Yesterday I wrote a post Can a Jesus Feminist Wear High Heels?: Evolutionary and Incarnational Reflections on the Male Gaze. In the comments Dianna Anderson gave some helpful and constructive pushback to the post. Dianna also followed up with a post on her blog: Cruciform Incarnation: In Which All Bodies Must Matter. I encourage you to read her thoughtful reflections.
Given the blinders I have on in light of my social location I'm always deeply appreciative about getting feedback--even strong feedback--about the ways I might be intentionally or unintentionally excluding others.
So this isn't a "response" or "rebuttal" to Dianna, just a string of thoughts I had yesterday thinking about Dianna's comments and the post she wrote in response to mine.
I want to start with the conclusion of my post. A part of the problem, as Dianna saw it (and I'm sure others as well), was that my analysis in the post focused to heterosexual relationships. A part of that was simply due to the fact that I was responding to a concrete situation in how the male gaze might play out (or not) in a heterosexual marriage. And while that case study might have been limiting (and, thus, exclusionary), I think the theological conclusion of the post generalizes to every person in any sort of romantic arrangement.
Specifically, the theological conclusion of the post doesn't depend upon anything that Dianna finds objectionable to the post. For example, and I'll discuss this in more detail in a minute, Dianna finds gender essentialism in my stating that males are, statistically speaking, more visually stimulated than females. For the sake of argument, that's a point easily conceded. It doesn't really matter which partner of whatever relationship is or is not more visually stimulated. The theological point of the post is that, if this preference exists, for whatever reason, Christians aren't going to force that preference on their partners. The visual aspects of sex are to be free of power and coercion. The visual aspects of sex should be engaged in playfully and joyously. Your partner might want you to wear a teddy or high heels or leather chaps or a clown suit. Such visually-based kinks are all part of the fun if there is mutualism and cruciform love.
So it doesn't matter all that much if there is or is not a statistical trend showing that males, on average, are more visually stimulated than females.
The point being, I think the theological vision of the post is very inclusive.
Now the controversial parts of the post are due to the fact that I do make some claims and arguments about male arousal being more visually-based. I want to talk more about about those claims and arguments. But before doing that we need to disentangle two things that I think Dianna mixes up a little bit.
In my post there are two scientific claims/arguments being made. The first is descriptive and the second is explanatory. And they need to be keep distinct from each other.
The descriptive claim is that, statistically speaking, the male arousal system is more visual than females (which is more relational/emotional).
The explanatory part is a speculative argument proposed by some evolutionary psychologists about why this difference came about.
Let's start with the descriptive claim. Are males more visual in their arousal system? The answer to this question has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology. It's a simple empirical claim that we can gather evidence for or against. And as I pointed out to Dianna, I think the evidence is clear that the difference exists. For my part, given that I'm convinced by the psychological and brain imaging data, I think it's best to, tentatively, assume this data point in theological reflections about embodiment.
But Dianna's point is well taken, we should never reduce incarnational theology to this (or any other) data point. But mentioning the data point and reflecting on it isn't the same as being reductionistic. It's not inappropriate to theologically reflect on a data point regarding human biology (if it exists). That's a place where I think Dianna misjudges a bit. To reflect on something is not to reduce. To say something is not to be taken as saying everything.
Now, three points about this descriptive issue.
First, if there is a "difference" between the genders in this regard the difference is statistical, not essentialistic. In trying to explain why men are "different" from women in this regard what we are trying to account for isn't an essential difference between Platonic types. We're trying to explain a statistical trend, why more men, statistically, are visually stimulated relative to women.
Because, to be clear, any given person can be however they are. Conforming or breaking with the trend. Which brings me back to the theological point of the post: it doesn't really matter if this trend does or does not apply to you, but if it does you need to not lord it over your partner. Same goes for any sexual preference or inclination.
Second, Dianna pointed out in her post that most (perhaps all) of the studies on vision and sexual arousal have mainly looked at heterosexual men, heterosexual women and gay men. There hasn't been a lot of work regarding visual arousal with other groups (e.g., transgender persons or lesbians). And that's a point worth making.
Still, I don't think it changes the conclusions I reach. If we, for the sake of argument, grant that any particular LGBTQ group is just as visually simulated as heterosexual and gay men then I'd simply say that, in those particular relationships, the sexual gaze should not be privileged or lorded over the partner. Again, most everything I'm saying generalizes.
And finally, let me just make a simple logical observation. We're talking about the male gaze. Which seems to presuppose that there's something going on with the male visual psychology in regards to women. If there were no differences between the genders in this regard we wouldn't be having conversation about a gaze. We'd surely be talking about something else, but not a gaze. This whole conversation seems to assume the trend being denied. If there are no visual biases at work then this conversation doesn't happen. We'd be talking about men doing something else to women rather than gazing at them.
And this brings us to the more controversial part of the post, the explanatory account based on an argument from evolutionary psychology.
First, to be clear, this explanatory account can be wholly wrong and the descriptive differences between the genders (the statistical trends) still be true. Again, there is a distinction here between description and explanation.
Regarding Dianna's concerns, in her post she says that I'm using the evolutionary account to "baptize" the male gaze. I'd like to disagree with that. I'm not trying to baptize the male gaze. I am trying to naturalize it and, thus, root it in an incarnational theological account. And by naturalize I mean, as I said clearly in the post, to render the gaze morally neutral, akin, like I said, to why sugar tastes sweet. Naturalizing is a far cry from baptizing, as I also clearly say that these natural responses can be used for good or ill. Like eating sugar can be good or bad.
As I mentioned in a comment to Dianna, we have to remember Hume's Dictum: You can't get an ought from an is. Just because something is natural doesn't make it good.
So my attempt to naturalize the male gaze wasn't an attempt baptize it. For example, in the post I describe a relational context where the gaze is good. Like there are times when eating sugar is okay. But I also described where the gaze is evil. Like when eating too much sugar isn't a good idea. In short, the gaze in neutral, dependent upon context. And like I said above, that can be a LGBTQ context or a hetero context.
In a related criticism, Dianna felt that the appeal to an adaptive history was "foreclosing on a framework for
how power and historical sexism even enter the picture." As I mentioned in my comment to her, I actually felt that I was doing the exact opposite. Again, in pointing to the adaptive aspects of
the male gaze I'm not justifying it on ethical grounds (again, Hume's dictum). This leaves the field wide
open to explore how this particular adaptive quirk has became a locus of
oppression. Consider a parallel example: skin color. There is an adaptive history
behind skin pigmentation. But noting that adaptive history doesn't justify
oppressing people based upon skin color. The same reasoning holds for the male
gaze. Just because males have a visual bias doesn't mean women must submit or be subjected to it. So the framework Dianna is asking for to explore how men have
exploited the gaze to oppress women is as wide open as it is for those
wanting to explore how whites have exploited skin color to oppress
people of color. The adaptive backstory doesn't foreclose on any investigation that Dianna might want to do in analyzing how the male gaze is oppressive to women.
All I'm suggesting, and I could be totally wrong about this, is that a when a male looks at a female and feels sexual arousal this isn't intrinsically a symptom of patriarchy. Some of the time it might just be biology. But that arousal, no matter its source, doesn't justify any actions toward a woman that are oppressive, dehumanizing or exploitative. And that will most likely mean that a man must restrict, redirect or resist his gaze. And personally, I think that's an interesting area for theological reflection. When does fleeting and spontaneous sexual arousal become objectification? Is that even a legitimate or helpful distinction? I think it is, but when and how to make that distinction is an open question.
That said, the evolutionary account I gave is very speculative. But happily, it's the most expendable and severable part of the post. You can take it or leave it. As I've noted, it doesn't affect the descriptive issues noted above or the theological implications, for all persons, hetero and LGBTQ.
One issue to kick around, however, is how any appeal to evolution is inherently biased toward heterosexuality given the central role of biological reproduction in both natural and sexual selection. To be honest, I'm not sure how that should be handled. I'm assuming, of course, that anyone working in queer theology believes in evolution. So we admit that evolution happened, and generally agree that it works as Darwin said it works, through differential reproductive success. We grant all that but agree to never use it as theological data? Is that the way we are to proceed? Or are there times when an incarnational approach can legitimately invoke evolutionary history, despite its bias toward reproductive success?
My point is that evolution looks biased, given its mechanisms. So it's hard to talk about what happened during evolution, which we all agree happened, without looking biased. But it's also strange to talk about embodiment and never candidly talk about the forces that shaped our bodies over millions of years. And again, to return to Dianna's point, theological reflections regarding embodiment shouldn't be reduced to evolutionary accounts. That's a given. What I'm asking about if evolution can ever provide theological data.
And finally, what I found very helpful in Dianna's post is how I may have been misusing labels and, thus, causing confusion. As Dianna defines it, "the male gaze" is intrinsically oppressive. Thus it makes sense to resist any attempt of mine to extract oppression from that label. If that's the case then I was misusing the label "male gaze" in equating it almost synonymously with "visual bias in male sexual arousal." That was a mistake on my part, a sloppy use of terms. The purpose of my post was to extract a psychological feature from an analysis of power, to make a distinction between sexual psychologies and how those sexual psychologies become loci of oppression.
If that distinction is coherent--visual bias in sexual arousal is distinct from power--then I think the incarnational theology I sketched in the last post holds, for everyone. We might debate the descriptive issue about if men show this bias, statistically speaking, more often than women. We might debate how this bias is distributed across the LGBTQ spectrum. And we can keep or discard the adaptive framework. But overall, the theological thrust of the post holds for everyone in every relationship.
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faërie
The Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
- Two Brothers and Texas Rangers
- Visiting and Evolving in Monkey Town
- Roller Derby Girls
- A Life With Bibles
- Wearing a Crucifix
- Morning Prayer at San Buenaventura Mission
- The Halo of Overalls
- Less
- The Farmer's Market
- Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink
- The Bureaucrat
- Uncle Richard, Vampire Hunter
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- On Maps and Marital Spats
- Get on a Bike...and Go Slow
- Buying a Bible
- Memento Mori
- We Weren't as Good as the Muppets
- Uncle Richard and the Shark
- Growing Up Catholic
- Ghostbusting (Part 1)
- Ghostbusting (Part 2)
- My Eschatological Dog
- Tex Mex and Depression Era Cuisine
- Aliens at Roswell
On the Principalities and Powers
- Christ and the Powers
- Why I Talk about the Devil So Much
- The Preferential Option for the Poor
- The Political Theology of Les Misérables
- Good Enough
- On Anarchism and A**holes
- Christian Anarchism
- A Restless Patriotism
- Wink on Exorcism
- Images of God Against Empire
- A Boredom Revolution
- The Medal of St. Benedict
- Exorcisms are about Economics
- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
- The Ethic of Death: The Policies and Procedures Manual
- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
- Ears of Stone
- The War Prayer
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Experimental Theology
- Eucharistic Identity
- Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy
- Holiness Among Depraved Christians: Paul's New Form of Moral Flourishing
- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
- Covenantal Substitutionary Atonement
- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
- Piss Christ in Prison
- Advent: A Prison Story
- Faithful in Little Things
- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
- Singing and Resistence
- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
The Fuller Integration Lectures
Blogging about the Bible
- Unicorns in the Bible
- "Let My People Go!": On Worship, Work and Laziness
- The True Troubler
- Stumbling At Just One Point
- The Faith of Demons
- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
- Christus Victor in the Lord's Prayer
- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
- Pseudepigrapha and the Christian Witness
- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
- Civil Rights Family Trip 2: Atlanta
- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
- Christian Political Witness
- The Road
- Powers and Submissions
- City of God
- Playing God
- Torture and Eucharist
- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (Gutiérrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
- Insurrection
- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
- Guilt and Atonement
- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
- Moral Foundations
- Primum non nocere
- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
- Tattoos
- The Ethics of :-)
- On Snobbery
- Jokes
- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
- Doubt and Cognitive Rumination
- A/theism and the Transcendent
- Kingdom A/theism
- The Ontological Argument
- Cheap Praise and Costly Praise
- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
- Orthodox Alexithymia
- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
- Skilled Christianity
- The Two Families of God
- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
- The Gifts of Doubt
- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
- Pragmatic Belief
- N-Order Complaint and Need for Cognition
Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies