who make these “jokes”—and  the people who aren’t outraged enough by them to chastise the “jokers”—cannot see the connection between “jokes” about raping a woman and the actual act, which is being played out every moment somewhere in the world.

If it’s okay to joke about rape, then what is wrong with raping a virgin child in order to “cure” yourself of AIDS?

If it’s okay to send a vicious, hateful email threatening rape and violence towards a blogger, then it must be okay to pay to have sex and beat a fifteen year-old girl who was sold to the brothel by her grandfather (or, unspeakably worse, her own mother) in order to pay off debts.

At the root of this culture of violence, I must reiterate, is the belief that woman are objects and that they can and must be used by men as men see fit.  They aren’t human, so human rights don’t apply to them.  They can be harassed, threatened, and assaulted because what they feel about it doesn’t matter.

If we can be scandalized by the treatment of women and girls who are the victims of human trafficking, then I argue that we have a moral imperative to be scandalized by the attitudes that undergird this treatment.

Matthew 5:21-22 reads (in the TNIV):

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

I’d like to argue that the anger-murder connection is similar to the connection between an attitude of scorn towards women and actual violence against women.  If we don’t check our hearts to see how we feel about women (i.e. do we laugh at “rape jokes”? do we think the feminist blogger “deserved it”?), then it is as if we also raised our hands against them.  For women who might share these attitudes, we become both violator and victim, for we commit this violence against ourselves.

The distance between a “joke” or an “idle threat” and the brutal violence against women perpetrated in a brothel that traffics in children might seem galactic, but in the eyes of the God who physically reached out even to the least of these, there is no difference at all.

The Body and the Bride

Through these sacraments, drawn from the side of the New Adam while He slept, God the Father is forming a Bride for His Son. So for Catholics the Eucharist is the sacramental means Christ established by which we participate in His holy and perfect sacrifice, and by which we receive His divine life, i.e. grace, and by which we are knitted together in charity into His one Mystical Body.
(Taken from part 5 of the interview between the iMonk, Michael Spencer, and Catholic blogger, Bryan Cross, on Nov 4.)

Here is an interesting reflection on the Eucharist, Lord's Supper, Communion, the Service of the Table or whatever you want to call it. The context of the discussion is an explanation on the part of a Catholic convert (from Protestantism) of the meaning of the Catholic doctrine of the true sacrifice in the Eucharist.

Now, my Protestant side instinctively recoils at the idea that the sacrament of the Eucharist is the means by which grace is imparted to us sinners. There is, however, a part of me that is longing for greater meaning in the practice of the Eucharist, especially in regards to the ways in which communion--notice the root word there--draws us together as believers and partakers. The Catholics get that in a way that Protestants often don't. We have drained as much "hocus pocus" out of the Eucharist as we can, and have lost a great deal of the divine mysterium in the process. But whether we believe that the Host actually becomes a literal stand-in for the bodily sacrifice of Christ or not, I think we can agree on the idea that the bread is the symbolic representation of the Body (i.e. "this is My body, given for you") that makes us all one body together (1 Cor 10:17).

To extrapolate from that further: the body of Christ is the Church (Col 1:24). The Church is the Bride of Christ (2 Cor 11:2, Rev 21:2, 21:9). Through the Lord's Supper, we partake of a part of the Body and are made into the Body, just as a fundamental part of Adam (his rib) was taken to make Eve. I don't know...maybe I'm not equipped to draw the deep theological meaning out of this idea, but what I do know is that it really scratches that itch I have to find depth and meaning in communion beyond the whole "let's remember what Christ did for us" angle.

All of this stems from the thoughts I had at the last communion service I attended (this past Sunday, to be exact). I had already been reading iMonk's discussion of how to make the Eucharist significant in Evangelical contexts, so some of these ideas were floating around in my head. The church I attend (a Baptist church of the Canadian Baptists of Western Canada variety), usually celebrates the Lord's Supper once a month, which I think is not nearly often enough. I prefer the practice of weekly communion since I think it is an intrinsic part of Christian worship...but maybe that's another discussion. Now, this first Sunday of the month was very special (I thought) given that it was All Saints' Day according to the traditional Church calendar. But there was no mention of that fact AT ALL during the service, despite the fact that we were having communion. The service of the Table was instead very focused on individual repentance of sin and a reminder of Christ's sacrifice. Don't get me wrong: those are important parts of the Christian service as well, but so much of the idea of being One Body is lost in the individual emphasis. Maybe it was just where I was at and the significance of the day that had me disappointed at the individual emphasis this time around, I don't know. But I think that generally speaking, as Evangelicals, we miss out on the community element of communion all the time. We forget that we, as the saints, as the Body, are joined together as the bride (and the bride-to-come) of Christ. We are saved, not only as individuals who do need a "personal relationship with Jesus," but also as a community, a family, a unity. We are blessed together as the body so that we might be a blessing to the world. Communion, the act of, yes, remembering Christ's sacrifice is also an act of bodily (literally physical, somatic, corporeal) worship as we enact with our own flesh a memorial of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

So, I might not be ready to make the leap to Catholicism any time soon (ever), but I have to give honour to the wisdom and beauty in this thought about communion. May it be for His glory!

Thanks for the compliment...or not

"to say something nice may be worse than saying nothing at all when the content of the comments is about the appearance of women’s weight or shape."*


This is the conclusion of a study done recently by psychologists at the University of Kent and the University of South Florida. They were studying the effects of compliments and negative comments about appearance and weight on women, testing such factors as varying levels of self-objectification, varying levels of appearance monitoring (thinking about the way you look to other people), and the degree of importance subjects gave to their appearance vs. their competence. The results of the study suggest that even women who don't regularly self-objectify have higher levels of body consciousness and a more negative sense of body image after receiving not an insult about their size/weight, but a compliment (i.e. "Have you lost weight?" or "I wish I had your body.")

The reason, the researchers suggest, is likely that a compliment draws attention to the fact that a woman is being assessed for her physical appearance and not for her competence, and raises her awareness that her body is on display and available for evaluation by others.

This is something that I've thought about before, though under different terms. It is a popular way of expressing a compliment to someone to say, "Have you lost weight?" or "Have you been working out?" but it raises a lot of questions about what one values about the other person. Do we truly value a persons weight or appearance above their competence or, to be more theological, the fact that they are children of God and made in God's image? Should we even be assessing how heavy or light a person is and commenting on it? (as an aside, I think that if a friend is showing signs of hurting themselves by being terribly underweight or overweight, then it might be important to intervene in their lives, but not by making body-related comments)

Women are exposed every day to images that proclaim society's idolization of the "perfect" female body. We have to cope all the time with ads, television programs, movies, music videos, video games, and magazines that make the point that a woman is her body and that certain bodies are more valuable than others. So even receiving a compliment that suggests that we have "made it" closer to the thin ideal turns on the switch in our brains that makes us aware that we too are on display, just like an ad, just like a tv show.

I'm not saying we shouldn't compliment one another. I am suggesting that we should try some creativity in our compliments, and work towards finding things we value in other people that aren't expressly appearance related. Examples might be: "You are really happy today; it's very inspiring" or "I just love the way you laugh!" or "Your friendship is really important to me."

It's a popular notion, even (especially?) among Christians that a woman's essence is "beauty." I think that putting emphasis on something that, by nature, calls to mind physical beauty (I think most people, when asked to define beauty would start with things they could see, like trees and mountains and art and then move on to the other senses before finally coming to the more esoteric notions of truth, etc) is a way that we continue to buy (literally) into a culture that wants women to think about physical beauty above all.

I think that because our culture poisonously focuses on a woman's physical beauty (or lack thereof as defined by rigid and unrealistic standards), Christians should be very circumspect about how much we value physical beauty. Do we as Christian women strive to fit culture's perfect thin, youthful, white ideal? Do we then (even subconsciously) apply those standards to others? Who are the lepers amongst us in a world that raises up fitness and thinness to a moral duty? How can we love each other as daughters of God who are made in His image, regardless of whether we have a perfect BMI?

I think that the results of this study suggest that we should start by focusing on the good things about the women in our lives that have nothing to do with how they look. Although well-meaning, a compliment about weight or shape or beauty might be more hurtful than loving.

* from Rachel Calogero, Syliva Herbozo, and Kevin Thompson, "Complimentary Weightism: The Potential Costs of Appearance Related Commentary for Women's Self-Objectification," Psychology of Women Quarterly 33 (2009), pp. 120-132.

Ads that Objectify: As Dangerous as Smoking

On page 198 of their seminal article "Objectification Theory," authors Fredrickson and Roberts write:

"Because advertisers may have no incentive to regulate their use of objectifying ads, federal restrictions and warning on advertisements--similar to those that govern the tobacco and alcohol industries--should be explored as a means to protect public health."

This is after they have explored, in depth, the effects that the widespread objectification of women has on women's psyches, relationships, and bodies. Their conclusion is that the health of women is at stake when we are routinely treated not as persons, but as bodies that serve a function.

There is most definitely not room in a weblog to reiterate what Fredrickson and Roberts take over 30 pages to describe, but suffice it to say that this article forms the foundation of 12 years of further psychological and sociological study of the effects of objectification on women. Effects include the obvious, such as eating disorders, and the less obvious, such as the interruption of "peak motivational states" (described as those moments in which we apply ourselves, body and/or mind, so completely to a task that we lose direct consciousness of ourselves, feel like we are no longer being controlled by other people, and are actually very happy). Women have trouble experiencing peak motivational states because we are socialized to constantly attend to what our bodies look like to other people.

They go on further to describe the effects of objectification on the psyche, including mental illnesses such as depression. Their conclusion is that the totality of the effects of widespread, culturally-sanctioned objectification of women is dangerous enough to require government intervention. What if there were warnings on skin cream advertisements or regulations that restricted the way that the human body was portrayed? I don't know what such regulations would look like, or what the results would look like, but I think it's important that someone is taking seriously the lived effects of these ads on real women. Perhaps regulations around airbrushing and computer modification are in order, so that we can see that real women have--gasp--pores.

Most of all, I think it's time that we as consumers of media stopped being apathetic about what we allow them to shove down our throats. Women need to stop allowing other women to be objectified so that we can see how good the latest pair of jeans will look on a hypothetical, impersonal ass. Men need to take stock of how much they love the women in their lives and whether or not they think it is worth all the "eye candy" to know that secretly their mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, daughters, nieces, aunts, etc are suffering from often a profound sense of dissatisfaction from their own bodies, and hence from their very selves.

We need, in short, to stop using people. It isn't good for their health and it isn't good for ours.

Reference:

Fredrickson, Barbara L., and Tomi-Ann Roberts. “Objectification theory.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 21, no. 2 (June 1997): 173-206.

iBody and "Disability"

I'm working on a master's thesis right now that involves a lot of thought on human bodies, particularly the bodies of women, in relation to society and to God. In particular, I'm trying to address the two disparate thoughts that (a) all human beings are created, body+soul, in the image of God, and (b) the majority of women in Western Society have very challenging and unfriendly relationships with their bodies, because capitalistic/patriarchal culture is constantly providing "normative" "good" bodies with which to compare, none of which are actually normal or good. The young/slim/sexy body that is portrayed in the media is unattainable, especially since most bodies that we see in magazines, on TV, in movies, or on the 'net are touched up by computers.

As a part of my research, I was just reading a round-table discussion on the contribution that differently-abled women could add to feminist/womanist theology. I'm glad that I read it, even though I might not characterize myself as a feminist theologian (although I might characterize myself as a theologian and a feminist). Because the discussion involved much talk about the body and the Body, particularly putting forth the possibility of thinking of the Body as a "disabled body," I was very interested in the thoughts these women could share.

But on a note totally unrelated to my thesis, it occurred to me that virtual worlds really exclude the disabled body (or the non-normative body, for that matter, including the fat body). I play MMORPGs, games that provide the player with the opportunity to create an avatar which then goes on adventures and otherwise interacts with the persistent world of the game. Now, MMOs tend to be "adventure" based, so in some ways it is understandable that one cannot create an avatar that, for example, has one leg or no arms or is deaf. Blindness, due to the fact that computer games are visual media, is very much out of the question.

But then I thought about it further. I tried out the "game" Second Life after seeing it on CSI:NY. I was generally unimpressed since I see no need to have a "second life" (my first life is work enough as it is). But what is interested is that there still was no way to create an avatar that is differently abled (or fat/obese). Now, I know that most people want to create ideal versions of themselves, or something completely different (though still usually ideal in some way) when they re-image themselves on the Internet. But it seems to me that if a differently abled person wanted to enter into the Second Life world mirroring their first life, then they would be without opportunity to do so. I saw no option to have my avatar negotiate the world in a wheelchair or to need a cane, or any other physical form than having two legs, two arms, etc. Age and fat were also limited in the avatar creation.

I haven't done a lot of thinking about this yet; sometimes I blog more to get random ideas out of my head than to communicate well developed thoughts! I think the conclusion I've come to is simply that the iBody is probably as limited if not more limited by a normatizing force of culture than the fleshly human bodies we actually are. Sometimes this is simply a lack of imagination (i.e. World of Warcraft features a race called the Tauren which appear to be humanoid cattle; the females have human breasts. Why don't they have udders?), but often it is a detrimental and insidious normatizing of a particular image of human embodiment. "Good" or "desirable" human bodies are young and thin/fit/strong (depending on gender), sexually desirable (for men, this means being big and muscular, for women, small waisted and big breasted), and "whole." Scars (in MMOs) are seen as evidence of battle prowess and are not "disfiguring" in the truest sense of the word.

I'm probably reading more into this than I should, but as a woman and a theologian (in training) concerned with the human body, and as a "gamer" (casual, not hardcore), I found the thoughts percolating.

Feminists and Christians: Not Always as Far Apart as People Think

Naomi Wolf on Why Porn Turns Men Off the Real Thing -- New York Magazine

I'm reading The Beauty Myth for the first time right now. For those who haven't heard of it, it is Naomi Wolf's first book, credited with kicking off the third wave of feminism by opening the eyes of women to the fact that we are under constant manipulation by a market-driven, politicized beauty culture. I have to admit that 17 years after the book was written, things seem to have gotten worse rather than better, but that's a post for another day.

I googled Wolf's name to get a sense of what she is up to now, and came across the above article on pornography. Porn is a hot topic (pardon the pun) in today's world, both in the secular realm and in the Christian subculture. More and more pastors are discussing porn addictions and more and more magazines, news programs, and academic settings are starting to engage the topic of pornography and its identity as art, sex slavery, or harmless fun.

Naomi Wolf says some things in this article that would shock a few Christians, mostly because they are coming from the woman who launched third wave feminism. Frankly, I think that if her name or identity was hidden from readers, this article might pass (with a very few alterations) for an article in Christianity Today.

Reading the following article, I was particularly struck by the resemblance of the following to a passage from one of the twentieth century's most celebrated apologists:

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.
- Naomi Wolf, "The Porn Myth" (click through to the second page)

Compare:
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer [sic] about the state of the sex instinct among us?
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 96. Originally published in 1952.

Although I shudder a little at the comparison of a young woman and a bit of bacon, I also think there is an eerie prophetic resonance between the words of Lewis written 56 years ago and the words of Wolf, writing in the 21st Century cyber-world. Our appetite for food has been debased -- we are the strange country that Lewis proposed -- and our appetite for sex is also being, or I should say, has already been, debased. The words of the young man that Wolf leaves us with at the end of the article are haunting:

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

He was being asked to justify his claim that newly dating couples should have sex right away in order to get the "tension" and "awkwardness" out of the way.

Wolf gives very surprising deference to the religious folks that have already understood that the preservation of the mystery of the sexual union is valuable. A lot of my evangelical Christian sisters and brothers would be shocked beyond belief to hear such a suggestion from a feminist, whom they believe of course to be responsible for most if not all of the postmodern amorality surrounding sex.

But when it comes to porn, the similarities between feminists and Christians become striking. We both shake angry fists at the industry that enslaves, directly or indirectly, millions of women, children, and men every year. The industry that makes violence sexy, and that iconizes the casual sexual union is a common enemy for both Christians and feminists. And as someone who rather insanely likes to self-identify both as an Evangelical Christian and as a feminist, this issue has the capacity to make both parts of my mind equally livid.

I guess my point (aside from getting people to read and think about Wolf's article) is that evangelicals and feminists need to step away from some of the more popular issues that divide us (we all know what those are) and try to unite on this one issue. Aside from being rather earth-shatteringly exciting, such a union could have the power to make something happen. The reality that both groups need to address is that porn is exponentially more popular every year, and that it is becoming very acceptable to the mainstream. It is no longer considered wrong, deviant, or shameful to consume pornography. I have even heard whispers among Christians that, as long as it is viewed only by married people, together, porn is an acceptable way to stimulate sexual passion.

No. And again, NO. For all the reasons that Wolf lists and the many ethical and moral reasons that Christ would list, pornography is never good, never normal, and never acceptable to anyone, especially Christians. It is abusive (save me the "porn stars choose their lot" arguments -- I'd bet that for every woman/child/man who chooses to be in the porn industry, five more are forced to be there; and let's not even get into the relationship between porn and the sex trade), it is unbelievably degrading to the human body and soul, and it promotes deviant sexual relations. (Watch it now -- here comes the crazy evangelical part of me:) Porn is, quite simply, a work of Satan. There: I said it. Satan! It makes a cruel mockery and perversion of what God created to be a good and holy gift: the sensuality expressed in Adam's cry, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Genesis 2:23), the union of woman and man in marriage. That's a pretty strong position, I know, and it's not original either. You can visit any Christian anti-pornography site and get the same message, with even more crazy fonts and bright colours.

The issue just tends to get me riled up because I am deeply concerned about the growing apathy and even acceptance of pornography in the mainstream. As a Christian, my concerns are ranted above, and as a feminist, I bewail the degradation particularly of women, who have come so far in the twentieth century only to continue to be held back by issues such as this. It concerns me both as a Christian and as a feminist that such little value is placed on the human lives involved and on the interference that porn is having on healthy human relationships. We need to be discussing the why we shouldn't's of porn in order to out-shout the why we want to's of the porn consumer. And I think that this discussion would get deafening if it was heard to be taking place, civilly and with solidarity, between Christians and feminists.

How Did I Miss This?

Some things I just take for granted without thinking about them. Here is a case in point:

The Winter 2008 edition of The Priscilla Papers, the academic journal published by Christians for Biblical Equality features the article, "Women Martyrs in the Early Church: Hearing Another Side to the Story" by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari, which dropped a little fact into my lap that overturned something I had always taken for granted.

Molinari pointed out two pieces of Scripture:

Mark 1:29-31
²⁹ As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. ³⁰ Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. ³¹ So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.

1 Corinthians 9:5
⁵ Don't we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas?

(for those unfamiliar with the Bible, Simon and Cephas are the same guy, more commonly known as Peter)

I've emphasized the bits that were a little paradigm shattering for me. I had always taken for granted that the apostles were all single. I'm not sure where I acquired that idea, but it seems to me that I'm not alone in believing it.

Instead, we know for sure that Peter had a wife (and Molinari's article, which is not about married apostles but about women martyrs, shares her martyrdom story), but according to Paul, not only Peter but "the other apostles" had wives as well, and their wives went with them as they travelled for their ministries.

I don't know about you, but this was a pretty radical new image of the apostles for me, and one that I should have come up with on my own. With all the arguments going on to counter Dan Brown's suggestion that Jesus was married -- i.e. that it was culturally the norm in Jesus' day for Jewish men to be married and that the radicalness of Jesus was that he wasn't, blah, blah, blah -- why did it never occur to me that twelve more guys running around single with Jesus would be even weirder! It made sense for Jesus to be single (ask me why!) but it wasn't necessary for the apostles to be single as well.

Now, this does beg a question: did the apostles' wives travel with them while they were travelling with Jesus? It's another interesting tidbit to consider...

I just can't believe I've always missed this!