Beauty Gone Wild

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.