THE HOOKUP CULTURE PROVES A GIANT LET-DOWN

Sociologist Gail Dines writes that modern sexual practice is anything but liberating, especially for the female:

·       One study of college students found that of the female students who experienced “unwanted intercourse,” 78 percent of occurrences took place during a hookup. This makes sense when we think about the lack of clear boundaries set up during a hookup, further blurred by alcohol consumption. In an ongoing relationship, couples can discuss and negotiate sexual boundaries as the relationship develops, but in a hookup, there will typically be little discussion. Talking or establishing boundaries is not what hookups are about. How could they be? Boundaries are like strings, and hookups are famous for having “no strings attached.”

Few consider the costs:

·       Studies have also found that women who participate in hookups have a higher risk of getting an STI and are more susceptible to low self-esteem and depression. It is not clear whether these women seek hookup sex because they are depressed and have low self-esteem or if these conditions are consequences of hookups. The truth is probably that both are applicable to different people, but neither scenario places hookup sex in a particularly good light. 

Women are particularly vulnerable:

·       Whereas women hope that the hookup evolves into a relationship, not so for the men. Many of the male college students interviewed by sociologist Kathleen Bogle for her book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus “preferred to hook up with no strings attached.” Indeed, one of the men interviewed by Bogle said he saw hookup culture as a “guy’s paradise.”

Where are the feminists when we need them? Why aren’t they sounding the alarm?

New Atheism and its Abuse of Women

The way we think is the way we live. If we think that we humans are merely another genus within the kingdom of animals, eventually, we will begin to treat others as animals.

Mark Oppenheimer has documented many instances of abuse among those sharing this worldview. Atheist women are complaining that they have abused by their atheist brethren:

• For the past several years, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and online forums have become hostile places for women who identify as feminists or express concern about widely circulated tales of sexism in the movement. Some women say they are now harassed or mocked at conventions, and the online attacks — which include Jew-baiting, threats of anal rape, and other pleasantries — are so vicious that two activists I spoke with have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. One of these women has been bedridden for two years.

Why is such abuse taking place among the most “enlightened” ones – the “freethinkers,” those who are truly “bright?”

• According to [atheist and evolutionist] PZ Myers, atheists and skeptics may be uniquely unable to recognize their own flaws. “You’ll find the atheists who say, ‘I’m rational, therefore I’m better than everybody else,’” Myers said. “They take it for granted that all of their beliefs and positions are founded on rational thinking.”

Arrogance breeds hardness – an unwillingness to be self-critical. This is a theme that is epidemic among all groups that believe that they are the “enlightened” ones. In Going Clear, an expose of the cult of Scientology, Lawrence Wright quotes a former Scientologist who claimed that those who felt that they had been liberated by this cult had actually been imprisoned by it:

•  “You have all these thoughts, all these ways of looking at things, that are [the founder’s] L. Ron Hubbard’s … You think you are becoming more you, but within that is an implanted thing. (320-21)

Those who regard themselves “freethinkers” are sometimes the most bound up. Without humility and the awareness that there is still so much we need to learn, we cease to be students and resist any correction. Meanwhile, our false ideas will chasten us.

Believing that we are animals, we will act like animals and will reap the appropriate consequences. It seems that these atheists are beginning to receive the censure that they so well deserve. Orthodox Jewish writer, David Klinghoffer, has concluded:

• Whether the rampant accusations of sexual harassment are all true, mostly true, or even just one quarter true, the New Atheism is a community that has a problem with women.

And women are understandably finding that they have a problem with it.

Christian Feminism

Feminism has hurt women more than it has helped. It has demeaned female gifting and has informed the woman that, for her to have value, she must be able to compete with a man and have a career. Raising children has been relegated to an inferior position. Consequently, women are more depressed and dissatisfied that ever. (Please read this testimony by a woman writer raised by a feminist: )

However, I also think that we must try to understand Christian women who have revolted against their biblical role, even though their response – placing feminism and its modern interpretation of freedom above the Bible – may be troubling.

One Christian feminist responded to me that God had led her to a modern feministic way of interpreting the Bible, and that this had given her a sense of freedom:

I sometimes get messages from mostly young women asking about specific bible verses pertaining to women. Always, they explain how they are trying to follow and honor God and understand these verses as somehow demonstrating God's love for them. But over and over, they keep coming back to a question they can't shake: "why does God hate me?" Sometimes they specifically say, "I wish God hadn't made me a woman" because trying to follow what they had been taught God requires of women is killing their spirit. It breaks my heart because I used to feel exactly the same way.

But as I found the courage to embrace other ways of understanding these verses, I was granted an enormous peace - the sort of peace that only God can bring to us. I started understanding that the enormous pain I and other women feel under the teaching of the unique subordination of women didn't come from my rebellion. It is actually the rebellion of the Holy Spirit in me refusing to accept a teaching that I wasn't made for. Along with peace came freedom. The freedom that Jesus came to give us. Freedom to be the person God created me to be.

Here’s my response:

Thanks for your candid response. I am grieved that, for you, the Bible's hierarchical male/female, husband/wife role distinctions provoke the question, "why does God hate me."

I'm wondering whether we must all be head-honcho in order to think that God loves me. Would this also pertain to being a pastor or an elder? Must the church rid itself of all role distinctions so that everyone might be assured that "God loves me?"

Perhaps this is the way of the world? I worked for years as a probation officer and resented the fact that I was repeatedly passed over for supervisor. Finally, I got the position and for the next six years I was absolutely miserable.

I had erroneously equated social rank with my value as a person. I also equated my rank with the degree that God loved me. The lower the rank, the less I was in the eyes of God. How tragic we see things in such unbiblical ways!

Please understand that I too regard it as tragic when Christian women lament, "I wish God hadn't made me a woman," but I wonder whether this is because of the biblical role of the woman or because of the negative appraisal society has placed on this role.

In light of the fact that the feminists have undermined the female role and gifting, it is no surprise that many now lament the fact that God had made them a woman. Rather than feeding into this demeaning of women, I think that it is our role as Christians to honor the woman for who she is – the blessing that God made her to be. This should start with husbands:  

·        Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers. (1 Peter 3:7)

God will tolerate no less than this!

Freedom, Family, Sexual License and Fulfillment

What is freedom? We tend to understand freedom and liberty as an absence of limitations. However, if we just consider this notion for a bit, it falls apart.

Life is a game of chess. If you play chess without rules or limitations – if you can move any piece in any way, whenever you want – the game becomes entirely meaningless. Life is the same way. Every move or decision is not the same. Each carries with it its own particular costs. Jumping off a building is not the same as jumping into a swimming pool. It costs us dearly! Instead, we maximize our freedom as we live according to certain laws or principles that are consistent with our nature and goals.

Just consider a goldfish confined in his tank. Now imagine that he sees the great world through the glass in his tank and grows increasingly displeased with his fishly limitations. Determined that he will not live with this confinement, with a great show of strength and courage, he propels himself out of his tank and flops helplessly about on the waterless floor of his freedom.

Perhaps our lives are the same way, and we disdain the limitations that actually maximize our freedom and well-being. Perhaps there are inherent limitations in the area of family and human sexuality. Perhaps we too must pay a hefty cost when we jump out of our fishbowl.

Indian scholar Vishal Mangalwadi points to an unexpected cost of sexual libertarianism – an inevitable and severe backlash:

• Our [Indian] neighbors could not even refer to their wives by their names. A wife was Bhitarwali – the one who belongs indoors. Women’s enslavement was then sold as traditional morality. The consequence? Not one girl in our village had gone beyond the fifth grade because the nearest middle school was three miles away. It was too risky to send a girl far out of sight…What they considered morality was, in fact, our women’s slavery. (The Book that Made your World, 277)

How did such “slavery” come about? Why would parents treat their daughters in such a repressive manner? And husbands, their wives? Mangalwadi explains that this repression was the result of sexual permissiveness. He refers to a Hindu temple in that vicinity which gives testimony to an age sexual libertarianism:

• Every imaginable sexual act had been carved in stone to adorn Hindu temples. My ancestors’ religion of “sacred sex” had enslaved our women just as it did in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilization. (277)

Sexual libertarianism inevitably leads to abuse. This is generally followed by a repressive reaction, which can imprison women for centuries. It also leads to a disdain of women, even among the most “liberated.” Mangalwadi claims that:

• Rousseau – one of the fathers of secular enlightenment and a champion of liberty – believed that woman was unfinished man. Hindu sages taught that a soul with poor karma incarnated as a female to serve males.

Mangalwadi also quotes from Swami Sivananda, the founder of the Divine Life Society regarding the backlash against “Kama Sutra” and other forms of sexual “liberation”:

• Sex-pleasure is the most devitalizing and demoralizing of pleasures. Sexual pleasure is no pleasure at all. It is a mental delusion. It is false, utterly worthless, and extremely harmful (287)

Celibacy had become proof of “spiritual superiority,” and it entailed a diminuation of women. Although today’s non-theists – anything but celibates - tend to blunt their negative and materialistic appraisals of the female sex, their behavior seems to convey something else:

• As skeptics, atheists and humanists prepare to gather for their largest meeting in Las Vegas this weekend, attendance by women is expected to be down significantly. Officials for The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, said Wednesday (July 11) that women would make up 31 percent of the 1,200 conference attendees, down from 40 percent the year before. A month before the conference, pre-registration was only 18 percent women, organizers said…Online forums have crackled with charges of sexism…In June, Rebecca Watson, a skeptic blogger and speaker, canceled her TAM appearance because, she said on her blog, she does “not feel welcome or safe.” Other nontheists -- both male and female -- have shared stories of unwanted sexual attention at nontheist gatherings, including propositions for sex and unwelcome touching…Meanwhile, two more skeptic/feminist bloggers announced they will not attend TAM.

One feminist skeptic even responded with the previously unspeakable – she’d rather associate with Christians!

As one thinks, so too does he live! If the female is no more than a material object and life has no more meaning that self-gratification, why then not make use of the physical “resources” at one’s disposal!

“Liberated” Yale’s notorious “sex week” also reveals the correlationbetween sexual “liberation” and the eventual enslavement of women:

• Every two years undergraduate students at Yale university are invited to two weeks of pornography, porn stars, fetishes, sex toys and sex talks, all in the name of the university’s infamous “Sex Week.”

However, what started as “liberation” has turned into abuse and now a university crackdown:

• The clamp down on Sex Week follows several years of heightening controversy surrounding the event, compounded by a formal complaint filed by 16 students alleging a “hostile sexual atmosphere” on campus characterized by pervasive harassment and assault.

Perhaps ironically, “liberation” comes at the cost of enslavement - the objectification of the female. When sex is understood exclusively as personal gratification, then the object of this gratification becomes little more than an object.

Mangalwadi explains the repressive veiling of Muslim women as a reaction against libertarianism. The Prophet Mohammad had visited his loyal follower and adopted son Zaid. Zaid wasn’t home, but his stunning wife was. She later related to her husband how captivated Mohammad had been. Therefore, the faithful Zaid divorced his wife so that Mohammad could marry her.

Although initially Mohammad refused this offering of his son’s wife, conveniently, a subsequent revelation (Sura 33.2 - 33.7) provided liberation from such an inconvenient restriction. What was the result of this enhanced freedom? Mangalwadi concludes:

• The Islamic world learned that it was safer to cover your women’s beauty than to be sorry. (280)

Mangalwadi also argues that the sexual freedom available through polygamy and divorce also served to devalue the women. In contrast to sexual “liberation,” sociologist Rodney Stark argues that:

• A major aspect of women’s improved status in the Christian subculture is that Christians did not condone female infanticide…the more favorable Christian view of women is also demonstrated in their condemnation of divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy. As Fox put it, “fidelity, without divorce, was expected of every Christian.”…Like pagans, early Christians prized female chastity, but unlike pagans, they rejected the double standard that gave pagan men so much sexual license. Christian men were urged to remain virgins until marriage, and extramarital sex was condemned as adultery. Chadwick noted that Christianity “regarded unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust than unfaithfulness in a wife.” (The Rise of Christianity)

Mangalwadi concludes:

• I believe the habits of India’s heart (habits gaining ground in America since the 1960s) have been at the root of the enslavement of our women and the stagnation of Indian civilization. (281)

Indeed, what civilization has prospered as sexual “liberation” has been widely practiced? Instead, we maximize our freedom and well-being as we live in accordance with the physical laws. Perhaps this also applies to the teachings of the Bible!