Non-Toxic Masculinity (Part 1)
Book Review (Zachary Wagner)
What tipped me over the edge to read this book was the author’s review of another book, Nancy Pearcey’s The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity Reconciles the Sexes. In that review, Wagner puts his finger on precisely what I think is the problem with a widespread response of conservative Christians to the severe problems of patriarchy and sexual abuse that have become widely known in recent years - that simply saying “well, that was a failure to be Christian enough, and if people just got on board with our vision of conservative gender and sexuality roles, this wouldn’t happen.” That is unconvincing to me because I agree with the critiques that are prepared to say, “Hey, some of these problems arise because of not despite the culture in churches.”
And thus, Wagner’s book. If we agree (which I do) that toxic masculinity is a problem, and we need a non-toxic masculinity, what should that look like, and what is a constructive Christian response?
Critiquing Purity Culture
Wagner opens his book with four chapters exploring the history of purity culture, and evangelical responses to sexual liberation.
Purity culture was most prominently expressed in the Purity Movement of the 1990s and 2000s, a movement centered in America and spearheaded by evangelical, white, politically and socially conservative Christians. (p.19)
Purity culture isn’t simply the belief that sex should be reserved for marriage. It’s a culture - a set of practices and beliefs.
Purity culture refers to the theological assumptions, discipleship materials, events, and rhetorical strategies used to promote traditional Christian sexual ethics in response to the sexual revolution. (p.19)
It’s characterised by emphasis on :
(1) premarital sexual abstinence for young people, (2) sexual freedom and fulfillment within heterosexual marriage, and (3) the assurance of blessing for those who lived according to this ethic and consequences for those who transgressed it. (p.19)
Wagner then sets out about critiquing this culture and movement. He identifies 7 messages that characterise purity culture, that are at odds with traditional Christianity.
Bodies are evil, sex is bad.
I definitely agree that while purity culture often tries to teach that sex is good, and bodies are good, the constant focus on sex, sexuality, sexual thoughts, feelings, and desires, actually tends in the opposite direction, creating a Gnostic-like hatred of the body.
Your best sex later.
Here the idea is that if you follow all the rules, remain sexually pure until marriage, then the reward is sexual bliss in marriage. That is a version of the prosperity gospel, played in a different key. “Sex was used to sell abstinence”. This is an example of how PC actually idolises sex. And the promise is a lie. It’s simply not true.
Sexual certainty in an uncertain world.
This kind of ties in to the previous point, but it’s a broader sense that there is just a guaranteed curriculum for your life, and sexuality, that you’ll grow up, get a job, get married, have kids, and sex will just work perfectly fine and normally for you and it’s all just going to be smooth sailing.
Sexual sin always has clear consequences
A very one-to-one view of “people who obey the rules about sexual behaviour, get blessed in clear tangible ways (related to future sex”, and “people who disobey the rules about sexual behaviour, experience suffering as punishment for straying”. Anyone who has spent any time talking to adult human beings should know this isn’t true.
Sex at the center
If the sexual revolution of the mid-20th century sold the line that sex was just something bodies did and it didn’t have any greater significance, purity culture responded by first saying, “well, actually, sex matters a great deal” but then doubling-down so that sexual purity seemed to many to be the be-all and end-all of Christian discipleship and living. Sexual sin was the worst of all possible sins. A half-truth (that sex matters) became a double-scoop of falsehood (sex is all that matters):
Sexuality is one aspect of our life, not the totality of it. No teenager, Christian or otherwise, should feel that their worth before God, their parents, or their spouse is contingent on whether they had sex before marriage. This type of performative righteousness is contrary to the gospel. p.39
Singleness is subhuman (and only temporary)
Commonly, PC taught that singleness is just a phase (of adolescence), that you’ll get married and live happily ever after. This is, however, not a biblical position. It demotes unmarried people to a second-class existence.
Boys are dangerous (And so are girls)
A twin message. Boys, on the one hand, are dangerous creatures because they just can’t control their sexual appetites, and we shouldn’t expect them to. Girls, and their bodies, are walking enticements to sin.
Dehumanization
What, then, is “toxic masculinity”? Wagner rightly begins here by pointing out that toxic masculinity isn’t a Christian problem, it’s a human problem. And one place to start is to represent the simple biological difference that generally speaking adult male bodies have a strength and size advantage, and on the whole this leads to “embodied male advantage”. All throughout most of human history, this has meant that men have power, tied to their physical capability, and not least the threat and use of violence, that has accumulated other types of power to them. Other forms of male advantage, male privilege, ultimately rest upon embodied advantage.
This, per Wagner’s argument, becomes ‘toxic’, “when men leverage their embodied advantage to harm and dehumanize others.” (p.45)
toxic masculinity is a way of thinking, living, and acting as a male that dehumanizes self and others. To put it another way, toxic masculinity involves men leveraging embodied male advantage for selfish ends, thus dehumanizing others and men themselves. (p.45)
It is, for Christians, “the distinct way that sin has broken and fractured the expression of male embodiment.” (p.46)
And what this creates is culture, or cultures, or ways of being, that privilege male perspective, power, and wants. And when this meets Purity Culture, or its parallels, then it’s particularly a toxic masculinity that gets rooted in Christianity.
So, “the teaching that hyperactive and out-of-control sexual desire is an unavoidable part of being male is one of the most damaging messages of purity culture.” (p.48)
If we define maleness in terms of a stereotype of sexual urges, what happens to our view of both men and women?
Purity culture dehumanizes women and girls by oversexualizing their bodies. It dehumanizes men and boys by oversexualizing their minds. It teaches that men, because they are men, view the world through an erotic lens. (p.48)
At this point, I think both some people, and some other books I’ve read, would want to push back and say, “okay, but isn’t it true that men are responsible for more sexual assault and abuse, that men are characterised by higher sexual aggressiveness and so on.
I think it’s possible to say “yes, that is generally true as a phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean we should essentialise it”. That’s part of the problem. When we take hypersexuality and embed it into the definition of ‘maleness’, we actually create a self-fulfilling prophecy because we are training men to see themselves this way, not as moral agents capable of sexual control.
Wagner spends some time talking through models and ideals of male non-emotionality, of sexual conquest, and of the ideology of American masculinity. And its Christian veneer versions.1 This creates an unwinnable paradox for men: to be hypersexual like their idols, and yet able to flee temptation created by these same ‘untameable’ lusts. All while holding a relatively immature view of sexuality and others.
Women because of toxic masculinity
No one’s surprised by that.
Do evangelicals have a reputation for a strict set of rules about sexual behavior? You bet. Do evangelicals have a reputation for believing, caring for, and advocating on behalf of victims of church-based sexual abuse? Not so much. (p.57)
The fact that churches have responded to abuse in their midst, repeatedly, by again and again doubling down on other issues, lauding doctrinal purity, conservative purity culture ethics, backing abusers and ignoring/silencing/neglecting victims, conducting cover-ups, and so on and so on, ought to make any person weep at the persistent, pervasive injustice. It’s no wonder people leave the faith over this. It’s more of a wonder when survivor-victims don’t.
Part of the rhetoric of purity culture is that men are fragile creatures prone to sin, and it’s women’s jobs to guard them. Women therefore are supposed to figure out how to dress, act, and handle men in ways that protect men from lust, at the same time that they are internalizing a message that oversexualises their bodies.
In Christian churches, overt hypersexualization of women is taboo, but subtle hypersexualization of women is not. (p.62)
Well, all this is depressing, and perhaps you recognise things in all the above that speak to your past or present experiences of churches, church culture, yourself, those around you. Or perhaps you don’t (in which case, blessed are you I would say). Even though Wagner is writing in a very particular American Evangelical context, one that I don’t share, I definitely observed some of these things, in watered down versions, in my church experiences in my late teens and early 20s here in Australia.
But, what to do about it all? Wagner has a great little section at the end of chapter 4, before he moves on to the rest of his book, that lays it out so simply and persuasively. it’s this: Repent and believe the gospel. All the talk in the world won’t solve this unless men (because we’re dealing with toxic masculinity) recognise, admit, and confess their brokenness, and the particular ways they are broken and sin, and believe the good news that God loves and accepts you despite your broken, sinful masculinity, and in fact can and will redeem that masculinity and sexuality through the work of Christ mediated by the Spirit.
Then, then we can begin to talk about a renewed vision of male sexuality. Which is what I’ll talk about in part two of my review.
(cough cough, wild at heart).