Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 2
Brad discusses the strange contradiction at the heart of purity culture's vision of masculinity: You are a sexual savage that has a near uncontrollable libido and that is just how God made you. And you, the uncontrollable animal, should be the leader of church, family, and society. This, among other things, is a form of rape culture. It's also an infantilizing view of masculinity and sexuality that hurts men . . . and women.
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What's up, y'all?
Welcome to Mild at Heart, our series on masculinity, love, and sex after purity culture.
I'm Brad Onishi, co-host of Straight White American Jesus, and today is our second episode, and I want to talk about the intersection of masculinity and sexuality and purity culture and how it creates paradoxes and cruelties.
And so, let me sort of explain what I mean by that.
Last time I gave you a little bit of my story.
I talked about how I converted at age 14 and I have a kind of before and an after when it comes to purity culture and evangelicalism and all of those things.
One of the first things that I learned in evangelicalism is that there's a certain way of understanding what it means to be a man, okay?
So there's a certain conception of Masculinity.
I remember being in a ninth grade Sunday school class about four or five months after I had converted and we had this Sunday school teacher named I'll call him Mike and Mike was a former linebacker a very sort of Muscular big dude.
He seemed one of those people that's like seems like he's as wide as he is tall handlebar mustache And just one of those guys that, you know, when you're a ninth grade boy, you realize this is not the guy to mess with, even though he's, you know, 40 something years old or whatever, right?
And I remember him asking us, you know, in our little Sunday school class about, you know, what to do.
Let me back up.
What it would mean to show Christian virtue in our daily lives.
And he said, you know, a lot of you guys play sports.
I know that.
So how do you show your Christian virtue when you're playing sports?
I was a convert.
I was very zealous.
I was very enthusiastic.
And so, you know, I raised my hand and I'm like, well, I think we could be really kind and gentle and forgiving and we could sort of be a teammate and an opponent who really embodies Christ's kind of love and care.
And he's like, yeah, that's good.
I mean, yeah, good.
You know, what's really best is to play as hard as you can, go as hard as you can, do everything you can to win and really sort of vanquish your opponent and show your team and yourself and anyone who's watching that you're the kind of man and you're the kind of player that never gives up, that gives all he can and will do anything right for his team and for himself to be victorious.
And in essence, he was saying, you know, look, gentleness, kindness, all those kind of virtues that you might hear about.
Those are great.
But what's really important, okay, is aggression, is winning, is victory, that kind of stuff, okay?
What I took from that is a certain understanding of what it meant to be, you know, a godly man, right?
So on that side of things, hang with me here, we have a sense of masculinity, right?
That if you're going to be the right kind of man in the Christian context, then you're going to be the kind of man who is victorious and aggressive and assertive.
Now, this was, of course, backed up by a lot of the books that were circulating in my life and I know a lot of you know all about.
So, one of them is Wild at Heart, okay?
And this is where we get the kind of pun for the name for this series.
So, in Wild at Heart, John Eldredge says that men are adventurers who are born to be rescuers, to be conquerors, and to save the princess from the burning castle and from the attacking demon, okay?
James Dobson, one of the founders, of course, of the family values discourse and one of the most influential evangelicals of the 20th century, says that young boys are, from the time they're toddlers, are, you know, what he calls kamikaze pilots, which there's problems there with that whole thing, but they like to kick cans, attack animals, destroy things, jump off of buildings, blah, blah, blah, right?
He has the image of the boy and then the man as this aggressive, assertive, and in many ways out of control being who is made for dominance, okay?
So we have these ideas, right?
What does it mean to be a man, according to my Sunday school teacher, to John Eldridge, to James Dobson?
According to them, it means to be a conqueror, a victor, somebody who is a rescuer, somebody who's a earthly savior, in some sense, and somebody who's always looking for an adventure and, left to his own devices, is going to be aggressive in a way that's bordering on destructive.
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