March, 2009

One thing that continues to be disconcerting for me when I’m driving down the freeway, flipping through a magazine, watching tv or just walking down the street (not all at the same time of course), is how frequently we are confronted with images of women who are portrayed in a very sexual manner. What is more disconcerting however, is how used to these images I am getting. Sometimes I don’t even give it a second thought anymore! It makes me wonder just how much a part of our culture this kind of display of women’s images has become. It also makes me wonder how much further we can slide down the slippery slope of what is considered “beautiful” in our culture today. Just think, we now have video footage of spring break trips of girls gone wild for sale AND these things are actually being paid for and watched!

In her book, “Radical Womanhood,” Carolyn McCulley writes: “We live in a culture of hyperaggressive female sexuality, which is arguably the worst ever in recorded history. Those who promote this view often publish books and magazine articles with vulgar titles and references, stating that they are “reclaiming” these words for feminism.” She suggests that somewhere along the way, a woman’s power became tied to their expression of their sexuality. As a result, to be a powerful and liberated woman, you must also be sexually liberated and free to engage in this type of “hyperaggressive female sexuality.” She further indicates that up until the second wave of feminism, feminists were actively opposed to the pornographic industry, viewing it as an act of oppression against the rights and liberties of women. This was also a time in which they were aligned with Christian evanglicals in the stand against the sale of pornography. When the third wave of feminism came about as a reaction to the second wave feminist movement, there was a decidedly opposing reaction to the “porn wars” of the second wave and a new kind of “sex-positive” movement began to take place. With porn going mainstream and feminism tying itself to a newly held value of sexual liberation, this generation of young women were ushered into what we see and experience today - a “raunch culture” as Carolyn McCulley so aptly describes.

And we all feel the reverberations of this movement. Whether it is an undercurrent of feeling that modesty is not only boring, but a measure of how liberated or powerful you are as an individual, whether it is the incredible dilution and distortion of what true love should be like, whether it is the feeling of unsafety in our own clothes as we walk down the street or whether it is the reality that somewhere out there someone is engaging in incredibly risky and unhealthy behavior simply to engage in this type of raunch culture, we have all in some manner been affected. Nonetheless, this line of thinking inevitably presents an opportunity for us as Christian women to react. Perhaps it is important to consider that a new type of woman’s empowerment is to actually embrace and exhibit what Scripture tells us about being beautiful women…that it is actually more radical and more powerful when we decide early on in our girlhoods to say “no” to this raunch culture, to choose purity over pornography, love over lust, reason over raunch and affirmation over attention.

I had the privilege of visiting HMCC of Austin a couple weekends ago because my husband spoke for their Missions Week Sunday.   I say privilege because it was exactly that!  

Let’s back track 12 years or so…

October 1996 was when I attended my first ACCESS at HMCC of Ann Arbor as a freshman in college.  We filled the first two rows of Angell Hall, Auditorium B.  I eventually joined the Welcoming Team, which is when I gained this weird sense of ownership of the church and made it my personal mission to make every person feel like they belonged here in our house of worship (a.k.a. various school auditoriums).  Since those early days of HMCC of Ann Arbor, I’ve slowly forgotten that child-like excitement of seeing God bring in people one by one into our church community.

Back to 2009…

As I was standing at the back of the movie theatre in Austin, I saw three people praying together for the service—one brother on the Austin team, one brother who recently came to accept Christ as his Savior and one brother visiting from Michigan.  Everyone else was checking the sound, setting up the projector or welcoming at the entrance.  As opening worship began, I saw people trickling in one by one, and I sensed that child-like excitement once again.  By the end of opening worship, there were two completely filled rows in that theatre.  At that moment, I had a brief glimpse into my freshman year when HMCC of Ann Arbor was very similar to this picture I was seeing before my eyes.   I felt as if God was saying: Remember my FAITHFULNESS, POWER and SOVEREIGNTY.  God will do great things at HMCC of Austin, just as he has at HMCC of Ann Arbor.  

Thank you, God, for giving me the privilege to see what You’re doing in Austin!

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.  – Ephesians 3:20-21

Where does the longing to be beautiful come from?  Every time period and every culture had some concept of a beauty ideal.  For example, during the Elizabethan era or 16th century England, women were inspired by Queen Elizabeth’s pale/powdered complexion and fiery red hair.  As a result the women painted their faces with ceruse (a.k.a lead paint) and wore red wigs as a fashion trend.  A more striking example of a painful beauty ideal is “foot binding” which was commonly practiced in China.  Believing that having tiny feet was an important expression of femininity women would literally bind their feet at times even restricting or breaking the arches of their feet in order to keep their feet from growing.  Yet another painful yet fascinating beauty ideal that comes to mind are “lip plates” which women from certain tribes in Africa and S.America wear to enhance their beauty.  For example, the Mursi and Surma women (nomadic tribes in E. Africa) would make an incision in their lower lip and insert a disc into the lip.  As time went on they would replace the disc with larger ones eventually going to a diameter of 10-15cm.

The fact of the matter is that beauty has always mattered to women and neither culture nor history has erased this innate longing that all women share.  The desire to be beautiful or to behold something beautiful is a transcendent longing and it is something that is deeply ingrained in every woman’s heart.  From the moment that God created us in His image and brought us into existence, He deposited into us His own beauty ideal - His moral excellence, His sense of relationship, and His sense of stewardship.  Beauty matters because beauty matters to God and in the end or in this case, in the beginning, He is the ultimate standard of beauty.  As a result, every woman carries an unanswered question in their hearts - am I beautiful?  I think the deeper layer to this question is am I who God intended me to be - fearless, safe, unashamed and whole?

Beauty is also a very culturally constructed ideal.  This is an unfortunate effect of the fall.  In our particular postmodern, western culture, the beauty ideal has mutated to the extent that nothing matters more than what’s on the outside.  It makes me wonder why of all the incredible aspects of femininity to focus on, why does it have to be so concentrated on what we represent on the outside?  Additionally, the current beauty ideal is not only incredibly superficial, but it is also increasingly sexually charged.  Consider the recent cover of Vanity Fair where Miley Cyrus, a preteen pop icon, posed semi nude.  A beautiful image to be sure and some would even consider it being a work of art, but what is most frightening about this picture is that it communicates to a very young, moldable and vulnerable generation of women that it’s completly ok to objectify oneself.  Sadly, many women buy into this form of self-imposed objectification without even being aware of it and at the heart of this particular matter lies the hearts of a generation of women who feel incredibly worthless and very much like the object they strive to be.

I’d like to continue to express in my later entries that this development of our current beauty ideal or more specifically, the distortion of God’s beauty ideal did not happen in a void.  There were movements and significant decisions that have been made in our history that have shaped the way in which women understand and appropriate this culturally entrenched beauty ideal into their lives.  Stay tuned!