Slut-Shaming and the Gospel of Grace
Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog
In a time when we no longer know what a man is, or what a woman is, it would seem to follow that we can no longer know what the perversions of these offices are. Among many other weirdnesses, we are so far gone that we no longer know what a slut is.
Societies and cultures disintegrate in complicated ways. The pathologies of decadence are built on lies, and lies are always complex. They don’t disentangle easily because they are designed to be tangled.
This is the position we currently find ourselves in, which means we need to be careful as we go. But the need to take care is not an argument for saying nothing because we are up against torrens calumniae, a torrent of slanderous lies. To say nothing is to acquiesce in being swept away, over the falls, and down to the rocky cauldron of nonsense far below. In fact, I think we are already down there, waiting for the ambulance.
Because I am going to argue for something here that will be considered completely outrageous by the sob sisters of feminism, I want to state the conclusion first before turning to any arguments for it. I want every reasonable person to see that every appropriate qualification is built into what I am saying.
Here it is. In a culture that knows what a slut is, slut-shaming is utterly contrary to the spirit of the gospel. In a culture that has lost its ethical moorings, as ours has, any attempt to articulate any fixed moral standard in the sexual realm will be accused of slut-shaming and worse, and will wear those slanders as a badge of honor.
The sexual revolution is nothing less than autonomous man laying claim to define the entire world. The world is understood to be completely malleable, and so we can call men women and women men, and some people neither. This latter class apparently needs to use the bathroom a lot, and so bathroom access for them has become the pressing civil rights issue of our time.
In addition to that, having laid claim to the right to define the world, secular man is simultaneously laying claim to the right to define all crimes against their newly minted definitions. They not only want to define men, women, trans, queer, bi, and so on, but they also insist, quite violently, on their absolute right to define words like hate, bigot, rape, insensitive, and so on. So my unironic use of the word slut — meaning that I am not scrawling it on an ignorant sign for a slut walk — is sure to inflame somebody. Ask me if I care.
But return to my initial point. Here are a couple of scenarios to illustrate it. Suppose it is 1950 in some high school in middle America somewhere. A girl known to be easy is being taunted by classmates for being a slut, a whore, and so on. Any decent Christian walking in on such a scene would rebuke everyone involved and tell them to lay off. The self-righteousness of the accusers would be more likely land people in Hell than any of the other sins present. It was not for nothing that Jesus said that hookers were closer to the kingdom than the theologians (Matt. 21:31-32). The sin of self-righteousness is parasitic and requires some sort of fixed standard to feed on, and fixed sexual standards are no exception. Jesus rebuked the self-righteousness of those who would stone the woman caught in adultery, but notice that He also upheld the moral law when He told her to go and sin no more (John 8:1-11).
But another scenario is also possible, the kind much more likely in our time. Suppose someone is counseling a young woman who has been with multiple men, and she wants out of the destructive pattern of her promiscuity. She knows it is destructive, and no help to her at all. But then she says to her counselor something like this: “But the worst thing about all this is that people think I’m a slut.” The word think is not there accidentally because although our society catechizes us in very few things, one of the few things remaining is the importance of self esteem. How dare people think she is a slut? So the assumption runs. But the problem was that she had sex with the whole football team. There is an objective reality there. That’s what a slut is. The problem is not what people are saying. It used to be that slut-shaming was a matter of being cruel to someone in that unfortunate position. Today it is thought to be slut-shaming if you simply think that there is such a thing as a slut, and that somebody might actually be one. Today the problem is not self-righteous name-calling; today the problem is thought to be any retention of normal sexual standards.
Now I do need to take a brief moment to condemn the double standard that stigmatizes the woman as a slut, and yet provides us with no adequate word to describe the men of the football team who have been with as many women as she has been with men. But God has a word for it, and there is a day of judgment coming. So my point here is not to defend the men. My point simply has to do with the comparative fragility of a woman’s reputation — and all the politically correct legislation in the world cannot equalize this. Women just bruise more easily than men do, and this is true both of bodies and reputations. Anybody who wants to live in the real world needs to take this reality into account. It is a reality that must be navigated, not condemned.
And so all of this brings us down — quite naturally — to the current state of our presidential campaign. Is it really true that in a political campaign, wives and children are off-limits? No, of course not. It would be better to say that, in a culture where everybody had not lost their collective minds, wives and children would be off-limits.
Wives and children ought to be off-limits, but in order for that to be so you have to have a particular kind of culture, and you cannot have the kind of culture necessary for such respect for normal privacy if you have been assiduously destroying the foundations of such culture. As Lewis said, prophetically, we castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. We remove the organ and demand the function. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
A few years ago, Melania Trump, then Melania Knauss, did a nude photo shoot for GQ magazine. In one of the shots, she was reclining on some kind of fur thingy (PETA, call your office), had on a diamond necklace and bracelets and very little else, and was handcuffed to some very important man’s briefcase. The subtext of this photo, for those who need to have these things spelled out for them, was that she was a very expensive and nice-looking piece of meat. What was happening there was that Donald Trump was showing off his current concubine.
Now she did all this out in public. She had these pictures published in a magazine. This was her job. She was a professional supermodel. Some women do accounting and other women show us their hotbod. You know, professionalism is an all-purpose disinfectant. Now an anti-Trump super-PAC (not connected with Ted Cruz) undertook to display this photo to the good voters of Utah, as much as to say to them that even though Melania is not a native of New York, this would be as good a display of New York values as anything else. Did you really want to elect someone so that we might have the whole world looking at photos of the First Babe handcuffed to a briefcase just oozing with money and store-bought testosterone?
So it is beyond stupid to say that we all need to pretend we are in the Truman/Dewey election and that personal attacks on spouses are just not done. This is a fine rule when everything is normal. But — and I trust that some of you have noticed this — nothing is normal anymore.
The dust-up about the Melania photo shoot was quickly followed by Donald Trump personally attacking Heidi Cruz (for no good reason), and this was quickly followed by the National Enquirer, run by a friend of Trump’s, printing an unsourced story alleging that Ted Cruz had had five mistresses. But in The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump bragged about his affairs with married women. “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.” Well, scoring is what counts, isn’t it? And when you think your membrum virile and tiny little hands are a fit subject for presidential debates, you must have a lot to prove, don’t you? The allegations against Cruz are not worth answering, but remember that Trump glories in this kind of thing. Trump supporters are accusing Cruz of doing what Trump has openly boasted of doing. And so ends just one more day in the madhouse.
Now in a society that understands the fixed nature of the law of God, it is possible for an immoral woman to come to a banquet where the Lord was seated in order to wash His feet with ointment and tears (Luke 7:37-38). Not only was she received by Him, but she has also been continually honored by Christians down to the present. As far as the church is concerned, the tears she mixed with the ointment are the only tears she need ever shed. The woman is forgiven, just like the rest of us.
But never forget that this same Lord, in His pre-incarnate state, once sat in Abraham’s tents at another banquet, resting for a while in the course of His journey to Sodom, where He was about to destroy tens of thousands of immoral women with fire and brimstone from the sky. Not only so, but in a remarkable display of even-handedness for those patriarchal times, He also wiped out the men.
So the issue is not whether we are dealing with sex. The issue is whether we are dealing with humility or arrogance. Humility submits to the authority the Creator has over the world. Arrogance wants to remake the world. Circle back around — high end hookers and courtesans were precisely the kind of women who were often attracted to Christ’s ministry. And yes, I am referring to women just like Melania Trump. A gospel of grace that doesn’t have a lot of room for such women is a gospel that is alien to what is presented to us in the New Testament.
But women in her position, when confronted with the gospel, can go in two opposite directions. Women like that can respond the way Mary Magdalene did (Luke 8:2-3), or they can respond the way Herodias did (Mark 6:22,24). Unrepented arrogance about sexual immorality is the foundational problem, and is the problem that results in judgment. “Such is the way of an adulterous woman; She eateth, and wipeth her mouth, And saith, I have done no wickedness” (Prov. 30:20). In the course of the gospel’s progress through the world, many courtesans have heard the call to separate from Babylon, and to come out from her in order to be separate (2 Cor. 6:17). There were a number of such women in Christ’s entourage. But there were also a number of them who remained, or who, like Lot’s wife, wanted to remain (Luke 17:32). These women stayed in Babylon in order to drink the wine of the wrath of their fornication (Rev. 14:8).
I earlier mentioned the sob sisters of feminism, those who were going to be offended by what I was going to say here. I was referring to those egalitarian levelers who have absolutely destroyed the cultural respect that respected womanhood once had in our culture, and who want it to magically reappear whenever they have an emotional need for it. Well, sorry. If you tear down your house, you must live in the ruin.
Think about it. The rot we need to be fighting has gotten into everything. What is actually going on here? Fox News pretends to be a conservative news outlet, but it is actually a network trying to promulgate a form of sensible liberalism. Megyn Kelly, brassy newswoman, asker of tough questions at presidential debates, professional lawyer turned journalist, doesn’t mind doing the sexy sprawl for the camera. Take that, Melania. And Shannon Bream, one of the regulars on Fox’s Special Report, said the other night (to Charles Krauthammer, of all people) that she wouldn’t mind photos of her out there like that, provided she looked like Melania. As if — notice the deadly assumption — the only possible rationale for feminine modesty is that one’s body must come up to the exacting standards established by the purveyors of one-handed magazines.
When the levelers are doing their work, their central demand, one they impose on all observers, is the requirement that no one actually see what is going on. No one is allowed to notice, and if they notice by accident, they are not allowed to say anything. Moreover, this remains the case even when the differences-that-must-be-ignored are manifest, enormous, glaring, and so on. You will be shouted down if you dare to say that there is, um, any significant difference between Melania showing us her booty and Eleanor Roosevelt planting a tree at some university in the Midwest. Wives are wives and wives are off-limits. Yes, that was quite true in the world you threw away. Now it would be more to the point to say that wives used to be off-limits, back when they weren’t showing off their booty to millions of people.
Only a few people are willing to say this kind of thing anymore, and so I arise to address the house. Puppies aren’t kittens. Circles aren’t squares. Call girls currently charging $300 an hour aren’t modest wives.
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