Obey Your Body

Traversing a mall with a friend recently, we spotted a booth selling some crap in a bag with pretty ribbons (women love that shit!) over which was a sign that read, “Obey Your Body”. Most people don’t even notice such things, but of course, my response to it was to excitedly exclaim “OK!” and make like I was squatting to take a dump, complete with sound effects. Then I suggested we stand in front of it and piss, and when anyone complained, we could just say, “hey, I’m obeying my body – my body said I needed to piss!”

At this point I really did have to stop my comedy routine as my friend is eight months pregnant and belly laughter can be uncomfortable for a pregnant woman, so in deference to that I gave it a rest. The point is, just imagine if the sign had said “Obey Your Husband”. It seems I can hardly go anywhere anymore without seeing the absurdity of people’s comfortable obliviousness to the demonic, while at the same time knowing that they would react to anything hinting at Jesus like a vampire reacts to holy water.

So why dance around the obvious – they react because their hearts contain the Truth, put there by God. The state they must be in, numbed to God and immersed in what has become essentially a culture of death – one that simultaneously denies/avoids death (“that’s put a bit of a damper on the evening hasn’t it”) yet daily sacrifices hundreds of unborn babies in the name of convenience – cannot allow the light in, because it is too painful and it burns.

Being in the world but not of the world is not an easy path. It is heartbreaking, exhausting, galling, horrifying. But the path of rejecting God, of being numb to evil to the point where soaking the land in the blood of the unborn is looked upon as a right, where hideous demonic concepts that hide behind fluffy, feel-good catch-phrases are treated as Gospel, is the utterly terrifying path chosen by the multitudes.

As the Chinese philosopher Mencius wrote around 300BC:

To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one’s life without knowing where it really leads, such is the behaviour of the multitudes.

In other words:

Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. – Matthew 7:13 (RSV)

A Sex-Obsessed Shrew

I stumbled across another Christo-femDOM extraordinaire, writing under the pseudonym Charis R. Hart, via a comment left here. The semantic acrobatics (a.k.a. hamster wheeling) are something to behold. In her post, Are you “subject to your husband in EVERYTHING”?, she claims that she is “subject” to her husband in “EVERYTHING” but that she does not  “SUBMIT to him in EVERYTHING.” [All emphasis in the quotations cited is hers – there is so much emphasis added that one wonders why she can’t make a point without shouting]. Please do click on that link – the graphics alone are worth it. For more fun with semantics, check out this pretzel logic she linked to: Good question…did/does God order wives to ‘obey’ their husbands?

Of course, one can’t mention submission without providing the fodder for women to see themselves as abused. Granted, there are situations that are abusive – I don’t deny that at all – but this constant emphasis on male abuse of women makes it seem more prevalent than it is, and that women are always blameless. So, What if he is abusive?, she asks. In this she repeatedly implies that her husband is/was abusive, that he needed to repent, that he caused her to “WILT”, and the only way to change this was to lead the marriage herself.

Is this accurate though? In another very strange post, she emphasises the word “sex” over and over in huge red letters. The title of the post is: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex- Is it really ALL about SEX???? This looks like someone who is repulsed by sex, for whatever reason. Speculatively, they probably has a ‘chaste courtship’ and the sex was never that great, or it was duty sex to make children (they have eight). It might have been something like this:

In this post she examines the meaning of 1 Corinthians 7:5, using a modern literal translation: Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. (RSV) Her contempt for men is loud and clear:

So don’t refuse sex to each other..
(Contemporary English Version) 1 Corinthians 7:5

One needs to go back and look at the Greek, because every English version is a translation with the translators being mostly male (with their “biases” and “SELF-interests” shall we say?) Contrary to popular belief, the passage in question is not a teaching restricted to SEX

So what she is saying that sex is something those filthy men want, and a pure and holy woman is repulsed by the base male sex drive. She equates unsatisfactory marital sex with harlotry, and to drive home the point that the husband should respect his wife first she offers evidence in the placement of the word “likewise” in 1 Corinthians 7:3: The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. (RSV) If she’s going to argue that way, how does she reconcile the fact that the wife is instructed to submit before the husband is instructed to love her in Ephesians 5?

 

A bit more digging turned up this gem: Coming out of “Complementarianism” and Becoming Equal. On the about section of that blog, she says this about her marriage:

Our marriage was not at all egalitarian and to be honest, my husband has not arrived here by choice.  He dug in his heels and fought my journey out of submissive wifery.

Now we get to the truth. She is a femDOM shrew who doesn’t enjoy sex and who has hen pecked her husband into submission under the banner of egalitarianism. I’ll say it again, the true egalitarian ideal is functionally impossible.

The constant application of negative epithets to describe her husband (she does this in a clever, underhanded way, perhaps similar to her methods at power grabbing in her marriage) betrays her attitude. If he was truly abusive or personality disordered, he wouldn’t have changed that easily if at all. She sees leadership as power, but nowhere does she mention (that I was able to find) the responsibility and burdens that go along with power, or that she has taken on some of these along with the leadership role, or even the claimed “co-leadership” role.

This is yet another example of people who try to teach others based on how they cope with their own dysfunction. Not content to be miserable alone, they need to drag others into their frame.

The Christian Dissing of the Submissive Women

For some reason, a lot of trad-con Christians seem at best uncomfortable with, at worse openly hostile to, submissive women. (This does not denote weakness or lack of opinion or influence over her man). This ‘dissing’ is bizarre considering what is plainly stated in Ephesians 5. It seems that women are free to choose anything except submission to a man.

The Generous Husband misses the deeper significance of the recent explosion in erotica use by women. None of this is new, only the method by which it is delivered. What exactly is wrong with a woman who wants to be dominated sexually? If that is what she desires yet her man tells her she is disordered and refuses, is he not rejecting her sexually? Is this loving behaviour?

A likely supportive argument would be that it is loving if it is helping her to overcome her disorders, but to that I say wanting to be overpowered and restrained during sex is hardly a disorder. When TGH’s view is taken to its extreme, one could surmise that having a man’s weight on her in the missionary position is too much domination, so we shouldn’t desire that either. TGH never says why this is hard core porn if female submission is practised in a marriage or why kinky sex is a sin. Then TGH goes on a slippery slope argument and projects all kinds of exaggerated meaning into what a wife might want, followed of course with worrying that she will want excitement and that is bad.

The worry seems to be that she will want it again – and again. Well, duh. My sources tell me men want women who enjoy sex and who crave them. Women have cycles and won’t need to get freaky every day, but after she gets a dose of dominance, she will be content and life will be more peaceful for all. If it would help, I could put it into silly pop-psych terms: her dominance bank account will need topping up from time to time (usually when she’s ovulating or close to it). If he lets her stores run dry for too long, she will become discontent and that is when the testing will start. This is simply how women work.

The Generous Wife also misses the point and draws a rather strained analogy between porn/erotica use and eating bad food. TGH and TGW are invested in seeing women as they ‘should be’ and other prudish women comment that they are disturbed that some women might enjoy sex this way. (This is probably due to a fear that it might be contagious). It almost seems like TGW is rationalizing TGH’s disdain for what she desires according to her nature.

Wussy men are a turn-off to the majority of women. If my man did not have enough dominant strength to assert his insertion I would be uninspired and unsatisfied. I see the demonization of submission all the time with Christian blogs – this kind of strange criticism of female submission – and it irks me. Is this just a ‘kink’, or is it something deeper? I would suggest, as I did on TGH’s post, that they think about male and female natures as reflected in the body; the male acts upon, the female is acted upon.

While I agree that reading much of erotica (of the poorly written, pornographic variety) is a waste of time at best, it’s also true that if your sex life is satisfying these things lose their power, same as porno-vision. From what I gather of the Shades of Grey series, the writing is pretty terrible and it’s just cheesy porn, which is not very satisfying compared to having a good sex life.

Nevertheless, often people have to read such things to discover their desire.  Many are so indoctrinated by the church and the culture that they need a shock to realize what they truly want.  Since submission (so submission denial) is hard wired in women, the submission is a silent truth placed there by God which is revealed by whatever resonates with that truth, whether it be in porn or in proper materials.  Since this is rarely if ever written about in proper material, the only place left for women to discover (confirm & affirm) this desire is in romance erotica.  The negation of the D/s dynamic by Christians only serves alienate those that accept their natural desires and/or continue to mislead Christians into struggling with marital dynamics by trying to make egalitarianism work. There is a corresponding denial of the plain meaning of Ephesians 5.

There are normal desires reflected in the extreme and people go to the extreme because their natural desires have been repressed, or they’ve been told they are wrong for having them. Whatever is repressed will tend to expressed somewhere else in unhealthy ways.

See also: The Perversion of Normal

I’m going to relate this to something that happened with my daughters. A neighbour gave them a bunch of crystals and a book about them, saying they are magic and “gifts from the earth and the higher power of the universe”. Faced with the question of what I should do about this, 7man made a suggestion, and I took his advice.

I gave the kids a blessed Miraculous Medal and said they could give her that and tell her it is a blessed sacramental and a means of receiving graces from the ultimate higher power of the universe. They didn’t word it quite like that, but through this, I discovered this neighbour has an affinity for the Archangel Michael, so I gave her a blessed St. Michael medal. She was very excited and enthusiastic knowing they’d been blessed by a priest, and placed them in her pouch with her crystals after giving me a hug.

Imagine how this would have gone had I gone fundie on her, rejecting her gift and rebuking her in the name of Jeeeeesussss. Rather than creating animosity, this helped in forming some kind of friendship. Christians would do well to plant seeds and provide encouragement which may fertilize the seeds planted by other Christians.

This is how things can be built upon and the good enforced rather than rejecting it entirely because of one aspect (even if discovered via questionable means). TGH & TGW should have applied this concept rather than show contempt for a the normal submissive nature of women.

Of course if most Christian women really desire a submissive man that she can be dominate and over whom she can assert her female moral superiority, then I stand corrected; but that dynamic just does not induce ‘tingles’ for me.