Christian abstinence movements are really fucking weird about masculinity.
(My qualifications for writing this post, as an atheist skeptic who has had quite a lot of sex: I went to Catholic abstinence-only education in high school, I took a class on the abstinence-only movement, and I’ve read a fuckload about it in my free time because it interests me. See! Qualifications! I have them!)
The fundamental problem with the Christian abstinence movement (by which I mean, e.g., Silver Ring Thing, True Love Waits, and their host of slick, glossy imitators) and masculinity is that they’re trying to present abstinence as being cool and abstinence, for men, is really not cool. There are sociological studies showing that, for men, virginity is far more likely to be a source of shame than a “present” they’re saving for their true love. Even worse, they can’t be like “defying gender norms is awesome!” because they’re Christian abstinence movements, their entire thing is holding up gender norms. So they have this interesting problem to solve.
Look at the covers of books directed at men. Every Man’s Battle, which talks about “winning the war” on impurity. (While there is a Every Woman’s Battle, it appears to be a companion volume with the name kept for branding purposes, and apparently women fight battles in order to discover God’s plan instead of to win wars. How does that even work? “Everyone stop fighting now! I’ve figured out whom God wants Muriel to marry!”) Who Moved the Goalpost?, which presents sexual purity as a football game. The Game Plan, which is also about how purity is football. Seriously, guys? This is embarrassing. You’re like four steps away from those Pepsi Ten “no ladies allowed” ads.
A lot of the gendering stuff is like that, actually. For instance, Pure Freedom occasionally does men’s programs that feature urinal etiquette jokes and a super-masculine version of Rock Paper Scissors called Gorilla Man Gun. (I am not making this up.) It is unclear what any of this has to do with abstinence, beyond a faintly hysterical attempt to stay “cool” and “with it” and the combined desire to enforce that all men are masculine and to make male virginity stop being so uncool. There’s also some kind of hilarious stuff where they complain that men aren’t masculine enough anymore and explain that Jesus would approve of men beating bullies up. However, some of the gendering stuff is way more interesting– for instance, the way it plays both sides of the Knight/Beast dichotomy.
The Beast elements are pretty obvious. All men are thought to be lustful. (Sorry, David Jay, you are not real.) In Making Chastity Sexy (which is an excellent ethnography which you should check out if you’re interested in the subject, and also the source of a lot of my material), one of the people quoted says that his lust test is “we strip you down naked, and if you have a penis, you struggle with lust.” The advice directed at men tends to be about how to deal with your lustfulness, while the advice directed at women is almost solely about how to avoid being pressured into sex. Similarly, women are told to be modest so they aren’t a “stumbling block” to boys, while boys are not instructed to avoid, say, taking their shirts off lest they drive women into sin.
But I think the Knight element is the most key– pretty logically, for a movement that’s based around *not* having sex. Christian abstinence movements are really big into fairy tales. They have entire things about how you’re not supposed to kiss frogs to see if they turn into princes. So while the woman is constructed as a princess who guards her purity for her husband, the man is constructed as a knight who nobly battles the sin of lust in order to win the heart of the fair maiden. The prince, of course, gets much more agency in this model than the princess does; he gets to do things, while her job is pretty much limited to picking out her favorite of her suitors.
For men, being pure is framed as a “battle.” Yes, Every Man’s Battle. I mean, literally, The War Within has diagrams of battle plans with memorized Scripture verses as your weapons.You are evilly beset on all sides by temptations– pornography, women in short skirts and tight tops, masturbation, a girlfriend who feels like it wouldn’t be that much of a sin if you just touched her breasts– and it is your job to hoist your sword, load your ammo, and gird your loins (puns entirely intended) to defeat them. However, once you defeat them all, you’re rewarded with a beautiful (and virginal!) princess and a happy marriage for the rest of your life. So that’s good I guess.
It also encourages men to pedestalize women– classic Knight behavior. Again, there’s a person in Making Chastity Sexy literally quoted as saying that they will defeat feminism once men learn how to be chivalrous enough to women. Because women en masse are going to be all “…nah, I don’t need equal pay, I can have a dude open my car door for me!” That totally sounds like a fair deal here. A woman is supposed to find a man who can “treat her like a princess” as a reward for her purity, and men are supposed to learn to do so– partially through staying virginal until marriage, and partially through acts of chivalry and devotion.
UGH reading this reminds me of how much rage I have at the church for feeding my young mind with such twisted and confusing messages about sex and sexual desire.
I have uninformed and uncohesive thoughts about the chastity movement. It involves old men’s jealousy of young men and some kind of conscious or unconscious attempt to keep young men off of young girls so that the elders have a chance at the virgins in an unhealthy jack-Morman way. Daughters as chattel and a higher bride price if the package isn’t open. Creepy elders slightly tumescent while talking to rooms full of lithe youngsters about the cravings of the flesh. Kids just shutting their parents up and proceeding with wet-petting, oral and anal- I have reports from a bible belt… Read more »
Ironic how they hide how priests abuse young boys….
it’s a really messed up thing….
also, what’s a “pure” guy to do if the only women who are willing to go out with him have slept with tons of men (or even women)?
Mmm, yep, I grew up in a region with tons of fundie churches where both young men and young women were doing the “purity” thing. The war metaphors are particularly cringeworthy because – who are these guys fighting a war against? The lit makes it sound like they should be fighting a war against their own sexual drive, but in practice, a lot of the onus was put upon their female peers to avoid tempting them. The guys often felt empowered to basically go up and say “hey you are tempting me to sinful thoughts, cut it out”, which is… Read more »
Oh come on, if you grew up in a fundie church you know the war is against “Satan” – because he’s the one telling us it’s ok to have sex and be all beastly and stuff!
I grew up around enough fundies to know that “Satan” is any negative or unacceptable thought, anything that could be considered temptation, any external inconvenience or setback, and any idea that didn’t fit into a certain narrow framework. “Fighting Satan” could involve any of those things, I’m trying to get a bit more detailed as to how those “fights against Satan” were lived in the real world.
Where there is no Satan, there’s just your morning wood. Or your classmate’s cleavage.
f.
I thought there’d been an auto-correct mistake and was trying to figure out what item of clothing “cross-body bags” is when I realized with horror you mean a purse or cargo bag. What a terrible way to grow up.
I read that some of those movements believe that men should avoid sex merely to avoid ruining someone’s future wife, not for the sake of their own chastity. (I thought I read it in Jessica Valenti’s “Full Frontal Feminism” but now I can’t find the exact quote). Medieval Christians certainly believed in the importance of male chastity, but it seems that somewhere in the 20th century, or maybe the late 1800s there was this notion that only women could possess this magical virginal magic whatever they keep hinting at.
This would make sense, yeah, as the whole message is basically that men have all the sexual drive and agency.
I am personally more familiar with movements that sold first-time sex on your wedding night as omg the most magical experience ever!!! for both men and women. Both genders were also encouraged to not even kiss before their wedding day.
I just looked up Gorilla Man Gun and it really pisses me off. Probably more than it should. Gorilla beats Man, Man beats Gun, Gun beats Gorilla? That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way those three things make a circle – how are the gorilla and man different? How does man beat the gun? The beauty of Rock Paper Scissors is the balance. The brute force of Rock smashing the tool, Scissors becoming a weapon and cutting the paper, and delicate Paper unexpectedly wrapping Rock.
Argh.
Thank you for letting me vent.
I think it’s because gorillas are stronger than humans, and guns can’t do anything useful without a human using them. But you’re right that it doesn’t quite form a circle; a gun without a human can’t beat a gorilla (unless the gorilla fools around with it and accidentally shoots itself), and a gun with a human beats a plain ol’ human. Unless it’s a barely-skilled amateur gunner versus a kung-fu master, but in that case the kung-fu master would have good odds against the gorilla. A better variant is fire wood water. Fire burns wood, wood absorbs water, water douses… Read more »
I wouldn’t complain too much about variants of rock paper scissors not making sense until you can explain why rock cares in the least about being wrapped up by paper.
Meant to reply that to Sally, not Not Me. My bad.
PMDR, That gave me a good laugh. I think it’s symbolic – paper representing intelligence or non-physical power (sort of like the pen is mightier than the sword). Then I found this on-line. It may or may not be B.S. “It comes from an ancient Chinese tradition where when a request was sent to the ruler on a piece of “paper” or the equivalent at the time, the rock was placed over the paper if the request was accepted, the paper was draped over the rock, indicating defeat of the request, if the request was rejected. Hence, paper over rock… Read more »
“OK, rock beats paper, right?”
“I thought paper wraps rock”
“Nope, rock flies straight through paper”
“So what beats rock?”
“NOTHING beats rock”
One internets for anybody who can source this quote
Oh that’s nice. I like fire wood water. But I suppose water is just to feminine.
But wouldn’t water be able to warp wood? I suppose that could work for the corrupting influence of women on male chastity, but only if water beats wood. OK, let’s hear all the wood jokes.
Only sometimes, and even then only if it really matters what shape the wood is, which doesn’t apply to a generic hunk-o-wood. So no.
I just remembered “Snake Toad Slug”. Snake eats toad, toad eats slug, slug dissolves snake. This variant was created in the 1640s by people who apparently had really weird ideas about slugs.
The best of them all:
http://youtu.be/iapcKVn7DdY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock