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Every Man’s Battle

Part Two

The adventure continues! Unfortunately!

(Part One)

Content warnings for: racism, genocide, sexual assault.

I think we might discover the answer to the question from part one: ‘If we aren’t [sexual] addicts, then what are we?’

This is not my choice of chapter titles, personally.

‘Our maleness brings us a natural vulnerability,’ I am really in awe of how much of a deal this book makes of how hard it is for men, sinfully ensnared and sexually suffering in their bondage, throbbing, overwhelmed with their sinful desire to… overcome rewinding the VHS back to the sex scene in Forrest Gump.

Alarmingly, Fred runs premarital classes.

I LOVE putting ‘kinky’ in quotes.

I’m also calling attention to the gender essentialism here that portrays women as naturally more prudish and naturally less interested in sex. Of course, we ARE talking about people who:

Grew up not being taught anything about sex except for “don’t,”

Grew up frightened of sex, which in church is portrayed as a vehicle for pregnancy, drugs, deviances, getting STIs and or AIDS, and of course going to hell,

Are frightened of even talking about or thinking of sex because to think of it is to ‘commit adultery in your heart,’

Have been discouraged from masturbation or from developing any sort of sexual self-knowledge due to fear of ‘addiction,’ going to hell, etc, as well as a lack of understanding within the church that women even can masturbate (my church boy ex thought it was ‘physically impossible’)

Get married off super young to men who they haven’t been allowed to touch or be alone with, and who have received just as little sex ed. Often these are men who have been raised in intensely patriarchal homes and believe women are inferior emotional creatures who are required to be caretakers of their husbands,

Know that there are kinds of sex that are still sinful within marriage, but nobody is in agreement about what these are (it is often anything ‘non-procreative’—so, oral and anal sex, fingering, sex toys, anything not P in V that could make a baby; anything that doesn’t reflect a complementarian hierarchy—men performing oral sex on their wives, pegging, anything that could be seen as a man being submissive to a woman; or just anything deemed ‘kinky,’ because good god-approved missionary sex should be hot enough for you, and on the seventh day while god rested, the devil invented blindfolds and spanking). All that means that, just in case it is sinful, or you’re talking to someone who thinks it is, very few evangelicals are willing to admit they even know what those sex acts are.

…which is all to say, when Mark says, “some areas of sexual exploration seem embarrassing or immodest to her. Sometimes she even calls them ‘kinky.’ I think she's rather prudish,” it’s worth remembering that almost nobody around her (and the other women being discussed) know where the clitoris is. Some evangelical women aren’t even aware orgasms exist. Even when they do know what they want… they’re in relationships where they can’t ask for it. Their only way of having any agency within their sex lives is by refusing to have it.

Because this is what the authors believe is God’s good standard for sexual purity, they can’t acknowledge that their wives might be more interested in sex if they’d received any sex education whatsover, if they were culturally allowed to be hornier, and if their husbands were actually willing to finger them or eat them out.

‘Because of the differences between men and women, forming a satisfying sex life in marriage is hardly a slam dunk. It's more like making a half-court shot.’

I thought men and women were supposed to be perfectly suited to each another, Adam and Eve, the dream team. If it’s not working out that seems like a cut-and-dried reason to become a Practicing Homosexual,

I would also like to draw attention to the use of the word ‘nirvana,’ a Sanskrit word referring to a Buddhist end-goal state of the ‘extinction of desire and individual consciousness.’ I think that Fred and Steve maybe mean it in the sense of being a paradise or a fulfilment (the fact they can’t say ‘heaven’ is because the evangelical understanding of heaven is a sexless one) but the idea they might mean it in the original sense is FASCINATING, as in ‘marriage creates an extinction of desire and individual consciousness’ like okay! wow!

The second point they make here is ‘what if your wife receives an injury or you can’t have sex with her for a time? Obviously you can’t just use porn and jerk off until she’s better.’ There’s a reference to a woman with ‘a structural problem’ requiring surgery before she could have sex. I thought they’d possibly discuss how many evangelical women develop vaginismus but… of course not. From the lack of specifics in this paragraph it’s clear that their promise to be ‘explicit’ doesn’t extend to words like “vagina,” which is Fascinating.

The third point is worded in ways that make the dog whistle of the chapter title, ‘Mixing Standards’ even louder.

A strapping, handsome man with great Christian heritage, blonde, Ken and Barbie?

It’s incredible how much this suggests Linda is villainous for being ‘far more interested in her career than in fulfilling him sexually.’ Gasp!! How could she!

This is a great place to say: whether they acknowledge it or not, the biggest motivator for sexual purity within evangelicalism is race purity. Ken and Barbie are expected to continue their ‘great Christian heritage’ by producing more little blonde-haired, blue-eyed future pastors to be called by God into the ministry. Good (white) Christians can’t sleep around or have non-procreative sex, because then they risk tainting the bloodlines—and being no better than the sinful worldly people willing to sleep with them.

It’s not to say that Black evangelical churches and pastors don’t recommend this book as a guidebook for sexual purity—I’m sure they do or have done. There might be more up to date and more preferred books now. But a book that talks about Ken and Barbie Christian heritage and ‘mixed standards’ is DEFINITELY assuming their reader is white by default.

“But ‘mixed’ doesn’t necessarily refer to race, Briar!!” I hear you say. You’re right! Unfortunately it gets even more overt.

‘Mixture can destroy a people. When the Israelites left Egypt… God told them to… destroy every evil thing in their new homeland. That meant killing all the heathen people,’

Here, an incomplete genocide of Palestinian people is equated with sexual impurity.

‘But the Israelites were not careful to destroy everything… In time, the things and people left undestroyed became a snare. The Israelites became adulterous,’

I’m not a huge fan personally of evangelical Christians reading these passages and saying “Ah, so when God’s nation calls on me, I have to be ready to destroy all impure things and people.” I think ordering those items in that order is the scariest thing. Either the writers want to minimise the horror of advocating for destroying people… or they come from a cultural legacy that finds it easy to suggest there are traits inherent to some people that make them worth less than things.

(Normal voice) I hope my readers are all filled with self loathing!

Thankfully these writers have easily summarised these points for your study group. (Also the scan quality on archive.org drops again… I’m sorry but also I’m not unhappy that this book isn’t crisply preserved).

So, you’ll notice none of these arguments come with a textual attribution! “Sexual immorality” in the modern church is based on (deeply biased translations of) Levitical laws. (It’s not totally clear why sexual purity Levitical laws are considered still applicable to churches who believe Jesus’ death lets them mix fabrics and eat ham).

Some of the sexual impurity we know the Bible is definitely against:

Incest (the story of Moses ends with his daughters plotting to get their father drunk and sleep with him!! The more you know!!)

‘Lying with a man as one lies with a woman’ (sorry to queer affirming christians who say homophobia was injected into the Bible by biased English translators… Judaism and Islam both interpret this verse as meaning the same thing).

Adultery is a general no-go.

Related but kind of funny that it happened: a guy fucking his stepmum and the two of them coming to church (this is the source of their ‘don’t closely associate with’ thing, which is from one of Paul’s letters. I wanna say it’s a Corinthians letter??)

Taking advantage of people you owe hospitality to (the story of Sodom and Gomorrah)

‘It is better to get married than to burn with passion,’ again a Paul letter somewhere and the only real biblical argument for virginity prior to marriage. There is no ‘no sex before marriage’ in the OT, because most of the men in the stories had multiple wives and/or concubines.

Depending on how you interpret Romans 1, it’s either ‘no homosexuality’ or ‘no gay sex with priests in the name of their Roman gods.’

Better scholars than me have made way better translations and analyses of the above but it’s REMARKABLE to see these guys redefining the catch all of ‘sexual immaturity/immorality’ to include like ‘seeing an underwear model.’ It’s unfortunate they haven’t focused on the messages that white evangelical men actually need to hear like: don’t sexually assault members of your congregation.

Wow what a gruelling chapter! Maybe we’ll get a fun one next.

#purity culture deep dive #my battle with every man’s battle #dodgy biblical interpretations abound in this book WHO COULDVE THOUGHT!!!#purity culture #my position on ‘homophobia was added to the Bible by biased translation’ has changed. Britain didn’t invent homophobia it popularised it

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