What Is Her.meneutics?
The Christianity Today women's blog provides news and analysis from the perspective of evangelical women. We cover news stories and books related to international justice and evangelism, pregnancy and sexual ethics, marriage, parenting, and celibacy, pop culture, health and body image, raising girls, and women in the church and parachurch.Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.
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Why the New Planned Parenthood Controversy Raises Old Questions
The world is waking up to a conflict pro-life women have faced for years.
If you’ve been paying attention to recent events involving Planned Parenthood and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, you probably have whiplash by now.
First, Komen—the world’s best-known breast-cancer-fighting organization—decided to stop giving funds to Planned Parenthood. Two reasons were given: Komen’s policy against supporting organizations under investigation, and the fact that PP does mammogram referrals rather than actual mammograms. Said Komen founder Nancy Brinker, “We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”
That story was greeted with a storm of protest by the pro-choice movement, and loud cheers from pro-lifers. Many of these pro-lifers, who had long been deterred by the PP connection from giving to Komen, started opening their wallets and checkbooks for the organization for the first time.
Then, this morning, Komen released an apology. Their official statement read, in part: “Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. . . . We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”
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Real Women Don't Text Back: How Women Fuel the Man-Boy Problem
Women will help single men grow up by refusing to play by their frat-boy standards.
“Wanna grab a burrito 2nite?”
The melody of the Atlanta symphony’s instruments flowed through the auditorium. I didn’t have high expectations for dating at 23, but a text containing the word burrito wasn’t exactly what I had in mind (and with 1 hour notice). I liked him, but couldn’t escape the mental picture of showing up in a swanky outfit to an establishment where my entrance would be announced in a jubilee of “Welcome to Moe’s!”
The resounding question I hear from many single women today is: “Where have all the good men gone?”
Recently, several articles and statistics have shown that women are making history with career achievements, while men in increasing numbers are seemingly living in a prolonged state of adolescence, sitting back with their buddies and playing video games. Cultural observers note that men are not finding compelling reasons to grow up and marry. The former cultural standards of marriage for sex and children have changed drastically in the past 50 years as one-night stands are celebrated and single parenthood accepted.
And women are only fueling this behavior by excusing it.
The charged response to my husband’s blog post “Real Men Don’t Text”revealed women’s frustration with text messages, video games, and guys who still act like frat boys. Women posted the link on Facebook and wrote things like “Can I get an a-men?” “Men! Read This!” Others wrote in with stories about men who had asked them out through text, broke up with them through text, and asked them to have sex through text. Men were challenged to “grow a pair, pick up your Bible, turn off the video game, and pursue a woman.” But an interesting perspective arose from the clamor of “Amens!” Several men said that while “real men don’t text,” real women don’t text back. They knew, from experience, that a woman wasn’t worth pursuing if she engaged in a text relationship.
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Grieving a Lost Child
In the aftermath of my miscarriage, I cling to the promise of new life.
I inherited the herb garden when we bought our townhouse and quickly learned that it’s virtually impossible to kill rosemary. I’ll prune or trim once a year—maybe—but the truth is it grows on its own—except for one patch of earth between the jasmine and the indestructible citrus tree. The patch gets plenty of sun, and the same amount of attention (or lack thereof) as the rest of the garden, and yet it yields nothing.
Our wedding anniversary is November 2. I love cut flowers, and by mid-October I’m dropping hints. My husband almost always comes through, so each year after the store-bought flowers have wilted, I lay them in the garden over that barren patch of ground, and hope something will grow.
This November, the week before our ninth wedding anniversary, I had a miscarriage. For weeks my body held onto the life we had created, refusing to believe, as did my mind, that it wasn’t a life. So on the advice of my doctor I made an appointment for a “D&C,” as it appeared I wasn’t going to “pass” the baby on my own, or what a nurse casually referred to as the “evidence of conception.”
I was at a writer’s retreat in the Texas Hill Country in September when I realized I was late. For two years the months had come and gone and we wondered if we'd ever get pregnant again (our daughter was born in 2006). I didn’t believe it. I checked and rechecked the dates, then waited another week before casually adding a pregnancy test to my grocery list. When I finally took the test, three actually, each one revealed the same pink plus sign, shadowy like an impressionist watercolor.
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Getting to the Root of Female Masturbation
And the surprising role the church can play in helping women curb addiction to it.
Angela* sits down in my office. After a long conversation about love and God and concerns over family and employment after graduation, she falls silent. I sense she is weighing whether or not to continue the conversation. Then, in a burst of bravado, she plows through her reservations and blurts out: “I struggle with masturbation.”
Earlier this semester, Jasmine*, another student, asked me to mentor her. In our first meeting, she revealed that she has struggled with masturbation since junior high but has managed not to masturbate for two years.
These two lovely young women, from distinctly different backgrounds, seek to be faithful followers of Jesus. For them, and I imagine other women, masturbation is about much more than sheer pleasure.
Do we Christians make much ado about nothing when it comes to masturbation? Many of the college students I work with wonder whether it is a categorical sin, a harmless way to relieve sexual tension and stress, or something in between. Opinions vary among Christian leaders. In an e-booklet aimed at men, Mark Driscoll doesn’t mince any words about masturbation. The Mars Hill pastor states:
What I am not counting as masturbation is the manual stimulation between married people whereby a husband and wife enjoy pleasuring one another's genitals, as taught in the Scriptures, either orally (Song 2:3; 4:12) or with their hands (Song 2:6). I am also not classifying as masturbation self-stimulation done with the blessing and in the presence of one's spouse….What I am referring to by masturbation is self-pleasuring done in isolation that is usually also accompanied with unbiblical lust.If masturbation is done alone and accompanied by lust, then it is a sin, Driscoll maintains.
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Beards: A Hairy Topic in My Household
The cultural and religious significance of the manly mane.
Every year about this time, when the petunias wither, the horse coats thicken, and the dogs have to be coaxed outside in the morning, a certain delicate debate returns to the Prior household. Each year, as if for the first time ever, I inquire of Mr. Prior if he has forgotten to shave. And Mr. Prior answers, without elaboration, in the negative. After a few more unshaven days pass, I ask, as though I don’t already know: “Are you growing a beard?” And Mr. Prior again offers a noncommittal sort of non-response. Finally, after a week or so goes by, I state rather than ask, “You’re growing a beard.” And Mr. Prior, as though we hadn’t discussed this once or twice or twenty times before, responds, “I thought you said you liked my beard,” referring, of course, to last year’s battle of the beard. “Yes, I like how it looks . . .” I explain, trailing off, unconsciously brushing my sensitive cheek with my hand.
Sometimes our facial hair skirmish goes on for a week, sometimes a month. Happily, it always comes to an end once the beard does, too.
Beards have a complicated and varied history. In various times and cultures beards have signified wisdom, manliness, virility, dignity, poverty, propriety, conservatism, and countercultural revolution. Some men’s very identities are tightly wrapped up in their beards: who would Abraham Lincoln be without his legendary beard? Or good ol’ St. Nick without his white whiskers?
Poor men. While the range of personal expression women can achieve through fashion includes bags, shoes, jackets, hairstyle, hair length, hair color, nail polish, earrings, necklaces, scarves, boots, barrettes, bracelets, and lipstick, or the lack of any of these, a man’s range can be pretty much summed up in Dockers or not-Dockers, bowtie or regular tie, and facial hair.
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How 'Modest Is Hottest' Is Hurting Christian Women
What the phrase communicates about female sexuality and bodies.
I remember the first time I heard the words chirped by an eager female college student as we discussed the topic of modesty. Her enthusiasm was mixed with perk and reprimand, producing a tone that landed somewhere between Emily Post and a cheerleader.
To be honest, my initial reaction to "modest is hottest" was amusement. I thought the rhyme was clever and lighthearted, a harmless way to promote the virtue described in 1 Timothy 2:9 and 1 Peter 3:3-4. No harm no foul.
Since then, I’ve heard this mantra of the pure proclaimed many times by young women, Christian artists (including, most famously, CCM singer Rebecca St. James), and Christian leaders. In conversations the phrase always elicits chuckles, but my response has changed over time. I still wholly affirm modesty as a biblical practice for men and women, but now I hesitate to embrace the “modest is hottest” banner. Those three words carry a lot of baggage.
The Christian rhetoric of modesty, rather than offering believers an alternative to the sexual objectification of women, often continues the objectification, just in a different form.
As the Christian stance typically goes, women are to cover their bodies as a mark of spiritual integrity. Too much skin is seen as a distraction that garners inappropriate attention, causes our brothers to stumble, and overshadows our character. Consequently, the female body is perceived as both a temptation and a distraction to the Christian community. The female body is beautiful, but in a dangerous way.
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The God of Awkward Virgins
Can he be trusted?
Watching clips from the new TLC series The Virgin Diaries, which debuted Sunday, is a bit like seeing Borat, The Yes Men, or another feature-length “you’ve been had” films. The show profiles virgins in their late 20s and 30s, most of whom are choosing to save sex — and their first kiss, in one case — for marriage. Debuting as a one-hour special this Sunday, it is casting for future episodes and has already prompted criticism for exploiting its subjects. The subjects kiss awkwardly at the altar, choreograph their first night while swinging and riding teeter-totters at a park, sing songs about abstinence, and discuss “reclaimed virginity” during a backrub chain in one woman’s bedroom. Only the virgin by circumstance is shown in adult settings, like a dinner out with friends.
The trailers don’t specify why the subjects are still virgins, but it’s fair to assume that at least a few of them are waiting because they are Christians. So, if nothing else, The Virgin Diaries is a chance to bravely acknowledge our common ground with the socially awkward and other fellow believers who prove hard to love.
But there are other, subtler ways a show like this challenges us. Even the brief clips in the trailers get into your head as pictures of people who probably got here because they entrusted their bodies to God (at least in some cases). And what kind of God does that conjure in your mind? Be honest.
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Should Christians Take Antidepressants?: A Response
I've never heard Christians protest relieving the pain of childbirth. So why would they protest relieving major depression?
I’m surprised that I’ve never heard a Christian argument against epidurals.
God, we give thee humble thanks for that thou hast been graciously pleased to preserve, through the great pain and peril of Child-birth, this woman thy servant, who desires now to offer her praises and thanksgivings unto thee.If childbirth is now both less perilous and painful than it was when these words were penned in 1789, is the praise and thanksgiving of a woman after childbirth also less fervent and sincere? And should Christians then consider not using epidurals, so as to experience both birth and gratitude more intensely?
I don’t think so. As a doula, I support women who choose to have an unmedicated birth, but not because I think pain is more spiritual. And as a doula (and a mother) I recognize, too, that the pain of unmedicated birth can be helpful: not to mince words, but when you feel the burn as the baby’s head is coming out, you know to slow down the pushing and are less likely to tear.
Sometimes, though, the intensity and length of labor, as well as the health and strength of the mother, make pain relief a wise, merciful, and advisable choice. I’ve heard more than one Christian woman praise God for epidurals.
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The Thin Line between Trafficking and Pornography
Trafficking survivor Jessica Richardson talks about the connection in her own life.
When a pimp approached 16-year-old Jessica Richardson at the Portland diner where she was working in 1995, Jessica was primed to accept his offer. She had been sexually abused at age 5, and then her dad was murdered when she was 10. "I desperately needed to be accepted and loved. And when I didn't have my father and was already used to being sexually exploited, it just seemed to fit that all I was good for was sex," says Richardson.
Soon after meeting the "incredibly charming man," Richardson was turned out, first in Portland, then at sporting events and hotels up and down the I-5 corridor, the West Coast's track for trafficking. After 15 months of the nightmare, then an unplanned pregnancy, Richardson fled her pimp at age 18.
Now a Christian and member of City Bible Church in east Portland, she is one of the best-known survivors in the city, speaking to churches and schools to expose the lie that says anyone is only good for sex and testify to Christ's transforming love and acceptance.
On site in Portland, CT video producer Nathan Clarke and associate editor Katelyn Beaty spoke with Richardson about her story of survival, documented in a stunning short film for CT's This Is Our City project. Richardson spoke of the connection between trafficking and pornography, the multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, 89 percent of which is created in the United States. Her story impresses upon Christians the importance of treating pornography as more than a personal discipleship issue.
You experienced the sex industry from the inside out. How does that experience change the way you see it?
All around us we see this glamorized image of the sex industry. We see that it's something amazing, this "porn star lifestyle." What we're seeing is just the surface. We don't see the damage that is really happening, that the sex industry really is trafficking, that the vast majority of people that are in the sex industry as a whole are there because they were sexually abused as children, that they didn't have any other option or choice.
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Holy Hot Flashes! A Spiritual Take on Menopause
How the mysterious life stage changes a woman's capacity to nurture others.
Belly fat? Check.
Hot flashes? Check.
The desire to nurture others? Pfffft. Gone. Current thinking on menopause tells us that the caretaking “instinct” is nothing more than a relic of a woman's reproductive years.
As Sandra Tsing Loh notes in a wry piece in the November issue of The Atlantic, the message of pop-culture self-help tomes like Christine Northrup’s The Wisdom Of Menopause is that mommy’s selflessness is basically a biological hiccup. In other words, as a woman’s estrogen powers down at menopause, she becomes far less nurturing and way more self-centered. It’s pure biology:
It is not menopause that triggers the mind-altering and hormone-altering variation; the hormonal “disturbance” is actually fertility. Fertility is The Change. It is during fertility that a female loses herself, and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen. And of course, simply chronologically speaking, over the whole span of her life, the self-abnegation that fertility induces is not the norm—the more standard state of selfishness is.
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Tattooed Barbie: You’ve Come a Long Way!
Barbie is art imitating life (and vice-versa).
A new limited-edition Barbie is raising eyebrows with her punky pink bob and smattering of tattoos. Barbie has had tattoos before, but those were of the temporary butterfly variety and thus decidedly less hardcore. The mild uproar this doll has incurred is to be expected, I suppose. But the objections are unsatisfying on several fronts.
For one thing, the doll is for adult collectors and is apparently not available at toy stores, which mitigates concerns about the doll becoming a role model for children (although this raises some different questions about adults who collect Barbie dolls—but that’s another issue entirely). Besides, Barbie being Barbie, a Tattoo Barbie makes more sense than, say, a stiletto-wearing Church Barbie.
Furthermore, the question—if not the conclusion—of Barbie’s sway as a role model for girls is a given, particularly when it comes to body image. Regardless of whether one grants Barbie a great deal of power in shaping a girl’s self-image or a negligible role, it is certain that a girl (or woman) who wants to imitate the tattooed Barbie would do far less harm to herself in being tattooed than in submitting to the horrific surgery that would be required to sculpt herself into Barbie’s surreal shape. I’m of the school that is a lot less concerned with Barbie’s influence than with the influence wielded by real life role models (including Hollywood starlets). On the other hand, I played with stuffed animals, baby dolls, and Barbies as a girl, and now I love animals, hate abortion, and adore fashion. Perhaps I should reconsider my position on the influence of toys. I guess it’s a good thing I read a lot of books, too. I might have done better with the Anne Bradstreet doll. (True confession: I studied abroad one summer in college, and my Italian housemate told me that I looked like Barbie. It was a number of years before I realized that this wasn’t necessarily the compliment I took it to be.)
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MIA: Men Who Don't Use Pornography
For a new survey on prostitution, researchers had a hard time finding men who don't buy sex, whether embodied or digital.
I don’t remember much about sex education in 10th grade, other than anxiety about what topics I might have to discuss with peers. But I do remember a woman who came to our private, secular school to talk about “chastity.” She kept me enthralled as she explained we had been deceived by adults to believe that sex was an inevitable part of adolescence. She said, “You have power over your own desires. You are not a victim of your own urges but can make responsible choices.” Her message was old-fashioned even 20 years ago, and the sex-ed teachers didn’t approve. But as a girl trying to make sense of both the desire for sexual intimacy and the desire to wait for sex until marriage, her message of self-control was liberating.
I thought of her words upon reading a recent study about men who purchase sex. In the study, clinical psychologist Melissa Farley and a team of researchers interviewed 201 men in the Boston area about their sex-buying habits and their attitudes toward women. One hundred of the men were “non-sex buyers,” and 101 were “sex-buyers.” Farley’s study is unusual because it deals exclusively with men’s attitudes about buying sex, whereas most research within the field has focused on selling sex (i.e., prostitutes). And, while most studies of “johns” only identify behaviors among men who buy sex, this study involves a control group of “non-sex buyers” who correlate to the sex buyers in age, education, and income level. This study (overview here) distinguishes between men who buy sex and those who do not. Yet it also underscores the prevalence of men seeking sexual stimulation outside of intercourse with a willing partner.
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Inside the Heart of an Animal Hoarder
When a love for pets goes terribly awry.
Cruelty, like love, takes many forms.
Perhaps the most sinister form of cruelty comes in the guise of love. One need not look far within the human family to find this kind of brokenness. But such brokenness extends to the animal kingdom, too.
Consider the animal hoarders.
According to experts, animal hoarders:
· keep more animals than they have ability or resources with which to provide proper care and attention
· deny this inability as well as the severity of the situation
· obsessively maintain or increase the number of animals despite deteriorating conditions that range from cramped and unsanitary living spaces to neglect, starvation, and even death.
Seemingly inexplicably, animal hoarders usually express love for their animals and exhibit severe anxiety at the prospect of the animals being removed.
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Maggie Goes on a Diet: A Story for Children?
How a new book simplifies the larger female relationship with food.
With a title like Maggie Goes on a Diet, it’s hard to believe author and publisher Paul Kramer did not anticipate the criticism he and his publishing house would receive when the book recently appeared on Amazon for pre-order. Not even in print yet, this book has been hurtled into the middle of the ongoing debate regarding childhood obesity, eating disorders, and how exactly to teach young children about healthy eating habits.
If the title doesn’t make you cringe, maybe the product description will: “This book is about a 14-year-old girl who goes on a diet and is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image.” Add to that the book’s reading level — ages 4 to 8 — and the cover image of an overweight girl imagining a thinner self in the mirror, and the result seems more likely to cause psychological damage than a desire to eat better and exercise.
The public’s reaction is split. Some believe the book at least provides a healthy alternative to poor eating and no exercise; others say it could spark eating disorders. Time quotes psychologist Carolyn Becker, who sides against the title: “They are trying to promote healthier behavior, but at the same time they're likely promoting weight stigma. . . . For some people, getting healthier may or may not lead to significant weight loss. It's also quite possible to lose weight on an unhealthy diet.” Yet many believe Maggie’s approach to weight loss is healthy and applaud her efforts. As the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The key — as Maggie discovered — is not only to eat healthier foods but to exercise.”
As reasonable as the Times sounds, something that stems from years of images of perfect bodies thrust in our faces has many women in an uproar about Maggie’s experience.
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Christ and My Curly Hair
Attempts to undo my wiry hairdo had grown to idolatrous proportions - and taken up three whole months of my life.
This spring, a friend asked me to accompany her to Africa to document the labors of a nonprofit working in microfinance. She told me we’d be traveling to a number of remote villages to complete our assignment.
Instead of a dewy-eyed, “I’ll go wherever God sends me,” or even the sturdy old-stall tactic, “Let me pray about it," my first thought was, How will I blow dry my hair?
My vain response forced a long, hard look in the mirror, and not just so I could prep for another day of battle with wiry, frizzy hair. I’d sat through decades of sermons and Bible studies telling me that I was fearfully and wonderfully made, urging me to love myself because God loved me. All this self-acceptance talk may as well have been spoken to me in Portuguese. A demanding little idol called the Straight Hair god had rendered the message unintelligible.
As a young girl, I learned about the Straight Hair god from shampoo commercials and TV, and my “Ellis Island” hair wasn’t it. My natural `do makes me look a lot like the people pictured in those grainy pictures of Eastern European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic in steerage class at the turn of the century, probably because I am related to a handful of them.
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Adderall Arrives at Christian Colleges
Are well-meaning evangelical faculty and administration in part to blame?
Like any university campus, Christian colleges/universities have their share of students who abuse street drugs. But in my work with Christian college students over the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more over-the-counter and prescription drug abuse. One of the newest and seemingly innocuous (from the students’ perspective) drugs of choice is Adderall.
Adderall is prescribed to those suffering from ADHD. However, students who feel pressure to achieve high grades and maintain the requisite college experience are turning to Adderall, known as the "study buddy," for a boost. As an "academic steroid," it gives students the energy and focus they need to pull all-nighters or study for long periods during the day. And it's easy to get. A student can buy it on campus from other students or lie about their condition in order to obtain a prescription from a medical provider. Inside Higher Ed reports that nationally, the number of students who are using Adderall and Ritalin as “study aids” is close to10 percent. In a New Yorker article titled “Brain Gain,” Margaret Talbot writes:
. . . in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement . . . .
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Three Stories About Reproductive Technology
A heartbroken mother, an infertile couple, and a novelist’s characters reveal the emotional tales behind technological reproduction.
What do the stories of a grieving mother, a couple traveling to India, and a fictional character have in common? All three stories involve people using reproductive technology to have a baby.
Hance describes how she has survived such a loss, supported by friends who cooked meals for an entire year and continued to come get her for their morning runs. She also accepted a fertility doctor’s offer of free IVF services (Hance previously had a tubal ligation). The treatment gave her something to focus on, though she wasn’t sure she could go through with having an embryo transferred to her womb. But then she had a dream.
I was standing in heaven and I could see Emma, Alyson, and Katie through these big gates. God would not let me inside the gates. He said that I had been given a gift from that doctor and I had to use his gift before I could be with my babies. So, almost in a daze, I told the doctor I wanted to try to get pregnant, never expecting it to work.
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Sugar Daddies and Abba Father
An echo of the sugar daddy/sugar baby phenomenon may be coming to a church near you.
It’s no secret that more and more college students are graduating with crushing student loan debt. And with a job market that is less than favorable to the 20-something job seeker, some college students and graduates are looking for innovative ways to tackle the high cost of education and subsequent debt.
Enter the sugar daddy.
Reporter Amanda Fairbanks recently chronicled the lives of young women who seek relationships with older, wealthy men in exchange for large sums of money. “Sugar babies” are either drowning in college debt or facing the dire prospect in the near future. So they have taken action in the form of selling a most precious commodity — themselves. A handful of websites are devoted to securing “sugar daddy/sugar baby” relationships. They promise companionship for the men and financial gain for the women, all coordinated by a man from cyberspace. Before we start to think of these as friendly arrangements for old, rich men needing someone to talk to, as Fairbanks suggests, there isn’t always a whole lot of talking going on in these relationships. While not all these young women are selling their bodies to anyone who offers, many are exchanging sex to a select few who pay a hefty price.
It used to be that women in need of financial security would simply marry up. We called them gold diggers. These ladies would prowl around looking for an unassuming rich man to buy them fine jewelry and launch them into society (think Breakfast at Tiffany’s). But sugar babies don’t seem to be after marriage. And as the saying “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” goes, the sugar daddies aren’t rushing to the altar either, though the proverbial milk isn’t exactly free. In many ways, this is simply an exchange of goods, but with far greater consequences.
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Kids' Diets: Why We Need Immovable Love, Not ‘Let’s Move’
Where Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign falls short.
The first time my daughter grabbed a box of cookies out of the pantry, flipped the package round and round, and asked me how many calories were in each one, I laughed it off.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering.”
The second time she asked — while reaching for another square of our regular Friday night pizza — an alarm went off. This time she added, “I don’t want to get fat. That’s bad.”
Even as I told her that she didn’t need to pay any attention to calories, that they were good things, that we needed them for energy to run and play, I seethed. After all, I had a new enemy: whoever had introduced this calorie nonsense into my home and had made my healthy, vibrant 7-year-old worry about counting calories.
As it turns out, naming the enemy was more difficult than anticipated. Even as I read a horrifying (if overblown) story about the number of 5- to 7-year-olds who are being treated for eating disorders in the UK, I couldn’t simply blame the media, Barbie, or the uber-retouched, sickly skinny celebs on magazine covers the way the Telegraph report did. After all, how could a thin woman in a magazine cause my daughter to dread getting fat?
But I was wrong. While loading food onto the conveyor at the grocery store, I saw her. On a magazine cover. In her pretty dress and sweet cardigan, ankles crossed ladylike on a picnic table set with apples in their summer glory.
I reached for the August issue of Better Homes and Gardens. “Fresh and Healthy: Michelle Obama,” the cover read. At last I had found the culprit: one of the world’s most beautiful, powerful, and intelligent women. Great.
If you don’t know, Michelle Obama’s major initiative during her husband’s presidency has been the Let’s Move campaign, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation by encouraging healthier eating and activity “during their earliest months and years.”
While well-intentioned to be sure, something about it strikes me as insidious.
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Photoshop, Patriarchy, and Protection of the Vulnerable
Should it be so shocking to seriously consider censoring the consumer arts?
“That’s not real, right?”
As a friend and I walked through downtown Manhattan, a bus wrapped in an ad featuring a Victoria’s Secret model — who was at once alarmingly taut and seductively squishy in all the right places — zoomed past us.
“No sweetie,” I assured her, “it’s not real.” I confess, it was a little matronizing.
Though my intelligent friend suspected that the image had been digitally doctored and that the model likely had not eaten a carb in months, she was clearly rattled by the smooth two-dimensional Amazon beauty who had just zipped by.
Had she been walking London’s cobbled streets, she would have been afforded greater protection from the unwanted visual assault.
British activists, recognizing the negative impact of aesthetically improved photos of human faces and bodies, especially on women and girls, lobbied Parliament in 2009 for the regulation of digitally altered images. As a result, the current UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (CAP Code) was enacted September 12, 2010. The British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates the legality, decency, and truthfulness of ad campaigns, became responsible for monitoring and penalizing advertisers employing unrealistic digital enhancements.
This week, complaints were lodged against ads for Lancome and Maybelline, ads featuring international beauties Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington. The ads were pulled by the ASA for being overly airbrushed. Parliament member Jo Swinson, of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party, which originally pushed for the legislation, was responsible for notifying the ASA about the offensive ads. Swinson told the BBC that she believes the problem is more widespread than the two beauty campaigns.
Since I am unable to find a single ad in American women’s magazines, either mainstream or Christian, that has not been retouched, I am convinced Swinson is right.
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Two Stories about Babies with Down Syndrome
In light of new prenatal testing, what story will Christians tell about children with an extra 21st chromosome?
“It’s a girl!”
I received these words with tears of joy when our third child, Marilee, was born. We could have known her sex months earlier, of course, but we decided to wait. And yet, as I wrote in a recent Her.meneutics post, other cultures are far less willing to receive girls with joy. In both India and China, many people receive the prenatal information that they are having a girl as cause to terminate a pregnancy.
Prenatal information always comes within the context of a larger cultural narrative. We express our dismay over the “gendercide” halfway across the globe, yet prenatal testing in the United States also comes within a cultural context. Here, prenatal testing focuses upon identifying “fetal abnormalities.” Information about such abnormalities occasionally help a baby survive through surgical intervention in utero or due to additional medical support at birth. Information can also help parents receive a child with physical or cognitive delays. But the same information is often used as the reason for having an abortion, particularly when tests identify the presence of an extra 21st chromosome, more commonly known as Down syndrome.
In recent months, researchers have found a way to conclusively identify Down syndrome using a blood test in the ninth week of pregnancy. Although the test remains prohibitively expensive, it should be widely available in the next year. Current screening tests begin as early as 11 or 12 weeks, but the only definitive way to identify a fetus with Down syndrome is via chorionic villus sampling (CVS) in the 11th week, or amniocentesis around the 18th week of pregnancy. Both of these procedures carry with them a risk of miscarriage. The new test is noninvasive, providing close-to-definitive information without risk to mother or child. It also occurs before the time many women have told others the news of pregnancy.
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Being Loved through Breast Cancer
God became 'the God who sees' when I faced a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation at age 27.
I met Kristin during my first shift in an urban E.R. in Portland 3 years ago. I was working in Fast Track as a physician assistant, and she was the assigned nurse for the day. She was strong and outspoken and said within minutes of meeting me, “I’m probably going to offend you today. I apologize in advance, okay?”
I nodded.
“Okay,” she said, and we got to work.
We worked well together, but other than work, we had little else in common. She was tough, outspoken, tattooed and pierced — and I was none of those things. Earlier in her life she had battled an addiction, and lived in a car while she put herself through nursing school. Then she raised two kids as a single mom while working full time in the E.R.
A year after I left that job, I was having coffee with my friend Stephanie, who works in the same E.R. She told me that Kristin had just been diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer at age 42. She had already started chemotherapy to shrink the tumors, and in a few months would have a mastectomy and radiation.
“How’s she doing with everything?” I asked Stephanie.
“You know — it’s hard,” she said.
I nodded. It’s been five years since I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27 and went through a bilateral mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I also remember how far away God felt during that time, how I asked everyone I met — from the hospital chaplain to my oncologist to my pot-smoking neighbor — how God could do this to someone he loved when I wouldn’t do it to someone I hated.
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My Father Was a Porn Addict
The Playboys lying on the coffee table were the tip of the iceberg in our home.
My father taught me how to ride a bike, the value of a great punchline, and what a woman was supposed to look and act like.
My dad was a great guy with a bad habit.
When we consider relationships negatively impacted by a pornography addiction, most of us first consider the addict’s spouse or girl/boyfriend. It is not just the adult partner who is affected by a porn habit. Even if the addict believes he or she has the habit under wraps, porn’s toxicity leaks into other relationships in an addict’s life.
When I was growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, porn made its way into our home in the form of Playboy magazines on our coffee table, next to copies of my mom’s Redbook and Ladies Home Journal. My parents had come of age in the Mad Men era, when Hugh Hefner’s magazine was a signpost of cool in the same way that other sophisticates of their generation smoked cigarettes in the doctor’s office, slow-danced to Sinatra, and imbibed a dirty martini before dinner.
The coffee table reading was only the tip of the iceberg in our home. I can still remember the shock waves that hit me when I discovered the cheaply printed hard-core erotica stashed in my parents’ bedroom. I was 11 or 12 when I discovered a stash of the stuff in my dad’s dresser drawer and nightstand. Whenever my parents left the house, I pored over each plain-wrapped volume. I didn’t fully understand what I had read, but I knew that I’d been initiated into the world of adulthood at an age when I barely understood the mechanics of how babies were made.
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Why We Don't Use Natural Family Planning
The method works wonders for many Christian couples, but shouldn't be elevated to one-size-fits-all heights.
Because I write often about reproductive ethics, I knew Bethany Patchin’s story long before Mark Oppenheimer wrote about it in last weekend’s New York Times. Bethany and Sam Torode divorced in 2009 after nine years of marriage, during which they had four children. Early in their marriage, the couple wrote a book called Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception, in which they argued that natural family planning (NFP) is the healthiest, most spiritually enriching contraceptive approach for Christians.
NFP, the only contraceptive method approved by the Catholic Church, requires couples to track the woman’s fertility by detailed observation of body temperature and cervical mucus. Couples can then avoid intercourse on the wife’s fertile days if they wish to avoid pregnancy, and plan intercourse if they want to become pregnant.
The Torodes, as other NFP supporters do, argued in their book and here at Christianity Today that not only is NFP as effective as medical forms of birth control when done correctly (which admittedly requires knowledge and practice), but also makes for healthier marriages that more closely align with God’s purposes for husbands and wives. They believe NFP honors our God-given bodies and fertility cycles rather than manipulating them to suit our preferences. It makes each act of intercourse truly open to God’s procreative purpose for marriage. It allows spouses to fully embrace each other, body and soul, without any barrier. It enhances marital intimacy and interdependence by teaching couples to constrain their sexual urges in service to a greater goal.
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The Cult of the Orgasm
Thinking Christianly about the vibrator boom and unsatisfied sexual desire.
Baptist theologian Russell Moore recently warned, “On the nightstand of a woman in your church, there’s a Christian romance novel and a Bible.” Yet if The New York Times is to be believed, he should have been more concerned with a vibrator on the nightstand.
Cultural mores are changing, The Times reports; once available mainly in dimly-lit sex shops, vibrators for women are now being sold in national chain drugstores, a supposed sign of women’s empowerment: comfort with discussing and pursuing not just sex but that sometimes-elusive hallmark of “success,” an orgasm. The Times credits this shift to many factors, but inevitably certain TV shows are said have played a role in the vibrator boom.
With the ranks of single Christian women unlikely to shrink anytime soon, it’s doubtful we have entirely opted out of buying into this trend, since we navigate the same cultural milieu as women outside the church. Aren’t we, too, struggling with some measure of sexual disappointment and frustration? Though many of us are likely too shy or conscience-stricken to purchase a vibrator, masturbation has been a topic of debate among evangelicals, with some concluding that it’s an acceptable way to wait until marriage for sex (assuming sex requires a partner). How should Christian women respond to the vibrator trend and its broader message of sexual empowerment?
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Guarding Your Marriage without Dissing Women
Women aren't disappearing from the workplace or ministry staff teams. How will married men adjust?
Another day, another high-profile sex scandal. Many Americans yawned when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s extramarital activities hit the headlines two weeks ago. By now it’s difficult to escape the fatalistic feeling that we’ve seen it all before and will see it all again, and soon.
I will not go out to eat alone with someone of the opposite sex. I will not travel alone with someone of the opposite sex.I really appreciate that Hyatt and other Christian leaders are addressing this issue, because I know what it’s like to watch a Christian leader fall. When I was 15, the senior pastor at my church — a man deeply beloved and admired by his congregation — left his wife for his secretary. Words can’t capture the spiritual and emotional devastation this man and woman left in their wake. Though they would eventually repent and confess their sin before the church, some of us carry scars to this day. So I can be nothing but grateful for Christians who make the effort to stay pure and who teach others to do the same.
I will not flirt with someone of the opposite sex.
I will speak often and lovingly of my wife. (This is the best adultery repellant known to man.)
At the same time, I want to humbly offer a word of caution: Sometimes, practical tips like the ones I’ve described can lead to practical problems.
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A Horror Film about Childbirth
In aiming to spotlight infant and maternal mortality rates worldwide, Christy Turlington Burns's No Woman No Cry relies on fear instead of facts.
You could say I'm passionate about birth. I delivered both my children without medication (the second was a water birth) and am trained as a doula. While I'm aware that situations arise that require intervention, even surgery, to keep mother and baby safe, I'm unconvinced that our nation's high cesarean rate is justified, and I think there are plenty of reasons to actively promote more midwife-attended births, even home births. I'm grateful that for most U.S. women, highly skilled medical help is just around the corner, ready to step in should something go wrong. But I also believe that birth is safe.
Yet for lots of women in the world, birth isn't so safe. It's not just that high-tech help isn't around the corner. It's the whole nexus of social, cultural, and economic reasons that make birth a riskier prospect. It's that girls get married and pregnant too young. It's that they haven't been nourished during their growing years or pregnancies. It's that they hold hospitals and non-traditional birth attendants in suspicion. The result? A woman dies from a preventable pregnancy or childbirth complication about every two minutes.
In her directorial debut, No Woman No Cry, model Christy Turlington Burns tells the stories of some of these women. As a doula, a woman, and mom — and someone who counts fistula pioneer Catherine Hamlin as a heroine — I was excited to see Turlington’s fame and fortune being wielded to bring global attention to these too-frequently forgotten women. The two-hour documentary aired earlier this month on the Oprah Winfrey Network, while a related album went on sale at Starbucks, most of the proceeds of which go back to Turlington’s maternal health project, Every Woman Counts.
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A Sketchy Ad from Skechers Shape-Ups
Do 7-year-olds really need butt-boosting training shoes?
A new ad campaign by Skechers takes its popular Shape-Up sneaker and markets it to girls. Skechers' line of “Shape-Up” sneakers was originally targeted solely to women but now includes men’s and girls' versions. It promises to burn calories, improve posture, and tone your legs and butt - ”all without stepping foot in a gym!” Conspicuously missing from the lineup are boys' Shape-Ups, which only add to the controversy over what, exactly, Shape-Ups are about.
You may recall the Skechers Superbowl commercial with spokesmodel Kim Kardashian in a steamy scene with her “trainer.” Complete with sweating, panting, and gratuitous body close-ups, Kardashian coyly tells her trainer that they have to “break up.” Flipping her hair and pointing her famous rear at the bewildered “trainer,” she looks him up and down and says, “it’s not someone, it’s something” while kicking her foot behind her so her new Shape-Up can point, well, at her behind.
Although Skechers claims its Shape-Ups are about being healthy, that’s not exactly what Kardashian's ad appearance portrays. The message seems to be that thanks to Shape-Ups, her butt looks great, men drool over her, and she doesn’t even have to work hard for it. This advertising sells the message that a woman’s body is made for adoration and that every woman should want to get into steamy-sex shape with as little work as possible. Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about that. Remember Suzanne Somers' “thank you Thighmaster” ads in the early 90s?
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Food Cleanses and the Integrated Self
How nourishment illuminates the relationship between the body and other aspects of our humanity.
We live in a culture obsessed with food. Eating disorders, once the exclusive terrain of adolescent girls, plague populations as diverse as older adults, Orthodox Jewish women, and young men. On the other hand, the nation as a whole is experiencing an “obesity epidemic.” Whether through self-starvation or self-indulgence, many Americans have an unhealthy relationship with food.
When I was 14 years old, I was diagnosed with a condition called gastro paresis, paralysis of the stomach. The doctors couldn’t determine a cause and they didn’t know of a cure. In retrospect, I think I had been eating so little that my body slowed to a halt in response. Soon enough, I couldn’t keep any food in my system. It came right back up. I told myself, and others, that I was suffering from a rare illness. The thing was, I liked being sick. Or at least, I liked being able to eat whatever I wanted without any worry about weight gain.
In the midst of those years of doctors’ appointments and visits to therapists and hospitalizations and continuing to insist to everyone around me that I was “doing just fine,” I remember my aunt asking, “What is there in your life that you need to purge?”
It took me years to understand her question. My aunt knew that I had more than a physical problem. She recognized that mind, body, and spirit exist within an integrated whole. And until I was willing to see the same, I wasn’t able to heal. In the end, recovery took an integrated approach. I needed prayer. I needed physical therapy to get my organs moving again. I needed medication for a time. And I needed to address the perfectionist tendencies (aka idolatries) that caused me to fear gaining weight and to want to appear thin and beautiful to the outside world.
As a result of my difficult history with food, I still avoid magazines about “health and fitness” because the images and tips inside could send me back into self-destructive patterns of thinking. I’ve noted but tried to ignore the Atkins diet, the Zone, the Mediterranean, and the like. But when two of my friends talked about the “cleanses” they were doing of late, I was interested.
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Sex Sells - So Does Virginity
Nickelodeon star Miranda Cosgrove is being marketed as the embodiment of purity in a sex-saturated culture. Why Christians should be concerned.
In February I reviewed Peggy Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. The book takes a hard look at the culture that imposes itself on our nation’s daughters, and challenges the notion that it is altogether harmless. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I highly recommend it. In a media atmosphere where the facts are often harnessed to fuel fear, Orenstein manages to inform her readers with sobering research without crossing into full-on paranoia.
In a more recent New York Times article, “The Good Girl, Miranda Cosgrove,” Orenstein continues her exploration of the themes in her book. The article features teen star Miranda Cosgrove, who shot to fame in her role on the hit Nickelodeon show iCarly. Cosgrove, who turns 18 in May, stands at the edge of a precipice with her adulthood stretching out before her. And like the teen stars that have preceded her, many are watching to see how she will emerge in the next season of life. Gracefully, clumsily, or catastrophically?
Orenstein is troubled by the media pressure cooker in which young women like Cosgrove exist. But even more concerning is the manner in which these young ladies’ virtue is marketed like a product. For the NYT, Orenstein wrote,
For as many seasons as the illusion can be maintained, [teens stars] remain, at least onscreen, uncomplicated, untroubled good girls, on the verge of, but never actually awakening to, their sexuality. There is a lot of money to be made — and a lot of parental anxiety to be tapped — by walking that line.
At this point in her career, Cosgrove shines as an unsullied embodiment of all the qualities a parent desires in a role model. No objections here. But things get complicated when Christians consider how to respond to an industry that uses morality as a marketing device. Should we praise these young women as role models, or hold them at arm’s length?
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Why I Let My Son Wear Pink
The real trouble with the J. Crew ad controversy is not a gay/transgender agenda but our culture's sexualization of children.
In case you missed the news story that Jon Stewart has named "Toemageddon," here are the facts: Retailer J. Crew sent out an online ad last week in which creative director Jenna Lyons appears in a photo with her 5-year-old son, Beckett. A quote from Jenna reads, “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.” In her hand, she cups her son’s foot, done up with bright pink nail polish.
Well.
Out came pundits accusing J. Crew of pushing a liberal agenda in which gender distinctions no longer matter, glamorizing a transgendered lifestyle, and, according to Erin Brown of the Culture and Media Institute, “targeting a new demographic — mothers of gender-confused young boys.” Fox News blogger Keith Ablow accused J. Crew of being “hostile to the gender distinctions that actually are part of the magnificent synergy that creates and sustains the human race.” Ablow put nail-polish-wearing boys on a spectrum of disturbing behavior, including boys in sundresses and people coloring or bleaching their skin so they could appear to be of a different race.
I didn’t want to write about this brouhaha for the same reason I felt compelled to: my 5-year-old son. Until recently, my son’s favorite color was pink. He says it no longer is, which is fine, although I’m sad that the major reason is that some boys at school (sweet, lovely little boys) told him that only girls like pink. Until then, he didn’t seem to know that his love of pink, occasional wearing of nail polish, and devotion to Dora the Explorer (as opposed to her male cousin, Diego, who is marketed to boys) mattered one way or the other.
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Obese and Beautiful
As the West exports its fat stigma to developing countries, the church might export its welcome embrace to those on all ends of the body mass index.
The New York Times recently reported that the West is exporting its ideals of beauty and body size to developing nations, including our stigma against overweight people. We are, it is said, globalizing the “fat stigma.” It appears that our prejudices have so proliferated that they’re even infecting those societies that traditionally preferred larger bodies, such as Puerto Rico and Samoa. And our notions aren’t just affecting women; increasingly more and more men are suffering from a negative body image or what some have called “body image distress.” The term manorexia has arrived in our vocabulary.
These reports turn my thoughts toward Sandra,* one of our family’s dearest friends. Together, she and her husband Matthew* were hospitality incarnate. Their home was open to myriads of people. From kids in our youth group to church folk, from grad student jazz musicians who endlessly wailed on the piano and other instruments through ungodly hours of the night, to their peers, to neighborhood kids and folk — anyone looking for a heart-warming, welcoming place to call home found it with them. Shawn and I were, like others, invited to walk in anytime, whether day or night, without knocking or needing to unlock the door.
Hesitant to take them up on the too-good-to-be-true offer, at first Shawn and I balked, but Sandra insisted. She meant it. And since she and Matthew, like Jesus, were so magnetic because of their love, we happily spent much of our time with them. Christmas Day was the only day reserved for their immediate family members. It’s no exaggeration to say that from her home, Sandra directly influenced thousands of people in the name of Jesus — and plenty more indirectly.
Sandra was morbidly obese.
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Keeping Kids Junk-Food Free
What Christian communities might learn from Amelia Brown, the Philadelphia principal who sees childhood obesity as the next urban crisis.
Amelia Brown, principal of the William D. Kelley School in Philadelphia, recently called on parents and Operation Town Watch Integrated Services (which helps neighborhoods fight crime and drug deals) to position themselves strategically around corner stores around the school. Their mission: to keep kids from buying junk food and encourage them to eat a real breakfast at school.
Since becoming principal last August, Brown has focused intently on improving the diets of her students. She began by urging corner stores to refuse to sell candy and sodas to kids in the morning, with mixed results. Brown, convinced that junk food is to blame for the headaches and stomachaches that consistently undermine academic performance, as well as for the steadily-increasing “flab” of older students, noted that she’d have no choice but to organize boycotts of the stores that wouldn't stop selling to students.
Brown’s efforts seem extreme, better reserved for the fight against underage smoking, say, or illegal drug use. After all, we're just talking about soda, candy, and chips. Or are we?
As The Times noted, we’ve known for a long time that cravings for sugar, salt, and fat are inborn; even newborns can’t resist the taste of sugar. Those "primal" cravings are exactly what the food industry capitalizes on, endlessly engineering, testing, and retesting products for "hyperpalatability": an elusive quality that renders edibles both irresistible and addictive. PET imaging shows these kinds of foods work on our brains in ways similar to heroin, opium, and morphine; it’s thought that they even stimulate the release of dopamine, which prevents the brain from turning on the “brakes” that would normally prevent us from overeating. Maybe Brown's calling in the neon-vested, walkie-talkie equipped neighborhood watch isn't extreme after all.
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The King's Speech and Doulas
What King George VI's speech therapist, Lionel Logue, and I have in common.
Turns out that Lionel Logue, the speech therapist to King George VI, played beautifully by Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech, had no formal training in speech therapy, or any kind of therapy, in fact. So what did he have?
Lots of qualities shared by a good doula, it turns out. A doula? Wait — isn’t a doula like a midwife?
No, we are not much like midwives, actually. To practice legally, midwives have to have the right letters after their names. They have to become experts at a host of clinical skills, including urine testing, cervical exams, fetal heart tone monitoring, and perineal stitching, to name a few. But doulas (the Greek word for "a woman who serves") — we are different. Much of our learning happens outside the classroom, and while we might have letters after our names, certification is optional in all 50 states. We don’t do anything medical. Mostly, we’re just there.
But "just" being there has a powerful effect on the process of labor and delivery, spilling over into the postpartum weeks as well. An oft-cited series of studies found that women who had a doula with them were 60 percent less likely to request an epidural, 50 percent less likely to have a caesarean, and 40 percent less likely to be delivered by forceps. Additionally, their labors were 25 percent quicker than those without doulas, and they reported lower levels of depression at six weeks postpartum. All this as a result of the presence of a person who isn’t required to have a diploma of any kind?
Those who have seen The King’s Speech, this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture, will recall that King George VI, "Bertie" to his family and Logue, had seen his share of experts about his stammer, but to no avail. Logue, who was familiar with healthy speech, having studied and taught elocution, honed his therapeutic model when working with shell-shocked veterans of the Great War. He wasn’t a doctor or a formally trained therapist. But he helped Bertie as no one else had, giving him techniques to speak more fluently and the confidence to find his voice.
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The Gospel of Grace for Women Who Self-Injure
How the church can respond as cutting and other forms of self-harm are increasingly glamorized online.
Self-harm — clinically defined as the deliberate destruction of one's body tissue without suicidal intent, such as cutting, burning, and hair-pulling — is not new. What is new is the proliferation of images and messages through social media that may trigger these behaviors among those vulnerable to them. This is the finding of research published this month in Pediatrics journal.
The study examined one hundred YouTube videos focused on self-injury. Researchers analyzed the most-viewed videos appearing under the search words “self-injury” and “self-harm,” and found that the top 100 videos were viewed over 2 million times and marked as “favorites” over 12,000 times. While some videos require viewers to verify they are at least 18 (a simple process requiring no proof of age), most of the videos were viewable to all. The researchers conclude that the videos “express a hopeless or melancholic message” and “may foster normalization of non-suicidal self-injury and may reinforce the behavior through regular viewing of non-suicidal self-injury–themed videos.”
A cursory look at these videos confirms that even those presented as cautions against self-injury seem more likely to glamorize it. Ambient music, moody settings and images, and artistic renderings of self-injury are typical. One recurring type features animated characters, further removing self-harming behaviors from the realm of reality, yet aimed at viewers whose very struggle is to remain grounded in reality.
My introduction to cutting occurred years ago when I was a 20-something English teacher in a Christian high school. I’d never heard of cutting before. Like all of the subsequent students I’ve encountered who self-injure, this student was female, intelligent, intense, and experiencing deep emotional turmoil. Everything “Grace” told me about her cutting is consistent with my later research and experiences. Around age 15, prompted by feelings of rejection, Grace began self-injuring by grating her knuckles on the brick fireplace that went through her bedroom. She later explained, “I had an overwhelming sense of pain that I didn't know how to deal with, and I felt that whatever my problems were were my fault. So the physical pain seemed to sate the mental pain.”
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The Social Network's Women Problem
The likely Oscar Best Picture winner's disturbing view of women apparently come not from Mark Zuckerberg's world but from the views of writer Aaron Sorkin.
The Social Network is a Golden Globe winner for Best Drama and one of the most acclaimed films of 2010. The story of how Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook is a frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar this Sunday night, and there are people who will be gutted if it loses. It’s innovative, stylish, cutting-edge — all those things that have critics tripping over each other to praise and reward.
In one aspect, though, the movie harks back to the stone age: its view of women. In both the early scenes at Harvard University and the later scenes in California, women are there as sex objects and little else. They inspire vengeful fantasies; they strip at parties and go home with strangers; they reward creative nerds for their creativity with spontaneous sex in the bathroom; they get drunk and high and play video games (badly). And that’s about it.
In the film, women are barred from any role in either the technological or the business side of Facebook. A female intern at the company is only there to show off her rear end in a short skirt and then get arrested for doing drugs. Even a seemingly levelheaded and businesslike woman flips out for no apparent reason, and sets a gift from her boyfriend on fire just for the heck of it.
I’m not saying there aren’t women who act like this. But nearly every woman in an entire movie — a movie that’s supposed to be a serious drama and not a frat-boy comedy?
The film’s defenders point to the fact that The Social Network is bookended by appearances from two smart, sensible women. But these two, a student named Erica and a lawyer named Marylin, are there to give Mark contradictory messages about himself. (Erica’s there at the beginning to tell him he’s an [expletive]; Marylin’s there at the end to tell him he’s not an [expletive].) Both female characters are lacking in serious screen time and substance.
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The Argument for Girl-Boy Wrestling
Joel Northrup cited his Christian faith for refusing to wrestle Cassy Herkelman in last week's Iowa state championship. I say his Christian faith should have taken him to the mat.
When my friend posted a link to the story of Joel Northrup — the 16-year-old Iowa wrestler who defaulted rather than wrestle a girl, Cassy Herkelman, in a state tournament last week — I was floored when my athletic, competitive friend said she had “mixed emotions” about his decision. I imagine this friend, had she pursued wrestling and not track and field in high school, would’ve wanted the opportunity to wrestle. Even if it meant competing against the boys.
My reaction to this story was decidedly unmixed. I think Joel should have wrestled Cassy.
Not that I don’t get some of the issues at play here. I understand that teenage boys, as a rule, are stronger than teenage girls. I understand that boys wrestling girls could introduce some sexual awkwardness. I agree that the best-case scenario would be for Cassy to be able to wrestle in an all-girls wrestling conference.
But in this world, best-case scenarios almost never exist. So our job as Christians is to figure out how best to live and behave in these broken scenarios, how to be “salt and light” in every arena.
Which brings me back to Joel, since he cited his Christian faith as reason to default.
In his statement, Joel said, “Wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times. As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner.”
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Why Your Church Needs a Dr. Oz
Fitness programs like the one launched at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church rightfully teach us that exercise and healthy eating are not spiritually 'neutral.'
Where do you exercise? Your basement? Your backyard? Your gym? Your church?
Browsing the list of weekly programs offered at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, fitness classes and weight-loss support groups are now listed alongside baptism and leadership training classes.
Warren made headlines last month when he announced his New Year’s resolution: to lose a whopping 90 pounds in 2011. Warren is certainly not alone in his goal: Every January, millions of people pledge to lose weight, get in shape, and eat healthier, and evangelical Christians have long used Christ-based fitness programs, like Gwen Shamblin’s The Weigh Down Diet and Jordan Rubin’s The Maker’s Diet, in their personal routines.
What make Warren's announcement headline-worthy was the significant commitment of his church’s time and resources to pursuing health and fitness, in the form of what he calls “the Daniel Plan: God’s Prescription for Your Health.” Developed specifically for Saddleback by Dr. Daniel Amen, Dr. Mark Hyman, and Dr. Mehmet Oz (Oprah’s health guru), the Daniel Plan, Warren says, is a “healthy lifestyle program including a six-week small group study, an online profile you will create on this Website that will help you track your progress, monthly Webcasts with me interviewing leading health experts, an optional healthy choice menu, and new outdoor fitness equipment set-up on the Lake Forest campus.”
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The State of Sex
For one writer, porn is simply a representation of sex: a brutal, male-dominated, and harmful act. Sign me up for lifelong virginity.
When it comes to attitudes about sex in America, I often find myself somewhere between cynical and hopeless. I read statistics about 95 percent of adults losing their virginity before marriage. I look at the magazine rack in the grocery store and the headlines that encourage promiscuity and multiple sexual partners. And I tend to conclude that Christians who believe God intended sex to be a joyful, mutually edifying expression of commitment and love, a mirror of God’s love for his church, a gift that binds a wife to her husband and a husband to his wife — I tend to conclude that such Christians (myself included) have lost not only the battle but also the war. As cynical or hopeless as I might become, two recent articles have inspired me to try to articulate a view of sex that counters the mainstream assumptions and calls individuals to a different way.
Both articles appeared in The Atlantic, a publication that routinely engages topics such as marriage, divorce, sex, and pornography in a thoughtful and even-handed way. For instance, there was the essay in which Ross Douthat argued that viewing pornography could be considered adultery, and the blogpost about Hephzibah Anderson, who decided to abstain from sex for a year. So when the January/February issue arrived, with two articles about sex and porn in the United States, I was looking forward to reading them.
The first, “The Hazards of Duke,” by Caitlin Flanagan, analyzes a PowerPoint presentation created by Karen Owen, a recent Duke graduate. This slide show details Owen’s sexual escapades with 13 campus athletes. Flanagan concludes that despite Owen’s bravado, crudity, and “desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way,” she is really just a girl wanting affection from boys. Flanagan laments the culture of random hookups on college campuses: “We’ve made a culture for our college women in which they have been liberated from the curfews and parietals that were once the bane of co-eds, but one in which they have also shaken off the general suspicion of male sexuality . . . Maybe they’re all the better for it. Or maybe an awful lot of these young women at our very best colleges are being traumatized by what takes place during so much of this mindless, drunken partying…” Flanagan has no answer for the problem Karen Owen represents. But at least she understands that there’s a problem.
The next article, “Hard Core” by Natasha Vargas-Cooper, explores the world of Internet porn and what it tells us about our humanity. I have chosen not to link to it because I cannot recommend reading it due to its depraved view of men, women, and sex.
Despite its content, the article deserves comment. In fact, it deserves rebuttal. Its subheading reads, “The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women.” According to Vargas-Cooper, the sexual acts portrayed on many porn websites merely reflect natural human, or rather, natural male, desire: “porn doesn’t plant [ideas] in men’s minds; instead, porn puts the power of a mass medium behind ancient male desires.”
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Miss America and the Bikini Question
Do modern-day pageants ask young evangelical women to compromise their values an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny too much?
It’s hard to believe that just over a decade ago, two-piece pageant swimsuits were taboo for Miss America. In this year’s competition, all but one contestant wore a black bikini and high heels. (Apparently pageant officials give contestants few swimsuits to choose from.) The young woman who donned a one-piece swimsuit was not 17-year-old Teresa Scanlan, Miss America 2011, former Miss Nebraska, and a devout Christian. No, the brave one-piecer was 19-year-old Miss Idaho Kylie Kofoed, a Mormon and music major at Brigham Young University.
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A Woman, Not a 'Gestational Carrier'
How the global infertility industry reduces women to profitable body parts.
Editor's Note: This is the second Her.meneutics post responding to Melanie Thernstrom's New York Times Magazine article on twiblings. Ellen Painter Dollar covered it last week.
As millions around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, issued a press release announcing the birth of their baby boy, born on Christmas Day. Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John, a healthy baby, was born through modern, assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Using an anonymous egg donor and a "gestational carrier" (a term that is getting some criticism), Elton and David fulfilled one of their greatest wishes: to be parents. They have now joined the ranks of the growing list of celebrities having babies via ART.
This got me thinking about another list I read a few years ago: the "Ten Best Chores to Outsource." Expecting to see housecleaning, gardening and landscaping, pool cleaning, laundry, I was shocked and saddened by the number one "best chore to outsource": pregnancy. From the Time piece:
Outsourcing brings to mind big factories and call centers. But entrepreneurs around the globe now offer services — from tutoring to sculpting a bust of your grandpa — to regular folks for a fraction of the cost in the West. Thought the world was flat before? Well, now you can hire someone in India to carry your child.
Entrepreneurs like Rudy Rupak, CEO of medical tourism agency Planet Hospital, are just another example of those who are hopping on the ART modern-family bandwagon. Rupak's brokering business even offers what his company calls the “India Bundle,” an "affordable" package deal that gives would-be parents an egg donor, four surrogates for four embryo transfers, room and board for the surrogate during the pregnancy, and transportation services when the parents arrive in India to pick up the baby. Costs escalate from there depending on services rendered. Gay couples wanting to do egg-sharing so that each can offer sperm to fertilize the eggs (so that each has a biological child) drives up the price. All the various preimplantation genetic diagnostic tests also drive costs upward. In sum, this setup is a consumer model of baby-making.
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Blessed Are Those with Alzheimer's
Discovering God’s image in a nursing home called “The Beatitudes.”
Americans are living longer and longer. For many individuals, this comes as good news, and yet for the larger culture, it brings social change, significant increases in health-care costs, and a higher prevalence of diseases such as Alzheimer’s. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, 5.3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer’s, but the disease impacts an even greater swath of the population. Nearly 11 million unpaid caregivers (many of them women) often work around the clock to try to understand and deal with the impact of dementia on family members.
Recently Pam Belleck reported on a novel approach to Alzheimer’s care in the New York Times. Her article “Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate,” focused on a nursing home in Phoenix, Arizona. This nursing home has served elderly men and women with dementia for decades, and in recent years the staff implemented a series of measures to care for their patients more effectively. At first glance, their approach appears indulgent, even potentially harmful. As Belleck writes, patients “are allowed practically anything that brings comfort, even an alcoholic ‘nip at night.’” They eat whenever they want and whatever they want—chocolate, bacon, and so forth. The state of Arizona resisted, and even tried to regulate, many of The Beatitudes unconventional methods. But over time, this small facility, with only 30 patients, has become a model for individual caregivers and institutions alike.
The New York Times’ article did not mention the origins of The Beatitudes and their ethos, but the name alone suggests the Christian roots of the institution. “The Beatitudes,” of course, refers to Matthew 5, the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which he proclaims God’s blessing upon “the poor in spirit,” “those who mourn,” and “the meek” (among others). According to The Beatitudes’ website, the facility began in the 1960’s as the response of a church congregation to the need for a welcoming retirement community. In fact, “the young church congregation decided to build the Campus before they built the church sanctuary because the need was so great for comfortable, caring, and affordable retirement living to meet the needs of seniors with modest economic means.” The Mission Statement of The Beatitudes refers to a “heritage of Christian hospitality” and “a model of wellness that promotes soundness of mind, spirit, and body.”
Their approach goes far beyond indulging the desires of patients.
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The Virgins-Only Dating Website
Is WeWaited.com really a perfect haven for Christians struggling in a sex-obsessed culture?
Fewer and fewer Americans are getting married. Those who do are, on average, waiting longer to wed than have previous generations. But according to Time's "Who Needs Marriage? A Changing Institution," women and men still want to meet and build relationships with each other, so marriage remains an ideal. Because of this, reports Stephanie Rosenblum in The New York Times, online dating sites of a remarkable variety have proliferated in recent years. Some are based purely on physical appearance, others focus on hobbies and interests, while others highlight education or the type of computer you use.
Wading into these crowded waters is WeWaited.com, a dating site exclusively for virgins. Only 30 percent of applicants to the site are admitted, and they gain access through a fee and a survey designed to assess their trustworthiness. The site's founders admit that some virgins are left out due to the rigorous screening process, while some who lie about their sexual activity make it in. But, according to its homepage, WeWaited.com mostly achieves its goal: "to use virginity as a significant compatibility tool to bring people together."
If movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and covers of Cosmopolitan weren't enough, sociological data back up the fact that virginity before marriage is rare in the West. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 95 percent of Americans engage in premarital sex. So WeWaited.com offers a safe space for the small segment of the population who want to stay virgins until marriage. It enables partners who value their own virginity to pair up, and it affirms the desire to remain chaste before marriage.
The founders of the site, a husband and wife team who exchanged their "vows and their virginities" on their wedding day, believe virginity is something that goes beyond physical intercourse. They see it as physical, emotional, and spiritual, and believe waiting to exchange their "whole selves" until their wedding was a blessing.
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Don't Think Pink
Breast cancer awareness campaigns often raise everything but real, tangible support for survivors. Just ask my mom.
“Why are the comics pink?” my mother wanted to know a few weeks ago, glancing at the Sunday funnies lying on the kitchen table.“Breast cancer,” I explained.
Enough said. Anyone who hasn’t been living on Neptune for the past few years knows that pink is shorthand for, “I care about breast cancer patients.” Especially during last month, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the whole world seemed awash in pink. From football players’ chinstraps to bracelets to the omnipresent ribbons to, yes, the comics, the color of awareness was everywhere.
It’s odd, then, that some breast cancer patients and survivors — like my mom — are getting a little tired of it all.
“Especially during October, everything from toilet paper to buckets of fried chicken to the chin straps of NFL players look as if they have been steeped in Pepto,” writes Peggy Orenstein, another survivor, in The New York Times. “If the goal was ‘awareness,’ that has surely been met — largely, you could argue, because corporations recognized that with virtually no effort (and often minimal monetary contribution), going pink made them a lot of green.”
What does all this awareness actually accomplish? In Orenstein’s opinion, not much: “Rather than being playful, which is what these campaigns are after, sexy cancer suppresses discussion of real cancer, rendering its sufferers — the ones whom all this is supposed to be for — invisible.”
My mom feels much the same way, which is why the pink comics left her less than impressed. When she had her own battle with breast cancer a few years ago, the parade of pink was little more than background noise for her, and not very pleasant noise at that. For all the efforts to correlate cute pink accessories with the message “I care,” none of those things made her feel cared for at all. It was the turning of a disease into a trend — something that’s been done with every disease from AIDS to Alzheimer’s to acid reflux. And in the long run, it felt more dehumanizing than encouraging.
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Apple Takes a Bite Out of Sexting
Is a parental-control device the best way to teach teens that sending sexually explicit texts is a bad idea?
Apple recently secured a patent for technology that would allow the company to read, and censor, iPhone text messages. The patent was almost immediately dubbed an “anti-sexting device,” despite the fact the actual patent title is “Text-based communication control for personal communication device.”
The idea is that text messages will be subjected to a control system — an algorithm or perhaps an underpaid intern — that will flag objectionable content and prevent it from being sent. The logic is similar to that behind the TV Guardian, a device that filters so-called “mature” content from television and movies, based on a series of filters that users can turn on or off. (Perhaps this reveals my immaturity, but when reading through the list of TV Guardian options, “Hell/Damn Filter” made me snicker.)
I couldn’t find any statistics on how many homes own a TV Guardian, but I’m willing to bet it’s less than the number of people who own an iPhone.
The proposed Apple technology contains some laughable aspects, such as a grammar option, which would allow parents to set up alerts whenever their children’s texts contained an assault on the English language. This description, from the patent itself and quoted in PC World, sums it up nicely:
"A parent can . . . institute a condition to improve a child's grades. For example, the control application may require a user during specified time periods to send messages in a designated foreign language, to include certain designated vocabulary words, or to use proper designated spelling, designated grammar and designated punctuation and like designated language forms based on the user's defined skill level and/or designated language skill rating."
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Actually, It Takes Much More Than a Village
Annie Murphy Paul's new research shows mothers alone cannot be responsible for babies' prenantal health.
I picked up Time with trepidation. I’m nearly six months pregnant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Annie Murphy Paul had to tell me in her cover story, “How the first nine months shape the rest of your life.” I already had a list of rules to follow: don’t eat cold cuts, don’t drink alcohol, take a prenatal vitamin every day, don’t drink too much caffeine, don’t eat soft cheese, don’t take medicine if you get sick, don’t lie flat on your back, stay active but don’t overexert, don’t gain too much weight, and get plenty of rest. I worried that reading Paul’s findings would only compound my sense that I could and should always do more to protect the life of this child within.
But the article surprised me. It didn’t mention rules for pregnant women. Rather, it placed women and their unborn children in the context of a larger community. For example, Paul offers evidence that links air quality not only to the health of a fetus but also to the health of that fetus as a growing child and an adult. Evidence suggests that “exposure to traffic-related air pollution during pregnancy” can be linked “to a host of adverse birth outcomes, including premature delivery, low birth weight and heart malformations” as well as “damage” to DNA that “has been linked to increased cancer risk.”
In other words, when as we all contribute to polluted air now, we also contribute to health problems for the next generation. Similarly, pregnant mothers who endure intense stress (and here we aren’t talking about having a bad day but the stress caused by warfare or starvation), “give birth to children with a higher risk of schizophrenia.” The article, based on Paul’s book on the topic, suggests links between fetal health and heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and mental illness. Paul writes, “Scientists are exploring the possibility that intrauterine conditions influence not only our physical health but also our intelligence, temperament, even our sanity.”
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Outsourcing Baby-Making in India
The disturbing realities of reproductive tourism as a global growth sector.
It’s a typical story in our global economy: Citizens of wealthy nations hire Indians to provide goods and services that cost less than the same goods or services domestically produced. But in the case of “reproductive tourism,” the Indian laborers are surrogate mothers who literally labor on behalf of foreign couples. They are paid to 'host' babies who are later carried home to the U.S., Britain, Israel, Australia, and other developed nations.
One expert recently referred to reproductive tourism as a “global growth sector,” with India leading the trend. (Reproductive tourism is not limited to India. British women regularly travel to U.S. fertility clinics to access a larger pool of donated eggs, and Indian-style surrogacy programs are springing up in Guatemala.) Fertility clinics in India market their services by offering foreign clients travel services so they can sightsee while in India for an IVF cycle or retrieving their baby. The clinics also recruit surrogates, usually poor Indian mothers; help clients obtain donor eggs and sperm; perform in vitro fertilization (IVF); house, feed, and provide medical care to surrogates during their pregnancies; and deliver babies.
Advocates for this business claim that everyone wins. Childless couples get the babies they long for, and surrogates receive income for better housing and education for their own children. But it’s not that simple. Indian surrogates must live in special housing while they are pregnant. They are well-fed and taken care of, but what does it say about whose families are more valuable when Indian mothers are away from their own children for months while they gestate babies for wealthier foreigners? According to a recent Slate article, many of the women cannot read their surrogacy contracts. Those from higher castes are paid more than those from lower castes, and surrogates are paid only if they deliver a living child.
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Abortion Case: Womb vs. Egg
Ethical issues abound in case of British Columbia couple who wanted surrogate mom to terminate pregnancy after baby was found to have Down Syndrome.
A British Columbia couple creates an embryo using in vitro fertilization (IVF). They contractually hire a surrogate mother to carry the child. Then they discover, through prenatal screening, that the baby has Down syndrome. The couple asks the surrogate mother to terminate the pregnancy. The surrogate disagrees with their decision. According to their agreement, the surrogate can continue the pregnancy, but she will become responsible for raising the child. Then, the surrogate mother, citing problems it would create for her own two children if she kept the baby, goes ahead with the termination.
I know about this story because I receive an e-mail every day from Google about news related to the key words “Down syndrome.” Our daughter Penny, who is four, has Down syndrome. Any given day offers me heartwarming stories about the accomplishments of a young adult with Down syndrome. Most days bring up some questions about genetic testing and prenatal screening. And every so often a story appears, like this one, that raises a host of ethical and legal questions.
Had the couple and surrogate mom gone to court, the scenario would have pushed the limits of abortion law. Whose baby was it? According to the Canadian and U.S. court systems, the legal right to an abortion is not dependent on biological parenthood but on the privacy rights of the woman carrying the baby. As a result, a father of a child has no legal right to prevent (or insist upon) abortion. Similarly, the surrogate mother retains the right of choice, even though the parents who created the baby had entered into a contractual agreement with her.
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The Unfunny Side of Modern Feminism
What I observed at Double X's recent event on women and comedy.
Is feminism funny or humorless? That was the question asked and evaluated at a Slate event I attended in New York City two weeks ago called Double X Presents: The Smoking Bra: Women and Comedy. I thought the question was worth exploring because, like so many contentious topics, feminism doesn’t often inspire laughter. The problem is, I was looking in the wrong place for an answer.
I would describe the comedy event in detail, but doing so would violate Philippians 4:8, which instructs us to think on things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable. Much of what I saw and heard was anything but that.
Double X editor Jessica Grose opened by introducing a “pioneering” female comedian whose claim to fame was passing gas on stage. Next, Second City alumnus Jenny Hagel, showed a film in which she plays an uptight gender studies professor who tries to convince a thief that she is a feminist, whether the thief likes the label or not. When reason doesn’t work, Hagel turns to rap. Some of her nimble descriptions are compelling, like when she says a feminist is someone who knows that if a guy buys her pie, she doesn’t owe him sex. Others are trite, like when she suggests a feminist is excessively curious about her own genitalia. Megan Kellie then showed a video of crass street interviews asking the question: Why do men think their private parts are funny and women don’t?
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Is Pain Relief a Human Right?
My daughter's own experience with pain has helped me answer this question.
The International Association for the Study of Pain issued a declaration saying it is. People have a right to receive pain relief, without discrimination, via medications and non-medication techniques; to have pain assessed as a vital sign; to be treated by medical personnel trained in pain management; and to have chronic pain recognized as a disease entity that requires comprehensive treatment.
In a related story, Human Rights Watch published a report revealing that “most Kenyan children with diseases such as cancer or HIV/AIDS are unable to get palliative care or pain medicines,” because existing programs don’t serve children, health-care workers are inadequately trained in managing pain, and inexpensive opioid medications are scarce due to government policy and providers’ reluctance to give these drugs to children.
I learned of these developments while I was also reading — actually, devouring — Melanie Thernstrom’s acclaimed new book, The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing and the Science of Suffering. The meticulously researched book covers the history of how we interpret and treat pain; the relationship among pain, the body, and the brain; and Thernstrom’s story of living with chronic musculoskeletal pain.
Thernstrom describes injustices in how pain is perceived and treated. For example, women with chronic pain are more likely to receive medications for depression and anxiety, while men are more likely to receive opioids, surgery, and complete exams. She says women who aggressively demand pain treatment are more likely to be dismissed as hysterical, and women’s fears of being perceived as demanding make them hesitant to report pain. African Americans are also more likely to be under-treated for pain, denied opioids, and to “have their requests for medication interpreted as ‘drug-seeking behavior,’” she writes.
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Burqa Watching in Great America
Some Muslim American women say wearing the burqa keeps others from objectifying them. But must women hide their bodies to be taken seriously?
During this summer’s visit to Six Flags Great America, I was prepared for the bikini-clad girls with short-shorts pulled down low, the shirtless boys with white tanks tossed across their shoulders, not to mention the matching families in khaki shorts and neon green tees.
I was not, however, prepared for the burqas. My jaw dropped as the family approached me: two fathers in tidy slacks and polo shirts walking alongside two women (presumably) draped completely in black, peering out through slits. One set of hands poked out of long sleeves to push a stroller, while the other set held the hands of two small kids.
As my eyes went from the women to the men, a rage boiled up inside me. In my mind, I was witnessing walking bondage, humans trapped beneath black cloth.
I have never considered the hijab (head scarf) oppressive, simply because I find the scarves and their wearers to be elegant and lovely — and because they do not cover a woman’s face. But to me, the burqa and even the niqab, which covers the face to a lesser degree, communicate an oppression that no woman in the world — let alone in Great America, the amusement park or the country, should bear, and certainly would never choose.
So imagine my surprise when I heard a young, modern Muslim woman named Nadia defending her choice to wear a niqab and cover her face in public at CNN’s Belief blog.
“I’ve never seen anybody interview a Muslim woman and ask her if she’s oppressed,” Nadia says. “Or if she feels oppressed for wearing what she wears, or if she’s oppressed in her home.”
Nor have I. Neither have I asked a Muslim woman. I can blame my assumptions on the Taliban and my open-jawed reading of Half the Sky, or the protestor’s images of a veiled woman being stoned for adultery. Nadia says these images are not valid in America. She has never met a woman forced to wear the veil.
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My Encounter with Mental Illness
College is a seedbed for depression. Here's what Christian campuses can do to help.
My freshman year, I spiraled into a clinical depression triggered by an off-campus move. That semester, my lack of finances required moving from the dorms into an apartment across the street from the university. There, I lived rent-free with a generous elderly woman. Yet I felt like an outsider looking in as daily I’d peer out the window at students walking to and fro.
Although I lived in a cloud of mental confusion, somehow I managed to attend classes and chapel. For over a year, I daily fought back a stream of tears that threatened to publicly out me. I thought I was crazy; my only relief was sleep. So I slept a lot. And I loathed myself. Even though I prayed and read Scripture daily, I felt numb, isolated, and alienated — damned. It felt as if God had fled. Although surrounded by several thousand professing Christians, I was too ashamed and embarrassed to tell others except a counselor and superficially a few others. For the most part, no one seemed to notice. I contemplated suicide.
Because of the fervent prayers and encouraging phone calls of my younger siblings, Kenny and Michelle, I clung to life. Day by day they ministered God’s grace. And, thanks be to God, I started the climb out of the lowest rungs of hell late in my sophomore year.
Yet I know that not everybody makes it. And according to one report released last week, the number of college students struggling is growing. At an American Psychological Association meeting, John Guthman of Hofstra University reported that, based on a sample of over 3,000 U.S. students, the percentage of students with moderate to severe depression rose from 34% to 41% from 1998 to 2010. Relatedly, the number of students on psychiatric medications went from 11% to 24% in the same period. (Conversely, the number of students who said they had considered suicide within two weeks of counseling went from 26% to 11% in this period.) Guthman said the rise isn’t about increasing stress loads — though that’s a likely factor — but about more students with pre-existing conditions attending college, and their increased willingness to seek help.
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Celebrate National B-----Feeding Month
To counteract our culture's squeamishness about breast-feeding, first we need to be able to talk about it.
World Breastfeeding Week has just ended, we are in the middle of National Breastfeeding Month, and I feel like I've been boob-deep in lactivist reading. Oops — did my use of the word boob bother you? If so, then you might not want to watch this video, which features women (including mini-celebrities Ali Landry, Kelly Rutherford, and Lisa Loeb) tossing off euphemisms for breasts at the camera in celebration of their own breast-feeding experiences. The Bump, a community website geared toward new moms, created the video as a pro-breastfeeding public service announcement, part of their "Join the Boob-olution!" campaign.
I love the video.
Before becoming a mother, I was squeamish when it came to words for body parts. I didn't like the word breast even when it was applied to chicken, while some of the other ones were downright un-utterable by me. It just seemed so immodest to say them out loud. Good girls don't talk about their dirty pillows, right?
Giving birth and then breast-feeding lowered some of my inhibitions, and now that I'm a certified breastfeeding counselor training to be an IBCLC (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant), I can say pretty much any anatomical word without blushing. But I recognize that Christians and non-Christians alike maintain a great deal of squeamishness about women's bodies, and that posting the video on Facebook (as I did last week) might be seen as vulgar.
The women in the video are using words that are appear in our culture solely to sexualize women's bodies. That sin has become an obstacle that prevents many women from breastfeeding. Why should babies pay for the wrongs of their fathers and mothers? I applaud The Bump and its campaign for reclaiming breasts for babies by reminding us that the shock value of anatomical language can have the power to convict.
I'm all for the push-back against our unchaste, sexually perverse culture. I hope to raise my daughters to want something more out of life than Mardi Gras beads and thong underwear. And part of this means teaching them about the beauty of God's design of the female body, breasts and all.
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The Glamorous Life of the Pregnant Teenager
Do pop culture's portrayals of teen pregnancy harm young women?
When fast-fashion chain Forever 21 announced this month that they were rolling out a maternity line in five states — three of which have the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country — they were accused of what has become a common charge: glamorizing teen pregnancy. Like Juno, Jamie Lynn Spears, and Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up before them, Bristol Palin, 16 and Pregnant, and The Secret Life of the American Teenager have all faced criticism for promoting a deceptively attractive view of teenage motherhood. Have the baby, their implicit argument seems to go, and you can still look cute, have a career, and maybe even marry the father of your child.
Certainly reasonable arguments could be made that each of these pop culture icons have contributed to a softened, normalized view of teenage pregnancy. Kendall Jenner, the Kardashian half-sister and the face of Forever 21, is only 14. And the store’s omnipresence in malls across the country, along with its trendy, low-priced fashions and frustratingly small sizes, certainly targets teenage girls. But as a 24-year-old, I confess that I still shop there, as do most of my friends — many of whom are going through their first (or second) pregnancies and love cheap maternity clothes that don’t sacrifice style. Forever 21 already has a plus-size line as well as a “contemporary” line geared toward young professionals. Diversifying their offerings seems more like a good business strategy than a plot to convince U.S. teens to accessorize their pregnancies.
Is it true that young women see examples of young moms and decide they might want the same for their own lives? True, Bristol Palin has parlayed her high-profile pregnancy into tabloid covers, a lucrative job as spokeswoman for the Candie's Foundation, and even an acting gig on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, an ABC Family show slammed by The New York Times as “didactic and soulless cheerleading for anti-abortion sentiments.” But surely girls can recognize the unusual circumstances of Bristol’s life, as well as her own admission that being a teen mom “kind of sucks.”
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Following Christ at a Porn Convention
Editors' Note: This post has been removed at the request of the author.
Stalked by a Priest
Donna Freitas's This Gorgeous Game, about a priest obsessed with a teenage girl, is a work of deep empathy and disturbing believability.
This Gorgeous Game (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), Donna Freitas’s new work of young adult fiction, is a first-person narrative of being stalked. Most stories that have emerged from the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal detail the horrors of pedophilia and assault. Freitas’s novel, about a bright teenager named Olivia Peters, demonstrates that being fawned over and called incessantly can be as terrifying as what are considered more “harmful” crimes. Especially if you are a junior in high school, and the person fawning over you is a Catholic priest.
Freitas, a religion scholar at Boston University, is best known for Sex and the Soul, her 2008 study of young adults’ attitudes on spirituality and sexuality. She identifies as a “stubborn Catholic,” writing for The Washington Post amid recent media coverage of the scandal, “I am still here despite my struggles to remain a Catholic and despite my scars, too. . . . My faith and place in this tradition is much bigger than one single priest and some terrible church officials. It transcends victimization and unspent anger.”
The scars, as readers might guess by now, are from Freitas’s own experience of being stalked by a priest for over two years. She makes clear that Olivia is not her stand-in, that the narrative does not mimic her own. But she says that “I never could have conveyed the first-person emotion of what happens to Olivia or known how to get into the mind of a priest who would do such a thing as stalk a young woman.”
As such, This Gorgeous Game is a work of deep empathy and disturbing believability. Readers spend their time inside the mind and heart of Peters, a cradle Catholic who has recently landed a prestigious writing prize from a local Catholic university. The prize includes enrollment in a summer writing program led by Mark Brendan, a priest and writer esteemed in church and intellectual circles. Olivia’s father has been out of the picture for some time, she tells us early on — “but my older sister, Greenie, and I have had plenty of dads over the years, it’s just that everyone calls them Fathers instead of Dads and they are married to the Catholic Church. . . . Now another one, another Father walks into my life. What luck.”
Luck, readers learn quickly, is not the right word here. We watch the red flags of boundary-breaking and obsession go up as Father Mark fosters a mentoring relationship with Olivia. Flag #1: For their first writing session, he asks Olivia to meet him in a bar, where he sips scotch liberally, telling her, “I probably shouldn’t say this [“then don’t!” we say], but the moment I first saw you, I wondered to myself: how did so much talent, such insight and imagination, come from a girl so young, and with such startling beauty? . . . I am astounded by you, to be quite honest.”
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Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom
Is it better to attend church burnt out and stressed, or occasionally stay home but miss corporate worship?
Several Sundays ago my kids were playing outside when we called them to get in the car for church. They stalled. They whined. They asked, “Why do we always have to go to church?” My responses became less patient and my words sharper, until I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and said through clenched teeth, “Going to church is what we do. Get used to it.”
We all arrived at church grumpy — an unfortunately common state on Sunday mornings. The following Sunday, we used the fact that it was Youth Recognition Sunday (often a particularly long, dull service) as an excuse to skip church. Now that it’s summer, we, like many families, will probably find more excuses over the next two months to not attend. We’ll be away some weekends, the kids have no church school, and we relish breaks from getting everyone up and out the door by a certain time. Judging by the sparsely occupied pews in many churches during this season, we aren't the only family who skips church more often in the summer.
A few years ago, such a lax attitude toward church attendance was unthinkable to me. We were die-hard churchgoers, in the pews every Sunday barring illness or vacation. But being a die-hard means that you are given jobs, and when you do those jobs well, you are given more jobs. Sunday worship ceased to be a time of renewal; it was work. When we joined our current parish two years ago, I was determined to be more deliberate and cautious about volunteering. Being less involved makes Sunday mornings more enjoyable, but it also makes it easier to skip Sunday services altogether because we have fewer responsibilities.
Our kids are thrilled when we take a Sunday off. But our newly relaxed attitude toward church attendance raises important questions: Are we modeling a nebulous spirituality, teaching our kids to pick and choose from among religious practices while rejecting anything that requires real commitment? Is it possible to engage in life-giving, sacrificial commitment without falling into energy-draining, resentment-breeding burnout? Perhaps most important: How do I instill faith in my children, and how important is church attendance in that endeavor?
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Before the Next After-Sex Pill
Moral, theological, and ethical questions behind ‘ella,’ a new pill to prevent pregnancy.
Medical experts, pro-life advocates, and women’s groups are once again debating the moral questions raised by so-called “morning-after” pills. On June 17, an advisory panel recommended that the FDA approve an emergency contraceptive known as “ella” for prescription use. Ella differs from Plan B, an emergency contraceptive FDA-approved for over-the-counter use, because it is effective for up to 120 hours after a woman has unprotected sex, while Plan B is only effective up to 72 hours after sex.
The controversy over ella centers on scientific uncertainty about its mechanism of action—whether it only delays ovulation, thereby preventing fertilization altogether, or whether it might also prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. The manufacturer has conducted studies showing that ella can delay ovulation. They have neither studied, nor do they plan to study, whether ella can also prevent implantation.
Because ella is a close chemical relative to RU-486, a pill that can terminate an early pregnancy, pro-life groups oppose FDA approval of ella because of its potential capacity to prevent implantation. Advocates for ella argue that the FDA should take a “just the facts” approach that solely evaluates whether the drug is safe and effective for its intended and studied use—preventing pregnancy after unprotected sex by delaying ovulation.
Given the potential for ella to prevent implantation, it makes sense for pro-life groups to oppose the drug’s approval. But in reading news coverage of the debates, I was struck by the tenuous nature of moral arguments centered on inconclusive scientific data. Both opponents and proponents of ella are focused on what science hasn’t yet made clear—whether or not the drug can prevent implantation. Without that crucial bit of knowledge, the ethical debate is reduced to the two sides stating and restating their competing interpretations of scientific data. Such a debate is unlikely to change anyone’s mind or lead to consensus.
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Q+A: Selling Girls on Craigslist
Rebecca Project founder Malika Saada Saar explains how Craigslist became the medium for human trafficking.
On Saturday night I attended a dinner party in Laguna. A guest seated next to me pulled out a snazzy looking camera, and raved about how he got it for a steal on Craigslist.
In the car, I asked my sister if she’s used Craigslist. “Of course! It’s the best. It’s where all the college students look for housing and jobs.” The online classifieds service is one of the most popular websites in the US today.
It’s also used for selling women and underage girls.
Last year, Craigslist changed their “erotic services” name to “adult services.” They also promised to manually monitor the section for any instances of child prostitution or human trafficking. And they started charging $5 to $10 per sexual service post.
The result? The privately-owned company’s revenues for prostitution have gone up. This past April, the FBI arrested 14 Mafia members for selling girls ages 15 to 19 on Craigslist in New York and New Jersesy.
Human rights activists continue to call Craigslist the “biggest online hub for selling women against their will,” according to The New York Times. But Craigslist’s two largest shareholders, company founder Craig Newmark and chief executive James Buckmaster, appear unperturbed by the complaints of human rights officials and authorities.
One human rights activist watching Craigslist is Malika Saada Saar, who founded the Rebecca Project for Human Rights while attending Georgetown Law. As director of the Rebecca Project, Saada Saar joined forces with other organizations to fight human trafficking in the United States, including trafficking on Craigslist. The Rebecca Project produced the YouTube video on the left with the FAIR Fund youth advocate, and Crittenton Foundation.
Saada Saar recently spoke with me about the problem and her efforts to fight it.
An estimated 100,000 minors in the U.S. are trafficked into prostitution. Why is Craigslist a major hub for trafficking?
[Craigslist] is this iconic, convenient way that we are able to purchase items. And because of the adult services section that Craigslist allows to be part of that process, individuals can purchase a girl for sex in the same manner that they are able to purchase a piece of furniture. Craigslist makes in very convenient.
When you look at who tends to purchase girls for sex, the research shows us that these persons are usually white men who are married and in their 30s and 40s. So it’s more convenient and discreet for them to simply go onto Craigslist and purchase a child for sex, than to go out onto the street and do that, or to go to a more taboo site like Backpage or myRedBook.
How many illegal Craigslist posts have been documented?
At any point in any city, you can go onto the adult services section and see children who are being trafficked. This is not only an issue within the U.S. borders; it’s also an issue within Criagslist Vietnam, Thailand, and India.
How many illegal posts are estimated?
We went onto the site last week because it’s often used as a way of trying to see if Criagslist is in fact manually removing those advertisements for sex that are obviously for children. Those days that we went there, we were able to track at least one girl each day that was up for being sold.
The other part is that there’s been some really good research that’s coming out of the Shapiro Group, a research group hired by the Women’s Funding Network. What their research shows, in the state of Georgia, was that Craigslist was used three times more than Backpage and myRedBook, and that 47 percent of individuals, once they were told that this was a girl under the age of 18, whom they were purchasing, continued with the purchase of the child. Something that’s interesting to note is that Craigslist issued a cease and desist order regarding the research, but the Women’s Funding Network released it anyway.
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Sexy Evangelism
Why our narrative about sex, dating, and marriage is a gospel priority.
My husband runs a dormitory of 30 high-school boys. Recently two of them lounged on our living room floor, asking questions about our faith. It started with theodicy (If God is good, why do bad things happen?). We covered confession and the difference between Protestants and Catholics and heaven and hell. Then we came to the topic of sex.
Two things stood out to me in their questions. One, they longed to hear my husband's and my story, the story of two people who started dating in high school and waited until marriage to have sex — two people who have been together for over a decade and feel grateful for, not constrained by, the protection of marriage. Two, we might as well have been telling a fairy tale: “Once upon a time in a land far, far away.” Our story intrigued them. It might have even attracted them. But they had no context for understanding what we were talking about.
The story of sex as told in mainstream Western culture is failing us, and a recent spate of articles from surprising mainstream sources has picked up on this. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan covers the way teenage girls want to reclaim the “boyfriend narrative” rather than settling for “hooking up” with various boys who expect no commitment or ongoing relationship. In Flanagan’s words, teenage girls are “designed for closely held, romantic relationships.” Flanagan never articulates who is doing the designing, but she argues that sex is not enough for teenage girls. Relationships, in fact, are better.
Then last week, Peggy Orenstein, in "Playing at Sexy" at The New York Times Magazine, argues that the sexualization of young girls (see Her.meneutics' recent post on the topic) is harmful. Neither Flanagan nor Orenstein upholds a conservative view of sexuality. Neither believes that sex belongs exclusively within marriage. Orenstein's concerns ultimately lie with young women's ability to express their sexuality in "healthy" ways. Yet both writers are noting that what we’re doing now isn’t working.
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Little Girls and Single Ladies
The backlash to the video of 8-year-olds gyrating to Beyonce suggests there's still hope for our culture.
It’s been a few weeks since the viral video debut of a dance routine featuring girls as young as 8 gyrating to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” The furor has mostly died down, but I find myself still thinking about it — even though I deliberately chose not to watch the video (still on YouTube for curious readers).
The reaction to the video was almost exclusively negative, with bloggers calling out the girls’ parents (what were they thinking?) and lamenting the oversexualization of children. One writer said watching the video left him “feeling the need to sit through a 13-hour marathon of The Lawrence Welk Show to cleanse [my] soul.”
When confronted by the media storm, the girls’ parents defended their daughters’ dance, saying it was being “taken completely out of context.” The routine was intended for the audience at the World of Dance competition, the parents insisted; “the girls weren't meant to be viewed by millions of people.”
But they were. And most people had something to say. A few souls defended the dance (and the girls’ parents), saying the real problem was the viewers: “when Babble.com publishes ridiculous commentary like the girls look ‘ready for the boom boom room instead of romper room,’ they become the ones who suddenly sexualize the video,” the Examiner claimed. Were it not for such sexualized commentary, the video “may have otherwise come and gone fairly harmlessly through viewers' Web-surfing rear-view.”
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Modesty: A Female-Only Virtue?
Scripture suggests that modesty means more than keeping the right parts covered.
About this time four years ago, Calvin College students, ready to enjoy the long-absent Michigan sun, spent hours each day on the campus lawn, “studying” for finals and playing Ultimate Frisbee until dusk. Calvin, affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church (and — I must say — a contender for the “Christian Harvard” label long held by Wheaton College), has no written policies on student clothing, though staff and students have debated that decision. But as tank tops and skirts began appearing on campus every spring, RAs and staff would somberly remind female students to mind our hem- and necklines, lest we let a brother stumble. “Women don’t realize how visually wired men are,” the reasoning went. “We shouldn’t wear things that lead their minds to impure places.”
Sexual immorality, of course, is a serious matter, Scripture attests, and research abounds on real chemical differences between men’s and women’s brains. Further, a thriving Christian community requires its members to think beyond their own preferences, about how personal decisions impact others. But, as I watched hoards of my male peers bounding across the lawn wearing nothing but flimsy track shorts — think Juno’s Paulie Bleeker — I wondered if they had received any wisdom or direction about their dress. Is modesty a virtue only for women?
This question arose in a personal way this Easter, which is a days-long celebration at the church I attend. A single friend asked if he could sleep on my roommate’s couch one night to avoid driving 45 minutes home late Saturday and coming back early Sunday. I obliged, seeing the setup through a logistical lens. We talked a bit Saturday night before heading to our respective rooms, my conscience undisturbed. On Sunday morning, I tiptoed past the sleeping friend to the kitchen. He, likely not thinking twice, soon entered the kitchen shirtless, wearing boxer shorts — and he went on to engage me like he might have while wearing khakis and a sport coat. Blushing and baffled by his nonchalance, I had to consciously “bounce my eyes.”
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Problems with Do-It-Yourself DNA Tests
Consumers don't just need information about their genes; they also need medical and theological wisdom.
After the FDA intervened this week, Walgreens has decided to postpone selling do-it-yourself DNA testing kits in 6,000 of its stores nationwide. The drugstore chain had arranged to sell kits made by Pathway Genomics that promised to reveal your risk of health issues ranging from obesity to breast cancer, as well as your children’s risk of serious genetic disorders.
Walgreens reversed its decision after the FDA raised concerns that the kits would encourage consumers to make rash decisions based on genetic information not fully understood even by experts, and without consulting their doctors. The FDA also raised questions about the legality of selling the tests; Alberto Gutierrez told the Associated Press, "selling a test over the counter without an FDA clearance, particularly for the type of claims they have, is not legal." The Federal Trade Commission likewise warned that direct-to-consumer genetic tests “provide medical results that are meaningful only in the context of a full medical evaluation.”
Context — medical, ethical, and, for Christians, theological — is sorely needed as companies market personal DNA tests as vital tools for informed health decisions. While the FDA’s action keeps the tests off store shelves for now, inexpensive DNA tests are already available online and through fertility clinics. The Pathway Genomics test, available online, allows consumers to send a saliva sample for DNA analysis. The analysis costs up to several hundred dollars, depending on how much information the customer wants. Late last year, a company called Counsyl started advertising $350 tests that allow prospective parents to determine if their children risk inheriting any of 100 single-gene disorders.
Americans have become experts at gathering medical information on the Internet rather than relying on doctors as all-knowing gatekeepers. As someone with a lifelong physical disability and the parent of a child with the same disability, I’ve had lots of interactions with doctors. Because our disorder is rare and I have online access to information and to other affected families, I often know more about treatments, new developments, and daily coping strategies than our doctors do. Our most valuable doctor-patient relationships are partnerships; I offer my information and perspective, the doctors offer theirs, and together we make treatment decisions.
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Perplexed by the Pill
How birth control pills — which turn 50 this year — led me to believe I was in control of my life and my body.
The Pill turned 50 this year, and Time magazine commemorated the anniversary last week with Nancy Gibbs’s cover story, “Love, Sex, Freedom and the Paradox of the Pill." Gibbs thoroughly and thoughtfully provides a scientific and sociological history of birth control, while addressing some of the ethical questions raised by the little tablet, swallowed by more than 100 million women worldwide every day. Gibbs sets up a strong contrast in how people respond to the Pill: “Its supporters hoped it would strengthen marriage by easing the strain of unwanted children; its critics still charge that the Pill gave rise to promiscuity, adultery, and the breakdown of the family.”
![2713580189_ff89c28b44.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/05/2713580189_ff89c28b44.jpg "Courtesy of nateOne, flickr.com, <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nateone/2713580189/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nateone/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/nateone/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>")
As a Christian who has taken the Pill intermittently for over a decade, I find myself on both sides of the divide, caught between an ethic of hospitality and of stewardship, between individual responsibility and collective consciousness, between traditional family values and feminist theory. Reading Gibbs's article didn’t answer all my questions, but it forced me to admit that the questions needed asking.
A year or so into our marriage, my husband, Peter, and I went away for a weekend. In the middle of an expensive dinner — both of us content with the “just us”-ness of our lives — I said to him, “Do you ever think about never having kids?”
"All the time," he replied.
We were young. We hadn't had sex before marriage. I wouldn’t have called it entitlement then, but in retrospect I admit that I felt entitled to “my” life with “my” husband. Kids were an afterthought, something that might come, someday, if we felt like it, and if a convenient time arose.
We both eventually changed our minds. We realized that kids are never convenient. More, I wanted to see Peter become a father. I wanted to give something of myself to a child. We wanted to have a family. But although we changed our minds, we didn’t change our perspective on having children. When I went off the Pill, we still thought we were in control.
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Female Sex Addict: Not an Oxymoron
Marnie Ferree's No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Addiction challenges easy assumptions about who gets addicted and why.
Biblical scholars have yet to determine if the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1–11) was a sex addict. But Nashville-based clinical therapist Marnie Ferree says the woman’s shame and social status make her an apt archetype for women struggling with sex addiction. For one, women sex addicts often face a double dose of shame because they believe they as women aren't supposed to have sexual sin. And because the number of female addicts is relatively small (expert Patrick Carnes estimates 3 percent of the U.S. population, with male addicts composing 8 percent), few books and recovery groups are available. “I tell some of my colleagues, such as Mark Laaser, ‘you wrote a great book, but the pronouns are wrong,’ ” says Ferree.
Thankfully, the story of the adulterous woman in John’s gospel reminds sex addicts that not even their deepest secret is outside Christ’s healing touch. Ferree knows this from personal experience, because she is a recovering sex addict — something she hid for 20 years until an HPV diagnosis in 1990 brought it to light and kick-started her recovery. Today, alongside her husband of 29 years, Ferree runs Bethesda Workshops, which aims to provide “Christian treatment for sex addiction recovery.” Their dramatic story appears in No Stones: Women Redeemed from Sexual Addiction, Ferree’s immensely practical, deeply biblical book for female sex addicts, out this month from InterVarsity Press. Ferree spoke recently with Her.meneutics editor Katelyn Beaty.
What is sex addiction? How is it different from, say, porn addiction?
There’s no difference between porn addiction and sex addiction. Sex addiction is an umbrella term; the particular form of acting out, whether it’s pornography, affairs, sex chat rooms, prostitutes, picking up people in bars, is immaterial. These are all just one manifestation.
The main characteristics of sex addiction (and any addiction, for that matter) are
Obsession: the behavior becomes the organizing principle of life. The addict is obsessed with acting out, trying to hide the acting out, and figuring out when she can act out again.
Compulsion: continuing behavior in spite of your best efforts to stop. You keep doing what you don't want to do.
Continuing despite adverse consequences: you continue behavior that clearly isn't in your best interest. You pay a price for your behavior (in terms of relationships, jobs, shame) and yet you keep doing it.
Several times you describe female sex addiction as an intimacy disorder: the search for “love, touch, affirmation, affection, and approval.” Is male sex addiction also at root an intimacy disorder?
Yes, absolutely.
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Female and Athletic: College Basketball's Gender Dilemma
Gay bloggers' backlash to Christian coach's pro-family statement highlights the NCAA's messy relationship with femininity.
What seemed like a simple statement about family togetherness has become a lightning rod in the world of Division I women’s college basketball.
![3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg ""Nash Shooting," University of Texas. Courtesy of aaronisnotcool / flickr.com <div style="float: left; padding-right: 10px;"><a href="http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg"><img src="http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b-thumb.jpg" width="345" height="230" alt="3108019973_ae57aedbf6_b.jpg" title=""Nash Shooting," University of Texas. Courtesy of aaronisnotcool / flickr.com <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/3108019973/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/cavalierhorn/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>" /></a></div>")
Robin Pingeton, the new women’s basketball coach at the University of Missouri, said in her first press conference April 8, “I’m very blessed to have my staff here. This is something very unique, I think, for Division I women's basketball to have a staff that the entire staff is married with kids. Family is important to us, and we live it every day.”
Pingeton, 41, who calls herself “a Christian who happens to be a coach,” has taken heat from gay rights bloggers who watch college athletics, reported Inside Higher Ed this week. Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights said Pingeton’s comments were meant to “subtly prov[e] that everyone in their program was straight,” and that mentioning her faith “was yet again, a subtle way of saying being lesbian or being gay would be against religious values and isn’t what our program is about.”
Pat Griffin, University of Massachusetts professor emerita, wrote on her LGBT sports blog:
[Pingeton’s] husband and son were at the press conference as were her proud aunt and uncle. Nothing unusual about that. Family is often present to celebrate professional achievements (unless, of course, the family is a same-sex partner). But then she goes on to make sure we know that heterosexual marital status is important to her by noting that all of her assistants are married with children. . . . [Y]ou have to wonder what kind of team climate she will promote for student-athletes who are not Christian or who are not heterosexual.
The backlash to Pingeton’s comments makes sense only in the context of women’s college basketball’s “long and persistent history of struggles over players and coaches’ sexuality,” reported Inside Higher Ed. The height and muscle that help players on the court often put them outside traditional images of femininity, and many of them endure rumors about sexual orientation. Rene Portland, former head coach of Penn State University’s Lady Lions, infamously had a written “no-lesbians” policy, and was sued by a former player who said she was cut in 2005 for her perceived sexual orientation. Sherri Murrell, the only openly gay coach in Division I women’s basketball, told Salon’s Broadsheet that during the competitive recruiting stage, coaches will dismiss other schools’ basketball programs for having too many lesbians.
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Yoga: An Exercise in Discernment
How I submit the meditative practice to Christ.
About 16 million adults in the United States practice yoga — an increase of 85 percent from 2004 to 2008 — and the Los Angeles Times reports that both Christian and Jewish groups are incorporating the Eastern meditation practice into their respective faith tradition. Explicitly Christian yoga classes, such as Laurette Willis's PraiseMoves, seek to "transform your workout into worship!" I've practiced yoga for over six years now, but haven’t sought out a Christian class, instead being content to bring my faith to the class I attend. This exercise in Christian discernment has strengthened both my body and my spirit.
![4491159511_aff9c4de29_b.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2010/04/4491159511_aff9c4de29_b.jpg "National Cherry Blossom Festival @ Washington Monument. Courtesy of Daveynin / Flickr.com / <div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/4491796528/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveynin/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">CC BY 2.0</a></div>")
I had two reservations when I began practicing yoga. One, I don’t like trying new things, and the thought of contorting my not-so-flexible body in front of others made me nervous. Two, I knew that yoga had Eastern origins, and didn’t want to turn exercise into an unwitting endorsement of Hinduism. But the class was free, and I wanted to be more willing to try new things, and I figured my faith could withstand one yoga class. So I went.
And I loved it. As a Christian, the spiritual aspect of yoga both attracts me and concerns me. It’s easy to affirm the goodness of taking care of my body. Even though “honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:20) was written to address sexual morality, it extends to the care we take in other areas as well. Christian theology insists that our bodies matter. God’s physical creation is a good one. In contrast to the Greek idea that the body is corrupt, Christ’s incarnation affirms the importance of physical existence. Moreover, Christian hope is built on the promise that our souls and our bodies will be resurrected as a part of God’s new heaven and new earth. Again, Christian theology insists that our bodies matter — even though our spiritual practices, especially in private, are often devoid of physical expression.
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Breastfeed for the Health of the Nation?
Not nursing has major societal and health consequences — but even so, mothers deserve our support and understanding, not our judgment.
A new study published in Pediatrics journal concluded that breastfeeding has major life- and money-saving benefits. The study found that “if 90 percent of U.S. families could comply with the medical recommendations to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States could save $13 billion [per] year and prevent an excess 911 deaths annually, 95 percent of which would be of infants.”
The $13 billion figure came from examining occurrences and associated costs of 10 common illnesses that occur less often in breastfed children, as well as calculating the lost potential wages of infants who die. The preventable deaths are due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and several infectious diseases that breastfeeding has been shown to reduce.
Breastfeeding came easy for me and my babies. They latched on, my milk came in, they gained weight. It is not so for many women. Their babies are tired, their breasts hurt, the nurses are overworked, the grandmas won’t stop asking if a bottle might be easier, the calendar careens toward the end of maternity leave, and they crave nothing more than the uninterrupted sleep they might get if their husbands could give bottles of formula.
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Lady Gaga: Champion of Abstinence?
The wave of celebrities touting a "celibate" lifestyle actually undermines the movement.
Lady Gaga can make anything cool: Muppets as clothing. Bows made out of human hair. Pantslessness. Abstinence.
Wait . . . what?
“I can’t believe I’m saying this — don’t have sex,” said the 24-year-old pop star in an interview with Britain’s Daily Mail. Gaga, the heir to the Madonna/Freddie Mercury glam-pop throne, known for her catchy dance music and outrageous wardrobe, went on, “it’s okay not to have sex, it’s okay to get to know people. I’m single right now and I’ve chosen to be single because I don’t have the time to get to know anybody. I’m celibate, celibacy’s fine.”
Her message, as the article points out, is more about choice than abstinence itself. “Something I do want to celebrate with my fans is that it’s okay to be whomever it is that you want to be. You don’t have to have sex to feel good about yourself, and if you’re not ready, don’t do it.” She adds, “And if you are ready, there are free condoms given away at my concerts when you’re leaving!” And this, in the context of an interview to promote a MAC lipstick that supports global HIV/AIDS projects — a lipstick Lady Gaga hopes will make women “feel strong enough that they can remember to protect themselves . . . [so] that when your man is lying naked in bed, you go into the bathroom, you put your lipstick on, and you bring a condom out with you.”
Not exactly the champion of abstinence many seem ready to make her.
Part of the problem seems to be confusion over what the word celibate actually means. Take, for example, the “celibate” Ashley Dupre (of Eliot Spitzer scandal fame). "I love sex and I'm very good at it, but I'm saving that," said the former call girl in a recent Playboy interview — complete with 8-page spread. "That's for my future boyfriend from now on. And it will be fabulous."
The word celibate to these celebrities, and in turn their very large audiences, seems to now mean “only having sex with my boyfriend” or “abstaining from random sex.” This is not the traditional understanding of celibacy or abstinence, but by identifying themselves with these terms, these celebrities point out an even more dangerous shift in the public conversation about abstinence. At least when Britney Spears told the press that she and then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake were abstinent, she meant that they were saving sex for marriage. She later admitted she was lying, of course, but at least she knew what the word meant. But if these women are now using the most “extreme” words possible to describe their sexual attitudes — which are not all that close to their traditional definitions — where does that leave actual abstinence? How can it be communicated when its terms have come to mean something entirely different?
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Cosmetic Surgery to the Glory of God?
Christians can't dismiss such surgery until they seriously consider our God-given desire for beauty.
I’d never thought much about plastic surgery until 28 years ago, when my then 2-year-old son bit through an extension cord and burnt his mouth. Even though we had no insurance, my husband and I found a plastic surgeon who restored symmetry and proportion to our son’s features. To have left our child’s face distorted would have been unthinkable, and Christian friends supported our decision as parents.
Twenty years later, when I considered restoring symmetry and proportion to my body after a 70-pound weight loss, I received the opposite response among Christian friends; many questioned my motives and some my spiritual integrity. Cosmetic surgery was a pursuit of the vain and shallow, they told me, even though I desired the same restoration for myself that I had wanted for my son.
A seminary grad, I began investigating cosmetic surgery through a biblical lens, particularly a theology of beauty and the implications of cosmetic surgery in a postmodern, consumer-driven culture. I wrestled with my motives: What did I really believe I’d achieve through such surgery? Was the story I was telling myself about who I was and would be if I had surgery consistent with God’s story for me? And what about stewardship? My husband was a Christian school administrator. Could we justify the expenditure?
In many ways, I saw myself as an unlikely candidate for cosmetic surgery — different from “other vain” women I envisioned. I was a Christian school teacher who didn’t know another soul who'd had a cosmetic procedure. (If they had, they didn’t talk about it until I came looking for them.) But I discovered on my journey that I was very much like thousands of other women — Christian and non-Christian — who seek cosmetic surgery. I wanted restoration. I wanted healing from emotional pain. I wanted to be average — not a beauty queen, just a woman beautiful for my husband, even though he already declared me beautiful.
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Minnesota Man Arrested for Prostituting Wife
Clinton Danner's arrest raises questions about Craigslist's culpability in sex trafficking — and about the church's response to criminal offenders.
A Rockford, Minnesota, man was arrested in Chicago two weeks ago for prostituting his wife using Craigslist, transporting her in a van to hotels in eight states and threatening to take away their 3-year-old daughter should she not comply.
Clinton Danner, 32, met his wife five years ago when she was a 17-year-old attending her family’s church. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Danner held a criminal record for burglary, lottery fraud, and drugs, but was working with a church counselor to change his life. The couple was wed at the church a few months after the young woman became pregnant.
The woman, whose name has not been released due to her victim status, told her parents about Danner a year ago and tried to leave him. Then, while at a downtown Chicago hotel in mid-March, she contacted Polaris Project for help. Founded in 2002, Polaris Project is one of the largest U.S. organizations battling human trafficking. Its hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, gets 400 to 500 phone calls every month.
The woman’s call led to the Cook County Sheriff’s Department involvement and Danner’s arrest March 14. Several metro areas in the U.S. are attempting to change their approach to prostitution, and Cook County has made great strides. The city has educated its police force to better recognize child prostitution and to view prostitutes as victims instead of criminals. (Oftentimes, prostitutes — even if they are minors — are arrested instead of their pimps or clients.)
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Learning from the Cornell Suicides
The Ivy League school's six suicides in six months serve to remind us of the people in our networks who are struggling privately.
The public image of Cornell University, the Ithaca, New York, Ivy League school, changed drastically this month when news broke that a third student in one month had committed suicide by jumping from Cornell’s famed gorges, following three other student suicides since October.
The March deaths of Bradley Ginsburg, William Sinclair, and Matthew Zika contributed to the stigma the press attached to the Ivy League school. The gorges’ eerie presence on campus didn’t help shake the labels. The natural landmarks served as an unusually public stage for suicides, and an all-too-effective reminder of the deaths for students forced to cross them on the way to class.
Cornell's administration responded quickly, posting guards at the bridges overlooking the gorges and sending staff to every campus dorm to search for students struggling to cope. Administrators have created a website compiling news related to the recent deaths and mental-health resources.
It's perhaps logical for the press and public to view the tragedies and Cornell’s response with increased concern. What is wrong at Cornell? The questions began. Is such a competitive academic program too much for most young people? But even with the rash of suicides, Cornell is no more a “suicide school” than other similar-sized universities. The Big Ten Suicide Study (1997), the most recent comprehensive study on college suicides, found that students in higher education programs are half as likely as non-college-bound young people to take their own life. The suicide rate for students in higher education is 7.5 per 100,000, compared with the national average of 15 per 100,000 among same-aged counterparts. By these numbers, Cornell, with some 20,000 students, falls within the national average for a school its size. In most years, it falls below the general average for overall deaths by suicide in the U.S., which is 10.9 deaths per 100,000 people. In fact, Cornell did not lose any students to suicide between 2005 and 2008.
Christians are wise to let Cornell’s tragedy serve as a corporate and personal reminder about how we communicate love and meaning. There are likely people in our lives who struggle with private depression, wrestling with deep questions and insecurities that do not often play out in settings as public as Cornell’s gorges. I was personally reminded of this earlier this month upon hearing that one of my former students took his own life at age 21.
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Get Your Free Human Eggs
A recent in vitro fertilization 'raffle' in London entices British women with an unregulated American fertility market. But it's too easy to dismiss that market as a money-grubbing enterprise.
Imagine that you are a woman with an intractable medical problem. You awake each day desperate to find a way to live the life you have dreamed of. Your doctors have offered increasingly sophisticated, invasive, and expensive treatments, to no avail. You have depleted your savings, and your insurance coverage is inadequate to pursue further treatment.
You attend a seminar about a treatment that has helped other women with your problem. A raffle will award one attendee a free treatment from the seminar’s sponsor. When the seminar ends, the speaker announces the winner’s name to the hushed crowd. It is your name. Maybe, just maybe, your nightmare is over. This treatment could work. And you will not have to pay a dime for it.
Sounds like a dream come true, right? But what if the medical problem in question is infertility? And what if the grand prize is an in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle that includes another woman's donated human egg? And what if the raffle, held in London and sponsored by an American clinic, was designed to market a kind of medical tourism, in which British women travel to America for IVF with donor eggs?
According to news reports, including this one from The Washington Post, the seminar’s sponsor, the Genetics and IVF (GIVF) Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, insisted that they were not raffling human body parts, but instead offering free medical treatment. When I initially heard about the raffle, I was troubled by such blatant commodification of human reproduction. But I could not dismiss out of hand GIVF's claim that they were simply trying to help those who needed their services. Shortly after we got married, my husband and I met with the same GIVF physician who is quoted in the Post article. Because I have a genetic bone disorder, we explored conceiving via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which is IVF with an added step of testing fertilized eggs for a particular genetic anomaly. Although we never received treatment from GIVF, my experience there and later at a fertility clinic in Connecticut showed me that we cannot disparage all fertility clinicians as money-grubbing marketing machines.
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Michelle Obama Tackles Childhood Obesity
The First Lady has been criticized for mentioning her daughters' weight to launch the 'Let's Move!' campaign.
As President Obama presided over a seven-hour cross-party debate on health care last week, First Lady Michelle Obama continued to make headlines in the advancement of her latest cause: childhood obesity.
In an historic appearance at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association on February 20, Obama called for a nationwide program to combat obesity in America's children, stressing as she did that such a plan need not be expensive.
Aims of "Let's Move," the name given to the Obama obesity initiative, include a $400 million annual budget to encourage grocery stores to carry healthier food selections, especially grocery stores in "underserved" areas, according to National Public Radio. "Let's Move" will also beef up (pardon the pun) initiatives to offer healthier lunches in schools, and partner with schools in achieving those goals.
It's no secret that being overweight is unhealthy and that obese children tend to grow into obese adults. And with childhood obesity continually on the rise, according to the latest government statistics, it's obvious something needs to be done. But from the minute it left the starting gate, "Let's Move" has endured some hefty criticism.
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Lead in Your Lipstick, Carcinogens in Your Hair Color
Most of the personal care products you use every day are damaging your health, argues Samuel Epstein in Toxic Beauty.
My story begins on a plane. All I did was ask the woman next to me for some lotion. Eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d asked for rat poison. She told me she did not use lotion anymore and launched into a long synopsis of the book that informed her decision: Toxic Beauty, Samuel Epstein’s frightening glimpse into the cosmetics and personal-care products industries.
My flight mate informed me that most if not all of the cosmetics and hygienic products that I used were bad for my health in one way or another. Then she dropped a bomb: cancer. That was more than enough to get my attention. “The book changed my life,” she said while massaging grapeseed oil into her hands, as I scribbled toxic beauty on my boarding pass.
As my friends can tell you, the only room I usually make for a recommendation in my long list of books to read is at the very end. But this one quickly moved to the front. And now it is my turn to say, “This book changed my life” — including the way I shop, the products I use, my health, my beliefs about responsible living, and my views on makeup.
Toxic Beauty’s central premise is that most of the cosmetic and personal care products (e.g., shampoo, lotion, and toothpaste) contain hazardous chemical ingredients, and that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal regulatory agency that should be responsible for monitoring such ingredients, is recklessly negligent.
As Epstein, professor emeritus of environmental and occupational medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, notes, we assume that our products are safe because we believe the FDA would not allow unsafe products on the market. Not true. The law, says Epstein, “does not require cosmetics or personal-care products and their ingredients to be approved as safe before they are marketed and sold.” All that’s required is that ingredients that constitute over 1 percent of the product be labeled.
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Eliminating Suffering or Eliminating People?
When genetic testing threatens our common humanity.
Imagine sitting in a doctor's office and receiving this news:
Good morning, Mrs. Santos. I have the results of the screening test you had last week, 12 weeks into your pregnancy. The test indicates a high likelihood that your baby will be a typically developing child, and I want to make sure you understand the implications of this diagnosis. Typically developing children are at risk for a number of physical, emotional, and mental complications throughout their lives.Although the risks are many, I will mention a few of the most prevalent. Your child has a 30 percent risk of obesity, an 8 percent risk of diabetes, and a 10 percent risk of clinical depression. Each of these factors can result in premature death. One in 166 children in the United States develops autism, and one in 500 dies within the first few months of life from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
In addition to the potential physical and mental problems, I want to make sure you've considered the financial costs associated with a typically developing child. Do you think you can afford to raise this child, given the current economic environment, rising health care costs, and the rising cost of higher education?
The decision regarding this pregnancy is entirely up to you. I just want to make sure you have the information you deserve, based on the test results.
Advances in technology are offering women more information about their pregnancy than ever before. Marilynn Marchione, of the Associated Press, reported last week on the increased use of genetic screening to “curb genetic diseases.” Those she interviewed see genetic screening as positive, a means to ensure that “some of mankind’s most devastating inherited diseases” will continue to decline.
Medical information can be useful in making decisions about trying to conceive children biologically, and even about how best to care for children once they are born. But when it comes to genetic screening, using medical information to eliminate disease often means using such information to eliminate life.
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Pregnant Olympians Are Not 'Selfish'
Women like Kristie Moore show that parenting well and taking healthy risks are not mutually exclusive — especially when taking risks means obeying God.
Last Friday a friend forwarded me a link to an article titled “Are Pregnant Athletes Selfish?” She guessed correctly that I might have something to say about it. It took one glance at the big black letters of the headline for my hackles to rise. The subtitle, “Olympic curler Kristie Moore is five months pregnant. Is this okay? Our OB/GYN reacts,” didn’t help calm me down.
Before I could get to the doctor’s reaction, my mind fumed over the fallout if indeed this doctor deemed curling too dangerous for a pregnant woman. Among other things, I'd have to guess a good chunk of the world’s pregnant women have little if no choice but to haul heavy things while shuffling over ice. It’s called “life” for pregnant women in winter.
As it turned it, I had no reason to fume. The doctor affirmed the same thing my OB told me throughout pregnancy. In considering whether or not in fact is was “okay” for Canadian Kristie Moore, who is 51/2 months pregnant and due May 27, to curl — and possibly become the first pregnant woman to win a gold medal — she wrote, “Olympic athletes are presumably some of the most fit people on the planet, so it's absurd to think that curling when you're five months along would do anything but benefit mother and baby. A happy, fit, endorphin-filled mom is a great place for a baby to grow!”
So, that settles that, right? We can watch Moore and her darling baby bump compete with ease, even excitement? And then we can all move on. Or, am I the only who’s still bugged by the initial question, especially since it headlined at a presumably “pro-woman” site?
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Gay Marriage Leads D.C. Archbishop to End Foster Care Program
Catholic Charities has given its caseload of 43 children, 35 foster families, and 7 staff members to a Maryland-based family-care agency so as not to disrupt client care.
The other shoe has dropped here in Washington, D.C., in a long conflict between the local Catholic diocese and the District of Columbia.
After warning for months that the District's pending same-sex marriage law — slated to go into effect March 2 — put its 80-year-old foster care program in jeopardy, the Archdiocese of Washington formally ended its program February 1.
It is the third Catholic diocese in the country to do so. The archdioceses of San Francisco and Boston stopped their adoption programs in 2006 after their respective states legalized gay marriage (California has since repealed its law) and made it clear that local Catholic Charities affiliates would have to work with homosexual couples.
The District's law would obligate all outside contractors working with the city to recognize gay couples by giving spousal benefits to such couples and allowing them to adopt available children. The Archdiocese of Washington refused to do this. Its Catholic Charities affiliate has turned over its caseload of 43 children with 35 foster families — along with 7 staff members — to Bethesda, Maryland-based National Center for Children and Families so as not to disrupt client care.
The foster care and adoption programs were among the 63 social service programs that the District paid Catholic Charities about $22.5 million to run. Of that amount, $2 million went to the foster care program. Because of the large amounts of money involved, it is highly unlikely that Catholic parishioners could raise enough funds to make up the difference.
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A New Frontier in Pro-Life Stem-Cell Research
FDA-backed Georgia researchers hope stem cells from umbilical cord blood will effectively treat cerebral palsy.
A team of researchers at Georgia’s health science university, the Medical College of Georgia (MCG), announced last week that they are conducting a clinical trial using stem cells from umbilical-cord blood as a treatment for cerebral palsy. The trial will build on a successful series of past tests using adult stem cells in regenerative medicine.
“Evidence up to this point has been purely anecdotal,” said James Carroll, chief of pediatric neurology at the MCG and principal investigator on the study. “While a variety of cord blood stem-cell therapies have been used successfully for more than 20 years, this study is breaking new ground in advancing therapies for brain injury.”
MCG's is the first clinical trial using adult stem cells approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and comes on the heels of last month’s announcement of the first FDA-approved trial of embryonic stem-cell treatment. FDA approval generally means enough funding and prior research has accumulated to make a heavily regulated FDA review worthwhile.
While there’s not exactly a competition, scientifically speaking, between the two different approaches, the fact that the government now supports embryonic stem-cell research underscores the importance of ramping up research into other methods (like cord blood stem cells).
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Why I'm Giving Up Counting Calories for Lent
The practice has led me to believe, erroneously, that thinness is a virtue.
As one of the 40 percent of Americans who makes New Year’s resolutions, in January I started going to a local gym three times a week. Wanting to stay active during Chicago’s long winter, I soon saw those lectures about the benefits of exercise from my dad — a former Marine with the health of a marathon runner — bear out. I felt energized and refreshed. I slept better. Stresses from the workday melted away as I jogged, stretched, and laughed out loud at Seinfeld reruns to boot. I found myself thanking God for making our bodies capable of tremendous strength and grace. Exercise became another facet of glorifying him.
For a while, at least.
Then the counting began. The gym is typical fare for Western-style health centers: an affordable private chain, it aims to make the gym experience personalized, pain-free, and highly measurable. For every step taken on the treadmill and every rotation on the elliptical, digitized numbers tell you how far, how long, how fast the pace and heartbeat, which body parts used, and, of course, how many calories gone.
For a Type A, task-oriented person like me, watching those burnt calories stack up felt like progress, like a sweaty checkmark of accomplishment. And it made me — who, medically speaking, does not need to lose weight and does not struggle with overeating — want to burn more calories each time, often with no “that’s enough” in sight. If the numbers ever stopped motivating, then copies of Shape, Women’s Health, and Self were readily available at the front desk to make sure I didn’t forget the goal.
Predictably, I began thinking in terms of caloric merits and demerits, as eating became a necessary (though, thankfully, usually enjoyable) activity that counteracted my gym achievements. Fixing brown rice and steamed vegetables for dinner was to keep on the straight and narrow; choosing the cupcake or brownie at a party was a failure of nerve and soul. The fitness-and-healthy-eating routine became a way to gauge my spiritual health — a way to congratulate myself for being a “good girl.”
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Hookup Culture: Mostly a Myth
Last Sunday's NYT piece only perpetuates the idea that college students are hooking up frequently, and that if they aren’t, they should be.
When I picked up the Style section of The New York Times last Sunday, I was excited to see the front-page feature, “The New Math on Campus,” a look at how the gender imbalance on college campuses (60 percent women, 40 percent men at some schools) is affecting the dating scene. I research, write, and lecture on sex, romance, and abstinence on college campuses, and especially on how these life experiences relate to students’ quest for meaning in general and spiritual and religious commitments in particular. The article quoted young women bemoaning the dearth of datable guys at UNC Chapel Hill, which they say means all the guys get to be players — at least for a while, living it up with any girl they want because the girls are desperate:
“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.” Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.
This kind of talk from women on campus is something I hear all the time during lecture visits to university campuses and in my research. So I wasn't surprised when reporter Alex Williams mentioned hookup culture. He turned to sociologist Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, for more information.
“Women do not want to get left out in the cold, so they are competing for men on men’s terms,” [Bogle] wrote. “This results in more casual hookup encounters that do not end up leading to more serious romantic relationships. Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hookup, women end up losing out.”
Yes, this is true; women do say this, and my research supports it. But there is another side to the story that we don’t hear often enough. It’s something many college men say when safely behind closed doors, about how they like hookup culture about as much as the women do — which is to say, they don’t like it one bit. They just feel pressured to say they do in public. While it’s socially acceptable for women to admit that hooking up is not for them, it’s generally considered social suicide for a man to say the same thing.
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Did You Consider Having an Abortion?
The value of Tim Tebow’s life is not more than that of any other child.
Everybody knows someone who considered having an abortion. It may be a friend, cousin, sister, aunt, or your own mother … and you may not even know about it.
Even if you didn’t watch the Super Bowl last Sunday, you probably heard about the pro-life ad funded by Focus on the Family that featured Pam Tebow talking about the birth of her son, Florida Gators quarterback Tim. In the weeks leading up to the grame, pro-choice groups such the National Organization for Women protested its airing, calling it divisive and the subject inappropriate for a sports event.
But CBS stuck by its decision, and after the ad aired, many wondered why the ad generated so much controversy. The ad never mentions abortion, and Tebow’s choice of life for her son is implicit. The ad offers viewers the chance to hear more of the Tebow story by visiting Focus on the Family's website, and according to the organization, that’s exactly what viewers did. A Focus on the Family spokesman told the Catholic News Agency that by Monday, 760,000 had watched the full-length version of the Tebow story at the website.
USA Today reports that the ad achieved its goal by generating “a torrent of new attention” for Focus on the Family, ranking the ad’s success on its consumer notice, viewership, and social media impact.
So now pro-life voices are beginning to wonder: Other than creating name recognition for Focus on the Family, what was the point of the ad?
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Botox: A Threat to Our National Security
How our cultural fear of aging and dying is giving some terrorists a financial boost.
One of my favorite Bible passages is from Psalm 34. Verses 4 and 5 read: "I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed" (ESV).
I have seen that kind of radiant beauty on those whose hearts are contented in God, who are eager to proclaim all of his blessings and mercies upon their lives. I firmly believe that is the most attractive beauty there is, because it edifies and builds up others. Yet I also know the strong pull of the cosmetic and cosmeceutical industries and the promises they make to stall or turn back the ravages of time. So I write this post with a bit of ambivalence, knowing the money I spend at various salons.
That said, I have never been Botoxed. My dermatologist did inform me a few years ago that it was time to start, because it would keep my fine lines from becoming deep wrinkles. I frowned (deepening those lines) and shook my head. There was no way I was going to stick a neurotoxin in my face, I announced. I was sure that in 20 years, we'd discover why that was a bad idea. She looked at me placidly and said, "I hope not, because I have a face full of it." Maybe she was looking at me in wide-eyed horror, but I couldn't tell.
Likely it won't take 20 years. We are now discovering a new problem associated with the Botox craze: an increased risk of terrorism. The Washington Post recently ran an article about how officials fear that the toxic ingredient in Botox could become a terrorist tool:
In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more — "as many as you want," he told buyers — from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.
No Chechen factory has been found, but a search for the maker of the highly lethal toxin in Rakhman's vials continues across a widening swath of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. U.S. officials and security experts say they know the lab exists, and probably dozens of other such labs, judging from the surging black market for the drug.
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A Walk to Beautiful: A Must-See Film
The Emmy-winning documentary spotlights the plight of women with fistula and the courageous work of Catherine and Reginald Hamlin.
When a woman endures prolonged labor while giving birth, her bladder or rectal tissue rips or tears, forming a fistula, a hole between her birth passage and internal organs. A simple surgery costing $300 can fix the problem, but without access to care — 90 percent of fistula sufferers live in the developing world — the woman is left incontinent, unable to have children, and stigmatized in her family and community. Christian physician L. Lewis Wall wrote about fistulas — faced by 2-3 million women worldwide — in this month’s issue of Christianity Today, connecting their plight to that of the unclean woman in Mark’s gospel (5:25–34).
Thankfully, two Christian doctors, Reginald and Catherine Hamlin, have been at the fore in the effort to make fistula repair surgeries available to more women, founding Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia in 1974. A Walk to Beautiful, a 2007 Emmy-winning documentary, highlights their work, capturing day-to-day life for Ethiopian women with obstetric fistulas. (The DVD is 85 minutes; about 50 minutes of it is available online.)
The documentary follows five women on their journeys to have their fistulas repaired and their dignity restored. Their stories are somewhat similar — how they got fistulas, their hurt and shame, their thoughts of suicide — but each of the women is unique. Ayehu, a 25-year-old mother, lives in a makeshift hut because her husband kicked her out and her mother will not allow her to stay in the home. Fikre, a friend, suffered from a fistula for ten years before going to Addis Ababa for surgery, and convinces Ayehu to do likewise. Ayehu marvels, “How can they bring you back to life?”
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Iris Robinson, Jesus Loves You More Than You Will Know
Speaking grace and truth into Ireland's sex scandal involving a born-again Christian woman.
Sex. Money. Power. Words that call to mind the recent debacles of Tiger Woods and David Letterman and a host of other celebrities before them. And now Iris Robinson — a self-described evangelical Christian and the wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister (featured in the video below) — has made the news.
First, Robinson admitted to an affair with a 19-year-old boy. Then financial improprieties came to light. Robinson had secured political favors to benefit her lover’s business. The financial deals included kickbacks to line her own wallet. In the midst of it all, Robinson attempted suicide. And the fact that she has called homosexuals “an abomination” on public radio has not garnered her any public support or sympathy.
Robinson certainly does not stand alone as a prominent Christian caught in adultery. And the recent public events speak to a series of personal decisions that most likely started many years ago. It’s a story that recalls that of King David, deciding to stay home instead of going to war with his men. Power had allowed him to neglect his responsibilities as king. He became lazy. He surrounded himself with “yes men” who approved of whatever decisions he made, who were willing to summon the beautiful married woman from across the way and turn a blind eye as he invited her into his bedroom. That first decision to stay home from battle led to adultery led to pregnancy led to murder.
But finally, the prophet Nathan spoke up. And David repented. And the Lord forgave him. This story is recorded for us in both 2 Samuel and Psalm 51; it’s as if the Holy Spirit wanted to say, “Pay attention. This could happen to you. And here’s what you need to do if it does.”
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Facebook and the Amazing Technicolor Bra Update
Does the bra-color meme — meant to raise cancer awareness — end up hurting women more than it helps them?
If you logged on to Facebook last weekend, you might have noticed a barrage of updates naming colors: Blue. Black. Leopard print. None. (Cue sound effects: “Eww, gross!”)
The barrage of colors was part of an effort to “spread the wings of cancer awareness” and “see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status,” according to the chain message passed around Facebook.
The color posts also elicited a blogosphere debate about whether the campaign is appropriate or even raises breast cancer awareness in the first place.
Mary Carmichael at Newsweek’s Human Condition blog wrote, “In the age of exposed bra straps and outerwear as underwear, this campaign doesn't strike me as very risqué — typing in the word "beige" is a far cry from dirty talk. But ultimately, what's the point of it? Almost all the people who are updating their status boxes with bra colors are doing only that. They're not saying a word about cancer. This isn't awareness or education; it's titillation.”
“Sall” over at Feministing.com went a step further, saying the trend “created a new platform to objectify millions of women and reduced them to their body parts.”
One of my own (male) friends’ updates on Friday read: “weirdest day ever on FB — beige, purple, leopard, polka dots, blue, black. TMI [too much information].” While I tend to agree with Carmichael that “typing in the word ‘beige’ is a far cry from dirty talk,” the recent Facebook campaign has made some a little squeamish (including my friend, who mentioned his concern upon knowing his aunt was decked out in lavender).
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N.C. Court Upholds Sex Offenders' Right to Worship
When extending grace and protecting 'little ones' clash.
For evangelicals who uphold both the boundlessness of redemption and the care and protection of “little ones” (Matt. 19:14), having sex offenders in church makes it hard to apply both beliefs at the same time.
In mid-December a Superior Court in North Carolina upheld the case of two registered sex offenders who had been attending Moncure Baptist Church, which offers childcare for Sunday worshipers and other children's programs. James Nichols and Frank DeMaio were indicted in March under a year-old state law that orders offenders to stay 300 feet away from facilities primarily intended for use by or care of children. Nichols’s story was highlighted in “Modern-Day Lepers,” a reported piece in the December issue of Christianity Today.
Judge Allen Baddour determined that the state law was too vague to enforce, and violated the men’s First Amendment rights to worship. “There are less drastic means for achieving the same purpose,” Baddour ruled, noting that to meet constitutional requirements, the law should specify whether or not an offender has the intent to be in the presence of minors.
But, as State Rep. Julia Howard (who sponsored the state law) told the Charlotte News & Observer, discerning someone’s intent for attending church or any other facility can be tricky. “The word intent is the most precarious word in the world. Who knows what my intent is? Anytime you see ‘knowingly’ or ‘intent,’ there’s something mysterious there.”
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Matchmaker, Matchmaker, I Don't Want a Match
Most yentas mean well, but their meddling only adds unnecessary pressure to a single's life.
It wasn’t until I read Cathy Lynn Grossman's USA Today blog post Tuesday that I knew there was a word for them: Yentas, the people (usually women) in your life who pry about your love life (or the absence thereof) and, for better or worse, try to set you up with someone. The term is Yiddish slang (think Yente, the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof), but let’s face it, every culture has its yentas. And American evangelical culture is no exception.
Are evangelical yentas helpful? In my experience, they only serve to exasperate.
I’m 23 years old and a recent graduate of a private evangelical college where people paired off as quickly as its suburban rabbit population reproduced. I graduated without an official significant other, and thus became prime yenta target.
Fresh from the holiday season, I’m sure many Christian singles have had recent encounters with yentas. Surely the yentas in our lives mean well when they about our love lifes and try to set us up with a “nice young man” or “sweet Christian woman.” But I ask the evangelical yentas out there: Why do you do what you do?
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The Joys of a False Positive
What the apostle Paul has to do with the new mammogram guidelines.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released recommendations on breast cancer screenings November 16, stating that too many women were given unnecessary tests based on an initial “false positive” mammogram. The task force discouraged women ages 40 to 49 from regular screenings, saying they were not necessary until age 50. As cancer groups and women’s health organizations have decried the new guidelines, the task force clarified its position last week, saying that women can have mammograms whenever they want, but that they are more effective for women ages 50–74.
A recent “false positive” myself, I cannot tell you how happy I am to be in such a group. My first mammogram was suspicious, and the second did not clarify findings, so a third was done. A radiologist reviewed the results with me right away, showing me the trouble area (near the armpit, where 50 percent of breast cancer is found). My physician said that while the new spots could simply be more calcification clusters, their location and strange appearance raised concerns. So a biopsy was done, and — praise God — no cancer was found.
While the task force’s new protocols treat false positives as a negative thing — resulting in unnecessary anxiety and more money spent on unnecessary tests — I see false positives as the result of due diligence in preventive health care. But since my field of expertise is biblical studies, not health care, I won't get into the details of health care strategy. Instead, when I read the report a few weeks ago, I began thinking about the phrase “false positive,” which sounded like an oxymoron. And my mind turned to the “false apostles” that Paul writes about in 2 Cor. 11:13. These preachers taught a different gospel, disrupted the Corinthian church, and defamed the imprisoned apostle’s work. The “super apostles” are false because they masquerade as true but are not.
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Should Christians See 'Precious'?
What is the spiritual benefit of watching hard-to-watch films?
After reading Camerin Courtney’s 3½-star review of Precious for Christianity Today Movies, I knew I wanted to see the film. Well, kind of.
Alongside other reviewers, Courtney made it clear that the film — about an obese, illiterate African American teenager who is HIV-positive and pregnant by her father for the second time — is often unbearable to watch. Filmmaker Lee Daniels and executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry were committed to capturing the rawness of their source material, poet Sapphire’s 1996 novel, Push. (NPR has helpfully posted an excerpt from the book, though some of the language may be offensive). Sexual abuse and violence are pervasive themes throughout the film, which earned five Independent Spirit Award nominations last week.
Claireece “Precious” Jones’s nickname is, of course, ironic. In others’ as well as her own eyes, she’s the antithesis of one who is esteemed, cherished, or beloved, as the American Heritage Dictionary puts it. Growing up in Harlem in 1987, Precious refers to herself as the “ugly black grease to be washed from the street.” Her parents have no doubt led her to conclude thus. Her father, who we never see except when he is raping her, has abused Precious since she was a toddler; her mother, a bitter welfare recipient who spends her days chain smoking in front of the TV, inflicts on her daughter constant verbal and physical assault, telling her at one point, “I should have aborted your a**.” Until attending an alternative school, where her teacher, Ms. Rain, has the effect of dignifying those around her, Precious is not so much a person with agency as an object to which terrible things are done. And perpetual poverty is the backdrop for her family’s story, telling its inhabitants that it would be a lot easier if they just didn’t exist.
If reading this description makes you flinch, it just means you still have a beating heart. Aware of Precious’s visceral punch before seeing it, I was still tempted more than once to leave the movie theater two weeks ago. And for some reviewers, the film’s commitment to shocking viewers with its subject matter diminishes its value. Esteemed critic Armond White excoriated filmmaker Daniels for exploiting popular stereotypes of blacks: “Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés . . . it is a sociological horror show.” CT Movies critic Brett McCracken took issue with a scene depicting Precious running down the street with a stolen bucket of fried chicken: “A film like this would be more effective, I think, without such an ungainly commitment to in-your-face shock value. It’s a shocking-enough subject matter without the scenes of fried chicken larceny."
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Stanton Jones, CedarvilleOUT Come to Campus
As a resident director mentoring struggling students, I welcome open conversation about same-sex attraction.
Last spring, John* asked if we could meet at the Hive, our college campus snack shop. After a bit of small talk, he confided, “My friends said that you’re someone I’d feel safe talking to. And this is what I wanted to tell you: Since junior high, I’ve known that I am gay. I don’t think I’ll ever change. If you lined up one hundred of the most beautiful women you could find, I’d maybe be somewhat attracted to one.”
“Have you told your parents?” I asked. “Yeah. I came out right before I returned to school this year. I’m not looking forward to going home.”
Last year, Hope* told me that she struggled with homosexuality. Hope grew up in a legalistic Christian home where an older sibling had sexually abused her. Her parents have no clue about her struggles, and based on past experience, Hope believes her mom would turn suicidal should she discover her daughter’s same-sex attraction.
This semester, as we sat and talked in my apartment, her eyes beamed. “I actually had a crush on a guy who I worked with at Christian summer camp! I don’t feel so gay anymore.” But she also related how her ex-girlfriend recently ridiculed her faith in Christ, and how a female co-worker had confessed to having a crush on her. “The thing is, I have never told anyone I was gay. I don’t even know how she knew. Please pray that I would be protected from temptation.”
As a resident director and spiritual mentor at Cedarville University, a Baptist evangelical school in the Midwest, I interact with students in almost every facet of college life, and delight in encouraging them to follow Jesus closely in the midst of their struggles. I live with my husband and 2-year-old daughter in an apartment attached to a women’s dorm at Cedarville. In the past few years, the Residence Life Department has seen an increase in the number of students confiding their struggles with same-sex attraction. And because we believe the Bible expressly forbids homosexual behavior, yet desire help in being Christ to students who struggle with their sexuality, we invited Stanton Jones, provost and psychology professor at Wheaton College, to discuss the research published in his 2007 book, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation, for Cedarville’s Critical Concern Series.
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A Quest to Question Mainstream Media
Connecting the dots between what we see on screen and who we become.
Many people who know me as an author and women's ministry speaker are often curious about why I started a film company. They seem to assume there is a split focus there. Perhaps there is, but because I see media in a more holistic way, one of the reasons I started Citygate Films was to influence the diet, so to speak, of what is being consumed in mainstream media. I also have a heavy concern that the "screen generation" is being fed more harmful images and narratives than uplifting ones.
For example, this is how my day has gone so far. I checked the news, and saw stories about a 15-year-old girl who was brutally gang-raped by anywhere between 7 to 10 men outside of a high school while at least a dozen others stood by and watched it without interfering, and a sadist who allegedly raped, murdered, and stowed the bodies of at least 10 women in his home. Those are just the stories in CNN's headlines — the tip of the iceberg nationally. There are numerous local stories about child sex abuse and murder that don't even make the national news.
Next, I checked my Twitter feed, which carried news of many nonprofit organizations (Christian and mainstream) that are working to improve the conditions of women and girls around the world. High on their list of concerns is sex trafficking and enslaved prostitutes.
I then started work by listening to a media panel about "transmedia" efforts — telling a single story across a variety of media platforms. One of the panelists spoke without shame of working with a clothing company that sponsored an interactive game about a stripper. The gamer controls the stripper's actions, which this media expert cheerfully said allowed the player to either make the stripper engage "in the most depraved actions" or "save her." It's an odd sponsorship, given the fact that the sponsor's clothes aren't seen very often. (The clothing company wasn't mentioned in this panel, but I wish it had been so that I would not patronize their stores or product.)
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Planned Parenthood Puts Restraining Order on Former Director
The director had resigned after watching an ultrasound for an abortion.
Planned Parenthood has found itself in a legal battle with a former director who said she had a change of heart after watching an ultrasound for an abortion and quit the organization .
KBTX of Bryan/College Station, Texas, reports that Abby Johnson worked for Planned Parenthood for eight years, and two years as director, but joined forces with the Coalition For Life earlier this month, praying with volunteers outside the clinic.
Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions, something the Episcopalian churchgoer recently became convicted about. "I feel so pure in heart [since leaving]. I don't have this guilt, I don't have this burden on me anymore that's how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion."
Planned Parenthood filed a temporary restraining order October 30 to prevent Johnson from disclosing information about the organization.
Johnson told Fox News that she became disillusioned after she felt pressure to increase profits by performing more abortions, which cost patients between $505 and $695.
"Every meeting that we had was, 'We don't have enough money, we don't have enough money — we've got to keep these abortions coming,' " Johnson said. "It's a very lucrative business and that's why they want to increase numbers."
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The Day We Let Our Son Live
It ended up being the most important day of my life.
When it comes to the chance for those with genetic defects to live, the news has not been good on either side of the Atlantic. Last week’s Telegraph reported that of all women in the U.K. who find out through prenatal testing that their baby will have Down syndrome, about 90 percent choose to have an abortion. And yesterday, ABC News reported a near-identical rate among women in the U.S.: 92 percent of those who find out their child will have the chromosomal defect decide to abort. One geneticist at Children’s Hospital Boston found that, without prenatal testing, the number of Down syndrome births would have increased by 34 percent between 1989 and 2005. Instead, the number of Down syndrome births has dropped by 15 percent over that time.
Upon hearing such news, I remembered Ellen and Al Hsu (pronounced shee), a Christian couple who works at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois, and who faced the same situation as the women above. This is Ellen’s story of Elijah, their 4-year-old with Down syndrome, as originally told on their family blog, Team Hsu.
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I gazed in wonder at the blurry form on the screen. “Hi, Baby,” I whispered. The image of our baby was much clearer on the level-two ultrasound. The technician rolled the ultrasound wand over my growing abdomen, and I marveled as I watched our son squirm and suck his thumb. A new life forming within me.
Our OB/GYN had referred us for a level-two ultrasound after he noticed choroid plexus cysts on our baby’s brain during the standard 20-week ultrasound. I was anxious about what the maternal health specialist might find. We knew a couple whose ultrasound also had showed choroids plexus cysts, but whose baby was perfectly fine when he was born. We had spent the past week praying for our baby and hoping for the best.
Al walked into the exam room as the technician was finishing up. She hadn’t said much and explained that the doctor would be in to take a look for himself and to explain what he found. Al and I chatted quietly while we waited. I was relieved that he had made it before the doctor came in. Little did I know how much I would need him.
The doctor came in and began his exam. I was delighted at the chance to see more images of our baby. But my world was shaken when the doctor finally began explaining what he saw. “Something is very wrong with this baby.”
He continued to roll the wand over my tummy as he pointed to various spots on the screen and began listing all the “abnormalities”: larger than usual nuchal folds; clenched fists; possible club feet; something wrong with the liver; enlarged ventricles in the brain; possibly no stomach. My tears flowed as his list grew longer. My delight at the new life within me turned to icy fear, and I clutched Al’s hand tightly.
The doctor suspected a chromosomal problem, possibly Trisomy 13 or 18, birth defects caused by an extra 13th or 18th chromosome. He explained that both of these conditions are generally “incompatible with life.” We were told that if our baby was born alive, he was likely to die within a day. If we were lucky, he might survive for 6 to 12 months. We wondered if we should begin preparing for death instead of life.
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It's a Not-So-Happy But Wonderful Life
God doesn't call us to be happy.
A couple weekends ago, I took my kids to an historic farm run by our local forest preserve. The buildings there have been authentically restored, and the staff and volunteers roam the property in costume and in character to give visitors a pretty-close encounter to what it must’ve been like to live and work on a family farm at the turn of the last century.
So when one of the in-character volunteers stopped hammering the chicken-coop roof, stepped off his ladder, tugged up his suspenders, and asked if we had any questions, I wasn’t entirely surprised by his answer to my question.
I pointed to the fluffy black and white chickens racing behind their wire and asked, “What color eggs do they lay?”
“Dunno, ma’am,” he said. Then he smiled, betraying his character entirely. “Chickens are women’s work.”
As he continued on about how his “wife” had an egg-selling business so she could buy “pretty things” from Sears Roebuck, a weird stream of envy washed through me. Truth be told, this same weird stream trickles through whenever I read Edith Wharton or read or watch anything about times and places where gender roles were fixed, expectations rigid, and life (and death) somehow more certain.
This is weird, of course, because I’m a liberated woman. I call myself a feminist — unapologetically. And I have since I was a girl. I was born in 1972, the year Helen Reddy and her woman-roaring made the charts. My early childhood memories are of parents, teachers, and Brownie leaders telling me I could do and be anything.
I grew up aware of the doors being thrown open all around me, the ones I’d be able to skirt through more confidently than any other generation of women in human history. I stood under some ceilings as they shattered, and throughout my professional career, my writing life and my motherhood I have continued to push (with the Spirit behind me) on those doors and ceilings that have yet to budge.
All this to say, you’d think hearing such things like historical “women’s work” wouldn’t make me jealous but rather happy or relieved. And yet, not so.
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Are You Happy Now?
How to think about the inverse trend of women's rights and women's happiness.
It’s been said before: Today woman have more than they have ever had but they are more unhappy than they have ever been. In a recent Time article, Nancy Gibbs, using the newest statistics, enumerates the significant progress women have made in just one generation. But she goes on to acknowledge that as a result, women are also more stressed and burdened by the weight of their new responsibilities.
In my experience, when Christian women discuss this trend, they often do so with a cynical “I told you so” attitude. The common assumption is that women can (and should) realize their greatest potential by staying at home as a wife and mother and leaving the workplace to the man. They would be happy if they just did that, instead of chasing after equality.
But whether or not this assumption holds up to biblical scrutiny, it misses a vital point: It’s not about happiness.
Jesus didn’t address the Samaritan woman at the well — elevating her to a much higher place in society — so that she could be happy. Jesus didn’t allow Mary to sit at his feet and learn — a place often occupied by male students — just to keep her happy. Christians don’t follow God so that they can be happy. And Justin Wolfers, co-author of the study “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” told Time in trying to explain the trend, “As Susan Faludi said, the women’s movement wasn’t about happiness.” It is about doing what is right. Or, as a Christian might put it, about bringing about God’s vision for society.
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What Christian Women Want Now
How do we respond to recent reports of women's declining happiness?
Get excited, because Her.meneutics brings two perspectives on Time magazine’s recent cover report, “The State of the American Woman.” Author Nancy Gibbs explores the questions, “Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win?” Time, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, conducted a survey to find out how we have responded to 40 years of change as we now approach a time where women will for the first time make up a majority of the American workforce. Gibbs reports, "Among the most confounding changes of all is the evidence, tracked by numerous surveys, that as women have gained more freedom, more education and more economic power, they have become less happy." Just a few weeks ago Maureen Dowd wrote on the same topic in The New York Times, and now everyone’s asking, “Why aren’t women happier?”
Is it because we now take on double the responsibilities and stress, as Gibbs suggests, that we now report more unhappiness? Is this necessarily a bad thing? And how do we, as Christian women, frame the issue in light of our own gospel call?
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Cancer’s Mercies
October is breast cancer awareness month, and I’m so aware I might as well be pink.
435 days ago there were meteor showers over Cincinnati. My world was rocked that night, but it had nothing to do with the meteors that my teenage son, Mikey, and I were watching in the wee hours of a sleepy summer night.
Right before I joined Mikey for Perseus’s fireworks, I had awakened to get a drink of water, and while being one of those things that go bump in the night, trying to find my way to the kitchen sink, I happened to find a bump. Or a lump, rather, on my breast.
I cannot explain the shock and awe I felt. It was like a meteor to the chest, literally. I remember the lump felt like a shooter marble right beneath the “milky way.” I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there the day before. My husband, Dave, is pretty sure it wasn’t there the day before. I don’t see how we could’ve missed a meteor like that.
When the meteor show was over, I had a hard time keeping my thoughts from spiraling out of control. A sensible part of me, that I had to dig deeply for, took all the other parts of me and put them to bed.
I lay there, not wanting to wake Dave, deciding to wait out the night, wait for him to wake, wait to see if it would just go away. Wait. And pray.
Since my thoughts like to play connect the dots, this would be where my inner Lady Macbeth started coming out, as "Out, damn'd spot" were the words that came out as I prayed. This seemed like a reasonable prayer, so I went with it.
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Mazel tov for Jewish Women
Orthodox Judaism gets in touch with its feminine side.
Orthodox Jewish women have a reason to celebrate this month.
Ten years ago, Nishmat, an advanced Torah study center for women in Israel, was founded as part of a larger experiment. The center sought to certify female students as experts in rabbinic law without overstepping the strict rules of the Orthodox faith. Orthodox rules do not prohibit this type of certification, though strict Orthodoxy does not allow women to be ordained as rabbis.
In 1999, Nishmat awarded the first Yoatzot Halacha (rabbinically-certified women consultants in Jewish Law) certificates to two female scholars. All graduates were certified experts pending a re-evaluation every 10 years. The program has graduated 61 female scholars in the 10 years since it was created. On October 11, Rabbis Yaakov Varhaftig and Yehuda Henkin announced that the 10-year limit on certification had been officially lifted, essentially declaring the program a success.
Rabbi Henkin said in a press release:
Because we understood the historic and political significance of creating women halachic experts – we were stepping where no one had in 3,000 years – we chose to proceed with caution … Now, ten years later, the Yoatzot Halacha program is no longer just a promising experiment – it is a vibrant reality for the Jewish people. The achievements of the Yoatzot are great and their positive effect on the community-at-large is so clear that we are removing this restriction permanently.
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Mixed Reports on Abortion
The media reports on a new abortion study while "The Gray Lady" shows a different side of the debate.
A new report by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice reproductive think tank, suggests that while abortion is safe and legal in most developed countries, it is risky and restricted in the developing world. The Associated Press and USA Today both emphasized the 70,000 annual deaths the study attributes to unsafe abortions.
Political science professor at the University of Alabama Michael New writes that media analysis is “faulty” because it neglects potential social factors and implies restrictive abortion laws are solely responsible.
“These (developing countries mentioned in the report) have low per capita income and a higher incidence of social pathologies that may increase the perceived need for abortion,” New writes on The Corner. “This nuance is not picked up in any of the media coverage of the AGI report.” New also points out AGI has released other studies linking stricter abortion laws with reduced abortion rates.
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Redeeming Roman Polanski
Looking for a Christian response to a child rapist with powerful friends.
Film director Roman Polanski was recently arrested on a 32-year-old charge of statutory rape, which he pled guilty to in 1977 before fleeing the country. Now, while Polanski fights extradition, Hollywood rallies for his freedom, and news sources turn it into a story about a celebrity instead of about our justice system, others are asking, “What if Polanski were a Catholic priest who had abused children?”
Meanwhile, many Americans are scratching their heads. Unfortunately, it seems many of the people quick to give their opinion on this issue got their facts from Wikipedia and assume it wasn’t as appalling as it sounds. Well, they are wrong. (Warning: Reading the facts may make you sick.)
Hollywood hasn’t forgotten, however, because apparently Hollywood never blamed Polanski for raping a 13-year-old girl in the first place. (To be fair, there are exceptions.) People protesting the “Polanski persecution” include Harvey Weinstein, Peter Fonda, and Whoopi Goldberg, among others, who are all old enough to know better. No, it’s probably not fair that the only reason the L.A. Police Department knew Polanski would be in Switzerland was because he’s famous. It’s not fair that Polanski has been celebrated — and publicly awarded, including an Oscar in 2003 —for the 32 years since he fled the country, either. His arrest in Switzerland, in fact, came about because he had a Lifetime Achievement Award to accept.
But as Jeri Thompson, wife of Law & Order mainstay Fred Thompson, and no stranger to celebrity culture, wrote, it’s “one more piece of compelling evidence of just how out of touch the ‘artistic’ community is with the rest of America.” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said yesterday that such an explanation is a little too easy, just as it would be to say that Catholics are out of touch with the rest of the denominations.
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Does Religiosity Encourage Teen Pregnancy?
An interview with Joseph Strayhorn, the co-author of "Religion and Teen Pregnancy Rates."
Some social liberals used a recently published study in Reproductive Health that found a strong link between high religiosity and teen pregnancy rates to further their case for why abstinence-only sex education doesn't work.
Double XX, Mother Jones, Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News & World Report, and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic say the results of "Religiosity and Teen Birth Rates" — which found higher teen birth rates in the most religiously conservative states, even after controlling for differences in income and abortions — point to conservatives' hypocrisy on family values. The researchers, father-daughter team Joseph and Jillian Strayhorn, speculated that perhaps teens in highly religious states are more likely to become pregnant because they are less likely to know about or use contraception. Jillian's work went toward fulfilling an advanced home-schooling course in statistics, roughly equivalent to a sophomore college course in regression analytics. (Dr. Strayhorn noted that "ironically, one or two of the bloggers I read who used our article to slam religion also slammed home-schooling.")
![154017695_e566265aea.jpg](http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/upload/2009/09/154017695_e566265aea.jpg ""Pregnant Profile IV," by Mahalie, Flickr.com")
After reading such interpretations, Her.meneutics regular Christine A. Scheller decided to interview Dr. Strayhorn, associate professor of psychiatry at Drexel University College of Medicine.
You said that your research "has already made many people angry." What about it has provoked such hostility?
The three topics most likely to anger people are sex, religion, and politics, and our article concerns all three. Various people have said that it’s bad research, not worth the money of whoever funded it, ignorant, biased, and so forth. Many critics dismissed the findings as a result of fewer abortions in more religious states, or of greater poverty in more religious states, not understanding or probably not reading about our attempts to control for these variables. Some commented that the excess of teen births was the fault of African Americans or Hispanics.
Is there legitimacy to the criticism?
After the article was published, we did another analysis taking into account the percent of the population for each state that was African American. This variable accounted for a non-significant fraction of the variation in teen birth rates in addition to that accounted for by religiosity and income.
Your study begins with this background statement:
The children of teen mothers have been reported to have higher rates of several unfavorable mental health outcomes. Past research suggests several possible mechanisms for an association between religiosity and teen birth rate in communities.How are mental health outcomes and teen parenting linked, and how do they relate to religiosity?
Some research has suggested that the social disadvantage that seems to accompany teen birth is the main causal factor for poor [mental health] outcomes. As to the relation of teen parenting to religiosity, one might predict that the emphasis on self-control and morality would result in lower teen births by religion, and some research points in that direction. One might also predict that teaching abstinence, as promoted by many religious leaders, could result in less preparation for use of contraception, which in turn could lead to more births when resolutions are not kept — and some research also points in that direction. Thus, for a social scientist, the research question was a good one in that whatever the results, they would be interesting.
How did you come up with the conclusion that religious communities may be less likely to use birth control? Is this scientific or personal opinion?
When we asked ourselves, “What about religious culture could possibly account for an increase in teen births?” we figured that it was unlikely to be, “A soft answer turneth away wrath,” or “Blessed are the peacemakers,” or “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
We figured it was more likely something like, “The church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable.”
This quote is a statement from the Vatican; it’s well known that the Catholic Church’s official position is that contraception, even when used by married couples, is a “grave sin.” (Mitigating the predicted effect of this teaching is that a rather high fraction of U.S. Catholics appear to disregard it.) Many Protestant leaders, without condemning contraception within marriage, strongly condemn teaching teens how to use contraception.
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Early marriage sounds great — as long as there are mature Christian men willing to initiate.
If you thought navigating the 20-something dating and marriage scene wasn’t complicated enough, former President Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson just put his oar in.
In an argument similar to Mark Regnerus’s cover story in the August issue of Christianity Today, Gerson says that “it doesn't seem realistic to expect most men and women to delay sex until marriage at 26 or 28.”
He believes that kind of self-control is possible but not likely, even among churchgoers. Besides, marrying late in one’s 20s can result in unhappier marriages, while early-20s marriages have the happiest results.
Where does Gerson get those numbers, you might ask? Slate’s XX Factor did some digging and found this 2004 study from the National Fatherhood Initiative. (Especially check out the graphs on page 19.) XX Factor also notes that some key information, like statistical significance, is missing from the graphs, so it’s hard to tell how seriously we should take the information.
Statistical reliability aside, Gerson’s argument — marry young, because people cannot handle not waiting to have sex until their late 20s — is weak on many levels. Is marriage really an excuse for sex? Should a lack of self-control be rewarded with early gratification? To say nothing of evangelical churches and families, it doesn’t seem like that mindset will lead to a healthy society at large.
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U.K. Christian Says Yes to Abstinence, No to Gardasil
Should women like Simone Davis be required to take STD-preventing shots if they are not having sex?
Simone Davis, a 17-year-old British immigrant and devout Christian, will be denied U.S. citizenship unless she agrees to a new immigration requirement that she be vaccinated with Gardasil, a compound that targets human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer and genital warts.
Davis, who was adopted by her paternal grandmother in Port St. Joe, Florida, applied to Citizenship and Immigration Services for an exemption on moral and religious grounds, saying she is not sexually active and does not plan to be in the near future. Her exemption application was denied. Davis’s citizenship quest has been funded thus far by church groups, but her grandmother, Jean Davis, says she cannot afford an appeal. Other opponents say the requirement places an unfair financial burden on women because a three-shot series of Gardasil costs between $300-$1,400.
Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Chris Rhatigan told ABC News, "The decision to include HPV as a required vaccine was made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] . . . The objection to a waiver would have to be to all vaccines, not just Gardasil." But the requirement differs from other vaccines in that it is the only one that targets a virus spread through sexual contact. The other 13 target highly contagious diseases.
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The Confusing Case of Caster Semenya
The South African runner may lose her gold medal after gender test results are released.
What might have been weeks of celebration have become ones of public scrutiny for Caster Semenya, the South African runner who won the women’s 800 meter final at the World Athletics Championship August 19. Due to Semanya’s 8-second gain over her time in 2008, as well as her masculine appearance, the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) required the 18-year-old to take a gender verification test. Initial test results confirmed that the teenager has three times the normal levels of testosterone for women. Rumors swirled about Semenya’s head coach, Ekkart Arbeit — who was accused of giving female gymnasts steroids in the 1970s — and whether he had given Semenya similar treatments.
Now, a source close to the IAAF probe has told an Australian newspaper that the test showed that Semenya “had internal testes and no womb or ovaries,” calling her a hermaphrodite later in the report. (Medically speaking, the source is wrong: a hermaphrodite is someone who has simultaneously functioning male and female sex organs. Thomas Rogers at Broadsheet helpfully clarifies the differences between a number of rare intersex conditions.)
While the IAAF stated today that it will not release its findings — which could disqualify Semenya’s win — until November, media have already picked up on the hermaphrodite label. Semenya’s parents and other South Africans have responded angrily, not only because the test might strip Semenya of her gold medal and an athletic career, but because it has exposed Semenya to sexual humiliation and her family to shame. Whether or not Semenya is biologically female, she has understood herself to be a female her whole life — something Semenya asserted with jewelry, makeup, and trendy clothing in You! this week (pictured above). As she told the South African magazine, “I am who I am and I am proud of myself. God made me the way I am and I accept myself.”
How do Christians make sense of Semanya’s story?
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The Case for Male Circumcision
Why the arguments from sentiment and sexual pleasure don't cut it for me.
What mother hasn’t, in the halcyon days after the birth of a son, felt her ferocious she-wolf instincts kick in when it comes time for her boy to be circumcised? Having perhaps suffered violence to her genitals during the birth, the physical ache to all that is vulnerable in her world can seem unbearable. And then it is done, and life goes on.
Anti-circumcision activists would have us believe that life does not in fact go on, that boys grow into men whose sexual pleasure (and that of the women they love) is compromised by this act of “genital mutilation.” While increasing numbers are swayed by both argument and sentiment, I’m stupefied by the controversy.
Male sexual pleasure is not my highest priority, having rarely witnessed a lack thereof. Nor is my own, if in fact I’m speaking out of my ignorance of the delight foreskin can deliver. What I am concerned about is sky-rocketing rates of sexually transmitted diseases, and the gender inequality evident in these rates.
A 2008 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study estimates that 25 percent of American women ages 14–19 are infected with at least one of the four most common STDs. Eighteen percent of them have human papilloma virus (HPV), which can cause genital warts and cervical cancer. Four percent have chlamydia, which, if left untreated, can lead to Pelvic inflammatory disease and sterility. Chlamydia can also be passed from mother to baby during vaginal birth, and is reported to occur in women at three times the rate it occurs in men. Furthermore, nearly half (48 percent) of African American w