Reading Time: 6 minutes Culture is fashion, and fashion is arbitrary; or, why a man isn’t less of a man if he’s wearing a dress.
Gender Roles
Posted inFilm/TV
Pirating gender in ‘Our Flag Means Death’
Reading Time: 3 minutes As a big fan of HBO Max’s “Our Flag Means Death,” I was very happy to hear that it’s renewing Our Flag Means Death for a second season. If you haven’t watched it, you might be asking: why the big fuss about this show? Well, first: pirates. Second: gay pirates. Then, throw in dashes of […]
Posted inSex & Gender
If you believe in sex differences, you’re probably sexist
Reading Time: 3 minutes If someone claims to see “sex differences”—apparently concrete and non-varying differences between men and women—I can be reasonably sure that they’re sexist, or that they benefit from sexism, which is basically the same thing. The whole notion of “sex difference” is somewhat outdated, along with “sex role” which we now call “gender role,” but the […]
Posted inSex & Gender
Gender is a fundamental structure in our lives, so why do some deny its reality?
Reading Time: 4 minutes There are stark differences in the lived realities of men and women, and sometimes, you just need to listen to learn about gender, as I discovered with my students this semester. It was nearing the end of my First Year Seminar, which of course I’d given the theme of fairy tales, on the premise that […]
Posted inUncategorized
J.K. Rowling and the Measuring of a Woman
Reading Time: 8 minutes Lately, a huge controversy hit social media when J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, offered a series of her own hot takes on transgender people. Some of what she said sounded very much like the stuff we see out of toxic Christians, so today I wanted to talk about the measure of a woman. What goes into womanhood? Who gets to decide? And who gets excluded by these lists of requirements?
Posted inUncategorized
Lee Strobel’s Martyrbation List (#13-15)
Reading Time: 8 minutes In this last installment, Lee Strobel stops selling evangelicals on seeker-sensitive churches to remind them that only they understand how to Jesus correctly. Moreover, he warns them that if anybody criticizes their Jesus-osity, it’s literally only because of their blazing-bright Jesus Auras. Today, let me show you how Lee Strobel models martyrbation for his readers.
Posted inReligion
Paul Ryan Doesn’t Understand: Reverence IS Objectification.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Members of the Christian Right may not realize this, but objectification takes at least two forms. Donald Trump is expressing the most obvious and direct form of it. But his Christian critics are, themselves, expressing the other form of it without even realizing they’re doing it–or why.
Posted inReligion
The Love Dare: Repackaged and Warmed-Over Glurge.
Reading Time: 11 minutes I scared up a copy, got reading, and then went through a second time and made notes. Copious, copious, notes. (Looking back over the notes, I can see I was getting progressively more and more frustrated with the thing – my notes started getting more and more editorial and profane as I went.) I ended up with notes that are almost as long as the book itself. More even than what The Love Dare represents in and of itself, though, it doesn’t actually say anything really new at all regarding relationships or how people should conduct themselves with their romantic prospects and partners.
Posted inReligion
How Non-Christians’ Marriages Work. (Um, Right?)
Reading Time: 13 minutes Considering the overweening and galactic-level hubris they’re displaying by daring to offer serious advice to people in real need of real help, we shouldn’t be surprised at all that they’re just as misguided and erroneous in their presentation of a typical non-Christian marriage as they are in how Christians should conduct their marriages. Today I want to talk about what the movie’s creators think they’re saying about how non-Christians’ marriages work.
Posted inReligion
A Monopoly on Manliness.
Reading Time: 11 minutes One of the genuinely weirdest turns that fundagelical Christianity has taken in recent decades has been its bizarre emphasis on hypermasculinity and rejection of all that is even vaguely perceived as feminine. I first encountered this strange focus when looking at the car of a co-worker some six or so years ago; it bore a bumper […]