Non-Toxic Masculinity, part 2
Non-Toxic Masculinity, part 2
Book Review (Zachary Wagner)
(Part one here. I was going to subject us all to a three-part review, but that would keep us in this book a long time. So, instead of that I'm going to compress the rest of the book into this part. In the meantime, I’ll have some more to say about masculinity shortly.)
What's the answer to purity culture's sexuality-gone-awry? Wagner offers three chapters that portray a 'renewed vision of male sexuality'. Let's begin here:
Where women and girls were shamed for the sexual thoughts they caused in others’ bodies, men and boys often experienced shame for the sexual thoughts and feelings they experienced in their own bodies. p.69
A view of male sexuality that sees all sexuality as sinful and shameful is going to lead to a spiral of shame that isolates them in actual sin and detaches them from God. What we need first is a vision of the gospel as the profound love of God, that loves us in our brokenness, and transforms us. In order to do so, we need to divorce sexual brokenness from essential masculinity.
Something similar has happened with toxic masculinity. Male nature is sexual, but toxic sexuality is not essential to masculine nature, nor is sexual brokenness the standard expression of male sinfulness. The dehumanizing and hypersexual impulses purity culture claims are part of being a man are not part of male nature. Instead, they are habits—more specifically, vices—men have been socialized into. p.74
Reading a 'better story' out of the Scriptures, a truer vision, is part of what is going to help us re-vision this aspect of humanity. And so Wagner spends two chapters working through correction certain misconceptions from the Bible. There is some profound (and unsettling, but in a good way) reflection here on the sexuality of Jesus. Jesus was a sexed human being, because there are no non-sexed bodies. Yet he was single and never had sex. He was also fully human, in fact 'more' human than all the rest of us. And it's Christ's humanity we are unity in, and into which we grow.
The final third of the book turns to "growing up". It's pitched around the idea that much of what passes for Christian masculinity is really just immaturity perpetuated, and here Wagner deals with topics such as boyhood, adolescence, dating, singleness, maturity, marriage and sex, fatherhood, before wrapping it all up. A few quotes from here and there in these chapters:
The damaged goods narrative is a disgusting, sub-Christian, and often misogynistic idea that has no place in the Christian community. It infuriates me that the church cultivated this view of human beings and virginity, not least because my wife is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The suggestion that I or anyone should view her as somehow less worthy of love and connection fills me with a unique type of rage. Damaged-goods rhetoric stems from a commodification of marriage, with virginity being a gift for your future spouse. p.141
The chapter on church culture is particularly valuable. Wagner talks about how conservative Christian churches can very much be places with cultures that dehumanize women (and men), as well as enabling abuse of women and children. His response: "I’m calling Christian men, single and married, to become more Christlike in the way we think about, treat, and live in relationships with women." (p.145)
I haven't highlighted it much in my notes, but Wagner does talk expressly (but not explicitly) about church-based abuse. He writes, with her permission and endorsement, about his wife's church based sexual abuse. He shares the stories of some other people too throughout the book.
Does Wagner’s book work? That’s my question at the end of it, and it’s a peculiar question because what are we hoping that it will do. I think what Wagner does is offer a very helpful and healthy critique of purity culture, its remnants, relics, and ruins, and I think the core of his call for renewal - for a culture and a virtue-formation among men that humanizes the way they treat others, women in particular, is a good thing. So, I did find a lot that was valuable in this book, as treading a path that isn’t just one more conservative evangelical “well, if they were just better christians we wouldn’t have these problems”, but also not “christianity is the problem and we need to massively remodel the house or just chuck it out”. Neither of those answers is convincing to me and neither has legs to walk on.
There is a bigger question lurking behind Wagner’s book though. Where Wagner is mostly restricted to a renewed vision for male sexuality, there’s the iceberg topic of masculinity in general. And it’s to that topic that I want to turn next week.