Culture Check: The Top-Selling Girl's Dolls

This image is sourced from Pigtail Pals Ballcap Buddies' blog, where a community member submitted this collage of the top-selling dolls in toy stores right now. Are these "just" dolls, or do they send a loud and clear message to our daughters (and sons!) about the "right" way to be a girl?

One of the reasons I wanted to share this is because there is a certain amount of fear about blurring gender lines in the evangelical, complementarian community. This is certainly a concern; God created two genders and declared two genders very good, and I think it is right to celebrate and defend that. But I think it is equally harmful the way the majority of our culture (as seen in the bulk of mainstream media and merchandise) seems to be pushing the lines further apart in ways that alienate and harm male-female relationships, and limit both men and women, boys and girls. You can bet that the top-selling boys' action figures have nothing in common in terms of interests, physique, or attire with any of these girls' dolls.

Yes, God created us different, but God also created us for fellowship and with many, many similarities. Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus; we are all image-bearers of God, joint heirs of the same salvation, and intended to live together with fellowship and respect, not mutual incomprehension. (And we both have a great deal more variety within our respective genders than these dolls would have us believe!)

10 Reasons I Stopped Wearing Make-Up

I want to talk today about make-up. Or rather, the lack thereof. And before I do that, I want to make a quick disclaimer: the purpose of this post is to encourage and provoke, not to judge. I feel myself very blessed to have a God who inspires a deep confidence that isn't rooted in other people's opinions of me, and a husband who affirms and celebrates my natural beauty without any makeup at all, but I know that given the prevailing cultural pressures, every woman will be on a different point in their journey. So I want to start by saying, I'm not judging anyone for wearing make-up. I think life in general is much better without it, and I want to share why, but if your choice is to continue, understand that this is not intended as a criticism of you.

So, that said, the story of how I stopped wearing make-up, and then 10 reasons why I think it's a great idea.

As a teenager, I was deeply insecure, wracked with guilt and condemnation about my sin inside, and convinced that externally I was plain and needed make-up to fix feature flaws-- my too-straight eyebrows, my crooked mouth, my eyes with the funny outside slant, my stubby eyelashes, my high forehead and long face. God was very kind to bring me out of my forest of condemnation and into a joyful freedom in Christ when I was around 18 or 19, but the journey of physical confidence was just starting. 

I often said I wore make-up because it was fun: colourful, experimental, interesting. There was a degree to which this was true (I liked cat-eye liner, bright lip colours, and bold eyebrows) but there was a much stronger degree to which I still believed in that list of "feature flaws" above. 

The year I turned 20, Steven and I began our relationship. Steven has been an amazing help to me in overcoming my physical insecurity; from the first he has called me the most beautiful woman in the world, never criticized my appearance, and has complimented the very things I considered flaws. I was so nervous for our honeymoon because he would see me with my hair down for the first time and I didn't like how it looked down, and wondered whether I should wash my make-up off in the evenings!

His acceptance and love of my appearance couldn't help but work it's magic on me, though. I remember vividly one morning midway through our first year of marriage when he was once again complimenting me, first thing in the morning before I'd fixed my hair or put on make-up.
"Do you really think I'm this beautiful with no make-up on?" I asked.
"Your eyes are brighter," he told me.
Well, if that was true, I didn't see the point anymore.

It took me a while to get accustomed to my face without the additions I'd given it, but over time I learned to love my straight eyebrows (I think they make me look intellectual) and care more about my smile and it's one-sided dimple than whether my mouth is perfectly symmetrical. These days, I occasionally wear make-up to formal events like weddings as a way of signalling that they're special, but I barely put any on; I usually feel like it makes my features look dark and unnatural.

I'm now about two years out from wearing make-up on a daily basis, and here are 10 reasons why I think it is a great decision for any woman to make:

1. You are free to cry, swim, or sweat without warning or consequence. Make-up subtly limits the activities you can participate in. How many times have you felt moved by something in church but been distracted from the deep significance of what you're feeling by the need to hold back the tears so they don't smear your mascara? How many times have you decided not to go swimming or play a sport (things that men participate in without a second thought) because it will ruin your make-up? Heck, you can't even drink normally as a make-up-wearing girl because your lipstick might smear on the cup. Losing the make-up frees you up to be more involved in actually doing things, instead of focusing your energy on just looking right. 
2. It saves you money. I always had a fairly small make-up kit: mascara, tinted lip balm/blush, an eyeshadow palette or two, brow shader, and eyeliner. At a frugal estimate this was about a $35 kit. (At this point in my life, I'm much more concerned about the quality and ingredients of my toiletries than I was as a teenager, so if I was still wearing make-up today it would probably be more.) Given shelf-life and rate of using up, that $35 kit was probably $100 yearly. If I started wearing make-up at 13 and kept it up until I was 65 (although in all likelihood if I went on that long, I'd probably keep going 'til I died) that would be over five grand spent on hiding my face. And that's a small, frugal kit! Aren't there better, more fulfilling ways to spend $5,000?
3. It saves you time. I'll soon be a mother of two. I'll be nursing (probably both of them), getting two babies dressed, and making breakfast for us all in time for Steven to come home from work for 9:30 coffee break. I work a part-time job, am redecorating my house, and pre-homeschooling a bright, curious little boy. In short, there are a thousand practical things that I am responsible for. Beyond that, there are many other meaningful things that do more for my soul than putting on make-up: reading my Bible, praying, reading good books, spending time with people, creative pursuits, and building my relationship with my husband and child. I gladly take the extra 20-30 minutes of time that come from not putting on and taking off make-up on either end of my day. And I believe that reading the Word or loving people actually do more for my beauty than mascara and blush. 
4. It's better for the environment. There are a host of problems with the ingredients used in conventional make-up products, from animal testing to questionable origins, but even if you're using organic, "earth-friendly" make-up products, you're still facing a colossal amount of packaging waste, manufacturing waste (power usage, by-products), and transportation costs (emissions, fuel use). When adding up the cumulative effect of this from the millions and millions of women using make-up worldwide, shouldn't we be asking ourselves if this is really good stewardship of the resources God put on our planet? Especially given that it isn't substantially improving human lives or allowing us to be better in serving the church or sharing the Gospel.
5. It's better for your health. If you've hung around me for any length of time you've probably heard me rant about the nasty ingredients in beauty products: alcohols, artificial fragrances, chemicals preservatives and dyes, many of which are known or suspected to be involved in causing cancer, reproductive difficulties, and more. Not to mention how a healthier planet (see #4) results in healthier humans. I mentioned this in a previous blog post about how the things that are considered feminine and beautiful are often harmful to our health, which I think is a good indicator of how warped our perception of beauty has become. 
6. It breaks a vicious circle. This is sort of related to the last point-- those nasty chemical ingredients in the beauty products that are supposed to give you flawless skin, miles-long lashes, a blooming complexion, erase your wrinkles, etc. are self-perpetuating a cycle of oil-overproduction and skin-drying for your skin, degrading and damaging your eyelashes, dulling your skin's natural bloom, and contributing to the aging of your skin. So that you'll need to buy more make-up to cover up the ill effects, so that your skin will be even worse off, so that you'll need to buy even more... Almost like make-up manufacturers don't particularly want you to be naturally beautiful isn't it? Like maybe they care more about profits than about you actually having any of those buzzwords they use in their commercials: "fresh", "natural", "breathing", "real you..." The other side of this is that the more accustomed you become to your face in an augmented/artificial mask-- the arch of your brows carefully achieved by plucking and pencils instead of your natural straight line, your thin upper lip plumped up with a lipstick, your undramatic lashes darkened-- the harder it is for your to enjoy or even recognise your own face without make-up; you start to feel as if the face you were born with isn't really who you are.
7. It takes a stand against the world's lie that age is to be fought and feared. The world, faced with at best nothing and at worst, judgement, in the afterlife, has a good reason to fear the effects of age, as they bring death ever-closer. But we have something else to look forward to: eternal joy, worship, and peace in a world made perfect by Christ. We have a Scripture that tells us grey hair is a crown of glory. The lie about age is particularly pernicious in it's condemnation of female aging, and I have heard this explained as a simple matter of biology: men like women who look young because men like women who look fertile. Never mind that female fertility is generally decent until around 40; we as Christians need to assess the deeply humanistic assumptions of this idea.
   
   Scripture teaches that the point of marriage is a lifelong commitment mirroring that of Christ and his Bride, the Church. Humanistic viewpoints often debate whether men are "meant" to be monogamous, assume the sole point of life is to pass on genes, and address attraction and parenthood from a purely naturalistic perspective. Not so the believer! We know monogamy is God's intention for human relationships and thus the happiest, most fulfilling path for both men and women. We know that healthy biological children are a great blessing from the Lord, but that they are not the be-all-and-end-all of a happy relationship or a happy life. We know that there is more to attraction than genetic influences because we are called to lifelong love and attraction where our mate's character and our own self-sacrifice are as important as genetic factors. Believing this, why do we buy into the idea that the highest compliment we can pay an older woman is that she "looks young"?* 
8.  It declares the "very-good"ness of God's creation. I want to tread carefully here because I know the effects of sin have brought deformity, illness, and injury into the world so that there are real ways in which one's face might no longer be "very good" as it was created. But at the same time, I don't believe God intend to create a world without genetic variation. I think that if there were no Fall, there would still be women with big noses and small ones, high foreheads and long torsos and cowlicks and widow's peaks, with crazy afros and downy-fine locks, with wide hips, flat chests, sturdy ankles, and narrow shoulders. I certainly don't believe we'd all be slight variations on the modern Western ideal woman: white, long flowing locks, slender figures with curves in the "right" places, doe-eyes, and perfectly regular facial features. My straight eyebrows, my high forehead, my "funny" eyes, are all part of the Avery that God lovingly knit together when I was in my mother's womb. My childbearing hips and my Laura-Ingalls-esque "strong as a little French horse" constitution are part of my heritage, traits I can see in my grandmothers and great-grandmothers. I will never be the "ideal" presented in movies, but I am just as God intended me to be, and I believe that is a far more beautiful thing.
9. It fights the false image of femininity sold to the men in your life. Sometime after I stopped shaving my legs, I came across an article about how, in a society where hard- and soft-core pornography is more and more readily provided for young boys, many young teenaged girls already feel pressured to get full Brazilian waxes-- boys from a very young age are squeamish about or unattracted by female body hair. Setting aside the numerous other issues we could explore in this story, isn't it scary that from such a young age, boys are indoctrinated to believe that a woman's body should look perpetually prepubescent? Make-up plays the same game, if more subtly; pouty lips and long, fluttering lashes help make a woman look perpetually physically attracted/seductive. Ditto blush. Arched brows suggest mystery. None of these are the things that make a woman a good Christian, a good woman, or a good life partner. Mystery? Honesty and encouragement in the faith are far more important. Seduction? It's all well and good in a one-flesh union, but it's not the part of a godly woman to be seducing the males willy-nilly. But if the media's image is the only one ever presented and it's always presented in a deeply attractive light, it's hard for male brains to ignore. If they should be seeing something different, surely they should be seeing it in the church?
10. It fights the negative body messages constantly sent to the women in your life. The number of genuinely hideous-looking people in the world is pretty low. But there are women all around you who see themselves as less acceptable because of the messages of media. Women who think they are too stocky, too pale, too curvy, too fat, too skinny to be attractive. Women who think they aren't glamourous enough or charming enough or that they lack the "feminine mystique" to be valued and loved. And every time you criticize yourself they-- your sisters, your friends, your daughters-- face the temptation to compare themselves to you and measure up even shorter. You moan about how you need to lose five extra pounds? The girl beside you carrying twenty-five extra pounds has a new reason for self-loathing. You mention how you hate your hair? The girl beside you who has always wished her hair was as nice as yours now has reason to suspect you think her hair is ugly beyond all belief. You use make-up to "fix" how your eyes look "too close together"? Now your daughter with the exact same eyes has reason to believe her mother thinks her eyes are a feature flaw and she'd better find a way to fix hers as well. The world needs women who will proudly declare that not only are there many things vastly more to be valued than physical beauty-- from kindness to humour to persistence to wisdom-- but that women as God created us are beautiful anyways-- we don't need to fritter away our time and energy and money to "fix" ourselves. 

*I remember one time in a prayer meeting we divided up by age: youths, 20-40 years olds, and over-40s. Our pastor joked that the over-40 women need not declare their age. I don't blame him for this lighthearted and probably realistic jest, but how I wish that women over 40 in the church were cheerfully sharing their age and showing their grey hairs and wrinkles to the younger women as a proud declaration that age is not something to fear but a blessing from God and a status of honour and wisdom as the Bible teaches!

Film Review: Gravity

Role of Women: Without wishing to give too much away about the film (and it's really hard to talk about it without spoiling it), I want to praise Gravity for giving a female a central, almost exclusive role in a film without resorting to cliches and tropes. In an earlier post I talked about how Hollywood tends to assume men won't watch films with a female central protagonist, but everyone I know who has seen this film has nothing bad to say about it-- certainly they don't mention how boring it was to watch a movie all about a woman! Dr. Ryan Stone is educated (in a STEM field), capable, and courageous, and yet also vulnerable, emotional, and caring-- palpably human with all the diversity that involves. It is rare for films to straddle that line in a female character; most tend to divide women into tough, "manly" types who are capable, independent, and unemotional, and gentle, "womanly" types who need rescuing and are nurturing. Bravo to this film for making their heroine a woman who, like most of humanity, has strengths and weaknesses, areas of capability and vulnerability, something to offer as well as some areas of neediness.

Sexualisation of Women: Clooney's character Matt Kowalski is more stereotyped than Dr. Stone, as a bit of a rogue or charmer, and he is guilty of the small instance of sexualisation in the film. In the throes of a life-threatening situation in space, he teasingly invites Dr. Stone to admit she's attracted to him. It's small and subtle, but it is an implied imposition of sexuality that by no means need be present.

Dr. Stone spends several scenes dressed only in the tank top and fitted shorts she wore under her spacesuit, but it didn't feel at all sexualised to me. The scenes draw heavily on a "rebirth" subtheme and she is never posed sexually while dressed like this; her body is acknowledged without being either vilified or objectified and I appreciated that.

Bechdel Test Pass/Fail: Fail. The other female in the film dies without any dialogue. There was a fine opportunity to include a conversation with a women when Dr. Stone makes radio contact with Earth, but the voice on the other end is the Hollywood default: a male. 

Male:Female Ratio: Of the seven characters in the film, two are female. One dies without any dialogue.

The "Default Male": What's That?

Scenario: a fly is buzzing through your kitchen, landing on your sandwich whenever you put it down. You and your toddler wave it off in annoyance for a while, but eventually you're sick of it. "Run and get the flyswatter," you tell your child, "and I'll kill him."

Scenario: you are reading Are You My Mother? to your toddler. The baby bird comes upon a dog. You put on a special deep voice for the dog as you drawl, "How can I be your mother? I am a dog."

So what do these scenarios have in common?

They are the illustration of a principle called the 'default male'. This term describes a phenomenon where we automatically assume that any creature not directly identified as female by specific "feminine" markings (long eyelashes, pink bows, long hair) is a male. This means that chances are good that you unconsciously refer to every frog, worm, anthropomorphised vehicle (say, an airplane you're watching fly by, or a toy car), bunny in the yard, stick figure, or unspecified professional (doctor, mechanic) as "he". This is true unless the animal in question has its offspring with it, in which case it is instantly a mummy (although the young are probably still "he".)

Try it out! Grab the nearest children's book with animals in it-- Are You My Mother? will do. In this book there are four gender-specified characters: the mother bird and the baby bird (male), the cow (which is clearly not a bull), and the hen. Do you read the kitten and dog as male or female? Consider the dog's reason for not being the bird's mother: "I am a dog." Chances are that if the dog was male, he'd say "I am a male," wouldn't he? But-- with no eyelashes, no frilly collar, odds are good that you read the dog as male and not female. It holds true in other books. Brown Bear, Brown Bear-- the sheep has no horns and the cat is a "girly" colour so perhaps you read them as female, but do you look at the rest of the animals and think "girl bear", "girl dog", or do you automatically assume they're all male?

Have you ever told your child before killing an earwig that you're going to "squash her?" Have you ever stopped to consider the actual natural functional relationships of creatures such as ants and bees (most worker bees and ants are sterile females) before calling them a him? Alternatively, do you ever call an animal pictured with it's offspring the "daddy"? (I had a funny moment today where my son was doing a puzzle, which featured a green-headed duck with four ducklings. Given it's plumage, it was obviously male, but up until recently I would never have called it the daddy, and I would not be even slightly surprised if the original puzzle-maker intended it to be a mummy.) *

So, like with canting, after having described what the term means, I want to talk about why it's a problem.

I've mentioned in earlier posts the ratio of male leads to female leads in children's media. I've also talked about why it troubles me that toys relating to family life are strongly marketed to girls as if family life is somehow not "manly".

These are, I think, two of the main problems with the default male phenomenon.** In general, it's fair to say that male-female populations are about 50-50 in the world, human as well as the animal kingdom. So what message do we communicate about one gender if we consistently leave it out? I would argue the message is like, "Males do more, experience more, and take up more space in the world than females," which, essentially, is tantamount to saying "Males matter more than females." I don't think it is a stretch to interpret it as such. If every creature you encounter is assumed to be male, unless there are very specific indications to the contrary (and sometimes even if there are!), you set up a world where male perspective will be more valued than female, because you've been subtly trained to believe that males are just more there. I believe this feeds into the imbalances of gender leads in our culture's storytelling, and probably strongly contributes to the idea that male's stories are universally representative, while female's stories are just for female audiences. I believe this feeds into the ways our language and cultural predilections make things coded "female" shameful for boys to associate themselves with.

Now, I don't think that the complementarian church as a whole actually holds the stated belief that "Males matter more than females." Indeed, thankfully, I don't know anybody who would say that. But here's the thing: there's a degree to which our actions are going to shout down our words. If we are adamantly insisting that complementarianism is about "equal but different" and supporting the idea that God created us for two different roles in churches and marriages, but that both genders are both image-bearers and equals before God and His law, we need to be careful. We need to be careful that we're not knee-jerking against feminism and thus ignoring ways in which we are not treating women as equal. And if we're defaulting to assuming male presence is more prevalent and male perspective more weighty, then I'm afraid we are not living up to our "equal but different" belief, and are thus undermining the credibility of our complementarianism.

The other side of problem with the default male phenomenon is how it limits girls. Consider how it must affect little girls to be taught by implication from the time that they are infants that if they're not either practicing some form of domestic, maternal instinct or displaying a specific set of beauty ideals (long hair and eyelashes, pink accessories, skirts), they're not a proper, recogniseable girl. Is it any wonder that our daughters are growing up beauty-obsessed, wearing make-up younger and younger, buying into a toxic beauty culture of disordered eating, insecurity, and self-alteration? Is it any wonder that there are still areas of interest that are predominantly seen as not really "for" girls (like STEM studies, politics, athletics)? The church ought to be a safe haven from a culture that teaches girls their beauty and marriageability trumps their brains, their hearts, their ministry giftings, and their talents in importance, and I believe we can be that while still holding marriage in esteem for both genders and proudly holding firm to a belief in different roles in the church and in marriages. And maybe it starts with sprinkling in a few 'she's' with all the 'he's' in your daily pronoun use...

*This post gives some examples from media of creatures interpreted by filmmakers as male despite nature pointing to them being female.
**Although, more seriously, in things like crash test dummies (based on average male figures) and heart attack symptoms (which actually present differently in women), the default male can lead to unnecessary female deaths.

Film Review: Man of Steel

Role of Women: To be honest, it's hard to tell where the portrayals of women in Man of Steel were flat or stereotypical because they were women, and when they were just flat and stereotypical because they were characters in Man of Steel, since one of the main criticisms I have of the film as a whole is the one-dimensional, underdeveloped characters. They had the usual suspects of hardboiled/tough girls-- Captain Farris, Faora, Lois Lane (who claims she gets writer's block if she's not wearing a flak jacket)-- and tender, motherly types-- Martha Kent, Lara-- none of whom ever really did anything to catch you off guard. The angst, suspense, and tension mostly lay between male characters. Clark's human father teaches him to believe in but also hide himself, leading to a relationship with currents of respect and resentment mingled; Clark's human mother gardens and has dogs and believes the best of Clark no matter what. Jor-El gets all the action in challenging the Kryptonians' self-destructive genetic selection and pointing out the end of the world, while Lara gets to be indecisive and mostly passive/background; do you really think she went through a natural pregnancy and childbirth because she was sort of thinking maybe Jor-El had a point about the end of Krypton? I have a feeling she would've needed a lot more courage and conviction than portrayed. It would've been pretty awesome if Lara had've been uploaded onto the ship as well as/instead of Jor-El, and really there's no reason why she needn't have been. Just Hollywood defaults.

Sexualization of Women: Why do filmmakers insist on putting women who need to run in ridiculous platform heels? Don't they realise that in real life either the heel would break, or the character's ankle? Other than that, though, they did fine on this front, with one exception-- when they had Captain Farris remark with a girlish smirk to her commanding officer that she thought Superman was "kinda hot". Considering the grit and dedication she would've had to display to get to her current position, is that really the sort of thing she would be likely to say to an authority figure in her job? Even if she did think that, I humbly suggest she would've had the self-control to keep it to herself. It just made her seem like a silly schoolgirl instead of a hardworking woman. 

Bechdel Test Pass/Fail: Iffy. Lois and Jenny have an exchange ("Why is the printer out of toner?" "You have got to come see this...") which is not in the strictest terms a conversation; more just two unrelated sentences tossed at each other. Given the relatively higher number of female characters in this film, you'd think they could've managed to give at least two of them meaningful dialogue that didn't directly involve a male. 

Male:Female Ratio: In terms of presence of women, this film did pretty well (especially compared with its counterparts in the same genre which often feature only one or two token females). Pretty well all the male main characters had a female counterpart-- Zod and his second-in-command Faora, Clark and Lois, Jor-El and Lara, Clark's parents,  Perry and Jenny, General Swanwick and Captain Farris. It is telling, however, that every single male main character holds the role of authority or action, while the females really are 'counterparts': second-in-commands, supporters, love interests, and underlings.

So, overall, not awful like some superhero movies can be (don't get me started on Iron Man 3...) but by now means a shining star either.

Elementary-School Girls and Math Anxiety

Just read a really interesting article in the Smithsonian on how math-anxious, female, early elementary school teachers pass on their math-anxiety to their female students. It's a really short article, so why don't you click through and read it?

I'm particularly interested in this as I begin researching how to homeschool my children. Up until about a year ago, I would've fit the definition of math anxiety given in the article: "When someone has math anxiety, they can master mathematical concepts but tend to avoid the subject and perform more poorly than their abilities allow." I'm a fairly intelligent human being, passed my SATs no problem, and generally was able to find most subjects interesting and engaging, from different types of genetic mutations to how to write a sestina to basic CSS, and everything in between. Why did math feel like such a brick wall to me?

There were probably a lot of things at play, but two points stand out to me as notable:
1) My own math teacher (my mother) was and is pretty math-anxious, while my dad is pretty good at math. Of my siblings and I, only my brother came out of secondary school feeling mathematically adept. I'm not trying to blame my parents at all, but I do think it likely that some of the subconscious stereotyping as described in the Smithsonian article was playing out in our family. Obviously, as with the teachers in the article, there is no intention of raising girls who performed worse in math than the boys, but I think it's reasonable to suppose some of those preconceptions about girls being worse at math than boys were communicated through my own parents' educations (after all, when they were being educated in the seventies and eighties, it was by teachers who would've been educated even earlier-- at a time when girls and STEM studies were pretty well considered totally incompatible.)
2) The other skill-area in my life where I felt that notion of a brick wall and not being able to improve myself was sports. I always thought I was just bad at sports, but that it didn't matter because I was a girl and didn't need to play sports-- that was for boys. As an adult, I am much more able to see the joy and use of using your body well, and once I'm not pregnant/recovering from a pregnancy anymore, I do hope to engage in sports much more. So I definitely think I was self-stereotyping, discouraged in what could've been of great interest and benefit to me by pre-conceived notions of what I could and should be good at.

So coming back to the research I'm doing for homeschooling my own children: even before reading the Smithsonian article, I had come to the conclusion that believing your brain isn't capable of doing a certain skill is a fabulous way to cripple your brain in doing it, so I knew I wanted to pass on to my children the joy of math, logic, and analytical thinking as surely as my own mother did such a wonderful job passing on the love of reading, poetry, and music. I am more sure than ever now that I want to be careful not to let my (potential future) daughters think that math is for boys, and that one way I need to do that is by entering joyfully into math myself.

What about you? How do you think your math teachers affected your ability to learn math? Have you thought about how you will teach math to your kids (real or potential future)?

"Ladies' Man..."

This is another exhortation to think about how the language we use reinforces worldly views of gender versus Scriptural views; a bit of a companion post to my earlier post, "Ladies..."

Ok, well, let's start with some frank, if perhaps somewhat biased, opinions: I think my son is an absolute looker. I mean, he looks like his Daddy, and his Daddy is a babe, so how could he not be, but something about his fluffy blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and miles-long dark eyelashes seem to move other people to agree with me. People are always stopping us in the grocery store and such to tell him what lovely eyes he has. And hey, my mama-heart likes seeing my son praised, although I know his outward appearance is superficial and will in no way determine whether he is a man after God's heart-- which is what really matters. But it's nice to see my son making a favourable impression.

However.

There's something a lot of people (unfortunately, some of them believers) tend to say to him that really troubles me; something along the lines of, "You're going to be quite the ladies' man, aren't you?" or "The girls will just love you." Lest you think I've just misplaced my sense of humour over what people obviously intend as a lighthearted remark, let me unpack why this troubles me.

If this was an isolated cultural incident, maybe it could be shrugged off as 'no big deal' or 'just a joke'. But it's not; far from it. One of the most common ways our culture warps God's ideal of masculinity is by promoting the ladies' man as a paragon of manliness. If you need convincing that this is a culturally-prevalent attitude, check out two places where cultural norms are not usually challenged: superhero movies and TV commercials. Watch an Axe commercial*. Or a beer commercial, or a shaving commercial, or pretty well any commercial that airs during a sporting event. Picture Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark's glamorous millionaire lifestyle, traveling everywhere with a girl on either arm. Alternately, think of Steve Rogers (Captain America) prior to his enhancement: as a runty, unhealthy (i.e. not very masculine) guy, he can't get one girl interested in him, while his handsome, broad-shouldered friend can easily pick up two. The message is clear, and it is everywhere: if you're really manly, you can get lots of girls to sleep with you-- and you'll want to.

Is this what people are thinking when they compliment my son by predicting he'll be sexually appealing lots of women? I hope not-- I hope they're just not thinking at all, not realising that they're predicting my one-year-old will be sexually appealing to lots of women (because if they are thinking in that language, that's thoroughly creepy). But the fact that it's unthinking doesn't change the fact that they're planting those seeds in his mind, adding their weight to a cultural barrage that would push my son into thinking uncommitted, unchecked sleeping around is glamourous and desirable.

Now think of Christ. Think of his singleminded, self-sacrificing pursuit of his one Bride. Think of the sober, committed man of God called to lead the churches and how his faithfulness to his wife is among the first qualifications given in 1 Timothy 3. Think of Proverbs 5, pleadingly praising the blessedness of enjoying one committed relationship and using words like "scattered" "folly" and "led astray" in relation to this "ladies' man" ideal our culture promotes. Do we really believe that following God's statutes is a delight and "riches", as Psalm 119 puts it? Then let us not use the language of rebellious ignorance to God's way in our praise of little children!

What I would love is if people instead said, "You're going to make one woman very happy."** That's a goal I would like him to have. Here's the thing: there is absolutely nothing wrong-- indeed, there's plenty right-- with a godly man who chooses not to pursue any romantic relationship at all until he finds a woman who not only attracts him with her beauty, but also impresses him with her character, nothing wrong with waiting for God's timing, and most of all, nothing wrong with being a guy who just never really interests most girls he meets, until he meets the one woman whom God intended for him, who can see parts of him that others couldn't, and who will appreciate him as a whole man, body, mind, and spirit-- not just a hottie good for a one-night stand.***

I would like to talk at a later point about another harmful cultural warping of masculinity/femininity, in which purity is seen as a more feminine virtue, but for now I think I'll leave you with this plea: next time you bend down to a little boy's level and let him know you think he's great, can you take a second and check that that encouragement will help him think of Christlikeness as more desirable than being liked by lots of women?


*I was going to link an Axe commercial but they are just too offensive, especially coming from the same company who owns Dove and purports to be promoting respect for women and their natural beauty. Basically, picture dozens of stick-thin but busty girls in the tiniest bikinis possible, fighting and racing each other to get to one man. Tagline, "Spray more, get more." Phallic symbol duly included.)
** Or, even better, left his future sex appeal off the table entirely?
***This works the same way for girls, by the way. I wish there was a way to reassure all the single girls I know that it doesn't matter two straws if there's no one interested in them right now. I was never the object of much male attention before I caught Steven's eye, and darned if I can think of one way that has made our love the less sweet or our marriage the less wonderfully fulfilling.