You want to know where this notion of toxic masculinity came from? It sprang from the loins of toxic feminism. Zoom out and look at the big picture. This is a manufactured concept, baptized in the (assumed) credibility of academia, designed to help women leverage power and control over men. How? By denigrating them at every turn, thereby convincing the world that men are intrinsically bad and women are good and must be elevated to prominence. Call me crazy if you want to, but it doesn’t take a prophet or the son of a prophet to look down the road and see that the feminist end game here is a matriarchal world where women rule and men drool. And there are plenty of brazen females out there who would openly and unashamedly admit this.
That, however, is not my concern. Sinners gonna sin, and God’s going to deal with them in His own way and in His own good time.
My concern is the way this attitude is fleshing (pun intended) itself out in Christian families and the visible church, and creeping into evangelical women’s (and men’s) hearts. Because, whether or not we’d like to admit it, this worldliness is advancing upon us, and we need to be aware of – and biblically approach – the facets of this issue that are already at our doorstep.
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Unfortunately, I also see the exact opposite. I see (ostensibly) Christian women who scream like banshees any time their pastor preaches on the passages of Scripture dealing with women’s roles in marriage or the church. I’ve seen women who claim to believe and follow the Bible throw an everloving fit when someone points out – from Scripture – that their favorite women’s “Bible” study author is a false teacher. I see women formulating their beliefs and practices about God, worship, the Bible, their own behavior, their families, and their churches based on their own personal opinions, experiences, and feelings rather than on rightly handled Scripture.
And, just like secular feminists demand domination over men because they feel oppressed, have experienced sexism, or resent the world’s history of male dominion, I see Christian women letting their emotions rule the day as they demand unbiblical solutions to their real or perceived personal experiences with men and male leadership.
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Toxic femininity is worldly and fleshly. It has no place in Christian homes and churches. How do we combat it? We take up the sword. We submit to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. We recognize that God is the authority in our lives, not self, and that we are to obey Him at any cost – even at the cost of our convenience and pleasure. We trade our desires for His.
— Michelle Lesley, Toxic (Evangelical) Femininity, August 24, 2018
Okay . . . I’ll call her crazy. :/
I don’t even know what to say anymore Bruce. Why is it that women bother to put up with this stuff? Easy for me to say I guess, this far removed from it all.
Feminism has loins?
::adding that to the list of wtf-ness:::
She hasn’t a clue what feminists think.
And no “toxic masculinity” doe NOT mean “All men are toxic”; it refers to behaviour by SOME men that is very destructive and damaging e.g. violence against wives and partners, rape, the sexual harrassment of women.
I don’t understand women like this: is it Stockholm syndrome? They are not uncommon. (Lori Alexander is another.) They do a lot of harm: what they say about women and the role of women is music to the ears of men who are abusive.
Alexander takes the worst sound bites from public feminists and tars all feminists with the same brush. I really wish she would sit down and talk with religious and secular feminists alike and learn what it is every-day feminists really believe and how they view men/women/family/children/careers. Unfortunately, thanks to a lifetime of Fundamentalist Christian indoctrination, she is absolutely certain that feminists are evil and patriarchal complementarianism is good and blessed by the Evangelical God. There are times when I am tempted to NOT give her views publicity, BUT having been where she is many years ago in my own life/marriage, I know it is important to hold such abominable views to the light of day. At times, her writing does give me a sense of a woman who is trapped with no way out. My wife can attest to having such feelings. When you are surrounded by this bullshit, it is hard to see your way clear, especially when children are involved and you have NO education/career training. All I can do is encourage such women by my own story and that of my wife.
But as I understand it, Lori A DOES have an education: she attended college. Something she is now very insistent that young Christian women should NOT do. College will introduce them to feminism, she insists, will give them all kinds of ideas about a career, etc.
I can understand her kind of thinking a bit more in a woman who genuinely has no qualifications or training. It’s sad and depressing but it is more understandable.
I will be 62 this year. She can go f-off. I am tired of being “accommodating” of divergent female “opinions”. Sigh…
Yet another fundie woman who conveniently forgets that her Bible says she’s supposed to be sitting in silence and refraining from teaching. Funny how they overlook that when they’re dying to reach out and oppress others.
And I hate to break it to her, but the situation she describes with the castrated husband and domineering wife is almost always the NORM within evangelical Christianity. The old coots get up in church and in their deacons meetings and strut and crow about how they’re leaders and women are to be in subjection, but to a man they will cower before their wives if she so much as shoots them a disapproving look. The women in my church (Church of Christ) had a saying: “men may be the head, but women are the neck that turns the head.” I never knew one single fundie wife who didn’t have her husband completely henpecked (if you’ll excuse the expression), and most congregations I was a part of, if there was ever any kerfuffle in the church, it almost always turned out that Elder Bubba’s wife Miss Biddy was mad about something and was twisting his balls at home to get him to do something about it.
So much nicer now to be out of that toxic patriarchy and be in a relationship where neither of us is in “control” and we’re both equal partners.
Yes, I grew up knowing a lot of Brethren couples in the UK. As you say, JD, it was often said that because wives had to stay silent in church they were very garrulous and domineering at home. Got invited to Sunday lunch by one such couple whom I didn’t know well. The wife never stopped talking and hubby asked me a question which I couldn’t answer because the wife chipped in over me. Hubby tapped the table with a spoon and said ‘My dear, I chair this meeting, Matilda, it is your turn to speak’…It was hard for me to keep a straight face, and the wife looked very crushed!
I try to figure out the psychology behind all this from a woman’s point of view. One scenario us these women enforcers are scared of God and think this is how they are supposed to live, like ot or not. But they are pissed off that so many women refuse to follow complementarianism for whatever reason (because it doesnt work, it us set up for abuse, they and their partner choose an egalitarian partnership, etc.). So they feel the need to justify their own (shitty) decision by preaching to others to convince them to submit too – misery enjoys company.
I would be happy to have a conversation with any of these ladies so they could find out what a real live ex-Christian secular feminist believes. I don’t hate men. I don’t think women are superior. I think each person should be judged by their actions, not by their hormone levels or sex organs.
Hello, ObstacleChick.
That scenario makes a lot of sense to me. I grew up in a house where both the parents were adult converts to Catholicism. My father is now dead, my mother is still very much with us and would qualify as a “woman enforcer”. My mother made one shitty decision: marrying my father who was emotionally unstable, in effect married to his own mother, etc etc. And, at about the same time, she made a further shitty decision: joining the Roman Catholic Church.
And yes, her life since then (early 60s) has been one of absorbing destructive messages about women and men and relationships, and acting on these messages. She stayed with an abusive man partly, I suspect, because she pitied him and partly because she didn’t want to lose the “approval” of the priest and the other pious people in the congregation. We moved house several times so had quite a few churches/priests/congregations over that time. . .and her dynamic remained the same.
It is striking that almost all of her female friends have been of the woman enforcer type too. Women who are anti-abortion and very judgemental of women who aren’t. Women who tend to blame other women for any kind of conflict within a relationship. (It’s never the man!). Women who tend to blame rape victims rather than the men who raped them. (“Why wasn’t she being more careful?” etc). It’s ugly stuff. And all these women enforcers appear to have (or had) marriages that were unhealthy and often abusive. And they all have low self esteem.
Victims of misogyny while being, simultaneously, some of its perpetrators.