Women, are you helping the men around you be men?
Last Friday, in our Round-Up video, Rebecca and I analyzed a new Desiring God article that was asking women to help men become better men.
It was a pretty epic Friday round-up, and Rebecca wrote about it later in the day for our weekly email, that goes out to over 40,000 people (and has an amazing open rate, because her articles are so good!).
I write a lot here at the blog, but I also produce content in other places that you may not see if you only read the blog. So today I wanted to share that Friday round-up video, and then share the Friday email. You have to subscribe to our email list to get Friday’s emails, which don’t appear anywhere else! But when you’re subscribed, you’ll also be notified of special sales that are coming up or if I’m ever doing engagements near you!
And here’s Rebecca with Friday’s article:
Today on our Friday Round-Up my mom and I looked at a really strange Desiring God article.
The article talked about how we, as women, need to see the men around us as “men in process” and use our femininity to “call out” the masculine in them–including our Uber drivers. We, as women, are apparently uniquely positioned to “help” the men and boys around us strengthen their fragile masculinity by… checks notes…acting helpless and praising them endlessly without ever making complaints.
And honestly at this point none of it is shocking anymore. But what I was overwhelmed by in reading that article is just how utterly exhausting it all seems.
Imagine living a life where Tamara can’t just see her pal Greg and say, “hi,” and think nothing of it. Imagine that Tamara, when she sees Greg, has to analyze the interaction through some weird metasocial lens of whether or not she’s being feminine enough and if he’s being masculine enough, and she has to double-guess her natural instincts of how to talk to Greg because he’s a man and she’s a woman, and did she accept him holding the door open for her in a grateful enough way? What if he looked at her while she was slouching, would that de-incentivize him towards the masculinity of which he is in process?
Why can’t Tamara just say “hi” to Greg without it being weird?
I know there are many people in the world naturally more socially adept than myself. My own daughter is one of them. But I read these articles and can’t help but feel like all of this is far more complicated than it needed to be.
For anyone who missed it, women are charged in this article to consider how we can help every single man or boy that we come across to move forward in his masculinity—from our husbands to our Uber drivers (a literal example from the article, I am not making that up).
I can’t help but think that there are a few things going on here subliminally.
First off, I think that the women who peddle this information, who are so incredibly fixated on the feminine and the masculine and on how men need women to puff them up so that they don’t do bad things, are living incredibly sad personal situations. I just don’t see how it’s possible to write this type of thing about men without that being a red flag that the men you know are real problems and pieces of work. And that makes me sad.
But I think that this mentality also persists due to a strange effort —> failure —> forgiveness cycle that can turn toxic.
One of the biggest areas of deconstruction for me personally, having grown up an incredibly devout evangelical, was deconstructing ridiculous performances of perfection.
For example, does it actually matter what wording you use in a prayer? No. But I felt guilty if I didn’t have the right words—was the Holy Spirit not speaking through me? Did I not have enough faith? Was this a result of me not reading my Bible every day?
For this weird gender stuff, I think there’s something similar happening. Because everything is hyper-spiritualized, we make new metrics of perfection that are, frankly, asinine. It’s silly for a 17-year-old girl to worry her faith isn’t strong enough if she’s not good at praying publicly. And it’s silly for a 26-year-old woman to worry if she’s not being a good enough Christian woman when she fails to act “feminine” around the men in her life (whatever on earth that’s supposed to mean). It’s silly for a grown woman to be worrying about whether or not the 15-year-old behind the counter at McDonalds is being spurred on towards his Masculine Calling TM by how she ordered her french fries with vinegar instead of ketchup.
But what I believe these superficial virtue-signalling aspects of religion belie is our underlying assumption that God is not actually loving and gracious, but is standing up there with a giant gavel he’s ready to bring down on our heads at the smallest infraction.
When we make things more complicated than they need to be, it shows that we have an anxious faith.
It shows we’re not able to rest assured in the love of our Saviour, because we’re busy making unnecessary hoops to jump through to prove we have earned His affection. We’re like a 14-year-old desperately in love with that girl in bio who won’t even notice him so he does all sorts of outlandish things to show off and stand out so hopefully she’ll return some of his affection.
But it ends up making us look like fools.
Beyond that, though, when we create impossible standards for ourselves, consistently fail to reach them, and then are repeatedly asking for forgiveness for failures we never even needed to attempt, it can be strangely reassuring.
After all, we’re supposed to be humble, and always being sanctified, right?
We’re supposed to be confessing our sins and constantly growing and improving, right?
We’re supposed to be “works in progress” who don’t have it all together, right?
Well, what if we create silly problems that don’t actually threaten our egos to disclose?
What if we create a whole new category of “sins” so that we don’t have to face the actual areas of darkness in our lives?
What if we work very very hard—so hard that God can’t say we didn’t try—and so then when he stands before us even if we didn’t feed as many people as we could have or we didn’t care as much for the poor as we probably should have we have proof that we were “good Christians” anyway?
After all, if I’m constantly feeling like I failed and am in a habit of confession, then I must be living out a life of humility and I must be chasing after Jesus, right?
What if a lot of these weird gender dynamics are created so that we can feel like we’re living a Christian life while conveniently ignoring the actual marks of a life of service to God?
What if we’re creating “busy work” for ourselves so that the cognitive dissonance is drowned out?
I don’t know what exactly is going on with the author of the original post we reacted to. I expect that we never will truly know, and we don’t need to. But I fail to see how micro-analysing every interaction in terms of sex is in any way healthy. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could leave these silly things aside, and get back to what being a Christian is supposed to be about?
Serving the needy. Advocating for the oppressed. Bringing the kingdom of heaven here to earth.
I’m just not sure how acting feminine enough for your Uber driver accomplishes that.
In our Friday emails, Rebecca often takes the things we talk about and bring them right back to how this impacts our faith.
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And let’s all be nice to our Uber drivers, whether they’re male or female. It doesn’t need to be weird.
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What do you think? Have we made this too weird? Does it distract from the work of Christ? Let’s talk in the comments!
What man spends even two seconds wondering how a random woman feels, let alone going through this much rigmarole for every female human he crosses paths with?
No wonder women are exhausted, with this level of mental nonsense on top of all the other stuff the average woman does day in, day out.
It absolutely is nonsense!
“What man spends even two seconds wondering how a random woman feels, let alone going through this much rigmarole for every female human he crosses paths with?”
The Pious Piper does.
(When he’s not hiding from Muscular Women Whose Physque Begets Unnatural Arousal in a Man, that is.)
I don’t think he knows how women feel at all.
All he knows is what HE feels around women.
Yeah, that whole muscular women thing was wild.
When the subject first surfaced over at Wartburg Watch many years ago…
Every time it came up, I posted a YouTube video of Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer”?
(Tried attaching a link, but your blog server doesn’t accept links.)
And WHERE did you get that picture at the top?
She looks like a complete airhead doing the “SoyBoy Meme Face”!
This, and then it’s also used against women. People will say that women make things more difficult than they have to be and “read too much” into insignificant situations while men are more rational and therefore more suited to lead. I’m so tired of it all.
I would rather be myself. I can treat others with kindness without being silly. As you said trying to be different from my actual personality is exhausting. Life is a lot easier when I just be who God made me to be rather than trying to fit someone else’s idea of who I should be.
Exactly. I just didn’t see Jesus asking these sorts of questions or telling us that we should be either!
I just keep thinking about that one line, also brought up in the Facebook discussion, when she says she’s “learned that this means letting him make decisions without adding ‘helpful’ suggestions when they aren’t specifically requested.” Rebecca already said in the Friday roundup that she hopes this author is OK and in today’s post that women who write this “are living incredibly sad personal situations,” and I think that’s true. The way she puts ‘helpful’ in quotation marks indicates to me that it’s her husband who uses that word sarcastically to describe her bids for connection (using Gottman language here). He’s that guy who snaps, “If I need ‘help’ I’ll ask!” I think the article’s author is telling us that she is not only not being heard in her marriage, but is being actively dismissed. Just like Shaunti Feldhahn told us that she cannot warn her husband if he’s about to miss the highway exit.
Yes, I would think that too!
I feel so sorry for that poor woman. After reading the original article, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, looking at everything else she’d written on the website, and it is so troubling. She mentions that the first time she was ever complimented on her appearance was as a 15-year-old at a youth group, when a boy told her to shut up because she was “too pretty to talk”. And she describes this as flattering! She says that a single women must avoid laughing or talking loudly and should help the men around her practice leadership by letting them make small decisions on her behalf. She refers to a wife’s role as being like the back seat of a tandem bike, praising her husband constantly, but only ever making a decision for herself when he has told her to – otherwise, even if it is about something that only affects her, she must do as he orders. It sounds like she has spent her whole life from childhood being crushed by others.
So this woman’s ideal is to become an AI CHATBOT wife?
Absolutely. It’s actually quite heartbreaking. And I’m sure in ten years it will likely all fall apart, just like Tia Levings or Natalie Hoffman or Alyssa Wakefield or all of these other women who had large platforms writing patriarchal materials, only to later escape abusive marriages.
Sheila have you come across any divorce research that looks at that?
There’s already a noted rise in “grey” (or “gray”) divorce in some countries, even though the overall divorce rates are declining.
I haven’t located any that specifically looks at conservative or evangelical or by faith group.
I haven’t seen anything specifically in the evangelical context, but I’d be really interested in it!
“Are You Feminine Enough for Your Uber Driver?”
My first reaction to that title was “WTF???”
Then reading it, I came across “Desiring God”, i.e. THE PIOUS PIPER. Okay, now it makes sense.
My reaction was
“I desperately hope she’s not describing a fawn response because she fears the Uber driver might assault her”.
It makes sense if she exists in a world where men do not respect women or see them as equals.
Her writings suggest she’s experienced abuse from more than a few men in her world, from at least her teenage years.
I’ve posted this on my FB page, with the following comment.
I know this will not apply to most of us adult Kiwis, because we tend to be a very practical lot. But since so many U.S. Christian influencers are in the evangelical camp, it would pay to know what they’re saying to your children.
Personal example: there were a lot of dumb ideas about masculinity and femininity floating around in my church culture when I was a teenager, which my parents didn’t realise at the time and were quick to correct once they found out about it.
Likewise, my kids have been exposed to this too: well-meaning and sincerely-held ideals that are inspired by chivalric codes and fairytales, NOT SCRIPTURE. These ideas are attractive in theory, but unworkable in daily practice — and, quite frankly, extremely discouraging to any girl who’s trying to reconcile the true message of “follow the Lord wherever He leads you” with the contradictory-but-packaged-as-equally-true message of “Godly girls, remember to stay small and self-erasing”.
Let’s become aware of this nonsense so that we can raise our kids in the nurture and admonition of the LORD, rather than in nonsensical ideas that will provoke them to anger (via exhaustion and frustration).
EXACTLY! Well put.
The example of the Uber driver slayed me laughing. My first thought was, being feminine for the Uber driver is going to be difficult if she’s a lady too! Haha
Oh my goodness, that Desiring God article is so strange!
I guess this is what happens when they start with a belief that it’s VERY VERY IMPORTANT that men and women are DIFFERENT and all men are a CERTAIN WAY and all women are a certain DIFFERENT WAY.
This scenario kind of reminds me of a friend who told me that she never asks her husband to do things for her. Instead, she words it like, “I would like this or that to get done,” without saying, “Honey, could you please…” Then she bragged about how my husband does this or that and I don’t even have to ask him, but she brought it up. I guess she thinks asking for a favor is considered nagging. At the time she told me this she had been reading one of Shaunti’s books. Probably the same one where Shaunti mentions that she cannot give her husband directions to a party.
Yes, that sounds like what would happen if you read her books!
Haven’t listened yet but what I’m wondering is: just how long will it be before these same people come down on women for accepting a ride from a male driver and thus obviously being a stumbling block… 🤦♀️
Oh, yes, I’m sure that’s coming!
If I’m a woman and my Uber driver is a man, the absolute last thing I want in this situation is to draw out his masculinity.
You wrote,
“ Imagine that Tamara, when she sees Greg, has to analyze the interaction through some weird metasocial lens of whether or not she’s being feminine enough and if he’s being masculine enough, and she has to double-guess her natural instincts of how to talk to Greg because he’s a man and she’s a woman, and did she accept him holding the door open for her in a grateful enough way? What if he looked at her while she was slouching, would that de-incentivize him towards the masculinity of which he is in process?”
This exactly describes *every single day* of my experience as a woman working in the military and other heavily male-dominated workplaces (blue-collar, 95+% male).
Yes, it’s totally exhausting. Yes, it’s incredibly rare for even the most well-intentioned man (in my experience) to understand this head-bender. And of course, nobody should ever have to experience this in church!
As far as all the comments about there being plenty of single, stable men who are romantically attracted to women who aren’t super feminine and/or unnecessarily flattering of men, please show me where to find them. I have yet to meet one.
My femininity does not increase or decrease based on what a random stranger thinks about me. The assumption that a man’s masculinity is so fragile that a word from me can amplify or diminish it? Men must be very fragile creatures indeed. I am so tired of hearing males giving advice to other men using language like “Oh, no, poor thing, she’s operating in her masculine energy!”. There’s another word for that, and it’s called competence. I believe all human beings ought to be competent regardless of gender. Everyone over the age of twelve should know how to cook dinner, do laundry, balance a checking account, and change a flat tire. The degree to which someone is masculine or feminine while doing these tasks is utterly irrelevant. A wise man wants his wife to know what to do if her car breaks down on the side of the road. Having her be helpless in this situation may prop up his delicate ego, but the price is too high if it leaves her vulnerable in the dark by herself. A woman’s safety is so much more important than her husband’s ego.
Uber Driver post is opposite like what say you in September! Defining masculinity!
Evangelical women say to puff men up to make more masculine and stop bad things.
You say to men are privilege and to high and high things are to be brought low and stop bad things.
How to be brought low the Uber Driver?
I think you are dead right about this gender stuff all being a distraction from the real work of being Christ-like. If you are spending all of your waking hours analyzing the men around you and trying to prop them up, how will you ever have time and energy to go volunteer at the local shelter? It’s yet another way to extract invisible labour out of women while eliminating self-responsibility in men –> yet another way to weaken men (why would men do that to themselves, outsourcing their self-respect?). All of this is bad for everyone in the end.
Reading this made my skin crawl. I was married to a man for three decades. I read every horrible book trying to build this a$$hole up. It was exhausting and harmful! I was actually told to build my husband up using my femininity, but when I am in public, I had to make myself so small, because of his jealousy. If I helped my Uber driver, my ex would have become raging mad thinking I was having an affair. I mean I was nice to a gay guy which caused a three hour circle argument. You think for the life of me, during my marriage that I was going to help other men build their masculinity? No WAY! It would have been unsafe for me. I wasn’t even allowed to wear make up because it was to alluring. I got so many mixed messages in the Christians circles I finally got out! I can actually hear God’s voice. Yes, Christian circles are exhausting women. Women are leaving the church, because the cross they are putting on us is too hard. My yoke is easy and my burden is light and it is finished, are sayings that have no meaning in these groups. They add a back pack full of $hit you need to do to make men feel masculine, but not to masculine that they rape you, because then you went too far being feminine. It is bonkers! I don’t know how to tell my friends stuck in the church how harmful these teachings are. They don’t want to hear. They are like sheep to the slaughter and it grieves me watching them blame the world, Satan, this generation, etc, but in all honesty, it’s their ways of teaching about God that is toxic and harmful. So sad.