What's Wrong With Christian Pop Culture (Part Nine)
The culture that makes the current porn glut possible is a culture that uses sex to sell…everything.
It pits our anxieties against our self-interest.
It persuades us to buy things we neither need nor want in the hopes we will appear desirable to someone else.
It proposes handling all problems by simply abandoning the problematic item -- be it living or inert -- and replacing it with a newer, “sexier” model.
No thought of fixing the problem.
No thought of repairing it.
It’s a consumer oriented economy that nonetheless wages war against the consumers themselves, overpricing goods and services, driving customers deeper into debt, catering to our anxieties which it simultaneously fuels to keep drawing wealth off of us.
Our culture puts a higher importance on males than it does females.
It denigrates all those who do not meet the hyper masculine image it projects (gay males or transgender people, for instance), but is also denigrates all those who challenge the idea that females exist solely to offer support to the males in their lives.
Why, yes, Christian complimentarianism, I’m looking at you.
And while there were gender roles in previous centuries / cultures, in Western history they weren’t this particular toxic combination of rapacious free marketeering and a rigidly enforced class system that claims those with XX chromosomes are subservient to those with XY pairings.
Christian complimentarianism -- basically that God ordained males and females to compliment each other by the males being the bosses and the females the worker bees, and thus any non-binary non-heterosexual look at gender is inherently false and evil -- relies heavily on the sexual anxieties our consumer economy foists upon us.
Christian complimentarians presents itself in some sickeningly perverse ways, most notable the purity movement and the Quiverful movement.
The purity movement is as perverted a sexual fetish as anything the Marquis de Sade or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch concocted.
It teaches sexual purity, in particular virginity, is a commodity to be traded on the open market.
It is the possession of the biological father (or, rarely, the step-father) of the young female initiated into the purity movement through a faux-wedding ceremony.
Look, both my daughters were in the Girl Scouts. We had father / daughter activity nights where we got together and had ‘smores and sang songs and played games and did skits, but the reason we did that was that we fathers wanted to do something nice for our daughters.
The purity balls (yeah, that’s what they call ‘em; irony is a lost art in Christian circles) are exactly the opposite. They end with the fathers putting rings on their daughters fingers after the girls pledge not to engage in sexual intercourse until dad has approved of a nice husband for them.
Let’s get one thing straight:
Nobody is entitled to intimate relations of any kind from any other person, nobody is obliged to provide intimate relations of any kind to any other person.
(And, yeah, there are occasions when one partner is interested and the other isn’t but the uninterested partner loves the interested one and wants to make them happy so they “take one for the team”; that’s not what we’re discussing here and you know it.)
© Buzz Dixon
