And so we begin Section III of Every Young Man’s Battle, “Choosing Authentic Manhood.”
Chapter 7 starts off talking about how most young men don’t have decent male role models - not even their fathers. Here’s an example of something Fred’s father said to him before he got married:
“Son, I know what the Bible says about premarital sex, and you and I are both Christians and everything. But sex is too important for you to get married without having intercourse with Brenda first.”
He was a terrible role model!
(As an aside, obviously I agree with Fred’s heathen of a father on this point. I’m not saying there aren’t married couples who’ve made it work, getting married without having sex first. But sex is an integral part of a successful relationship, and it pays to get to know your partner in that way ahead of time. Oh, I’ll probably just write a whole separate blog entry about this topic later.)
Follow These Hands and Eyes
So, what if your father is a horrible role model like Fred’s? To whom can you turn for guidance? Well, fortunately the Bible provides role models for you! Jesus, for example. He never “touched a woman with dishonor,” as our esteemed authors put it. Oh, and how Fred wishes he could say the same! He laments, “I have degraded women with my hands.” (Of course, we never hear from the women. I will ramble about this at great length in a future post, too, when it’s not past midnight.)
Enough about hands. What about eyes? It is not okay to look at an attractive woman without, say, thinking about baseball.
The impure thought life is the life of a thief. You’re stealing images that aren’t yours. When you looked down the blouse of a woman who isn’t your wife, you were stealing something that wasn’t yours. When you had premarital sex, you touched someone who didn’t belong to you.
So… what they’re saying is… a man’s wife belongs to him? Jesus H. Particular Christ. These people scare me more and more with each chapter. I mean, I laugh at them, but it really is scary and upsetting, the warped views of sex, relationships, and women that they are perpetuating.
Finishing off that paragraph I quoted above, Fred continues:
It’s just like walking down Main Street behind someone who drops a hundred-dollar bill, and you pick it up. If you choose to keep the money instead of saying, “Hey, Mister!” then you’ve taken something you’re not entitled to.
Yeah. It’s exactly like that. (And honestly, who says “Hey, Mister”? Are we in an episode of Leave it to Beaver?)
So what are you to do if you get discouraged by having Jesus as a role model? I mean, he was God, after all. Well, fortunately the Bible provides a regular guy who’s also a great role model. That’s right: Job!
Just a Man, a Great Model
And here begins the theme of the rest of the chapter, taken from Job 31:1, wherein Job apparently says, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a girl.”
So this is what you are supposed to do, guys. Make a covenant with your eyes. No, no, pick yourself up off the floor… stop laughing, it’s not funny! This is serious business! Now, let’s set about making that covenant. How do we start? Well…
Making Your Ocular Covenant
First of all, I just have to say, I love the phrase “ocular covenant.” I think I’ll try to slip it into casual conversation if at all possible.
Fred tells us of his struggle to make his ocular covenant. He meditated on the relevant Bible verse for days. He couldn’t really wrap his head around the idea… “Could I really expect my eyes to keep up their end of the bargain? Eyes can’t think or talk!” Damn those eyes.
And then… it happened. His epiphany, his awakening, whatever you want to call it. Fred remembers in acute detail the moment when the covenant was sealed. And this is such a fantastic passage that I have to quote a big chunk of it.
I remember the moment - the exact spot on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines - when everything broke loose. Minutes before, I had failed God with my eyes for the thirty-millionth time. A female jogger, her glistening body capturing my eyes as I drove past her, made me all excited. Yet as soon as I passed her, my heart churned in guilt, pain, and sorrow. Driving down Merle Hay Road, I gripped the wheel and through clenched teeth, I yelled out: “That’s it! I’m through with this! I’m making a covenant with my eyes. I don’t care what it takes, and I don’t care if I die trying. It stops here. It stops here!”
(I realize that more and more, these reviews are becoming just a series of quotes. Seriously, people, it’s hard to summarize… you gotta read this thing yourself.)
His heart churned in guilt, pain, and sorrow after looking at a female jogger? Cripes. Why not just self-flagellate if this is the extreme we’re going to?
On the upside, a few of my male coworkers have yelled, “It stops here!” at opportune moments. It’s hilarious.
And I gotta say, I really think there are bigger/more important causes worth dying for. Just go crank one out, for godsake; then contemplate world peace or something!
Don’t Follow This Sissy
The Bible provides good role models, but there are also men in the Bible whom you should not emulate. For example, Zedekiah. Our esteemed authors call him “the greatest sissy in the Bible.” Strong words.
Personally, I don’t really see Zedekiah as being a sissy. More like just disobedient. Maybe stubborn or hard-headed. Maybe just plan stupid. But a sissy? Nah.
And no, I’m not going to recount the Biblical story. Go Google it if you’re interested.
Man’s Man or God’s Man?
This last little section is supposed to be the “pep talk section” at the end of the chapter, I suppose. It’s really not much of a pep talk, though. More of a lecture. You feel like Fred and Steve are waving their fingers in your face and sending you to your room. They go out with a challenge: “Are you God’s man, hearing the Word and doing it?” -Not to make anyone feel even worse about their intrinsic sexuality, of course.
And in chapter 8, we will learn how to be “God’s man.” But I might skip reviewing chapter 8, and go right on to chapter 9, which is all about (gasp!) masturbation. In fact, there’s a whole section about masturbation. Chapter 9 is just the first of four chapters about “the M word.” So, stay tuned, gentle readers! It’s going to get good.
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19 Responses to "Chapter 7: You Can Choose True Manhood"
Seriously, these people should be all about the five-knuckle shuffle. Do you know how many marriages hotel porno has saved?
So… what they’re saying is… a man’s wife belongs to him?
That’s right, M@ber. And don’t forget it.
You know, I tell myself I don’t really need to read your reviews, but how they entertain me so… (And I thought the exact same thing with the “Hey Mister” line!)
The phrases of the day are: Ocular covenant and the five-knuckle shuffle.
And I may be confused, but didn’t God tell the father of Isaac and Ishmael (I forget his name) to sleep around on his wife?
Ocular Covenant and the Five-Knuckle Shuffle
Wow, that would be a really great name for a band. Who’s on bass??
Abraham was the father of Isaac & Ishmael. God did not tell him to sleep with anyone other than his wife. His wife, Sarah, told him to marry & sleep with her servant, Hagar, so that he could have a child.
Hmm, so he listened to his wife over God… somehow I have a feeling that’s probably not ok, either…
You’re right, Amber, it’s not okay to obey your wife over God. But what’s your point? Does it surprise you that Scripture contains stories about people who do things they shouldn’t do?
Wendy’s point is simply that Jen isn’t getting the Abraham story right. Jen admitted she could be “confused,” and Wendy is pointing out that she is. God did not command Abraham to sleep around on his wife.
I really don’t think you want to hear M@ber’s point.
why is scripture capitalized?
Presumably for the same reason that Bible is capitalized: to distinguish it from other scriptures.
Oh other scriptures ain’t good enough for capitalizin’ now? You don’t know me!
I wouldn’t ask the question if I presumed an answer. So “Bible” is capped to distinguish from the “other” bibles? Got it. Thanks.
So the authors seem to think that the thoughts in male brains upon seeing, say, a female jogger are deliberately and deviously contemplated with lechery mind. So there’s just nothing natural and hard-wired in the nervous system upon seeing the form of the opposite gender? Great. Now — if we wanted — we can learn to not start or think fearful thoughts even for a second upon seeing the sight of blood. And we can teach ourselves not to think about eating upon seeing certain foods. All of what we see is apparently sent through the conscious and deliberative parts of our brains.
God is obviously toying with us by making the opposite sex desirable. He’s having Himself a hardy laugh over the catch-22 in which He has us with His clever plan.
Or we could just blame women for making themselves objects of attractions. I mean, this jogger was out running to keep her shapely form, but damn her for not being covered enough to not entice our buddy Fred with her “glistening body.” (Why, Lord Almighty!? Why did you have to make women SWEAT so that they glisten in the sunlight, like a beacon on a dark night.)
Oh, God, you are a tricky One. Yes, indeed, You are. But I still love You for Your sense of humor.
Ken, I didn’t mean to sound snarky if you took me that way. You can, if you would like, substitute ‘I reckon `cause it’s’ in place of ‘Presumably’ to get the intended tone of my comment.
Adrian, I think a more charitable reading (although, this is strictly out of place to begin with) would be that this kind of social conservatism understands “visual sins” not as passing through conscious centers of the physical mind, but that the thoughts which are generated from the presentation of the human body can themselves be judged upon reflection. I don’t think that’s ridiculous to suggest. For instance, you yourself posit a situation where a person sees blood and has a reaction of fear. Would you agree that once that reaction happens, a person could reflect upon the reaction and see that, perhaps, it was out of place, just what was demanded, not forceful enough? To my mind, even Amber’s own comments about sexuality evince this kind of understanding about the reflective capacities we all possess.
You may say and so coherently construct a model of the human body where, say, being attracted to a woman jogging is the result of “natural” or “hard-wired” responses to specific forms of stimulation, and still permit there to be further reflection upon the phenomenology of experiencing that attraction, couldn’t you? I mean, you, and I take it none of y’all enjoying Amber’s reading as well, are such strict behaviorists that reflection upon our own apprehensions (in the mental sense of apprehending a phenomenon from within consciousness) of appearances, feelings, reactions is a complete impossibility. For, if you were such strict behaviorists, the very fact that Amber is making this commentary in the manner that she is, and we also continue the commentary, is problematic on that account. So then, if you can accept that reflection is permissible, what reason is there to deny that this is what dude is talking about in “controlling” those reactions?
A person need not be an explicit Freudian to accept that there is a relationship to consciousness and the unconscious, and whereas most people explicitly reject the direction Freud attributed to the relationship of consciousness to unconsciousness, they do endorse a belief that it is possible to manipulate the mental conditions that produce undesirable thoughts to exclude precisely those undesirables. Such people who exemplify this possibility, they are sometimes called “soldiers”, sometimes they are called “baseball players”, sometimes “yogis”, sometimes “politicians”, sometimes “physicists”, and so on. To ridicule the belief that through will and/or acclimation one can unthink the undesirable simply because it is already being ridiculed for us by Amber is, itself, the sort of mental inflexibility I suppose we should ridicule.
To ridicule the belief that through will and/or acclimation one can unthink the undesirable simply because it is already being ridiculed for us by Amber is, itself, the sort of mental inflexibility I suppose we should ridicule.
I’m not proposing/suggesting anything like that. I believe that it is possible (thought difficult) to change one’s ingrained reactions to situations/stimuli. Hell, I’ve been in therapy for almost 10 years, what do you think a lot of that is about! So, yes, I freely admit that it can be a good thing. The fundamental difference here, I suppose, is that I don’t think a response of attraction or arousal (though based on the author’s description of the situation w/ the jogger, it seems that “arousal” is too strong a word for what was going on) is “undesirable.” I see such a reaction as natural, normal, and healthy. Now obviously if he had jumped out of the car and accosted her, that would not be natural, normal, or healthy — it would be assault. But we are talking about thoughts here, not actions. (And with that, I fear I may have just opened up another can of worms…)
To be sure, Amber, the clauses in the sentence you quote are not conforming to what you are say you are not suggesting. For, you are, and from the beginning you were honest and upfront about this, ridiculing the claims and inferences made in this book. Now, if you want to agree that people can change, and change even if that requires the very long process of going to therapy for 10 years, then, again, you demonstrate another reason to make it unnecessary to resort to the kind of causal mechanisms Adrian suggested are needed to make sense of what dude is talking about in the book. We can make sense of it on the kind of account that makes sense of you, Amber, going to a therapist for ten years to overcome “ingrained” reactions. Of course, calling them “ingrained” is curious if they are meant to be comparable to “natural” reactions: that would indicate that ingrained reactions have the same automaticity as natural reactions, that it is possible for reactions to be naturalized to the extent that it is difficult to irrelevant to distinguish a reaction as ingrained (the product of habituated cultural/symbolic/environmental interaction) or natural (the product of “hard-wired” neurophysiological responses stemming from biomechanical, genetic, molecular sources). Or, in other words, one can then easily attribute a seeming lack of choice for some reaction (whether attraction or fear) to one’s experiences or to one’s material body. We can say, “I didn’t have a choice, I was born this way” without understanding the causal developments that occurred as a result of being a participant in a certain kind of culture with a certain kind of meaning assignments in language with a certain kind of enforced social habituation.
Certainly, yes, you think that the immediate reactions a person has upon seeing something he would deem “attractive” are ‘natural, normal, and healthy’, but if you want to say that they are all such because they are thoughts, and thoughts, unlike actions such as assault, do not cause harm, then it becomes very problematic. For one, if that is the case, why are you in therapy? For another, then what is so odd about this book it needs ridicule? Afterall, these are just this man’s thoughts, are they not?, and so they wouldn’t harm anybody by being expressed as thoughts, would they? Unless you believe that thoughts, once spoken and written, result in actions that do not necessarily result in direct and immediate harm but in conditions that can cause harm indirectly. You’ve been saying in various ways that the views expressed in this book are unhealthy, sexually and socially, and I take it that if something is unhealthy by your account, it’s also going to be harmful by your account. So, that this man has such unhealthy views about sex and women is also for this man to have harmful (to himself, to society, to you as a participant in society) views—or otherwise just what is the point in giving the kind of social censure you are to the view presented through this book, if not to reinforce some view antithetical to it, even one you personally share? I think it’s disingenuous to on the one hand make a claim that thoughts don’t do harm and on the other socially censure the expression of thoughts you find unhealthy. This book wouldn’t need the kind of treatment you are giving it, where you laugh and point at its stupidity while alluding to the moral and social and sexual superiority of some view you hold in common with others, if thoughts do not do harm to people. But, clearly, the very manner in which you want to make choosing these beliefs the book presents a socially shameful thing demonstrates the extent to which you think that possessing these beliefs causes harm. And so, you don’t believe that thoughts do not cause harm, because here, they obviously do.
Now, if you’ve never said that thoughts do not cause harm, but you have thought that thoughts can cause harm, then kudos. You’ve a consistent account of the capability of the will.
But given all of this, perhaps you have not been aware of an equivocation taking place within the standards for which you judge things healthy or unhealthy, natural or unnatural, normal or abnormal, on the basis of the comparison between thought and action. For, since you are deeming some thoughts as unhealthy and worth social censure but are not willing to condemn them in the same way as you do “accosting”—the physical acting out of a thought of an unwanted (or wanted, if the thought were carried out in that way) sexual groping, or sexual battery—it occurs that the different natures you ascribe to the thought and to the action require you to think of what remediation or rehabilitation involves for the thought or the action. Accosting requires, say, enforcement of the law through punitive actions: jail or prison sentences. Thought requires, as it turns out, public ridicule and shaming. While the mechanisms for discipline and punishment are different, the model of consequential response is the same for both: both require punishment, demonstrating again that both are conforming to a model of discipline whereby harmful habits are corrected through negative, punitive, public action.
In other words, this book “commentary” is just the re-presentation of a new take on the old Puritan ethic, and given that the social discipline is performed with reference to the wayward sexual habits of the book’s author, the model is all the more demonstrative of the thesis: this isn’t a progressive activity heralding a new age of sexual liberation; this is merely Puritan morality with a different locus of acceptability. The form, the convention, even the nomenclature of the public branding, right down to the audience’s own public involvement in the jouissance of punishment, it’s all the same.
And, as such, is one reason why I’ve never cared to participate in any of this up til now. For all that you talk of yourself, Amber, as a person whose sexual ethics and values are progressive, the manner in which you carry yourself in condemning other people’s views, which is precisely what ridicule amounts to, puts that claim to the true test, and I find it wanting. If it were up to me, a daring and adventurous sexual ethic would not criticize this book in the manner that you do, and it would go beyond merely condemnation and propose sexual responses that do not conform to the dynamics of power still being relied upon in your production of this commentary.
But, that is if this were up to me, and you certainly are “free” to continue ridiculing whatever you like. People seem to enjoy it, however perverse the enjoyment becomes, and we certainly wouldn’t want the Big Other to have all the enjoyment.
Charles, to be honest, I stopped reading your comments halfway through. If we’re going to use philosophical or academic labels, then I’m out of the conversation because I’m not going to go to graduate school just to have a simple conversation here. I’m not going to pretend to be comfortable with all the baggage carried by the terms “behaviorist” and “Freudian.”
Yes, your suggested charitable reading is possibly more appropriate (if I understand it), but the writers themselves don’t seem to acknowledge the immediate, non-deliberative aspects of such visual stimulation. In fact, preachy people everywhere gloss over that; they should be ridiculed.
I’m not sure what you mean by the thoughts “generated”. However, in the case of involuntary thoughts, it is absolutely, positively, tee-totally ridiculous and asinine to judge the person’s character by them; what they do in the voluntary realm can be judged. Noticing how incredibly hot the glistening, shapely jogger could not be sinful; thinking about how one is going to pursue that jogger could be.
Sorry for being rough around the edges. I’ve quit smoking.