Offended by the title? Squirming a little at the use of the word “erect”? Really?
It’s either because you live in a world where the sexually penetrative is rarely discussed publicly, and, rarer still, used as a battering ram against “bed-wetting feminists” who object to Doug Wilson’s assertion that the male’s penetrative and the woman’s receptive roles in heterosexual intercourse illustrates the Creator’s intention that men be initiators and women be receivers — that men start the act of initiative penetration and the woman cooperate in it by passively receiving the penetrative instrument — or you’re simply overwhelmed by the three-day long imbroglio Wilson has once again cheerfully started in online Christian circles.
Sorry. He “initiated it,” and I understand if, male or female, you’re tired of receiving it, either because of the frightfully phallocentric theology, or the lilly-livered lugubriousness of the ladies who take him on.
Check out Blog and Mablog and the various links therein and from without; I imagine you’ll understand the nature of the firestorm he’s gleefully ignited with the long, strong, torch of ill-advised, poorly-reasoned, and about as effing indefensible hermeneutics as anything he’s done. That includes last year’s marrying off a desperate young girl to a serial pedophile, who, by virtue of his status as a serial pedophile, is not a man whose sexual preference is for anyone other than children. Really hard to top that one, and almost unfathomably hard to top the malevolent stench of “Southern Slavery As It Was,” which lauded slavery as Biblical, benevolent, and beneficial to Black slaves.
But I’m going to get off my fainting couch — the place the Potentate of Prickly Pomposity regularly consigns “feminists” who, while saying that he surely doesn’t intend to use what some women, this one included, see as “rape language” in reducing the sexual act, or one of the sexual acts, or even the most desultory of the possible sexual acts, as a conqueror/conquered game — and respond in a series of posts, beginning with:
A Primer On Why You May Reduce To Impotence Any Expectations That Doug Wilson Will Ever Respond To Criticism From A Woman:
1. Doug Wilson, in the ten years I’ve followed his media empire here, has never, as far as I’ve ever seen, apologized, acknowledged error, or backed off from even the most factually erroneous, snarkily inflammatory, and blatantly inane pronouncements he’s made on the very many subjects in which he is an unimpeachable expert.
2. Because he presumes that women who do disagree with him in public are just disgruntled, unloved feminists, their complaints, particularly, as we see now, in areas that are especially in their provenance as women, are silly — again, the products of “bed-wetting” hysterics who, either from their fainting couches or their rugby scrums, simply cannot understand complicated metaphor. Or clear metaphor, or any other Deep Thoughts he has.
3. Wilson, who famously has said, in reference to gender equity in the military, that a nation defended by its women is a nation not worthy of defense, is the subject of frenzied-but-feminine-furor from his wife, Nancy, and his daughters, Bekah and Rachel, who together blog under Femina. I wonder, as the smelling salts clear, if a man defended by his girls meets his own standard of a man worth defending.
4. Regardless, Douglas Wilson as a man of integrity, a minister of any demonstrable competence and compassion, and a purveyor of a publishing and darn-close-to educational empire, is a man not worthy of defense and is, I believe, a man instead worthy of the harshest of rebukes and greatly in need of the Holy Spirit.
5. In joining those complementarians who see the presumed, eternal subordination of Jesus Christ, apart from the Incarnation, to the (non-metaphorical) Father in the economy of the Trinity and, as such, see the Savior as a model for the “ontologically equal, functionally different” (read “subordinate”) role of women, he errs in his understanding of the Trinity by wrongly using it as a defense of patriarchy.
6. Allowing himself, then, carte blanche to perpetuate the pillared mansions of patriarchy on the shifting sands of wrongful, un-Orthodox theology, he fills that structure with notions of sexual intercourse that, while correctly — albeit mechanically — describing the what-goes-where of coitus, use language that is uncomfortably close to the dominant/receptor, active initiator/passive recipient, and conqueror/conquered language that ought to make all women wince, and that makes rape victims, this woman again included, shudder.
7. We shudder not because he has the power to flood us with painful memories of our attacks, but because his language perpetuates the top/down, power-wielding, take/give up nature of sex and gender relations that encourages — even if he doesn’t intend it to — a perverted view of sexual intimacy, mutuality, and the beauty of unbridled marital passion.
8. My having just told you that he doesn’t intend to promote “rape language” won’t matter to him, because when another Christian feminist who objected to his language and asked him to apologize made it abundantly clear that she was certain he didn’t intend to promote sexual violence, he reduced her to one of the silly little feminists who aren’t smart enough to understand the penetrating analyses he offers. He thinks even less of me.
9. That his supporters would suggest on line that his apology would be like Jesus apologizing for “hurting people’s feelings” by, say, turning over the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple, or “rejoice” that Papa’s being “slandered” by the ignorami — but have not evidenced empathy, concern, or even civility to those for whom the “taker” and “taken” images some women draw from his words ought to be proof that the Holy Spirit is not Lord in the patriarchal, complementarian, Reformed circles Wilson travels in. Neither is even the most tender shoot of perspective or rationality.
10. A simple apology acknowledging that his words unintentionally offended, even frightened, some women, many of whom are his sisters in Christ, is beyond him. That he could make the same points — points I still believe are not correctly drawn from Scripture — and even amplify upon them after righteously making peace with his audience is too threatening to a man so desperately needy of adulation.
This will continue — from him, throughout the Christian blogosphere, and most certainly on this little corner of it from me. In coming days, I’ll review the “care for women” he showed to the woman now married to a pedophile, to the adolescent raped by one of his favorite Greyfriars students, and other examples of male power unleashed and unbuckled against his sisters in Jesus Christ.
For now, though, I’ll end with this: That man can sure read a lot into a penis.