Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 5
Brad discusses the fact that masculinity is often a performance for other men. Men fear what other men think of them, creating the need to constantly live up to an ideal of masculinity that is neither rooted in reality, nor healthy. Purity culture exacerbates this phenomenon by setting up God as the Ultimate Masculinity who every man mimics, but cannot live up to. This leads to anxiety and insecurity under the scrutiny of what Brad calls "the masculine gaze."
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What's up y'all?
Welcome back to Mild at Heart, our series here at Straight White American Jesus about masculinity, love, and sex after purity culture.
My name is Brad Onishi.
On our last installment, I talked about my experience leaving the Church and leaving Christianity and how that had Profound effect on my ability to form romantic relationships and and physical and intimate relationships afterward I want to expound on that a little bit.
So last time I talked about you know this kind of very brief but in my mind kind of meaningful relationship with somebody I call Kelly and Realizing that Kelly was not a Christian first time I'd ever sort of gone on a date or or had a conversation with anyone who is not a Christian and That over the course of you know
Meeting up with her, going on walks and meeting for coffee dates and stuff like this, I started to question what I had to offer, because we were not in a Christian context, so she didn't think of me as this Christian man who had Christian virtues.
And yet on the other hand, in my head, I had nothing to offer her from a non-Christian or secular perspective because I had been taught that to be a man in the world meant to have money and power and status and big muscles and rock star looks and all that kind of stuff.
So I felt stuck between two models of masculinity that didn't work for me.
And that made me feel as if I really was quite worthless and quite, you know, just in a bad place in terms of my ability to form relationships and to meet new people.
This brings me to some writing by Michael S. Kimmel, who is a historian and somebody who's just written a lot about masculinity in the United States.
But there's a couple of passages that I think can kind of help us understand some of what I talked about last time in a more theoretical perspective.
Here's what Kimmel says.
We are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men.
Other men watch us, rank us, grant our acceptance into the realm of manhood.
Manhood is demonstrated for other men's approval.
It is other men who evaluate the performance.
You know, I think we hear that kind of idea a lot of times when it comes to femininity and womanhood.
We hear the idea that women police each other and women often are the ones who are determining who is Embodying the right kinds of virtues and the right kinds of characteristics.
But I think we need to talk about that more in depth when it comes to masculinity and manhood.
So here's what hits me when I hear that.
We are under the constant careful scrutiny of other men.
So when I go back to being an evangelical and when I go back to being in purity culture and so on, here's what I think of, okay?
I think of a couple things.
One, I think of a weird dichotomy between God the Father and Jesus.
So hang with me for a second.
I think, for me, Jesus always represented something different.
Jesus was wise and patient, resistant to anger and to volatility.
Jesus yielded strength and influence through his words, through his actions in service of others.
To me, that was different than what I often learned about God the Father, okay?
And oftentimes, the virtues of God the Father were prioritized over the virtues of Jesus.
What do I mean by that?
Well, when I think about some of the lessons I learned about being a man in Sunday school and other places, it was the God of Joshua who waged war.
on an entire people group in order to give the Israelites the land of Canaan.
It was God the Father who, in the book of Ezekiel, and also in the book of Hosea, is willing to call Israel an adulteress and a whore because she has worshipped other gods, and as a result exposes her, abuses her in public, and humiliates her.
When I think of, you know, the prize sort of characteristics, it comes from this aggressive, warring vision of God as ultimate masculinity.
And I've written about this, I think, you know, some of you might have seen my writing about this at the Revealer and other places.
But God the Father seemed to be this ultimate masculinity that was always watching over us and that we had to embody.
And then impurity culture teaches you that as a man you're the leader, you're the authority, and in many ways you're the representative of God on earth, you're the voice of God to your family.
And so you think, okay, what does it mean to be a man?
It means to be something like that warring, aggressive, you know, at times violent, at times volatile, certainly angry, certainly a person or a character with no control over their emotions, who exercises authority in that vein.
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