If you grew up going to church with a penis, you may remember the first time your youth group leader or camp director split the human species by gender and sat the young gentlemen down to talk about masturbation and its devastating effects. The outsourced job of demystifying and demonizing sexuality is as new as it is troubling. What’s clear to me now, looking back, is that our young minds were involuntarily part of a reactionary experiment in male sexuality; a tangent of 1990s right wing, evangelical morality, from which I believe we are still recovering.

This foundation of fear, that as sixteen year-olds we could permanently ruin our future married sex lives, helped many of us to get through high school relatively – and literally – untouched. For this noble feat, I submit we have sacrificed a developmental understanding of femininity and platonic friendships, only to replace it with a new, glorified misogyny. Books like Every Young Man’s Battle made us believe that we could condition ourselves to “bounce our eyes” from beautiful women in an effort to reduce lust, and the inevitable self-gratification that follows. These personal battles with lust and overwhelming guilt became a natural discussion topic and often bordered on the homoerotic, with confused teens trying everything in their power to curb their shameful sexual longings, and failing miserably. But that’s not even the scariest part – this system of “accountability,” which requires each participant to offer lengthy and detailed accounts of their indiscretions to friends, actually serves to alienate and vilify females as the root cause of our incurable self-loathing. Paradoxically, in our efforts to remain pure, respectful, and godly, we’ve succeeded only in dividing humanity.

I have never been an overly vocal proponent of “feminism,” mainly because it smacks of retroactivity to remind women of their past and present oppression. However, the new wave of Christian patriarchy, as preached and practiced by Neo-Calvinist macho-ministers like Mark Driscoll, is a dangerous step backward for Christian marriage. Not only does it vindicate men as the rightful holders of familial power, it condemns, with biblical reference, any attempt by women to usurp male dominion. Their answers to the most difficult questions pertaining to sexuality and relationships have unmistakable overtones of male chauvinism and misogyny. It is a sexual overcoming of circumvention rather than understanding, and promotes what feels like a 1950s flashback of gender roles.

Titus 2:5 is a favourite bomb to drop by opportunistic biblical literalists, likely inferring that God’s word would most definitely become corrupt if we let women interpret the Bible on their own. John Piper, a godfather of new wave Christian patriarchy, makes explicit the movement’s implicit attitude. “In a well-ordered biblical marriage both husband and wife acknowledge in principle that, if necessary in some disagreement, the husband will accept the burden of making the final choice,” (italics added) says Piper. Sounds like quite a burden, John.

When will the Pipers and Driscolls of our faith wake up and realize that healthy relationships are only ever rooted in humility, respect, and equality? The realization of these patriarchal ideals, that manliness is next to godliness, dehumanizes women making it preferred for men to evaluate women as the sum of their convenient utility; be it sexual, social, financial, or spiritual. Driscoll even goes so far as to encourage men to ask their wives to be “visually generous” with them. You know, because dudes have intense sexual desires and they need to find a wife who will act as their sin-free and shame-free outlet.

This attitude has inadvertently put an unrealistic expectation on sex within marriage. As husbands we have now put the burden on our wives to please us to our wildest dreams because we ‘sacrificed’ so much prior, it would only be fair in the contract of marriage. This attitude is not making men any healthier sexually, it is just prolonging the occurrence of unrealistic
sexual expectations.