Category Archives: Sexuality and Culture

Where were You when You just had Sex?

As the ever-expanding world of social media appears to be systematically eliminating anything close to what we might have once called “privacy,” it should probably come as no surprise that there is now a social site dedicated to announcing where you have most recently worn a condom.  You read that right.  Just as you might utilize Foursquare or Facebook to “check in” at a restaurant or a theater or a ballgame, Planned Parenthood has now developed a new website targeting teens and young adults, called “Where Did You Wear It?” In short, it allows you to “check in” on where you just had sex with a condom because after all, “sex that safe should be shared!”

And just how much should we expect you to share?  Well, after entering in all the pertinent geographic information, the site also allows you to add a few more details.  Because after all, it’s not enough that everyone knows where you’re having sex.  This is the “Information Age.”  It’s the “Age of Jersey Shore.”  We need more!

So what’s your gender?  Male?  Female?  Trans?  What about the gender of your partner?  No point in making any assumptions or in protecting his or her identity.  This is all about maximum exposure.

How was the sex?  Was it “ah-maz-ing,” as in “rainbows exploded and mountains trembled?”  Or was it a bit more … down-to-earth, say “a work in progress?”   Don’t be shy, now.  Spill the beans.  We want to know.  Was your world rocked or was it not?!

Every once in a while, in a culture as vast and as complex as ours, you run across something so patently “new” that it’s difficult to know where to even begin an analysis.  And so today, I simply want to leave the analysis up to you.  What do you think Planned Parenthood is trying to accomplish through this site?  What exactly are they trying to normalize and should it be normalized?  What about what we, as a society, are sacrificing for this to be normalized?  Is there moral value in trying to protect people from the consequences of their actions?  What about the value in teaching privacy as a virtue of sorts?  Or is the concept of privacy growing increasingly “passe” in a hyper-connected world?   Regardless of religious affiliation, do you want to be part of a society that “checks in” on a site such as this?  Why?  Or why not?  And if the whole point is being “proud to wear protection,” why is there no ability to “share” this information directly through your personal Facebook account or Twitter?  The comment section is yours.  Have at it, readers.   

“Christians” Killing Homosexuals to Win the “Culture War”

In recent days, the politics of Uganda have once again captured the attention of the global audience, as lawmaker David Bahati has sought to introduce a bill into the National Assembly that would call for homosexuals to face life imprisonment for their crimes.  Three years ago, a similar bill, which also included the death penalty for certain sexual acts, was voted down when pressure from the international community was brought to bear on the largely “Christian” nation.[1]  But according to Bahati, “This is a piece of legislation that is needed in this country to protect the traditional family here in Africa.”[2]   In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Bahati went on to say: Continue reading →

Voices in the Static: When a Witch and Christian Sit Down to Talk

In just a few minutes, you are going to have the opportunity to sit in on a fascinating conversation that is the first of the “Voices in the Static” series.  These are meant to be conversations that highlight often-muffled “voices” that, although quiet, are steadily shaping our culture in ways that we may not yet be fully aware.   But before I bring you into that dialog, I want to begin by offering you a brief introduction to my partner in this conversation.  Over twenty years ago, Kendra Williams and I knew each other as friends who worked together in our high school theater.  Following graduation, we lost touch with one another, as so many high school friends are prone to do.  But in recent months, we have reconnected through Facebook; and tonight, she has agreed to engage with me in a conversation about her beliefs as a Pagan/Wiccan and how these beliefs shape her interactions with the broader culture and with Christians, in particular.  Kendra holds a degree in the theater arts from the University of Illinois (Chicago) and later went on to study the Japanese language at the University of Maryland.  She presently works as an Office Manager in downtown Chicago and moonlights as an artist in the medium of henna. Continue reading →

Breaking Rank: Coming Out as “Gay By Choice”

Cynthia Nixon and her finance, Christine Marinoni

Imagine a hypothetical scenerio in which a well-known pastor from a culturally influential church suddenly came out and admitted that he did not believe the Bible to be inerrant or even inspired.  What would the reaction of the orthodox Christian community look like?  How quickly would we close ranks, talking about the importance of community and foundational beliefs?

If you can imagine this moment and if you can grasp the cultural stakes that are up for grabs, than perhaps you can begin to understand the magnitude of Cynthia Nixon’s recent decision to announce that she is “gay by choice.” Within the broader LGBTQ sub-culture, [1] this is a defection from “orthodoxy” that provides all manner of fodder for those that wish to repress the influence of homosexuality on the wider culture at large.  And as a former star of the widely acclaimed, post-feminist Sex and the City, Ms. Nixon could not be a more public figure.

My purpose here today is not to enter the fray through offering any ill-formed opinions of my own.  Rather, my purpose here today is to allow Ms. Nixon to speak for herself, thus raising questions that are worthy of open discussion.

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.  As you can tell, I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”[2]

As I said, it’s an enormous declaration.  And there are so many things to unpack in a statement like this that I almost hesitate to open the can of worms.  Nevertheless, this is an important issue for both those within the church and those outside of it.  And when a well-known member of a marginalized community makes a announcement of this magnitude, we absolutely should sit up and pay attention because it has the potential to reveal a great deal about who we are as a society and what we believe to be true.

So what do you think of Cynthia Nixon’s decision?  Was it the brave act of a woman committed to walking her own path, in spite of what the majority of her sub-culture believes to be true?  Or was it the selfish and/or naive act of a woman who willfully threw an oil drum of jet fuel on the bonfire of a culture war?  It’s an interesting question to be sure, particularly in a postmodern culture that idolizes the value of community, but still worships at the alter of Modern, radical, individualized autonomy.

[1] LGBTQ is the acronym for the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and queer community.

“Sexless” Babies and the Rise of “Gender Creativity”

In 2007, Beck Laxton, a self-professed “radical feminist” gave birth to a baby named Sasha.  And for five years, Laxton and her partner worked to keep the sex of their baby a secret, in the hopes of making a statement against gender stereotypes.

“All I want to do is make people think a bit.  I just want Sasha to fulfill his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction … As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.”[1]

Since that time, Canadians Kathy Witterick and husband David Stocker have made a similar decision regarding their child, Storm.  When Storm was born in May of 2011, they sent out an email to their close friends and family in which they said:

“We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place?).”[2]

Although decisions like these are still clearly outside of the cultural norm, they are not entirely unheard of.  Take, for instance, Shiloh Pitt-Jolie, the four-year old daughter of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  In recent months, Shiloh has drawn attention to herself by her unique sense of fashion.  And in an August interview with Vanity Fair, Shiloh’s mother, Angelina, had this to say:

“She wants to be a boy.  So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys’ everything. She thinks she’s one of the brothers.  She dresses like a little dude. It’s how people dress there (in Montenegro). She likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits.”

Clearly, “gender creativity” is on the rise in society.  And while it is far from the norm for parents to make decisions as radical as these, there is no denying the fact that greater and greater freedom of choice is being given to individuals in the construction of their sexual identity.  But on a cultural level, this is quite confusing and even somewhat contradictory.

On the one hand, many who self-identify as being part of the “far left” want to deny the differences that gender should be allowed to play in the socialization of an individual.  They want to suggest that society should treat all people, regardless of gender, as equals, both in societal status and in access to power.  In the most extreme cases, you have parents who choose to maximize “gender creativity,” in the hopes of creating a world where sexual identity does not play a role in an individual’s ability to either succeed or be accepted.

But on the other hand, another segment of the cultural left wants to argue that the LGBTQ[3] community is entirely defined by its sexual identity, marking it out as a marginalized population.  For members of this community, matters of sexual preference are often seen as being deeply rooted in biology, and thus they serve as a defining characteristic of the individual, and one that shouldn’t, under any circumstance, be minimized or ignored.

This creates a rather interesting cultural dilemma.  If we want to suggest that socialization should not be determined by the biological sex of an individual, than how can we, at the same time, argue that biological predispositions towards certain sexual preferences form the core of an individual’s identity?  It seems to me that you can’t have it both ways.  Either sexuality should play a significant role in how people perceive us and interact with us or it should not.

If you tend to think that our biological sex should define how society perceives and interacts with us, how do you think we, as a culture, should go about deciding what are and are not appropriate gender roles?  What’s off limits to boys?  What’s off limits to girls?  And who decides?

If, on the other hand, you think that biological construction should not define us, then how can we, as a society, give any credence to notion that the LGBTQ community is a marginalized group of people? 

Whether we like it or not, these are the questions that we are facing as a society; and how we answer them, as Christians, will go a long way towards our ability to interact with those that see human sexuality in a different way than many within conservative evangelical circles tend to see it.

Lisbeth Salander, Genital Piercing and the Dearth of Female Role Models in the Church

A few weeks ago, I picked up Scot McKnight’s new e-book entitled Junia is Not Alone.  Interestingly enough, the very week that I purchased his book, the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox, complete with a cover caption that read: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: How an Intense New Thriller Brought the World’s Coolest Heroine to Life.”  This, of course, got me to thinking.

Why would a magazine choose to describe Lisbeth Salander as the “coolest heroine?”  What is it about Salander that has fascinated us as a society?  What is it about her story that seems to ring so true?  While the theories abound, I think the film’s director, David Fincher, gives us a great insight when he describes how they developed Salander’s look.

“Trish Summerville, the costume designer, and I talked a lot [about Salander’s appearance].  Trish has some of the most beautiful piercings and little studs in her nose, but that’s jewelry.  By contrast, Lisbeth’s piercings – brow, nose, lip, nipple – actually look painful and self-violating.  We went back to that first idea of Sid Vicious[1] with a safety pin through his cheek and what it meant.  That was not a way of saying, ‘Look at me, I’m special, I’m different, I’m committed.’  It was a way of saying, ‘Get away or you’re going to get blood on you.’”

You see, in many ways, Lisbeth Salander, as first conceived by Steig Larrsen, represents the next step in the cultural evolution of the female archetype.  She is the post-feminist, warrior – the literary and celluloid sister of Lara Croft,[2] Buffy Summers,[3] Angelina Jolie,[4] and even the pre-pubescent Hit Girl.  But is that all that there is to her character? Is she nothing more than an avenging angel?  Again, Fincher and his team are right there to help us understand.

“She’s not an avenging angel.  We were never interested in that.  We never felt this was Dirty Harry or Death Wish.  She’s a person who has to deal with a lot of things …   Psychologically, she has to work on two currents.  One of them is saying, I don’t trust anyone, I don’t want to have anyone in my life, and I’m willing put on this garb that says, “Stay the fuck away from me.’  And at the same time, it’s almost as if she’s in agreement with what everyone has always said about her, which is that she’s trash.  She’s perfectly willing to look like refuse in order to be left alone.”

So who is Lisbeth Salander?  She’s the new 21st century female role model.  She’s a deeply scarred and troubled young woman, sexually aware, outwardly self-confident, inwardly bruised, and profoundly violent.  In many ways, she’s a male fantasy – a millennial Cinderella who, while awaiting her knight in shining armor, has the courage and the moxie to take on all comers.  Sure, she’s in need of rescue, but she’s not about to sit around twiddling her thumbs.

So with this cultural story as a background, I picked up McKnight’s new e-book, in which he lays out a devastatingly brilliant argument regarding the neutering of the Apostle Junia.  So well-documented and so airtight was his argument that I found it astonishing that we, as a church, have not heard more about the lone female apostle in the New Testament, a woman described by the Apostle Paul himself as being “prominent among the apostles.”[5]  Now I’m not going to bother you with the details of McKnight’s argument.  Quite honestly, if you’re really that interested in this subject, you should just pick up the book for $2.99.  It’s only 35 pages long; and it’ll excite your imagination in ways my reductionist summary never could.

But my point is simply this.  We know that the cultural story is a damaging story that offers little in terms of real hope for young women in the world today.  We know that sexualizing your body for the sake of marketing yourself isn’t the answer.  And we know that vengeance for all of the abuses suffered – both large and small – will never lead to closure or reconciliation.

But as McKnight so clearly illustrates, we also fail to tell a different story!  We make sloppy hermeneutical decisions to violate the text and propagate the false idea that Junia was a man.  We rarely speak on Hulldah.  We barely touch on Deborah.  In fact, about the only thing we tend to offer is a vision of the “godly wife” from Proverbs 31 – a vision that is often carefully edited to omit the fact that she works outside of the home,[6] earning her own income[7] even as she built a public reputation that is so sound, that it’s praised by the leaders of the community.[8]

It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum.  And I fear that if the church does not begin to seriously take up the task of offering a truly counter-cultural image of what a female disciple might actually look like, if the church continues to let silence be its guiding principle on this subject, than we are likely looking at a future where the vacuum will be filled – not by the likes of Junia, Hulldah, and Deborah, but by the likes of Lisbeth, Buffy, and even the young Chloe Grace Moretz – women left with no choice but to “kick ass.”[9]

Click here for a discussion on misogyny, Lisbeth and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

[1] Sid Vicious was the iconic base player for the seminal punk band, Sex Pistols.

[2] Lara Croft is the fictional main character of the Tomb Raider video game series.  First released in 1996, the character has become so iconic that it has spawned 11 video game sequels, two film adaptations, a series of young adult books and even a few academic monographs seeking to understand her influence.

[3] Buffy Summers is a fictional character first developed by Josh Whedon in a 1992 film entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  While Whedon’s film was essentially dead-on-arrival, he resurrected the character in a breakout series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.  The series ran for several years, and gave birth to a spin-off program entitled, Angel, as well as numerous non-canon material such as comic books, novels and video games.

[4] Angelina Jolie is an Oscar-winning actress who first came to international fame playing Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider series.  Although she has flashed serious talent in numerous smaller projects, she is most well known for playing the type of woman described in this article.  Films in which she is depicted in this fashion include: Gone in Sixty Seconds, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Wanted and Salt.

[5] Romans 16:7.

[6] Proverbs 31:24.

[7] Proverbs 31:16.

[8] Proverbs 31:31.

[9] One of the most shocking, and provocative examples of this new female archetype is represented by Chloe Grace Moretz in Matthew Vaughn’s film, Kick Ass.  Here, the young Ms. Moretz plays a 10-year old girl who is trained to be a killer by her ex-cop father, played by Nicholas Cage.  While the film was ostensibly about the titular hero played by Aaron Johnson, the phenomenon was built around Moretz’s breakout performance as a young girl, deeply scared, but able to take on all comers.