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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
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We are now in the second half of chapter 2 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. This section is about how you shouldn't let gender roles dictate your marriage. Just be yourselves, instead of being what a woman "should" be or what a man "should" be.
Here's an interesting finding from our research: Women who do not believe traditional gender roles are moral imperatives feel more heard and seen in their marriages. In fact, women who act out the typical breadwinner-homemaker dynamic also feel more seen if they see it as a choice and not a God-given role.
Does this mean that it's wrong to have a breadwinner and a stay-at-home spouse? Nope. All three of us writing this book specifically chose careers that would allow us to be home with our kids. But when we unquestioningly buy into traditional gender roles, we create a strange dynamic in marriage in which we view each other as categories rather than people. We are all made with unique strengths, giftings, and callings, and these do not always fit with traditional gender roles. When a couple makes decisions based on who God created them to be versus who gender roles say they should be, it allows them to live in God's plan for their lives while feeling known and valued. Trying to live up to gender roles can mean that we're not fully ourselves; we're wearing a mask, and sometimes that mask doesn't fit.
Okay, 3 things I want to say about this:
First: Yes! I agree with all of this!
Second: Wait, isn't this obvious? Why does this need to be said? The bar is on the floor.
Third: But, sadly, yes, this DOES need to be said. For women coming from a conservative Christian background, they really have been taught that there are certain things that women have to do, and certain things that men have to do, and God said so. (This ideology is called complementarianism- the idea that men are women have different roles that "complement" each other. And therefore women can't be pastors, or something.) Yes, seriously, this is a real ideology... "biblical manhood" and "biblical womanhood" and people really do buy into it. I bought into it, because I was taught that this is what Christians have to believe/ this is what the bible says. (Later, I discovered that actually yes, there do exist Christians who believe in equality between men and women. Thank you Rachel.)
So yes, I'm glad this book says that you should be yourself, rather than trying to force yourself into a role based on your gender. Because that literally is something that the evangelical church is teaching, and it needs to be addressed.
Relatedly, this is one of the main reasons I'm glad I don't go to church anymore. Because in churches, you meet people who believe women can't be pastors, and other misogynist nonsense, and you're supposed to act like that's a perfectly fine opinion for a Christian to hold. They're just doing their best to follow the bible, and we have to be respectful of that. Oh BLAH. I am NOT HERE FOR THAT. (For more on that, see my post The Church is a Safe Place for Awful Beliefs and Samantha Field's post the pitfalls of the middle ground.)
(Also, I think that same-sex couples have an advantage here, because they don't necessarily have predefined "roles" that they are supposed to force themselves into. Though to some extent those roles do get re-created in gay culture- for example, the idea that a gay man has to be either a "top" or a "bottom" and that apparently means something about what role he has in the relationship.)
The next section of this chapter is about gender hierarchy- ie, the idea that the husband has to be the "leader." Yes, really, this is another thing that complementarian Christians teach, and back then I totally bought into it because I didn't realize I had other options.
(Do you EVEN KNOW how much time Christian college-age girls spend parsing the finer points of "the man has to be the spiritual leader"? Debating questions like "Is it a sin if the girl is the one who makes the first move, to ask the guy out?" [The answer I heard was, maybe it's not a sin but it's a bad idea- if your relationship is going to lead to marriage, then at that point he will need to be "the leader", and if he can't even be the "leader" of the first step, then that's not a good sign.] Figuring out ways to carefully drop hints to indicate interest in dating a guy, because we're not "allowed" to just tell him directly. Asking yourself "could I submit to his leadership?" when trying to decide whether to date someone. Believing that being more devoted to Jesus makes me less able to find a compatible husband, because where am I gonna find a guy who knows the bible better than I do? Ughhh let's just stop all that and communicate honestly like healthy people. [Spoiler: I married a non-Christian and I'm SO GLAD for that.])
I believed that the wife was supposed to "submit" to the husband. I believed that a good godly husband would not abuse this power- yes, he holds the final decision-making power in the marriage, and he would be able to overrule his wife's position, but in general he shouldn't do that. That would only be in a worst-case scenario, when they've been discussing something over and over and still can't agree. In all other situations, they should make the decision together.
That's how it was explained to me, back then. And I've heard people say, that in the ideal case, complementarian marriages are functionally egalitarian. ("Egalitarian" is the "opposite" of complementarian- it means the husband and wife are equal, and don't have to force themselves to follow gender roles. [Note, however, that this is still in the context of hetero marriage- egalitarians may or may not affirm queer people.]) In other words, the couple says they believe "the husband is the leader, and the wife has to submit" but in the actual practical reality of their marriage, they always make decisions together- they never have a situation where the husband pulls rank.
So at best, complementarian marriages are egalitarian, and at worst, the husband can abuse the wife as much as he wants and the church will just tell her she needs to "submit" more.
Anyway, yes, complementarian ideology is BAD. Gregoire and her co-authors are explicitly taking a stand against it.
Love & Respect, for instance, claims that "to set up a marriage with two equals at the head is to set it up for failure. That is one of the big reasons that people are divorcing right and left today." A common thread among all these books is that marriages without a tiebreaker are doomed to fail because relationships need someone to be in charge.
Yes, really. Popular Christian marriage resources really are teaching this. They say the idea that you can be equals and always make decisions together is just impossible, absurd, it would never work. Yes, really- and I used to believe that because they said it came from the bible, so I thought I had to believe it. (Fact check: No it does not, and no I do not.) They said there's no way a marriage can work unless the man is the leader, and I couldn't really make sense of what that would look like in reality, and it didn't seem right, but I thought "well these people are married and I am not, so I guess they know what they're talking about, and my intuition on this is wrong."
I'm glad I quit believing that, well before I got married. And now it is so GOOD and LIFE-GIVING for me to see people on the internet (for example, Dr. Laura Robinson on twitter) talking about how ridiculous it is that these complementarian men really can't imagine a relationship working unless one person has power over the other. Like, what on earth? Doesn't this say more about them than it does about the objective nature of marriage?
Also, can I say something about power dynamics here? There should be a class in school where they teach high school kids how to avoid signing contracts which are unfair to them. You know, the things you need to know about how the real world works. If someone presents a contract for you to sign, and the contract says that this other party holds a ton of power over you, and they tell you oh don't worry, they are nice and wouldn't really do those things to you, even though the contract says they totally can- YOU RUN. That is a HUGE goddamn red flag.
For example, when I was getting ready to move to China, I read a lot of people's stories on the internet, about how they moved to China to teach English, but their employer turned out to be shady, and the employer kept their passport "for safekeeping" and was able to exploit them, being an immigrant in China, unable to speak the language, and without access to their own passport. DO NOT let your employer keep your passport. Like, yeah I'm sure if you say you're not willing to let them keep your passport, they will be all sad about "you don't trust us" and how you're being a bad person for implying that they would abuse that power... RUN. A reasonable person will understand that you feel unsafe with that kind of power dynamic. An abuser would act like you taking common-sense steps to protect yourself is a personal attack on them.
In the same way, if someone claims that "God says" the man has to have all the power in the marriage, but don't worry, if he is a good Christian man he would never do anything bad with that power- NO, JUST NO. You should never get into a situation with this kind of power dynamic. Red flags everywhere.
So, in other words, I very much agree with what Gregoire and her co-authors are saying in this section here. It is NOT COOL that women are expected to force themselves into certain gender roles, to limit themselves- when you leave that behind and just be yourself, everything gets so much better. And, it is NOT COOL that Christian leaders teach that the husband is supposed to be the "leader" in a marriage. Gregoire says that when the husband and wife are equal, the statistics say the wife will have better sexual satisfaction than if she has to "submit" and has no guarantee that any of her opinions matter to her husband. I can't really speak to that, but yeah sure, good for them.
It's unfortunate that this needs to be said. But yes, it needs to be said.
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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
Related:
"Desiring God" Goes Full Toxic Masculinity
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