Word Weld

This is my post about Fifty Shades of Grey, but not really. Instead of writing about all the depravity of kinky behavior, bondage, perversion of sex, and our society’s twisted acceptance and glorification of it, I’m going to take a different approach and put my scope on a more fundamental issue. I’m going to come down from the putrid, flowering buds that are the films and books and so forth, and come down the trunk of the tree to its less-well-known roots, buried as they are in the mire of humanity’s ideological failure. After all, it is in the ideology that all this starts. In the same way that Nazi Germany’s acceptance and even glorification of tyranny, violence, torture, and ultimately genocide did not begin in Adolf Hitler’s jail cell as he penned that infamous work, Mein Kampf. Indeed not. It began long before his time, with much more fundamental ideas. Before Hitler there was Nietzsche, and like a great tree the ideas blossomed from the seed that was the philosophy of Nietzsche and his fellows. One survivor of the ultimate end of Nietzche’s philosophies put it succinctly:

I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.
—Viktor E. Frankl

By the same token, Fifty Shades of Grey, and more generally the increasingly bold and unashamed bondage/kinky sex movement is not a new thing in itself. Rather it is an outgrowth of something more powerful and sinister, a type of refined hedonism that is the outworking of fallacious philosophical assumptions.

But let me get to what I am really saying. I call this article The Death of Womanhood, because when you grab a shovel and start trying to get through the outer fecal layer of this new, open BDSM (“bondage, dominance, and sadomasochism”) addiction, you realize that what makes no sense on top actually does have philosophical and ideological structure beneath it. Let’s take a little thought journey and try to figure it out. This same process can be done on men and it will yield similarly troubling results.

Women today are empowered and enlightened. They are fully convinced that, despite undeniable scientific evidence to the contrary, women are physically equal with men, and mentally equal if not superior. Women in our culture are told they can do any job, from President of the United States, to working a jackhammer, to police work and soldiering, to business executive. Whether or not they should or can is not the focus of this article. I am only detailing that women have more rights and more encouragement from society to do whatever they want than they ever have in history. Society will even cater to women to mitigate the obvious biological inequality between women and men so that women can go on believing these physiological differences are non-present or inconsequential, and further break down the concept of the roles of men and women in the home and society, which is a Biblical concept. So the society that we live in has supposedly made it so that women can do whatever men can do, to the point of artificially simulating physical equality, and women feel as if there is no difference in role between men and women. In fact, apart from procreation there seems in our society no reason to have separate genders at all. So, the feminists have succeeded and all is now right with women, who have now attained their rightful place beside or else before men.

Despite this, however, we see glaring inconsistencies with this rosy feminist utopia. The problem is, it doesn’t exist. Despite these sweeping victories for the equality of women and feminism, sex trafficking and the exploitation of women for sexual purposes is as strong as it ever was, even according to secular organizations, though statistics can be tricky. Nevertheless, radical feminism and social restructuring has done virtually nothing against sex trafficking, or prostitution. It’s as if feminism has done nothing except kill the notion of a distinct, separate, special, honored view of women that people held, even when women didn’t seem to have as many rights as they do now. One would think, logically, that with the rise of feminism that we would see less female pornography in films, advertising, video games, music, and other media. Yet the visual exploitation of women for sexual fantasizes or simply general entertainment is prolific in post-feminism America. One does not even need statistics or websites or articles to see that. Whereas pornography used to be secret or clandestine, it is now open and public, being even used in the ads of common websites and stores, where it is used to sell everything, from cars, to hats, to computers. Nor is it even expensive. Porn is now largely free, according to the linked article above, and indeed all one has to do is Google anything at all and click “images” and inevitably dozens nude or sexually provocative women will appear on your very screen. In fact, to find a picture for this article, I Googled the word “lady,” and was bombarded with sexual images. I quickly changed my search to “modest lady” and there was virtually no difference. I did similar searches for “chivalry” and had to settle for an artistic middle-ages chivalry search to find an image of a woman that was modest and respectful.

But let me ask, how is it that in the age of the picture I used, women were in society had fewer rights and less equality, yet in general were more revered and respected? Of course there has always been the exploitation of women, in all eras, but in open society there was a reverence for the woman. Women may not have been able to vote or hold offices or drive around in police cars or serve in combat, but there was an ideological reverence for the female, and for femininity in general. Might I suggest that the vast majority of women were actually happier before their civil rights movement? I am not saying women shouldn’t vote or hold certain jobs. But I am wondering if the feminist movement delivered on its promises. I see very little change in the way society views women other than to take away the idea that women are different, special, and separate. There was in olden times the idea that women were to be honored and cherished, and held in reverence–and that they were to behave themselves in such a way as to be worthy of that reverence. But where did this idea come from, and why did we decide to kill it? Might I suggest that it is an ideology, one that secular society has been trying to snuff out since ancient times. It is a Biblical concept. For to God women are special. A diamond is little more than a rock, yet because it is rare and different, it is revered and valued. Why should all diamonds be beaten into rocks to make them equal? Flowers are the weakest part of any plant, yet are the most beautiful and the most valued. Why should all flowers be made into sticks and bark? Equality is a poor replacement for what we have lost. We have sought total equality of position and standing for women in Western society, and all we have done is to reduce women to mediocrity without even mitigating or eliminating exploitation of them. Feminism has not merely accomplished nothing, it has made the situation worse by taking away the great value that women had, which God had ordained. Peter says,

Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them [wives] according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life…
-1 Peter 3:7a (KJV)

What a beautiful command. Peter tells husbands to give honor, reverence, respect to the wife, acknowledging that women are weaker physically, different in role, yet equal in standing (“heirs together“). It is only the limited mind of man that cannot see the difference between role and standing. Women are equal with men in worth, value, and standing yet are to be willingly subject to men in role and position. Nor is it the man’s place to create this order. Indeed, this is true submission, not the laying of shackles or ropes upon the woman to bend her cruelly to a man’s will, but as partners women are to share the load of family and society with men, willingly placing themselves under the authority of the man, while losing none of their own value. Paul makes a crucial analogy in understanding this:

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.
-1st Corinthians 11:3

Beautifully, Paul clarifies the different roles and worth of men and women by making marriage a picture of the Trinity. Only a heretic would say that God the Father is superior to Christ, but rather they are similar parts of a single being, equal and coexistent in value and standing. Christ willingly places Himself under God the Father, as a matter of role and position, while losing none of His own value. He submits himself to the authority of God the Father. This is the nature of men and women. Women are to be under the authority of men, yet equal in standing, and this should not be forced but willing, loving, honorable.

And perhaps that is the point of Fifty Shades of Grey. Perhaps it is merely a corruption (perhaps all BDSM is) of the natural order that God created for men, women, and society. Except that instead of a woman submitting to a man to be loved, cherished, and honored, she submits instead to his abuse and loveless sexual appetites, finding perverse pleasure in being literally consumed by him, while he too is corrupted by the process, becoming a slave himself to his own violent, pitiless human nature. There is only one taskmaster in BDSM, only one dominant mind, and that is sin, and death is its begotten son.

Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
-James 1:15 (KJV)

We need to begin again to change our ideology, because only then will women be held once more in honor, as in those days where the Godly philosophy was dominant. As Christians, we ought to behave as if that philosophy, that Biblical ideology, is still present in our lives if nowhere else. Our men should be leaders, and respectful and reverent of women, and our women should be willingly submissive and behave modestly. The world will continue into deeper and deeper evil, perverting everything good, like an ideological cancer, but we are to be preserving salt. Christian women have no business fantasizing about this perversion, or reading the books or watching the movies. If it seems exciting, that is because it appeals to our baser, corrupted nature. And men ought not to find amusement in seeing the abusive pornography that is BDSM. Indeed, we ought to flee it. I will let Paul conclude for me, and let me note that even in Paul’s day this kind of perversion was nothing new:

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
…

Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.
What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
-1 Corinthians 6:9-20