Women and the Subject of Sex

It's times like this when I'm glad this blog is not widely read. This post is not likely to make anyone happy, and will probably tick some people off. My goal is not to tick people off for the sake of ticking people off. Nor do I think that what follows is incontrovertible and above challenge. This post is about my own observations and some conclusions from those observations. In other words, there's a lot more opinion than fact here, and my opinions might be misinformed. Have I thrown in enough caveats?! :)

It's no secret that many street-level "women's magazines" are very sexual in nature. The covers of these magazines are sexual if not erotic, and many of the articles inside of Cosmo, Glamour, etc are even more so. I was on a plane one time, and I was sitting next to a teenage girl and her father. With the father wide awake sitting right next to her, his daughter was comfortably reading a very graphic article in Cosmo on ways of obtaining sexual pleasure. The father didn't seem to care, and the daughter didn't seem at all fazed by the content. Now I know some of you are already saying something like, "Foster, please, get with the program! You sound like my grandmother who is hopelessly out of touch with today's world!" Well, maybe so, but my point here is in merely observing how graphic pictures and articles about sex have become thoroughly mainstreamed in our culture so that society itself increasingly seems to be defined by sex. And where it was once conventional wisdom to say that it was the men of society who were sex-crazed, it seems that ever increasing numbers of women are gleefully diving into the same pool.

Not only does this seem to be the case at street-level, it is also the case among the rarified air of the Academy. And perhaps most surprisingly, this can be clearly seen in biblical scholarship. Next month, the oldest biblical society in the US will hold its annual convention in Washington DC. A look at the very thick program for this annual meeting reveals something very interesting. Many female biblical scholars, while concerned with the usual fare of pluralism and gender power issues, are also squarely interested in sex, unlike many of their male colleagues. Among the papers that will be presented by female scholars are titles such as "Paul and the Virility of the Cross", "Religion, Text, and Sex: Contemporary Religious Sex Manuals", "Making Total Women: Sexual Bodies and Sexual Identity...", "Born Again is a Sexual Term: Demons, STDs, and God's Healing Sperm", "How Should a Nice Jewish Orthodox Israeli Couple Do It?", "Catholics Do It Infallibly". Other titles could be listed. In addition, a survey of mainly non-evangelical book publications reveals that at least recently, many of the books put out by female scholars are not only preoccupied with the typical womanist gender fare, but are also devoted to discussing sex. Among the titles, "Real Sex, the Naked Truth about Chastity", and "Sexuality and the US Catholic Church" are just some recent treatments of sex by female biblical scholars. Women's preoccupation with the subject of sex seems to know no strata and doesn't break along lines of 'respectability'. The SBL crowd seems to have quite a bit in common with the Cosmo crowd.

I have periodically suggested that in my view, too many women have been liberated for purposes of being way too much like men. Women are cruder, more violent, more sex obsessed, more ill-mannered, and more materialistic and shallow than I can ever remember. In other words, they're a lot like men have always been. There seems to be a mentality that because culture so long oppressed women and so long encouraged the suppression of sexual desire in women, liberation from this oppression must mean the exact opposite of it. Therefore, what we now have are women who live and breathe the subject of sex, and it doesn't seem to matter whether it's a teenage girl reading Cosmo, or a respected biblical scholar speculating on the sex life of Paul, Jesus, or David's concubine. Apparently, we're supposed to see the embrace of this extreme as progress and liberation. But I confess, I see it as a severe truncation of humanity in general, and women in particular. Women appropriately wanted to be liberated from a cultural milieu that treated them like sexual objects. But one of the results is that many women, in their liberation and freedom, have voluntarily reduced themselves to the very thing thing they were fighting against. I don't get it, but I'm convinced that our society as a whole is worse off as a result. What our society has long needed is for men to improve, not for women to regress. There's nothing wrong with sex and there's nothing wrong with giving a lot of thought to sex in a biblical way. But to make this the sine que non of our everyday thought life and scholarly endeavors is to greatly reduce the sphere of life and puts us in severe imbalance that then impacts everything else we think and do. I love and need women because they are women rather than men. This is not just a statement about sexuality, but about their intelligence, their perspective, their sensitivities, and their values. I fear that too many women are expressing their displeasure with men not by being different from them, but by trying to outdo them. Women are better than this, and the health of our society needs them to be better than this.