fe-MAN-ine

One of the early profiles I was matched with I quickly discovered that he was looking for:

"a feminine woman who will allow me to be a male around her and who will become feminine when we are together a woman that I could take care of for the rest of her life protect, nurture defend encourage and share my love with. I have so much love to give and need someone that will be willing to receive it."

So being that I had a pretty good idea of what was being requested but unsure I wasn't reading my personal bias into it, I turned to my lovely friends on Facebook and asked for a translation on this Christianese and received everything from the purely humorous to the serious and everything in between such as:

Secret desire for evangelical Christian dominatrix, of course - best friend

The answer to this question and any other about what they mean or are looking for is pretty simple. BJs. - former almost boyfriend (and a similar response from my father)

Allow me to translate. What this means is I read some book (I can probably name the book but I'm not going to because it doesn't deserve it) a long time ago that told me that women wanted traditional men to defend them and make all their decisions for them and so if I write a bunch of crap like this in my **** profile it will make women want me and find me a nice submissive wife who will let me be what I think a man is. In other words not the guy for you. - former university classmate and presently a pastor

When I spun the question around a few weeks later after finding that 98% of the profile matches were soliciting the same dynamic, I asked "it seems every **** profile cites the need for a feminine woman to make them feel like a man, this puzzles me. Have you ever turned to man to make you feel like a woman? Or is it a uniquely Christian male issue?"

The responses were very similar to each other so I picked to of the dozen or so married women who responded:

but 'woman' is just a label, and 'feminine' is a meaningless societal construction as far as I'm concerned. I'm a woman on my own terms, but more than that, I'm a person. My man makes me feel loved and valuable, and the fact that I'm a woman is hardly even relevant. If a guy doesn't feel like a real man without a woman that acts 'feminine', then that's his problem he needs to solve on his own.

 I don't think about feeling "like a woman" much at all, so I don't expect someone else to evoke such feelings! What's interesting to me is what they mean by "a woman who makes me feel like a man" - code for what exactly? And what could make them feel not like a man? I have a hard time picturing this to be a good thing.

In that moment I was so thankful that the Facebook hive-mind had come together and validated the feelings I had about this whole issue of being feminine so that I can exist only as a binary marker for my future spouse to mark himself against. Again the language of evangelical gender relations was not of woman as a whole but rather as only defined in relation, as though it doesn't exist without man. But there is the rub, at its extreme this dynamic also suggests that men cease to exist unless interacting with women. And all these roles and interactions do not even consider that gender is a construct and that cis men and women (and that does not even include trans men and women - not that they're not important to this discussion but rather it is a topic for another time and space) can abide on a spectrum. I might be able to bake a pie and scrub a floor but I also can also hang cabinets, use power tools and assemble furniture but none of those abilities/activities are a result of my uterus/sex. These are not intrinsic to what it means to be a woman or being feminine. 

And yet...

The message continues. 

We continue to tell women that they are only feminine if they are soft spoken and meek, not too educated and super excited by the prospect of having a huge family (see:Dugger's/quiver-full communities) and we tell men, just like these two cases that they are only men if they conquer (do but don't Google Douglas Wilson and conquer if you want to know details) or are "wild at heart" (thanks Eldridges). We eliminate all the shades of grey - all the beautiful complexity that is being human, wherever you place yourself on the gender spectrum and whoever you love. 

Lastly while I would love to offer a musical reference at this moment it seems in digging around the musical interwebs that there has been a lot of discussion for the idea of a woman needing a "manly" man - yes I'm looking at you Shania, Aretha and well actually the whole of music it seems. But I was able to find this song which condenses in some way the expectation of women in the Evangelical church - Stand still and look pretty

The Double C's

As I have spent the better part of this evening doing down the Taylor Swift rabbit hole in Youtube one of the many they have, not that I would know anything about being lost in the world of retro makeup or geeky desserts, I have come to the following question.

Are men taking their dating cues from T Swizzle?

I will qualify this by saying I will give a pass to any 14 year old and under who looks to her for dating advice because they're young enough that the swallow depth of her lyrics are not likely to cause to much trouble. Now for a 31 year old male.... I will give you that she is attractive (but she's also crazy); however, she is more, she also represents our cultural demand for a counterbalance to the "modern successful, even sexually forward" woman. She represents the cute woman more a girl than not yet a woman demographic. It is for this reason for Charlotte in Sex and the City or Jess in New Girl. She's often meek, often overly dream focused, flouncy and girly. She does not by her actions, words or carriage portray a deep held direction, conviction or even the ability to steer herself through life, she is at the behest of whatever male-force wind blows through her life. This concept shares similarities with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope which has been utilized in the art of covert misogyny in film. The issue is not that there are women who behave like Charlotte (most clips are NSFW so feel free to go down that rabbit hole on your own) or Jess but rather that these cinematic two dimensional characters are seen as normative rather than a masculine ideal. When women, are upheld to an idealized standard, one that in this case requires that they be emotionally, socially or even intellectually limited to be appealing, this is a problem (there is a growing degree of this occurring within women in regards to how they view men and that is not okay).

The problem manifests in dating, especially online dating as the double C's, the cute and cookie-cutter.

I am not cute.

Okay, well...

I might have moments that are cute or silly or even truthfully juvenile, but it is not my desire nor is it appealing to be classified as cute. However, as this one profile notes, "appreciates the differences between genders and attempts to understand the mind of a man...reflective/quiet personality...little financial debt, and I got to say... oh so very cute."* First off, I love ellipses but maybe consider some of the other grammatical devices available, like say a sentence. On the idea of cute. Puppies are cute, bunnies are cute, even sometimes small humans (ie. children) are cute. Is an adult woman? Well maybe before I wrestle with that one, what is or more so what does it mean to be cute in this context? Cute in this case exposes two underlying actions/thoughts. Cute is not sexual, as a good evangelical woman she would not in any way be sexual because that would imply that she's either not modest, holy or even more horrifying that she may want sex and thus pursue, even more horrible initiate, said action with her husband. It also suggests malleability, as the second C in the double C's is cookie cutter. Yes, often that phrase implies pre-arranged, pre-packaged two dimensional persons but it also holds with it the desire to have someone moulded to that exact shape and specification that works for you. 

 So with that in mind I do not want to be cute. I am me, just me. I am a whole person, full of quirks and awesomeness and all that stuff in between.

But that being said I have a confession to make.

I know that somewhere in the evangelical dating curriculum that went out and around almost two decades ago and the time that followed that there was this idea that if we complied this perfect list we would not have superfluous dating relationships as we already knew what we wanted. For the record my list was HUGE. I could have and I would have gone all Frankenstein in that moment. Since then? I tossed the list and got a really simple one. I'll know. I will spend time with people who interest me, men I have chemistry with and that combined with what I know of myself and what I need, it will all pan out, maybe, somehow, or not. But that's the issue in the cute and the cookie cutter. It isn't about the learning. Life, never mind love, is not about a list or a pre-determined shape I want to fit my life or a flavour I like best (apricot rugelach) it is about change, growth, definitions and redefinition. And that process has never and will never be cute, even for the small humans change is not cute, it's hard, but it can also be beautiful, fierce and fragile. That is what I want. That is what I want to be wanted for the beauty, the ferocity and the fragility that is life lived honest and whole hearted.



*per the fine print, this quote is word for word, a typos and ellipses are the individual's, in this case italics and bold are mine for emphasis.

In Which I Enter a Familiar Yet Foreign Land

Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken," speaks of two roads, diverging from one another,and according to physics diverging lines do no re-intersect each other after their initial point of contact. However, I have found that either the physicists or Mr. Frost have erred as it seems despite my best attempts to leave the road of fervent, even fundamentalist, faith I have found myself skirting its boundaries.

While I know that in practical terms I have never left evangelicalism as it has continually informed my life even as I have done whatever I could to remove myself from its reach, I was not expecting to discover myself on a this road of more traditional fundamentalist faith. The experience has been more akin to realizing I had mistakenly left my homeland and to my surprise enter into a foreign, hostile (to me) land. In an attempt to remain unseen I have found myself plunged into a ditch.

The first rule of thumb when entering a foreign land, even one that looks, sounds and smells familiar, do not drink the water until you know, for certain, it is safe. Unfortunately for myself I have found I am immersed in some unholy water, the backwaters of fundamentalist evangelical thought. I am positive that the whole of evangelicalism is not quite a stinky at this run off and yet I have fears that this water is what is irrigating future generations. This water does not contain the usual farm run off with a healthy growth of green sludge; rather it contains the bacterial strains of gender roles and politics, the language of "masculinity" and "femininity," a healthy dose of shame and a questionable understanding of the Trinity, all together, when swallowed will make you sick. I have spent the last decade of my life trying to avoid this water, these beliefs spewed like a commercial farm sprinkler in the forms of I Kissed Dating Goodbye to the recent "literary works" of Mark Driscoll and fellow neo-Reformers, like John Piper and Douglas Wilson.* The problem is while I know that these men and their thoughts in no way represent the whole of Christian thought, yet they seems to have found the most fertile soil in men aged 25-40. That is not to say they have not also impacted women as well; however, for all the hype that Joshua Harris garnered during my late teens and early twenties, the idea of throwing dating out the window for the purposes of purity did not ring true for me. That is not to suggest I did not want to throw the angst ridden concept of dating out the window altogether for other reasons, namely my awkwardness in the presence of men my age. I did *try* to date with intention which in practice looked much more like Hermione trying to use a crystal ball. For some reason I had mistaken the idea of intention to one of prediction, was he "the One," yes, then hang around waiting for the day he decides he wants to intently pursue you, while emotionally benefiting from your presence.Yes, you are correct, the math is very wrong in that equation, and no fancy calculus formula is going to make that one work out in the end.

So where does that leave me now... well I guess as I'm reading profiles which tout the wonders of John Eldridge or is looking for "someone who appreciates the differences between genders and attempts to understand the mind of a man" while being "oh so very cute," I am trying to decide if I have or am willing to drink a little of the water in an attempt to be polite.

*These men could also fall under the label complementarian.