Interesting Thoughts About Christian Views on Sex and Gender Roles at Sunshine Mary blog – also some obnoxious, totally wrong views
Please understand that I do not always completely agree with all views of every blog or site I link to, and that would be the case here.
I do not have an irrational hatred or suspicion of secular feminism, for example, and that this Sunshine Mary person links to the Vox Popli blog, suggests that she might – but she has a few points in some posts I related to.
I am not a secular feminist, btw, and disagree with some of their views, eg,
- (Link): Inconsistency on Feminist Site – Choices Have Consequences
(Link): On Miley Cyrus Being Sexual at 2013 VMAs – Hypocrisy of Secular Feminists
As I’ve discussed before on this blog, Christians claim to be alarmed at the deficit of marriage among Christians.
Conservative Christians claim to support sexual purity and virginity, but in reality, they do not (see my prior blog post: (Link): No, Christians Do NOT Support or Idolize Virginity and Celibacy, they attack both)
I, like “Sunshine Mary,” do not understand why so many Christians keep maintaining stereotypes and views that are either untrue, stupid, or counter-productive to values Christians say they support (such as marriage and procreation).
Here are thoughts on this by Sunshine Mary:
✱ (Link): Why do Christian women perpetuate myths about attraction?
In that post, Sunshine Mary discusses attending class at her church where the people in the class gave the usual Christian stereotypes about sex and marriage:
- This past week was rough because the topic was sex. I just could not believe that all the things we joke about Christians saying were actually said.
For example, one young woman actually used the women-are-like-a-crockpot crock of crap.
This is not true, in case anyone has not figured it out yet.
It does not take a woman, Christian or otherwise, eight hours to become sexually aroused.
The idea that a man needs to spend eight hours giving her tender kisses, helping with the laundry, telling her how much he loves her, and bringing her flowers just to turn her on is wrong. She may like all those things very much, they may be nice things to do, but they will not make her sexually aroused.
Why do Christian women keep telling men this? It’s like we’ve all succumbed to mass delusion.
I don’t support Sunshine Mary’s implication that because some survey or another she read says that males who do more housework get less sex than males who do not, that one should conclude from this that this necessarily means males should be permitted to abdicate from housework, or that it makes such males more desirable: sorry, Sunshine Mary, not in my universe.
Sunshine Mary goes on to say,
- Why do Christian women perpetuate these myths about attraction, thereby assuring themselves and their husbands a frustrating sex life? It’s certainly not Biblical.
We could be really jaded and say they are just lying, but I don’t think that is the reason.
It’s more that we hear this over and over again – that we want men who are always tender, gentle, and sensitive, that we need a deep emotional connection, lots of intimate conversation, and plenty of sweet romance before we can feel sexual attraction.
This advice is pervasive: it’s on every Christian website, in our movies, magazines, sermons, and books, and thus we just come to believe it.
Given that Sunshine Mary talks about swallowing red pills (and that she links to Vox’s blog), I take it that she is supportive of the sexist “men’s rights” groups. She writes,
- I seem to have picked up a lot of new readers as of late, and if you are new around this corner of the web, you may have seen the phrase “the blue pill”. What this means is believing lies and choosing to ignore the truth because society has deemed the truth inconvenient or unacceptable for some reason.
Visit (Link): THE BLUE PILL on Reddit for an anti-dote to the men’s rights bull shit; they satire the Red Pill, ‘wah wah, society is so unfair to men, and feminism is at the root of all evil in the world, waaah!!!!’ groups.
Sunshine Mary writes,
- We are attracted to men who are leading and who quash challenges to their leadership.
It depends on what she means by that.
I personally would not want to be in a relationship with a man who falls on too far either side of the spectrum:
I don’t want a doormat (which is what she seems to be describing, but I don’t want to date a stoic, only cares about himself and what he wants never considers my feelings and needs Marlboro Man, either.
Sunshine Mary writes,
- Donalgraeme explains what women are attracted to: Looks, Athleticism, Money, Power, and Status – in other words, women respond with sexual attraction to men who demonstrate some degree of physical and social dominance.
Who the fuck is Donalgraeme and why should I care what he thinks?
Sunshine Mary writes,
- Just as teaching the lie of mutual submission in the marital hierarchy does not help us, so too teaching lies about what generates attraction between spouses does not help us.
Oh, Sunshine Mary wants to be dominated by her man, kinky – but that’s what SHE wants. I don’t want that.
Sunshine Mary must totally be into Doug Wilson, who wrote (in a criticism, or shall we surmise, bubbling- under- the- surface- frustration- and- jealousy, of Christian wives’ fandom of the Fifty Shades of Grey erotica novel):
- (by Doug Wilson):
When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants.
A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.
By the way, that is the same idiotic Doug Wilson who believes people, including Christians, cannot go without sex for three minutes:
(Link): Douglas Wilson and Christian Response FAIL to Sexual Sin – No Body Can Resist Sex – supposedly – Re Celibacy
See also:
- (Link): The Gospel Coalition, sex, and subordination
(Link): Marital Rape? Doug Wilson on Dominance and Submission in the Marriage Bed
From Sunshine Mary’s page,
✱ (Link): Feminism and the Progressive Principle: Christian edition
According to Sunshine Mary’s comments on that page, the Bible forbids women from teaching or preaching, as in all women, for all time – no, it does not.
Anyway, what I did find interesting on that page were these comments (I’m not saying I necessarily agree with all these views, only that I find some of them interesting):
- (by Sunshine Mary):
Now let’s consider the elite covert Christian feminists.
Men:
Alpha male pastors, usually of mega-churches, like Mark Driscoll, who aren’t intentionally feminist but who enable feminism by training a legion of Christian White Knights to save women from suffering any temporal consequences for their terrible life choices.
Also, some alpha male pastors, though it may not have been their original plan to do so, end up cultivating a nice little harem for themselves within their churches, if the number of pastors who eventually get caught in sex scandals is any indication.
Women:
These women are truly wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are often pro-life themselves, usually married mothers, but they are eager to remove from women all stigma associated with sexual sin.
I’ve noticed many of these women are professors at Christian colleges (example: Karen Swallow Prior, a Christian professor, explains that God’s purity standard is impossible to meet and calls for a more “realistic” (i.e. slutty) definition of purity than virginity).
They masquerade as conservative or traditional women, but they are not. Additionally, some mega-pastors’ wives who like their cushy lifestyle and high status might fit here.
The Driscoll commentary was just interesting, to suggest that a Cave Man such as Driscoll is aiding feminists in some manner.
Where Sunshine Mary does get things (partially) correct is under the second section, where she opines that even conservative Christians today don’t really support sexual purity.
Sunshine Mary also has a long section farther down that page pointing out how churches support unmarried women who are fornicating and having multiple children out of wedlock, while the single women who are remaining chaste are being hosed by the whole system -that is most certainly true and a point I’ve raised on my own blog in months past.
Here is what Sunshine Mary has to say in regards to churches churning out continual support for fornicators while NOT rewarding women who are remaining chaste:
- A single mother is invited into the church or begins attending after receiving charity through the church.
People bend over backward to help her and make her feel welcome.
Her children may have behavior issues but everyone tolerates it because they feel sorry for them.
She often seems very sweet at first and sometimes begins volunteering in the nursery; during services, she closes her eyes and raises her hands during the Christian rock band performance worship time. So spiritual.
You give her a pre-paid gas card because you feel moved by God to help her. Other people buy her diapers. You all feel good; another woman saved! And then it happens.
Eight months after she began attending your church, having accepted Jesus and gotten baptized, you notice… her belly is starting to rise again.
Your first feeling might be one of outrage. You might feel that you were being taken advantage of. You thought you were helping her turn her life around, but this woman was clearly only playing at repentance and using everyone.
Yet no one makes a fuss; nice married ladies sign up to throw her (yet another) baby shower on their husbands’ dime; after all, didn’t Christianity Today tell us to Hold Baby Showers, Not Political Debates when faced with an unrepentant baby-mama-to-be?
Oh, and give her a parking space right up front so that she feels extra special.
Regarding Sunshine Mary’s comments above about how churches tend to “reward” fornicators, I agree.
I’ve posted about it before and myself and another person discussed that very situation in the comments here:
(Link): To Get Any Attention or Support from a Church These Days you Have To Be A Stripper, Prostitute, or Orphan
And (by the way, I am above average-looking; not sure why Sunshine Mary assumes hot, attractive, single women with traditional values have an easy time landing a spouse):
- (c) The traditional people getting robbed of value
Women: average or even plain-looking Christian women, who are trying hard to maintain their chastity while hoping to marry, suffer. Now that they’ve got slutty baby mamas and loosened sexual morals to contend with, it’s more difficult for them to find husbands. They don’t catch anyone’s eye and they can’t use sex to reel anyone in.
From another post at Sunshine’s Mary blog:
✱ (Link): Evangelical women, also known as covert Christo-feminists, rail against slut-shaming.
This too is an odd development I’ve noticed the past couple of years, and I started calling it “Virgin Shaming” or “Celibate Shaming”.
I’m over 40, never married, and a virgin (and I am physically attractive: I am not single this long due to being fat or ugly).
I heard as a teen Christian that Christians support virginity until marriage, but as I got to my mid 30s, I began noticing that conservative and emergent Christians have been ATTACKING virginity (see links much father below for examples on that).
Here are excerpts from Sunshine Mary’s page,
“Evangelical women, also known as covert Christo-feminists, rail against slut-shaming”
- … On the issue of sex, there is no longer a difference at all. Just as secular feminists rail against slut-shaming, Christian women are beginning to rail more publicly against “purity” culture, with purity culture simply being the Biblical mandate for a woman to maintain her virginity before marriage.
I would only also clarify that the Bible also expects a MEN to “maintain his virginity before marriage.”
Continuing with Sunshine Mary’s commentary:
- … [Christians] instead seem intent on making sure Christian girls face no judgment in the church for their sexual promiscuity.
In our present day, young unmarried Christian women are generally sexually active just like secular women are, with the only difference being that they have traditionally faced mild social censure from the church.
If conservative evangelical women have their way, these young women will be freed from that one last, small constraint.
Sunshine Mary then goes on to say one reason Christians need to keep reminding women (why just women? Why is she not also discussing that the Bible also teaches that males are to remain virgins until marriage?) that there are earthly consequences for pre- marital sex, and to that I say, to an extent, bull shit. I have blogged on that here:
- (Link): Older Christian Singles and Celibacy (There Are No Consequences for Sexual Sin)
and
(Link): Cheating Married Christian Women and Lessons I Take Away – and Being a Virgin Does Not Guarantee God will Send You a Spouse
Sorry, Sunshine Mary, but there really are little to no repercussions to pre-marital sex, and you’re hearing this from a 40-something year old virgin who lived by the biblical teachings about sexual ethics.
I have personally seen too many testimonies by Christian females (and some males) over the years who admit to having been total horn dogs slutto’s in their youths or twenties (or even later in age than that) who did not suffer fall outs or negative outcomes from it.
If Sunshine Mary dropped the patriarchy- supportive, men’s right horse shit, irrational- hatred- and- paranoia- for- any- and- all- forms- of- feminism, if she dropped the superficial, simplistic ‘blame feminism for anything and everything wrong with culture and relationships today,’ her blog would be the better for it.
>>>>> Posts on my blog about some of these topics:
(Link): Why So Much Fornication – Because Christians Have No Expectation of Sexual Purity
(Link): Christians and Cheap Grace Concerning Sexual Sin
(Link): How Christians Keep Christians Single (part 3) – Restrictive Gender Roles Taught as Biblical
(Link): Superman, Man Candy -and- Christian Women Are Visual And Enjoy Looking At Built, Hot, Sexy Men
(Link): There is No Such Thing as a Gift of Singleness or Gift of Celibacy or A Calling To Either One
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