"Ella Enchanted" Is A Movie About Consent

Ella and Prince Char. Image source.

[content note: spoilers for "Ella Enchanted" (2004 movie)]

I recently watched "Ella Enchanted" and was struck by its message on the importance of consent. Let's talk about it.

Here's an overview of the story: It's a fairy-tale setting, with magic. Ella (Anne Hathaway) is a girl who was given the "gift of obedience" by a fairy- meaning that anytime anyone orders Ella to do something, she is compelled to do it. This is a huge issue because it means she's extremely vulnerable. Anyone who knows about the "gift" can take advantage of her and make her do anything (and indeed, one of Ella's stepsisters figures it out and uses it against her). Really it's a curse rather than a "gift." Ella goes on a journey to get rid of the curse, and along the way meets Prince Char and they fall in love and end up together in the end.

This wasn't the first time I'd seen "Ella Enchanted." I saw it long long ago, back when I was an evangelical Christian, and the lens that I viewed it through was the idea that obedience is a virtue. Yes, when I was a little kid, I was taught by Sunday school teachers/ Christian books/ etc that obedience is a virtue. We're supposed to obey God/ our parents/ rules.

So back then, my evangelical take on "Ella Enchanted" was that in general, obedience is a good thing- but in this story in particular, there were people ordering Ella to do things that weren't good- and it's not okay that her "gift" required her to obey those.

In other words, I thought, obedience is a good thing, but with a few caveats.

I don't believe that any more. I don't believe obedience is inherently a good thing. I don't believe trust is inherently a good thing. I don't believe loyalty is inherently a good thing. Trust and loyalty can be good, but only if there are good reasons why that person deserves your trust/loyalty. As for obedience... I'm having trouble thinking of a situation where obedience is a good thing. Perhaps obedience is only a good thing in the case of a child obeying a parent about basic health/safety things, like "you need to brush your teeth every day." But even that is just a temporary situation; long-term, you want your kid to brush their teeth because they understand the health benefits, not because of "obedience." The only other situation I can think of where obedience is a good thing is if you're in some kind of emergency situation and your leader orders you to do something and there's no time to explain to you all the reasons for it, so you just have to trust that they have a good reason (I guess this is how armies work?). But that requires you to have the kind of relationship where you've worked closely together for a long time and you really really trust that if they tell you to do something, there's a good reason for it. But even in that situation, it's still not really ideal... you should still be held accountable for your actions, and "I was just following orders" is not gonna get you out of trouble, if someone ordered you to do a thing that seemed bad, but you trusted and obeyed them, and it turns out that yes, that thing you did really was bad. So again, it comes back to choosing whether or not to put your trust in someone- and if you choose wrong, that's on you- trust is not inherently a good thing.

So, back then I watched "Ella Enchanted" through the lens of "obedience is a good thing, with some caveats." But this time when I watched it, knowing what I know now about consent, I was surprised to see how strongly the pro-consent message is in this movie. Like, wow, I love this. It makes a lot more sense to view this as a movie about consent, rather than about obedience.

Let's talk about the relationship between Ella and Prince Char. Prince Char has tons of fangirls following him around everywhere, and he is drawn to Ella because she's not like that. She initially doesn't like him because she views him as complicit in the legalized discrimination against elves/giants/ogres, put into law by his uncle, King Edgar. He listens to her- and also listens to an elf and a giant talking about their own experiences under the laws that King Edgar made- and decides to take action to help. And then, the thing that is unique about the way he treats Ella is that he respects her right to consent, unlike anyone else in her entire life.

For example, look at this conversation:

Ella: So, have you seen Slannen? We have to leave. My godmother's on some kind of bender. 

Char: You can't leave now, it's the middle of the night. You have to stay for the party.

Ella: [magically compelled to do what he says] Okay, I'll stay.

Char: ...I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you don't have to stay. I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do.

Ella: Thank you, Char, for everything. So, I'll see you around? [she turns to leave]

Char: But I wish you would stay.

Ella: I guess one more night wouldn't hurt. [she stays]

I love this so much! At the beginning of the conversation, he can tell she doesn't want to stay- and then when she suddenly agrees to it, he feels like something is off. Consent is not just about if someone says "yes", because people can say "yes" to things they don't want, if they are coerced. He can tell from the way she's acting that she doesn't really want to stay at the party, even though she agreed to it- so he tells her explicitly that she doesn't have to do it. 

He's paying enough attention to her to realize that she's agreeing to something she doesn't really want- and it matters to him. He wants her to be free to do what she wants. Nobody in her life has ever cared about her in that way before. Ella's stepsister Hattie figured out that Ella does whatever she's told, and uses it to force Ella to do things. Random strangers tell Ella to do things and don't seem to notice or care about whether Ella wants to. Even Ella's mother sometimes used the "gift" to control Ella, but for "good" reasons like telling her to practice her musical instrument. (It's not okay that her mother did that.) 

Char is different; he doesn't want Ella to have to do anything she doesn't want- even if it's something he thinks is good. He cares about consent. He tells her, "I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do"- and that's a big deal. No one has ever told her that before.

Maybe some people would view it like "If they're forcing Ella to do something bad, that's bad. But if they're forcing Ella to do something neutral or good, well, that's fine." Char does NOT believe that, and that's a big deal. Char truly believes in consent, and I LOVE IT. 

Similarly, typically in conversations about consent, people are only thinking about it in terms of sexual situations- "If they're forcing you to do something sexual that you don't want, that's bad. If they're forcing you to do something non-sexual, well, whatever, not a big deal."

Because yeah, I think this is very important: when I'm talking about consent here, I don't mean in terms of consenting to sex. I think the concept of consent applies in all kinds of situations. It's weird that people seem to only talk about consent when they're talking about sex.

And I love how the movie showed so many different situations where Ella's obedience "gift" was a factor. Her beginning a romantic relationship with Char was just one small aspect of it. Consent should be about everything, not just relationships/sex.

Also, at the end of the movie [spoilers!], when the king had ordered Ella to kill Char, and she was holding the knife trying to stop herself from going through with it, and she ordered herself, "you will no longer be obedient" which finally freed her from the curse- it seemed a little too easy in my opinion, but at the same time, that is how it works in real life. The real-life equivalent to Ella's obedience curse is being a person who just does what other people want you to do, without any awareness about what you want yourself, without believing that your own desires matter. And the way to break out of that is by taking control of your own life, knowing yourself, knowing what you want, confidently pursuing what you want. Changing your thinking so that you believe that your own desires matter.

In real life, yes, the change really does have to come from inside you.

Another observation about "Ella Enchanted"- there were a few characters who figured out that Ella would do whatever anyone told her to. Ella's stepsister Hattie figured it out, and then she told King Edgar. And there's a scene where Hattie suspects that this is true about Ella, so she asks her to do some weird things in order to find out if it really works (and later another scene where King Edgar also does this). And it felt SO REAL, the way Ella is so terrified as she realizes that these other characters have figured out her weakness. Realizing that these people (who probably have bad motives) know that they have the power to make her do anything they ask. That's terrifying. The power dynamics of it.

And one more thing: Ella's mother ordered her to never tell anyone about the "gift", because obviously Ella is incredibly vulnerable if anyone finds this out. Overall, perhaps it was a good thing that her mother gave her an actual magically-enforced order to never tell anyone; otherwise, at some point she may have been magically compelled to reveal it against her will, and her mother's order protected her from that. But also, Prince Char knows something is wrong and is really trying to help her, and she's not able to tell him about the problem. It would have been better if she was able to at least tell him part of it- like "I'm under a magic spell that forces me to do specific thing X" (only mention the specific thing that's currently worrying her- don't mention that this would be true of literally anything that anyone tells her to do, that's just way too vulnerable).

This reminds me of how, because there are societal factors that make it harder to freely consent, society sets up other guidelines to try to correct for it, but those other guidelines introduce new problems. For example, people worry that teenagers are too young to make good decisions about sex- so then they teach abstinence-only sex-ed. Instead of giving teenagers good information and advice on how to make good decisions, adults just make a lot of rules. And maybe these rules do protect from certain risks (protect your daughter from rape by never letting her go on a date), but they cause other problems (encourages your kids to hide things from you/ won't come to you for advice/ they get sex-ed from bad sources instead). Similarly, Ella's ability to consent has been taken away, so Ella's mother "protects" her by also taking away her ability to consent, but in a different way. Maybe it's good that her mother did that, because Ella wasn't able to protect herself, but still the entire situation is so wrong. Wouldn't everything be so much better and healthier if everyone could know their own desires, communicate them clearly, and make their own choices rather than being pressured into anything? (Easier said than done, though- there will always be societal factors making this difficult.)

So anyway, I love everything this movie has to say about consent. It works a lot better if we view it as a movie about consent, rather than obedience.

[content note: abuse. If you want to skip it, scroll down to the image of Ella's martial arts pose as she fights off bandits]

And speaking of situations which are about consent but people wrongly think they are about obedience- well, I have to talk about John Piper's advice to women who are abused by their husbands. (Background info: John Piper is a big-name conservative Christian pastor who believes it's super super important that wives have to "submit" to their husbands, and women should never be in leadership over men because that would be against their God-given nature or something.)

Piper was answering the question "What should a wife's submission to her husband look like if he's an abuser?" (2009 youtube video) He gives a bizarre answer which assumes the issue is that the husband is ordering the wife to do something that God says is a sin. (He gives the example of a husband wanting his wife to participate in group sex.) As if it's about obedience, and the correct order of obedience for a woman is obey God first, and her husband second (and her own desires don't factor into it at all). He then says if it's a different type of situation, "if it's not requiring her to sin, but simply hurting her" then she should "endure" verbal abuse and being "smacked one night" and then go to the church for help.

He's viewing it like it's all about obedience. What are God's rules for this? What is or isn't a sin? What's the right way to get help while still obeying the "submit to your husband" rules? But that's all wrong- it's not about obedience, it's about consent. People deserve to not be abused. People have a right to stand up for themselves. It matters what you want; it's not just about if something is a "sin" or not- if it's not a "sin" but you're still not okay with it, then you absolutely have the right to not consent to it.

(Yeah... you may be wondering why I'm bringing up this one guy's bad opinion from 2009. If you're not connected to evangelicalism and have never heard of John Piper, I'm happy for you. But I used to be in that world, and I viewed him as a trustworthy Christian role model, and really bought into what he said. I truly believed that my own desires and my own suffering didn't matter- all that mattered was, am I sinning or not? am I putting God first? am I obeying God correctly? After you get out of that ideology, it takes a long time to even understand what your own desires are. And actually, immediately after getting out of that ideology, the concept of consent on its own is not that helpful because it relies on you knowing what you want. Hmm this is something I could maybe write about more in another post, if y'all are interested.)

(See also: Libby Anne's responses to Piper's statement, here and here.)

Ella fights off a group of bandits. Image source.

And maybe, to some extent, teaching obedience is the opposite of teaching consent. Obedience says that you should do what an authority figure says- for example, parents, teachers, pastors, boss, God, husband if you're a woman- simply because that's the correct order of the hierarchy, and your own desires don't matter at all. Consent says that your body, your possessions, your time, your emotions, your money, your life plans, all these things belong to you. You should figure out what you want, and make your own decisions. For things that belong to you, it's right and good that you should do what you want- that it should solely be your decision. There's nothing virtuous about handing control over to an authority figure, in the name of "being a good kid" or "obedience" or whatever.

In summary: Now that I know about consent, I recognize the very strong pro-consent messages in the movie "Ella Enchanted" (whereas I never noticed this before, viewing it through an evangelical Christian lens, believing that obedience is a virtue). Prince Char actually cares about what Ella wants, and genuinely doesn't want to force Ella into anything she doesn't want to do. It's not about if the thing she's forced to do is "good" or "bad"- it's inherently wrong for her to be forced into anything, regardless of what it is. Even when she agrees to do what he says, he feels that something is wrong and suspects that she doesn't actually want to, and he explicitly tells her he doesn't want to force her into anything she doesn't want. In that situation, it would have been easier for him to just let her do what he wanted, since she agreed to it- no one could blame him, right? But no, his concern is not meeting minimum standards of human decency so that other people won't judge him. He truly believes that Ella should not be forced into doing things that she doesn't want. This is what it means to truly value consent, and I love it.

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Related:

Let me tell you about a fanfic that reminded me of my marriage 

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent

Tickling, Consent, and The Way It Works 

When the Teacher Says, "Don't Look at Your Report Card"

Blogaround

1. This video from Andy Stanley:

“A gay person who still wants to attend church after the way they’ve been treated… I’m telling you, they have more faith than I do.” —Andy Stanley

I’m not endorsing Andy or his church, but it seems like he’s headed in the right direction.pic.twitter.com/x6A2c5Iht5

— Derek Myers (he/him) (@derektheheretic) January 24, 2023

Preach! This is so real! 

Huge disclaimer, I don't know anything about Andy Stanley except that he is a famous pastor. Don't take this as evidence that he is LGBTQ-affirming. Lots of Christians say nice things about LGBTQ people, and at the same time hold very bigoted views and want to deny LGBTQ people their rights. But, at least, I am happy to see Stanley has observed how courageous gay Christians are. This is very true.

Also, here's another important perspective- this Twitter thread from Kevin Garcia, who is very unimpressed.

2. Digging Into the Shang Dynasty’s Empire of Bones (January 23) [content note: human sacrifice, photos of ancient skeletons] 

3. The Poor Can’t Afford Not to Wear Nice Clothes (2019) "How do you put a price on the double take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to you because your mother’s presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle-class parents to advocate for her child? I didn’t know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up, but I am living proof of its investment yield."

4. Jinger Duggar Vuolo on Growing Up Under 'Cult-Like' Religious Beliefs: 'I Was Terrified of the Outside World' (January 18) "Even when her family went to play a sport called broomball, Vuolo says she felt 'terrified' she might be defying God's will. 'I thought I could be killed in a car accident on the way, because I didn't know if God wanted me to stay home and read my Bible instead.'" This is SO REAL. The idea that we should be suspicious of anything we desire or anything fun, because it might be a sin to pursue those things instead of doing something more "spiritual." The idea that there may be some little thing that God wants you to do, and God is totally in the right to kill you if you don't do it, and really it's your own fault because on some level you "know" that's what God really wanted you to do. And the incredible amount of anxiety that inevitably comes when you take these beliefs seriously and try to live that way.

I'm really glad to see that Jinger got away from her family's cult.

5. When will their churches condemn the Christian nationalism of MAGA politicians? (August 19) "In my context, both of my United States Senators (Marsha Blackburn of Christ Presbyterian Church and Bill Hagerty of St. George’s Episcopal) have used their government Twitter accounts to suggest that Attorney General Merrick Garland and our FBI are corrupt. When efforts to reach them and ask them to delete, retract and apologize for these incitements to violence fail, is it appropriate to request that their churches offer a public statement condemning, or at least distancing themselves from, these abusive behaviors? I think so."

6. Journal Club: The Labour of Love (January 25) This is really interesting because it's about a 2007 paper which talks about the "work" that women with sexual problems in hetero relationships do to figure out how to have sex/ how to deal with their male partner's sexual expectations. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe this as "work" before, besides me. But yeah it is work. It really annoys me how everyone talks about sex like it's something "natural."

7. I Found The Worst Christian Show (2021) "But at the same time, I had to appreciate this episode if only for its novelty. In a crowded room of pro-life people saying abortion is murder, 'Dream Motel' bravely goes against the grain and says, wait, maybe you shouldn't get an abortion because you might be dead in 10 years. And I think that's beautiful in its own way."

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese New Year decoration with rabbits, for the year of the rabbit. Image source.

Happy Year of the Rabbit! 兔年大吉！

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1. 'It was a beautiful moment': Moore County drag show goes on despite power outages (December 5) So, some conservatives were outraged about a drag show, and then there was a power outage- and then one of the people who opposed the drag show tweeted "The power is out in Moore County, and I know why." I find this SO FASCINATING, because yes, I have been in many situations where a Christian says something- something that if it was really true, would be very alarming and maybe we should get law enforcement involved- but nobody takes it that way. (The example that comes to mind is people saying, "I'm such a bad sinner, if you all knew what I've done, you wouldn't even want to be in the same room as me." Or a speaker I saw at a Christian event who said, "I've broken every one of the 10 commandments"- and immediately my brain was like "oh my goodness, she had sex???" and then my second thought was "WAIT, 'do not murder' is one of the 10 commandments" (!!!!!!!) and then my third thought was "well Jesus said that being angry at someone is as bad as murder, so I'm sure that's what she meant.")

So- "The power is out in Moore County, and I know why" and then she was so surprised when the police showed up at her house. Because, she meant it like, obviously God has heard our prayers to stop this drag show, and God has answered by causing this power outage, and this is such wonderful news, it's so exciting to see God working. She had no idea that, to normal people, it sounded like she was saying "I committed a crime." Her mistake was tweeting it where people outside of her Christian bubble could see it.

2. Wards of God (December 2022) "They have families. And those families are really struggling, maybe. And sometimes they’re struggling primarily because the state is intervening oppressively, but either way they exist."

3. Idaho’s ‘faith-healing’ exemption has led to more senseless child deaths (January 19) [content note: child death] So... I'm not sure if changing the law will help here. If "your kid might die" isn't a good enough reason for parents to go against their religious beliefs, then why would "your kid might die, and then you'll get arrested and charged with murder" be a good enough reason? I assume these are parents who love their kids and also really really believe that it's wrong to get real medical care, and that if they "obey God" then God will magically save their kids' lives. (Or, if God doesn't save them, well, it was "God's plan" so it's okay.)

I'd be interested to know if other states which do not have a "faith-healing exemption" have fewer children dying in these kinds of situations. Or, maybe if they arrest other people besides the parents- people who pressured the parents into refusing medical care, people who might fear "I'll get arrested" more than they fear "the kid might die."

But definitely some kind of action needs to be taken to stop this. Children have a right to real medical care.

4. Nonviolent Activism, Stress and a Major Victory in Oklahoma: On Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s Motion to Delay Executions (January 19) [content note: death penalty] "I don’t ever intend to sit back and let government killing of its’ citizens ever become an easy process."

5. The Humble Power Box That People Line Up To See (January 20) "A power box in Lujiazui, Shanghai's financial hub, has become a popular check-in spot."

Bucket List (a post about being a sex-favorable asexual)

An infographic that shows what a "deductible" is. Image source.

I'm hosting the Carnival of Aces this month, and my topic is "The Advice You Wish You'd Had." So I want to talk about being a sex-favorable ace, because the way this is talked about in "asexuality 101" types of discussions is not great.

A few posts from other people on this: 

From Queenie, I am not your dirty secret (2014), about how there is SO MUCH talk about "aces can have sex too," that sex-repulsed aces often feel pressured to have sex, or treated like there is something wrong with them for not even wanting to try sex. Even though a huge percentage of aces ("65% of asexuals, 51% of grey-As, and 37% of demisexuals") are sex-repulsed.

From Siggy, Take it from a sex-favorable ace: you don’t need to have sex (2018) (YES I AGREE) and 20 narratives of aces who like sex (2016). Talking about more specifics about sex-favorable aces' experiences, and how they very much don't fit whatever shallow impression one might get just from hearing "aces can have sex too!"

And I've been in a few situations where I'm at a queer event where I mention to people that I'm asexual, and they are like "but you have a kid" and I'm like, kind of caught off-guard by the idea that this would be confusing, like... isn't an asexual having sex specifically because they want to have a baby a really easy thing to understand? Apparently not? That's not the main reason I have sex, but at least it's a much easier reason to understand than "sexual attraction", whatever that is. (Maybe *all* my friends are wondering how I have a kid if I'm asexual, and they're all just too polite to ask.) So then I say, "well, I'm asexual, but I do have sex" and then I feel like... if this person was confused about asexuality before, and conceptualized it as just "not having sex" now they're back to conceptualizing it as "oh, just the same as non-asexuals then" which is, argggh not cool. I guess I should say something different...

So anyway, I want to kind of flesh this out more, the idea that I want to have sex but in a way that's different from how allosexuals want to have sex. ("Allosexual" means not on the asexual spectrum.) And also, if we want to talk about labels, I'm a sex-favorable asexual, but I never really felt like I had to use that term, "sex-favorable." (Background info: The ace community sometimes uses the terms sex-favorable/ sex-indifferent/ sex-averse/ sex-repulsed to label people's interest in actually having sex.) Yes, I totally fit the definition of "sex-favorable," no question about it, but I never felt like I had to use any label for it at all. I always felt like, some aces want to have sex, and some don't, and that's not really the most important aspect of being ace. I relate to a lot of things that other aces talk about, regardless of whether they're sex-favorable or sex-repulsed or anything else. But anyway, let's talk about "sex-favorable" in this post and see if it's a useful label for me.

Okay, so the summary of what "sex-favorable" means to me is: If I could do it all over again, I would have the perspective that "I would like to figure out sex, and masturbation, someday. Like, that is one of my overall life goals."

I would view it as, "Everyone's always talking about sex, and I'm really curious about what all the hype is about." And "Masturbating is one of those things that I feel like as an adult I should figure out, sort of like learning what a 'deductible' is when buying health insurance."

Like, very long term, at some point in my life, I do want to learn this. That's the view I would take, if I was in some alternate timeline where I'm young again and have access to good enough sex ed that I'm able to know what I want.

Knowing what I know now, I see that I don't feel there's any urgency to it. But I definitely felt urgency and desire and need for romantic things, rather than sexual things. When friends got engaged, I always felt like "their life is PERFECT, oh I want that SOOOO BADDDDD, when will it happen to meeee????" I hated being single so much. I was so lonely and desperate for romantic affection. And when I did have a boyfriend, I had to tell myself to slow down and hold back and don't spend all my time with him and follow him around with starry eyes and touch him all the time. I knew it would be a bad idea to open the floodgates of my romantic affection at the beginning of the relationship- that's the kind of thing you need to build up to. But wow I wanted it so much. (I also remember thinking to myself that I really couldn't imagine any set of circumstances where I would choose to break up with someone- being single was just so terrifying, I felt that even if I was in a bad relationship, I wouldn't be able to make myself believe that being single was better. This is, umm, not really a healthy perspective.)

I thought that since I had this overwhelming urgency and desire for romance, that also meant I had urgency and desire for sex. Because, the way that I always heard sex described was in very romantic terms- it's the highest expression of love, it's intimacy, it's giving yourself to another person, it's two becoming one, it's being fully vulnerable and fully loved with another person. I remember when I broke up with my first boyfriend and I was devastated and trying to figure out when I would get out of the hell that was being single, asking when I would finally get married and have my happily-ever-after- but the way I phrased it in my mind was, "how much longer will I have to wait till I can have sex?" Because I thought of "sex" as "you're married to this person who is perfect for you, and you know you're committed to them forever, and the sex is the fulfillment of all that romantic longing, the sex is the perfect love that these desires all lead to."

So I thought I really really wanted sex, in a more urgent way than just a checkbox on the bucket list.

But nope, lol. Turns out sex isn't "the highest expression of love" and all that romantic stuff. No, sex is getting together with another person and doing stuff with each other's genitals. I'm serious. Really. That's all it is. (I mean, I knew that's what it was in a dictionary-definition sense, but I always believed it would feel way more romantic than that. Turns out, no.)

(And maybe it should have been a hint for me, when I was so obsessed and in love and always having crushes, but never thought about actually having sex with the boys that I liked. [With a few exceptions...] Maybe it should have been a hint, that I had never masturbated, never even considered it, it was not on my mind at all. Yeah we can also file that under "the advice I wish I'd had.")

Anyway, my point is, I had that "urgency" for romance but not for sex. For sex, that can wait. (Or rather, that's the view I would take in this alternate universe where I have access to information about asexuality as a teenager. My real life didn't really go that way.)

And I think about a hypothetical, in this alternate universe, where I'm single and happen to mention to my friends that I am interested in having sex- in my mind a far-off long-term idea which would only happen under very specific circumstances- and then there's a guy I'm attracted to, and my friends tell me I should totally go try to have sex with him, like that same night. ??? Like what on earth, no, hypothetical friends, that is NOT how I meant it. Sex isn't the kind of thing I would do just because I'm attracted to someone. What on earth. Sex is far too weird, and I need a lot of time to analyze the situation and make a decision. And NOPE, I can tell you the circumstances are never going to be right if it's someone I just met. Like, the goal is to only do this with 1 person, that I really trust, in my entire lifetime. There's no need for me to have additional experience beyond that. What would be the point? Why bother, if the circumstances aren't really what I want? 

If you tell your friends "I want to buy a house" do they bring you a mortgage contract and expect you to sign it right then and there?

I've seen anecdotes written by sex-repulsed/sex-averse aces, about how some guy they met was like "but some aces can have sex!" and tried to use that as an argument for why they should have sex with *him* *specifically*. Like, what on earth? My dude, I'm saying I want to have sex at some point over the course of my life. This is not a meaningful difference in the probability for *you*, compared to if I wanted to have sex with no one ever. 

So sex-repulsed aces are saying this is why it's a problem to put so much emphasis on "some aces have sex!" and like, I'm sex-favorable and this would also be a problem for me, if someone interprets "some aces have sex" as "it is totally possible that I can convince this ace to have sex with me." Like no, that is NOT what it means.

So, if I could do it all over, I would view it like "sex and masturbation are things I'd like to figure out someday." But what actually happened in my actual life, well I've blogged about this a lot so I'll just summarize it here- it was a whole confusing process of totally buying into Christian purity culture, then working my way out of it, but still terrified of premarital sex, then when I finally did have sex it made no sense, then I figured out I'm asexual. 

And when I found the concept of asexuality, it was great news, because yes, I very much did want to figure out how to have sex, and I couldn't make any progress on it when I believed I was just a really confused heterosexual. Asexuality was necessary as a starting point for me- I finally figured out that the reason sex makes no sense is that sex just really does make no sense and I don't have sexual attraction. Whereas, in confused-heterosexual-land, I was stuck in this weird line of thinking, like "apparently, I have these desires, and apparently when I'm with my partner, things are just supposed to happen naturally and lead to sex, and apparently it's supposed to feel good" and couldn't make any progress because I was always stuck on the question of how to conceptualize my feelings so that they matched the feelings that I was "supposed" to have. 

So what I'm saying is, to actually achieve my bucket-list goal of figuring out how to have sex, I needed asexuality. I needed to realize the reality that this is something that takes time to figure out, not something that "comes naturally."

But anyway, even though I had to work through a lot of bad teaching and bad sex-ed, I got there eventually, now I'm with my husband and can check these items off the bucket list, and enjoy living in a way that incorporates them, and I'm happy with that.

Okay, and 1 more thing I want to say: Some parts of my "ideal" for what I want from sex during my lifetime match up with purity culture's "God's plan for your life", and I HATE that. I'm like, I want to have sex with only 1 person, and only when it's the right circumstance for it... argggh I sound like a nice church girl. That's what purity culture said everyone is "supposed" to do, that this is the "correct" view of the role sex should play in your life, and having a desire for something different than that is a horrible sin. Ugh I hate it. I hate how what I want matches that kind of holier-than-thou teaching. Here's what I really think: It's about knowing what you want. It's about knowing yourself. Wanting sex at some certain frequency does not make you better or worse than other people. There are no "correct" desires that you are "supposed" to have.

Please note, though, that my romantic desires very much did not fit into the restrictive box that purity culture gave me. I wasn't able to follow "God's plan" on that. I had to work so hard to repress my romantic desires, and I assumed I was also repressing my sexual desires, but turns out I didn't have any of those. And also, I had sex before marriage, and I plan to never stop talking about it, because it was a good decision for me, and that just invalidates the entire foundation of purity culture. 

So. There you have it. I've written before about being asexual and also the fact that I have sex, but I don't think I've used the word "sex-favorable" before, but there it is. I'm using it here in this post because I think it would help the ace community if there was more discussion on what *specifically* it might mean to be a sex-favorable ace. Otherwise, people just hear "aces can have sex too" and come away with the idea that most aces want to have sex/ can be talked into having sex/ have the same feelings on it as allosexuals do, or some nonsense like that.

If I was trying to give a 101-level answer, I would say, "I think most aces don't want to have sex ever. Some aces do want to have sex, but probably for different reasons than allosexual people do." (Or, does anyone have other suggestions on this? Leave a comment about it!)

For aces who don't want to have sex- yeah, I totally get it. For me, this very much feels like "I examined the options and made a decision." Like, there are options that one would need to examine, as a prerequisite for being able to determine that one is interested in sex. It doesn't feel like "well OBVIOUSLY this is what EVERYONE should think." It makes a lot of sense to me, to not be interested in sex or masturbation. I like how in the ace community, we discuss reasons to have sex, coming from the assumption that yeah sex is weird so if you want to do it, that's a bit unusual and we wonder what the reasons might be for that decision. Not like allosexual-world, where you need a reason to *not* have sex.

And yes, I know that other sex-favorable aces may have a completely different perspective than me. (Feel free to leave a comment!) I can only talk about myself- and I'm writing about it here because I think it's important to show that being a sex-favorable ace is a completely different thing from being allosexual. Apparently, most people feel like they "need" to have sex frequently??? Apparently, most people think sex is an important part of a romantic relationship???? Apparently, most people find it hard to not masturbate????? Apparently, most people's sex drive is associated with their health, and low sex drive is an indication of a problem?????? (What even is sex drive?) Apparently, most people have sex with the person they are dating??????? Apparently, most people think that if a married couple is not having sex frequently, that means there's something wrong with their marriage???????? Just baffling, all of it.

I do have sex, but when I hear society talking about sex, it doesn't sound like anything I can relate to at all. I seem to have completely different feelings on this than allosexuals. And that's what it means for me to be a sex-favorable asexual.

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Related:

My Husband Is Not The Entire Focus Of My Sex Life 

I Wanna Preach the Good News of Masturbation 

What If I Dated In High School

Blogaround

1. Black Hole Star – The Star That Shouldn't Exist (December 15) Wow this is wild.

2. Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous (December 12) You know how I sometimes talk about how hell completely ruins Christianity, because you can justify any atrocity ever by saying "well it's not as bad as hell"/ you can claim that what you're doing is so good and important even though it harms people, because there's a chance you're saving people from hell/ etc? Well, turns out the secular world is able to come up with an equivalent which is bad in all the same ways that heaven/hell are. Great...

3. The Pro-Life Mayberry Myth (January 8) "People who oppose Clinics aren’t that different from those who oppose colored folk."

4. Back on the (prayer) chain gang (January 13) I wrote about prayer last week- here's another Christian perspective on it. Also, the footnote at the end about how church prayer chains are "women's work" is SPOT-ON.

And another post from the Slacktivist: Tasting and grazing (January 16) [content note: euphemisms for oral sex] "Sex is not a separate universe with a separate set of rules."

5. Mansplaining in the Bible (January 15) "In Hannah’s case, well-meaning but totally clueless Elkanah doesn’t help the situation when he mansplains to Hannah why, in truth, she has no reason to be sad."

6. "For God So Loved The World?" (pdf, published in 1989) This is a very long, very good paper about the concept of "redemptive suffering" as it relates to Christian conceptualizations of what Jesus' death meant, because "redemptive suffering" has been used to argue that it's *okay* that injustice is happening (in particular, this paper mainly focuses on oppression of women) and that victims need to just accept their suffering like Christ did.

A lot of very very good points here. It's long, but since I'm a Christian feminist, I'm extremely interested in all of this, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

My opinion is, the core of the problem being discussed here is that suffering does exist in reality, and all religions have to address that somehow- have to address it by offering some kind of hope in the midst of suffering, something positive or inspirational, something along those lines. But there's a very fine line between "you will move on from this bad thing and have a good future" and "if that bad thing hadn't happened, then this other good thing wouldn't have happened after" [which may be true in a literal, factual, cause-and-effect sense] and "it's actually GOOD that that bad thing happened, because look at these good things that came as a result." There's a very fine line between "God understands what you're going through" and "therefore you're blessed to be in this bad situation because you are getting closer to God." There's a very fine line between "God sees and cares about what you're going through, God knows you don't deserve this, God will make this right someday" and "that's good enough, you don't need to consider whether it's possible for *you* to make a change and get OUT of the bad situation."

I 100% support the idea of using religion to find something positive in a bad situation after the fact. But we have to be careful that we don't buy into those "positive" things so much that we are no longer working to prevent those bad things from happening in the first place. Prevention is much MUCH better than finding a silver lining after the fact, and we have to make sure we NEVER lose sight of that.

For example, when someone dies, you often hear people say "they're in a better place." But nobody really believes that 100%. If you did, then you would kill yourself right there so you could go to "a better place." Everyone knows that *not dying* is better than if someone dies and then everyone convinces themselves to believe "they're in a better place." My god, I hope resurrection is true, but I don't know.

Anyway, my views are probably closest to what this paper calls "the suffering God." I also think the writings of Dr. King and Oscar Romero (also mentioned in the paper) are very important and powerful. They truly did take up the cross, and they had a lot to say about it.

I disagree with the paper's conclusion, because the writers seem to be saying they're not okay with *any* talk of anything positive at all related to suffering, because it can be twisted and used to tell victims that they need to just accept their suffering and that it's somehow good that these things are happening to them. I mean, yes I see that it can be twisted that way- but the reality is that suffering does exist, and I think religion has to at least say something hopeful about it. Otherwise, what good is religion?

Also, the writers of this paper seem to be saying they're not okay with any Christian view that says the cross is important. At the end, they present their own Christian ideology, which includes the point "No one was saved by the death of Jesus," which is, uh, surprising, but DAMN I read this section and I'm like "that'll preach." The Christian ideology they present here at the end is powerful and worth reading.

7. If you know someone is adopted—tell them (January 12) It is shocking to me that apparently there really exist people who adopt kids and then intend for those kids to never find out.

8. Atheist group demands Indiana sheriff end coercive inmate baptisms (January 14) "The problem here isn’t that the prisoners are making a public proclamation about their faith, which is obviously their right. The problem is the Sheriff’s Department promoting these religious events as if they’re inherently positive and treating Christianity as the office’s default faith."

9. Penelope Garcia’s Criminal Minds (December 21) "Historians have their favorite online resources, but where in the digital world is Garcia searching? According to the series, Garcia is accessing a series of digital archives that are equal parts fantasy and aspiration. Watching her work and seeing her archives are opportunities to think about what it would take to make this fantasy the historian’s reality."

10. The Double Standards of Sexual Expectations in Marriage (January 16) Oh my this post is so good. Every single point here is SO REAL. This could be an entire exhibition hall in the museum of "Are the straights okay?" (And no, we are not okay.)

Let's ditch this popsicle stand

"Two airport staff members dismantle a COVID-19 barrier at the arrival level of Pudong Airport's T2 terminal on Saturday night." Image source.

Complete list is here: Index of Posts About the March 2022 Shanghai Covid Outbreak 

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Hi all, here are the links about the current covid situation. If all goes according to plan, my next covid-related update will be "I'm in the US" :D (As I've mentioned in previous posts, I have a US trip planned.)

I haven't left China for 3 years, you guys.

---

Links

Sixth Tone

Confronting the Peak of the Epidemic in a Shanghai Hospital (January 12) A video about a hospital in Shanghai which is totally overwhelmed with covid patients. A doctor is calling all the different departments of the hospital trying to find an available bed for a patient.

‘It’s Insane’: China’s Doctors Struggle to Cope Amid COVID Surge (January 12) "Hospitals all over China are struggling to cope as a wave of COVID-19 infections rips through the population. Doctors describe shocking levels of overcrowding, shortages of key supplies, and medical teams weakened by mass infections."

Empty Shelves and Packed Clinics: Rural China in Crisis (January 7) "'I made the rounds of all the pharmacies, large and small. I couldn’t find a single box of ibuprofen or acetaminophen,' she said."

How COVID Misinformation Swamped Chinese Social Media (January 7)

In China, a Dark New Black Market Emerges: Fake COVID Medication (January 6)

COVID Is Rife Inside China’s Colleges. Exams Are Going Ahead Anyway. (January 5) "'Many of us were running a fever,' Tian said. 'I felt like the whole world was coughing, and my head was steaming. I did poorly. I couldn’t even finish my reading in the English exam.'"

COVID Is Spreading Explosively in China. Can Its ICUs Cope? (January 5) A lot of very informative, ominous graphs in this article.

Shanghai Expands Health System Capacity Amid COVID Surge (January 1)

SHINE/ Shanghai Daily/ Xinhua

COVID restrictions on travelers from China another political farce (January 15). LOL. Okay, it is just HILARIOUS how, now that zero-covid has ended, and some countries have made new policies about covid-testing for travelers coming from China, the Chinese government is like, "Well I never. I am shocked- SHOCKED!" Like... we all remember that for the past 3 years, China has put AN ABSURD number of rules on travelers entering the country, right? And now some other countries are requiring testing and possibly quarantine (looking at you, South Korea and Japan), which is honestly pretty tame compared to all the hoops that people had to jump through to get into China.

China reports 59,938 COVID-related deaths in over a month (January 14) I personally don't know if this number is realistic or not- maybe need to spend more time tracking down the math on it.

The travel itch: China's reopening releases pent-up demand for overseas tourism (January 14)

'It is just like it was three years ago' (January 11) I like the part where they interview the foreign pilots- "Yeah, we've been coming up for the last 3 years, but no, it hasn't been open like this, obviously. We've been stuck in a closed-loop system out at the airport and everybody's been wearing space suits. So yeah, it's good to be out." 

And "It is surreal, you know, that all of a sudden- Yesterday, everyone was in the PPE, and today you look around and we're back in this building. We're not on a bus going to get processed at a different location in the airport. Coming, it's just like it was 3 years ago."

WHO official urges science-based, non-discriminatory COVID entry restrictions (January 11)

Free PCR tests stopped with new procedures required for testing (January 10)

China halts short-term visas in South Korea, first response to COVID curbs (January 10) "The Chinese embassy in South Korea has suspended issuing short-term visas for South Korean visitors, it said on Tuesday, the first retaliatory move against nations imposing COVID-19 curbs on travellers from China."

China receives over 250,000 inbound passenger trips on first day of new COVID policy (January 9)

Shanghai greets first international arrivals, with no COVID limitations (January 8) 

China's grassroots fever clinics treat majority of patients (January 8)

A review of the travel regulations in effect since 2020 (January 7) This is a really informative timeline. Though I find it a bit odd that nothing happened in 2021.

Spring Festival travel rush begins amid COVID-19 response shift (January 7) Yes, this is a huge deal. In the Before Times, Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) was when everyone traveled to their hometown. Every year it was a MASSIVE migration of people. And then, during the pandemic, we didn't really do that because the government kept telling us not to travel. But now that zero-covid is over, suddenly everyone (myself included!) is super excited that "oh man, this year I can finally see my family during Chinese New Year!" So A LOT of travel going on.

China's latest COVID-19 control protocol highlights vaccination, personal protection (January 7) 

Working with emergency services during COVID: 120 for ambulance (January 6) "I've been a Dazhong company taxi driver for nearly 7 years. ... Our company told us about this situation. I saw there was a labor shortage of ambulance drivers, so I applied for it."

Key COVID-19 policy changes from January 8 (January 6) This is a nice infographic.

No more free PCR tests in Shanghai from Sunday (January 6) Yes, they will no longer be free. They will be 16 RMB (about 2 USD).

Beijing sees declining outpatient, emergent treatment demands (January 6) "Li Ang, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, said at a press conference that patients admitted to fever clinics dropped from the peak of 73,000 on December 15, 2022, to 12,000 on Wednesday, and the number of emergency admissions fell from the peak of 52,000 on December 30, 2022, to the current 42,000." Lol remember when China was pretending there were only like 1000 new covid cases per day?

No on-arrival PCR test, central quarantine for inbound travelers (January 6)

A long night on the last day of the year at Renji Hospital (January 5) "There are too many critical patients. In the past, not all the patients were in severe condition, but now all of them are in bad condition, and they all need oxygen, but the problem is, we have no more left."

Temperature checks at Metro stations a thing of the past (January 5) Yeah so, there have been IR cameras at the subway stations in Shanghai to check people's temperatures. (Or, before the IR cameras were installed, there was a very bored security guard sort of using a contactless thermometer on everyone's wrist as they walked through.) But, with the policy changes, they're not going to be checking people's temperatures anymore. Uh, okay, great, but really this whole temperature-checking thing was always a joke. There were several times that my son had a fever, and we took the subway to take him to the fever clinic, and nobody seemed to notice his temperature.

Shanghai defines COVID-19 serious, critical cases (January 4) 

Community hospitals equipped to offer early COVID detection, tiered treatment (January 3)

Paxlovid now available at city community hospitals (January 3)

New York Times

This Is What Shanghai’s Covid Outbreak Looks Like (January 10) Powerful photos here.

On believing that "prayer works"

Giant screen at a football stadium which says "Love for Damar." Image source.

So I want to talk about this blog post, from Hemant Mehta: An ESPN analyst’s gratuitous on-air prayers won’t help Damar Hamlin. Background info: On January 2, at a Bills-Bengals football game in Cincinnati, Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the field. First responders gave him CPR on the field, and took him to a hospital, and everyone was worried about whether he would live. A week later, he was transferred to a hospital in Buffalo, and now has been discharged from the hospital because he is recovering well.

Anyway, this was a big deal in the football world. A player almost died right on the field in the middle of a game. A lot of people connected to football have been showing support and love for Hamlin, and a lot of people have been praying for him.

So now we come to Mehta's post, about ESPN football analyst Dan Orlovsky actually praying out loud on tv, during his sports commentary show. Mehta says, "But it’s disgusting how some people have used the tragedy to advance their personal religious agenda" and talks about the reasons why Orlovsky should have just prayed on his own time instead of on his sports tv show.

Okay, first of all, yes, I understand why atheists wouldn't want that on their sports tv shows. This is a valid complaint.

But, second, I think it misrepresents the situation to say that Orlovsky is simply using this situation as an opportunity to push his religious beliefs on other people. I think Mehta's blog post misses the actual reason why Orlovsky prayed on tv: Because he believed that it would increase the chances that God would save Hamlin's life.

Now, obvious disclaimer, I don't know if Orlovsky conceptualizes prayer in this way- but when I was evangelical, I definitely did, and yes, the general belief about prayer in the Christian culture I grew up in was, the more you pray, the more likely it is that the thing will happen. The more people who pray for something, the more likely it is that it will happen. The more intensely and passionately you pray for something, the more likely it is to happen. The more faith you have when you pray, the more likely it is to happen.

I mean, nobody at church talked about it in terms of probabilities, but they said things like "prayer works"- they very much believed that praying for something can be a significant factor in God causing that thing to happen. I'm a math person so I call it a probability.

So, according to this ideology, the difference between praying by yourself vs praying on tv in front of thousands of viewers could be the difference between life and death for Damar Hamlin. When you use your giant platform and pray in front of your viewers, then probably a huge number of those viewers will pray with you- and God ups the probability accordingly. When you take a risk and do something weird and unpopular, like praying out loud on a sports show, that shows you really really have faith- so God ups the probability because of that. This could be the thing that puts God over the edge, so God will save Hamlin's life.

People in this ideology- like me when I was evangelical- really believe that prayer does something. That God can really intervene if he wants (I say "he" because the god I believed in back then was a "he") and so we have to beg desperately, as much as we can, to try to get it to happen.

(I should mention that many Christians, when confronted with the fact that this view of prayer doesn't really make sense, will say that, actually, prayer doesn't change things, because God already decided beforehand what would happen. But prayer is still important because it's a way for us to feel we are involved with the things that God is doing in the world. So I guess if you're a really really good Christian [I hope my sarcasm is obvious here], you will be able to guess correctly which things God has planned to happen- this is called "discernment"- and you'll pray for those, and then you'll feel so cool when those things happen- even though it's not true that your prayer had any role in causing them to happen. Okay, so, yeah, when explicitly confronted with the logic of it, Christians will claim they actually believe that prayer doesn't influence the likelihood of things happening, and things only happen if they are "God's will" regardless of how much people pray. They claim this is what they actually believe, but THEY DON'T. At church, when people are sharing their "prayer requests" and asking the other church members to pray for them, nobody says, "okay let's carefully analyze these prayer requests to try to figure out which ones are 'God's will' because, obviously, we don't actually believe prayer changes things- so we should only pray for things that are God's will." Nope.)

So, yes, in that kind of Christian ideology, people believe that "prayer works"- meaning prayer increases the probability that God will do a thing. People didn't actually use the word "probability" but the way they talked about prayer meant basically that.

Now, you might be saying, doesn't this God seem kind of like... a terrible person? Like, God is sitting up in heaven going "well I could save this person's life, quite easily, but I won't do it because not enough people prayed about it."

I mean, yeah, full disclosure, that is why I don't pray. I'm a Christian but I don't pray. I do not believe in a God who decides whether to help people based on whether you prayed about it correctly. A god like that is despicable.

And yeah, when someone wants something so bad, and they pray about it so much, and then it doesn't happen and they ask "why?" there are all kinds of answers offered by Christians. Maybe you didn't pray enough. Maybe you had the wrong motivations when you prayed. Maybe you had some sin in your life that is causing God to ignore your prayers. Maybe the thing you wanted wasn't "in God's will." Surely there must be some little thing you did wrong, that explains why this is all your fault!

So yes, we very much are talking about a God who would, for example, let your family members die because you didn't have the correct feelings when you were praying. 

My point is, many people believe that the more we pray, the more God will help Damar Hamlin, and I think that's likely the motivation for Orlovsky praying on tv.

But here's another question: Today, because of social media, news is able to spread very fast. If someone is in a bad situation, it is very possible for hundreds, thousands, millions of people to hear about it right away and potentially pray for them. Compare this to thousands of years ago, when the fastest that news could travel was a guy on a horse.

So, because of social media, we can get huge groups of people to pray for specific things in a way that was completely unthinkable back when the bible was written. Does that mean that God intervenes more now than he did in the past? Because, supposedly, more prayers means more chance that God will do something. So, the invention of Facebook has led to God becoming more active in answering people's prayers. Can this be true? ... I mean, it's ridiculous.

Perhaps God takes "inflation" into account- maybe a prayer nowadays in the age of social media counts less than a prayer back then. Or, maybe God applies a scaling factor according to whether you actually know the person you're praying for or they're a total stranger you just saw on the internet.

And, people's biases affect what kinds of news goes viral, and what kind of people are seen as "real" victims who deserve our compassion/ deserve to be prayed for. For example: missing white woman syndrome. If a young, attractive, white woman is missing, there will be a ton of news coverage about it, but very little attention is given to missing people who don't fit that image. So, it's very possible that if a white woman is missing, lots of people will see the news coverage and pray for her, but a woman of color in the exact same situation will receive little news coverage and won't have a ton of strangers praying for her. Does that mean that God will help the white woman more? Doesn't something seem wrong about this? God's actions are constrained by human society's prejudices?

Maybe God has some kind of "affirmative action" policy. Maybe, to make things more fair, he credits people with additional prayers if they come from a demographic group which is less likely to be seen by the general public as deserving of help.

I think this entire line of thought is absurd- but if it really is true that "prayer works," these are the questions we need to be asking. Here's a paper that I've linked to before: Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials (2009). I love this paper SO MUCH because the "Discussion" section at the end asks a lot of EXTREMELY IMPORTANT questions which we should take very seriously if it's true that "prayer works." (And no, I don't believe "prayer works.")

And another thing- this specific situation with Damar Hamlin is very unique in how it has inspired such an outpouring of support for him. I think in this case, the reason that so many people care is because of how dramatically it happened, on live tv in front of thousands of football fans, and then there were several days when he was in the hospital in critical condition and people just had to wait and see what happened- and the emotions surrounding this specific string of events inspire people to pray more so than if it had played out differently. What if it had happened somewhere else other than a football stadium full of fans, and therefore fans didn't feel the emotions of it this way, and didn't care enough to pray for him? Would God help him less because of that?

It occurs to me that some bad situations happen faster than others. Some bad situations allow more time for news to spread and people to pray about it (for example, if someone is sick and in the hospital) and some bad situations happen so fast that by the time anyone hears about it, the damage is already done (for example, being killed in a car accident). So, the "slower" tragedies surely get more prayer during the window of time where an intervention from God could make a difference, right? Does that mean that God does more to help with those "slow" situations than the "faster" ones? Like, "I would help, but I'm waiting for more people to pray about it ... oops too late."

Perhaps we can compensate for this by pre-emptively praying against those kind of "fast" emergencies that we won't hear about in time to pray for in real time. Maybe every day we should pray, "God, help everyone today who gets into some emergency situation which doesn't allow any time for their friends to hear about it and pray for them." How many times should we pray this every day so that God helps with "fast" emergencies equally to how much he helps with "slow" emergencies? Let's do the math on it! If people really believe that "prayer works," then they need to do the math on this and figure it out. Ah, but isn't prayer more "effective" if you know more details about the situation / if you have a personal connection / if it's something you really really care about? So the vague, impersonal "help anyone who gets into a 'fast' emergency" prayer ends up being a really "weak" prayer then, right? Should we imagine specific bad situations happening to specific people, and get ourselves all worked up emotionally about how bad those things would be, and then pray against them- would that produce prayers as powerful as prayers that happen in real time in response to a real situation? (Please don't do this, it would be terrible for your mental health.)

OR, WAIT, maybe this is how God handles this issue: I have heard anecdotes from Christians like "I just randomly woke up in the middle of the night and felt a burden [this means a really strong feeling that you are supposed to do something] to pray for so-and-so, so I did, and then a few days later I talked to so-and-so on the phone and found out they were in a dangerous situation at the EXACT SAME TIME that I felt I needed to pray for them! Wow what an amazing miracle! This is wonderful!" These stories are, uh, bad, because if you suddenly, out of nowhere, get a weird sense that something terrible is happening to your friends/family, this is called ANXIETY and you need to go to THERAPY and learn how to have more realistic emotions about the actual dangers that exist in the world. A terrible way to handle it would be to say "oh, maybe the reason I feel worried about so-and-so is because there REALLY IS something bad happening to them, and I need to pray as hard as I possibly can right now, because they might DIE, and it would be MY FAULT for not praying enough."

Like, how does this even work, actually? This is a common trope in stories that Christians tell- suddenly out of nowhere you have a sense that you NEED to pray for someone, and then later you find out that that person was in danger at that exact same time, but they are safe now. How does this work? Person A is in danger, so God says "oh no, I must do something!" and tells Person B to pray for Person A, so Person B prays "God, help Person A", so then God helps Person A? Doesn't this seem overly complicated? Why does God need to get Person B involved at all? It seems like God thinks Person B feeling cool about having direct communication from God is more important than Person A's safety. Because, if Person B doesn't understand what God is trying to tell them, or perhaps they've been in therapy for anxiety before and they know that it's best for their mental health to ignore random terrifying thoughts that just pop up out of nowhere, and therefore Person B doesn't pray- then does God not help Person A? You may say, well, maybe God helps Person A anyway- it's not dependent on what Person B does. Oh, so the only reason God got Person B involved was so Person B could have this cool experience of supernaturally knowing that a bad thing was happening to Person A? If that was God's goal, why give Person B thoughts of worry- why not give them thoughts of "a bad thing was happening to Person A, but it's fine now, they're okay"?

Just seems like this God is really disorganized.

Okay, so, coming back to Mehta's blog post, where this whole thing started. I'm writing about this because I think his post misrepresents the motivation that Orlovsky had for saying a whole prayer on his sports show. It kind of portrays it like, praying is a habit that religious people have when bad things happen, which is fine for them but they should do it on their own time- as if that's all there is to it. Completely missing the idea that Christians believe that prayer actually does affect what happens in the real world. (Lol, well, *I* don't believe that, and I'm a Christian...) If you don't engage with that idea, you're not really going to be able to make an effective argument about this situation.

Ah, but I am not saying "Orlovsky really does believe that praying on tv could possibly save Hamlin's life, therefore it's totally fine for him to do that and no one should criticize him." (This is a pretty minor example in my opinion- but there are much more serious examples along the same lines.) Even though a lot of Christians really genuinely believe things like that, society cannot say that means it's totally fine for Christians to just go ahead and do whatever it is they believe will influence God to save lives or whatever.

Because, here's an example, there are Christians who believe that God causes disasters to happen because the US allows same-sex marriage. And therefore, by denying rights to queer people, we are preventing God from sending hurricanes, and so we are saving lives.

Yes, there are many examples along the lines of "we need to do something/ not do something, and then God will cause some totally unrelated good thing/ bad thing to happen"- the only connection between the "cause" and "effect" being God. Rather than a cause/effect relationship there's actually evidence for in the real world. And society can't just decide "well, you have to let these religious people do this, because they really genuinely believe it will save lives." No, we can't live that way, because anyone could make up literally anything and claim that we *must* do it or else God will kill people. We can't allow that- we live in a society.

I do think it's a difficult thing, though, because people genuinely believe that our actions affect what God does to us, so it's very difficult to argue against. Difficult to find some sort of outcome that people would agree on. 

In summary: I'm glad to hear that Damar Hamlin has been doing better. I am a football fan, and it was emotional for me to see so many football-adjacent people coming together like this to show support for him. A lot of people have been talking publicly about praying for Hamlin- and I understand why atheists may have a problem with this in certain circumstances. But Mehta's post misrepresents the motivation for praying on a sports tv show. It was likely motivated not by a desire to use a tragic situation to push religion on other people, but by a belief that maybe this could actually help Hamlin's medical condition. The idea that, maybe if we pray more, we can convince God to help him. 

If you want to argue against this, it's important to understand the reasons behind it. And yes, let's definitely argue against the idea that "prayer works." Why would God choose not to help people just because there weren't enough prayers about it? What kind of monstrous God is this? Yes, fight against that kind of God.

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Related:

God of Bad Snaps

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God

I Didn't Like the Ocean in "Moana" Because it was Too Much Like God

"The Authority of Scripture" is One Hell of a Drug

The Worst Bible Story

Blogaround

1. Why Christians Should Be (the Best) Landlords (January 4) This is a post discussing the idea that a Christian landlord should never evict anyone. I think this is a really interesting and complicated moral question- and this writer is correct in saying the unique thing about the landlord-tenant relationship is it's so personal.

My opinion is (and I'm not an expert on any of this, so I'm probably missing some parts...), as a landlord, you should have some amount of compassion and understanding, and give people a little extra time even though legally you're within your rights to evict them. But if we really believe landlords need to do that, then that means landlords should take that into account from the very beginning when they're deciding whether to become a landlord. Like do a calculation "odds are, once every X years, I'll have someone who stops paying the rent, and I'll be a little nice to them and let them not pay for Y months" - you need to figure out the math of how "nice" you are going to be, and determine the price you should charge for rent based on that. (And also this depends on the laws where you are- I think most places have laws that you have to wait some number of months before evicting people.) And, yikes, if people are really arguing that a landlord should "never" evict anyone, then that means the landlord needs to be okay with getting paid 0 rent, indefinitely? (I don't know if anyone is literally saying this or not- maybe I'm misrepresenting them.) If that's the case, you should just not become a landlord in the first place. That risk is too great. 

Unless you decided to become a landlord as, like, a charity project. Instead of as a way to make money. Honestly this is not a good idea. I can easily imagine someone going into this very naive, like "I'm going to be a landlord who charges less rent, so I actually lose money, in order to help people" and then you discover that your renters are complex imperfect people, not the simplistic "people in need" stereotype that you had in your mind, and you begin to get mad at your renters for not acting grateful enough, or whatever. Or, maybe what I'm saying is, it's likely that someone who decides to become a landlord not for money but to "help the world" has some subconscious assumptions about how they want the recipients of their "charity" to act. They think they're okay with losing money and getting nothing in return, but actually they're not- they expect to get an "I really made a difference in someone's life" feeling in return.

And, I think some people are unhappy about the idea that landlords feel they need to make money. This baffles me... Well, actually, I think it's because there are people whose financial status is "I need to have enough money to survive" and people whose financial status is "I already have enough money, I want to make it into more money." It's very easy for people in the "need to survive" group to view the "I want to make more money" desire as completely invalid. I feel like... yeah the difficult thing is we are weighing "I want to survive" against "I want more money." You should rule in favor of the "survive" side- but then you have to know that the "make money" group will factor that in when they do the math on how to invest their money.

2. Why Is a Christian Book Trying to Coerce Wives into Sending Nude Photos? (January 6) Wow, yes, this is a very important post. I have heard ex-purity-culture women saying they were given "marriage advice" to do a boudoir photo shoot so their husband could have the photos, and that would prevent him from watching porn. (I personally never heard this advice myself when I believed in "purity," but yeah, it fits.) I'm really glad to see Sheila Wray Gregoire writing about this- and telling married women that *you* being uncomfortable with doing some sex thing is a GOOD ENOUGH REASON to say no- even if it's not "a sin."

Also, she treats the possibility of divorcing- and then being in the horrible situation where your ex still has your photos- as a REAL THING. Normally, Christian marriage advice treats divorce like some faraway threat that would never really happen if you follow the rules correctly. I've NEVER seen Christian marriage advice along the lines of "maybe DON'T make yourself vulnerable to each other in this way, because it could turn really bad if you divorce." The Christian marriage advice I always heard was, finally you can stop holding back, finally you can fully give yourself to your partner, be completely vulnerable in every way, you accept and love each other unconditionally, there's nothing to fear now, because you're committed for life.

And the way she "fixes" the story by changing it to "he realized he was replacing porn with his wife and decided to go to therapy"- that just totally blew my mind. The Christian marriage advice I've always heard was, basically, yes, men should replace porn with their wives (though they didn't say it in these words exactly). They said that was good and normal in marriage. They said men are like that.

Also this bit at the end: "I’ve been focusing on the coercive aspect of that passage, but there are so many other weird bits. Is it good for a man to be sexually aroused all day at work? How does that affect his colleagues? His work performance? How would you feel knowing a colleague was in a state of semi-arousal all day?" GOOD POINT. I, too, have read Christian marriage books which talked about how cool it is for a husband to be aroused at work all day, looking forward to coming home to his wife, and now I'm like... this seems more like a fanfiction trope rather than something that's actually a good idea in reality.

I really want to read Gregoire's book The Great Sex Rescue and write a review of it. :)

Also from the same blog: 2 Kinds of Marital Rape that Evangelicalism (Inadvertently) Enables (November 14) [content note: rape] Oh wow, this is a very good post. It connects real personal stories of women who have been raped by their husbands, with the Christian marriage teachings that say this is how normal marriages work. The comment section is full of women in this exact situation.

These teachings are VERY REAL. I VERY MUCH believed that as a wife, I have a "duty" to have sex with my husband, because he "needs" it. I remember hearing a lot of Christian marriage advice about why this reason or that reason are not good enough reasons to say no to your husband. (This is rape culture.)

Luckily, my husband is not a Christian.

3. Not Dead Yet [UPDATE: Meachen Responds] (January 6) I heard some people on Twitter mention something about "an author faked her own death"- well here's the story.

4. Cycles of extremism: NGOs suspend services after Taliban bans female staff (December 26) "In a series of moves surprising no one, the Taliban government in Afghanistan this past week banned women from universities, and also locked girls out of primary school (essentially ending education to female persons across the board), before also banning women from work in any local non-government organizations (NGOs)."

5. Youth-led climate change lawsuits are increasing across the country (April 2022) "In Montana, youth claim that state lawmakers have consistently prioritized fossil fuel infrastructure and profits to the detriment of their future. They argue that the state's actions have violated their constitutional right to a healthy and safe environment."

6. The Desire for Twins Is Putting China’s Mothers in Danger (January 9) [content note: pregnancy loss]

Allow Me To Showcase Some Internet People Who Know What's What About Vaginismus

The groom puts a wedding ring on the bride's finger. Image source.

[content note: sex, vaginismus, coercive sex, marital rape. Purity culture is rape culture.]

I came across this article by Rebecca Lindenbach, Research Deep Dive: How does a couple's first time affect her libido? (October 2022). (This website is "Bare Marriage" and it used to be called "To Love, Honor, and Vacuum"- it's Sheila Wray Gregoire's site. I've written about her before. I am very interested in her book, The Great Sex Rescue.) This article is about a study on women's libido and how that was related to whether or not they had an orgasm the first time they had partnered sex.