I’m on hiatus until August 29. I’m reprinting old favorite posts. This post originally appeared in October 2005.

I’ve been reflecting on the simple words "Don’t look."

Not long ago, I was walking through Old Town Pasadena with a group of my Wednesday night All Saints teens.  We passed two homeless men slumped against a wall.  Neither was aggressively panhandling, though they did have a cap upside down on sidewalk in front of them with some small change inside.  As we approached, I heard one of my girls say to her friend "Don’t look, those guys are really disgusting."  They quickened their pace and dropped their heads and hurried on.   Since we were out on a small, informal, but nonetheless "church-approved" outing, I should have spoken up right away.  I didn’t, however, and that was my mistake.

Our selfish instincts tell us that there are many things from which we ought to avert our gaze.   Homeless people, for one.  Dead animals by the side of the road.  The sick, the needy, the unattractive.  From the time most of us are children, we’re taught that it’s okay, even appropriate, to turn away from the reality of human and animal suffering.  Most of us don’t want to see what the cow goes through in order to become our burger.  Most don’t want to see how my beloved chinchillas die to become coats.  We don’t want to see the weeping parents in Pakistan, the desperate and starving children in Niger.  These images will upset us, discomfit us, challenge us — and we don’t like that.

My mother regularly gives to a wide variety of charities.  She’s long been a steady contributor to Amnesty International and other human rights agencies.  But she hates seeing the terrible pictures often enclosed in their mailings to her, pictures of human beings who have been horribly mistreated as prisoners of conscience.  She often says, jokingly, "I’d give them more money if they’d stop sending me those awful photos!"  She wants to give, but she doesn’t want to see.  I understand; my wife and I get an extraordinary number of solicitations from animal rights organizations, usually filled with images of abused and malnourished dogs, horses, seals, and other creatures.  And I have a hard time looking at all that suffering.

At the same time that we are told not to look at the reality of human and animal pain, we are encouraged to look at images that degrade and exploit the human person.  We do live in an increasingly porn-saturated culture, a point that commenters across the political spectrum have made with growing concern.  It matters little whether we’re talking about the demure Playmate in Hefner’s monthly, or the raunchy images found on a "bukkake fetish" website, we live in a society that is increasingly tolerant, even enthusiastic, about looking at the exposed bodies of (mostly) young and (mostly) economically vulnerable women.  What our forebears couldn’t look at (because porn, while very much extant, was not nearly as available) or wouldn’t look at (out of a sense, however incomplete, of religious morality), we gaze at and consume with an ever-increasing degree of comfort and nonchalance.

And as with pornography, so, of course, with violence.  In television, film, and increasingly in interactive video games, young people seem to have no problem viewing an extrarordinary number of killings.  The same folks who can’t stomach watching a cow slaughtered for food have no problem playing Grand Theft Auto, or sitting through "Saw" and similar bloody epics at the cineplex.  Looking at faked violence, like looking at the artificial and falsified sex in most pornography, is much easier than gazing at real suffering, particularly when encountering real suffering and real exploitation might make a moral claim on us to take action.

So I’ve come to a conclusion about my spiritual journey.   God is calling me to see, and respond to, the very things that those around me tell me I ought not to look at.   God is calling me to look at the homeless man on the street, look him in the eye, and whether I can give him the help he needs or not, at the very least acknowledge him as my brother.  I am called to look at how the food I eat is prepared, and not turn away my gaze from the reality of the slaughterhouse.   Reminding myself of the smell and the sight of slaughter helps keep me away from meat when I’m tempted, let me tell you!  I must look at the images of suffering in Pakistan, Iraq, Louisiana, and Darfur, even though looking makes me uncomfortable.  Whenever humanly possible, I must respond to what I see with compassionate action.  But if I can do nothing, even then I still must look; in the end, the last thing we can do is, if nothing else, serve as witnesses to the reality of the suffering of our fellow creatures.  At the very least, we won’t be ignoring their pain.

And just as I am called to look at what I don’t want to see, I am called to turn away from what I do want very much to look at!  Over and over again, many times a day, I find myself challenged to avert my eyes.  Each day, I make the conscious choice not to look at porn.   Each day, I make the conscious choice not to objectify those whose bodies are a click or two away from being on display on my computer screen.  Each day, I remind myself that my eyes are tools to help me see the reality of God’s creation.   My eyes are here to help me see those whom I am called to serve, and to see those who I am called to love.  They are here to make me more compassionate.  Visual porn in any form may please me, but it also inoculates me against the reality of the personhood of the woman at whose body I am gazing.  It distracts me from where it is I ought to be directing my sexual energy.  And it makes me a little more selfish, a little colder, and a little less human.

Jesus often is fond of turning conventional wisdom on its head.  He’ll often begin a talk by saying "You have heard… but I say to you…"  What I hear Jesus saying to me at this stage of my journey is that I need to see the very things my friends and family and culture tell me I ought not to look at.   And I need to turn my eyes away from the very things that my society encourages me to delight in gazing upon.

I am on hiatus until August 29, and am re-posting oldies every few days. In the light of the current Kyle Payne story, and in particularly in light of this post of Derek’s, I’m reposting this. It originally appeared in February 2007.

Thanks to Rudy C., I found this interesting thread on men, faith, and regret at Anthony Bradley’s blog. (It’s hosted by World Magazine, not normally what I link to.)

Regrets. What are men supposed to do with them? The older I get, it seems, the more regrets I pile on my mountain of dirt. They are haunting, heavy, daunting, ever-present. My deepest regrets were lived out of in response to the intense pain of years 0-18 that have had devastating, permanent, long-term effects. Prayer does not make them go away. It just doesn’t. Sorry.

First off, I always rejoice when I read honesty like that from a fellow Christian. So many of us in the evangelical world have been taught the lie that “to be a good Christian is to wear the happy face all the time”. Especially for those of us in leadership positions as Christians, who serve as youth ministers or pastors or authors, we’re called on to show people just how exciting and wonderful and fulfilling it is to live a life in Christ. We’re allowed to talk about our problems, of course, but only when we can say “But Christ healed me of this, and the Lord took care of that.” We’re allowed to tell our wild, self-destructive stories — but only when they are stories of how we once were, not how we continue to be. It’s okay to have been the prodigal son, as long as you finish your narrative by telling how you came home to your Father’s arms and lived happily ever after.

And danged if I ain’t guilty of exactly this sort of insipidness here on this blog. Time and time again, I allude to a colorful past; I drop hints about drugs and divorces; about addiction, adultery, and anorexia. And then I tie it all up neatly in a bow and say “But it’s all different now since my conversion.” And of course, in terms of the actual behavior, it is all different. I really don’t do what I used to do, and I do credit that to God’s work in my life, as well as to my own will, some great therapists, wonderful health insurance, some loving family members, and the amazing woman who is now my life. Continue reading →

I’m on hiatus until August 29, but am posting reprints of old popular posts. This post appeared September 28, 2006.

I was talking with a young woman who works as an aide to a colleague of mine.  She’s 19, and has a boyfriend the same age.  "He cheated on me", she blurted out to my colleague and me yesterday; "We broke up."  We made vaguely soothing noises, and listened to her story as best we could.  One part in particular struck me:

"He told me he can’t be faithful right now.  He’s got too many ‘wild oats’ to sow."

And this made me realize I’ve never posted about "wild oats."  Doing five minutes of quick Internet research reveals that the expression "sowing wild oats" to refer to reckless, usually promiscuous behavior on the part of young men, goes back to at least the 17th century.  And while many old-fashioned phrases have vanished from the idiom of today’s college-age population, most of them are quite familiar with the "wild oats" notion.

The popular "wild oats" thesis is basically this: young men (usually in their late teens and twenties), have an enormous amount of sexual and creative energy.  (Depending on whom you talk to, this is attributed to their "essential masculine nature" or "testosterone" or the "Y chromosome".)  It is natural and good and right for men in this age bracket to be a bit wild, a bit irresponsible, and to be unwilling to make enduring commitments.  Those who love them — and are wounded by the carelessness of young oat sowers –are given the cold comfort of being told "Sooner or later, they grow out of it.  They just have to get them (the oats?) out of their system."

I’ve noticed that the "wild oats" theory is closely linked to the "get it all out of your system" idea.  The latter notion is that we men have a finite amount of "wildness" within us.  After we’ve sown our oats for three years, or five, or ten, we’ll be "done."  After we’ve slept with 5 women, or 25,  or 250, we’ll presumably be "all out of oats" and ready to settle down into monogamy and responsibility.

There are a couple of things I loathe about this theory.  One, women rarely get to use the "wild oats" excuse.  Teenage and twenty-something women who exhibit reckless or sexually adventurous behavior get shamed as sluts. Since we all "know" that "women don’t really have wild oats", a woman who behaves as if she does is "unnatural", "perverse", a "whore."

Now, I spent a fair amount of time on a ranch growing up.  I know a bit about oats.  Men don’t have them, women don’t have them — be they wild or genetically modified, oats are not found in the human body unless they enter through the mouth and get processed through the digestive tract.  Now, both men and women — particularly when young — have adventurous spirits.  Both men and women have strong sex drives, though we tend to want to deny that women’s libidos make much of an appearance before 32.  But nobody got no "oats" no how. (Not to mention that by definition, “wild” oats aren’t going to be sown anyway).

Continue reading →

I’m on hiatus until August 29. In the interim, I’m reprinting a few old favorite posts. This post originally appeared March 30, 2006.

Maia at Alas, A Blog asks an interesting question:

The thing about blogs is they let people talk about whatever they like. So there are an awful lot of blogs out there about women’s experiences. Sometimes I wonder if this could be used for something more. If the barrier between feminist blogging, which is primarily about other women’s lives, and blogging on ‘women’s topics’ where feminist women (and non-feminist women) write about their lives, could be broken down. What would it look like if feminists who were writing about body image issues and reproduction, linked more to personal stories on weight-loss blogs and mother blogs (and yes it’s scary that those are the two female blogging topics that come to mind) and vice-versa? Because I do think that feminist analysis is stronger the more it links to women’s experience, and I think talking about women’s experience can be something more, it can be consciousness raising.

Emphasis mine.

In my women’s history classes, we spend a great deal of time dealing with issues about "the body."  As I’ve mentioned many times, I use Joan Brumberg’s vital The Body Project as a required reading in the course.  Of all the books I assign, it invariably provokes the strongest reactions.  What I like about it, of course, is that it offers a chance for students to learn basic feminist theory by applying it to an area of their lives with which they are profoundly and intimately concerned: their own bodies.   

Continue reading →