The high cost of casual sex

At the recommendation of a friend, I’ve recently been reading Michael Lewis’ excellent book The Blind Side. While until now I knew little about football beyond the fact that the quarterback is the one who throws the ball, they all hunch over before the play, and you score by running into the end zone (except when you kick or throw it through the end posts), Lewis succeeded in making the sport both fairly intelligible and compelling to me. If I thought I could actually witness some of the strategy he was talking about in a play, I might even schedule time to watch a game sometime this fall.

One interesting thing that struck me, though, toward the end of the book, was a passing exchange that highlighted how much is often at stake in one’s sexual license. Lewis is describing a Thanksgiving meal at the home of Michael Oher’s adoptive family, to which Michael’s brought some from friends from the Ole Miss football team.

To Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, Michael had invited a freshman linebacker named Quentin Taylor, who had no place else to go. At the start of the meal Michael leaned over and whispered, sternly, “Quentin, you’re supposed to put your napkin in your lap.” Right after that, Quentin let it drop that he had fathered three children by two different mothers. Leigh Anne [Michael’s adoptive mother] pulled the carving knife from the turkey and said, “Quentin, you can do what you want and it’s your own business. But if Michael Oher does that I’m cutting his penis off.” From the look on Quentin’s face Michael could see he didn't think she was joking. “She would too,” said Michael without breaking a smile.

It’s often very easy, I’ve noticed, for conversations about sexuality that tend toward the secular/liberal corner of the quadrant to stress heavily the importance of our “individual freedoms” and the “right” to self-expression. But what is often overlooked in such idealistic conversations is all the accompanying assumptions about class, race, sex and education that play into this simplistic view of things. The fact of the matter is, certain policies/freedoms/rights that many in America have long vociferously defended can take on very nefarious consequences in situations where the circumstances we have mostly unconsciously assumed for said rights are not all present.
Thus, for instance, a recent New York Times bloggingheads post discussing the problem of abortion’s use to drastically thin the population of female babies in India -- “sex-selection abortion,” they called it. And thus, as David Briggs noted in an article for the Plain Dealer earlier this summer, the urgency to a growing emphasis on abstinence in some urban communities and churches. As one source he interviewed put it, “There’s no way in the world we can avoid talking about sex because we see the devastation it does in our community.”

Sometimes what we think we’re defending can lead to very different results than those we meant to champion. And sometimes the self-control needed to not take full advantage of one’s rights can be a matter of far more than just a little pleasure or convenience. Sometimes it’s a matter of justice.

Immodesty in church?

Rhett Smith has a couple fascinating posts on his blog this week: Showing Skin at Church and Showing Skin Continued. Basically, these posts discuss the issue of dress in church and whether there should be a difference between our attire in sacred spaces and the rest of the contexts we interact in. Before you get up on any “here’s more sexism” high horse, read the posts to hear what he’s saying. Some interesting points from several people.Personally, one of the biggest things that comes to mind from reading these two posts is, once you get past the blame game and deciding who bears responsibility, how do you go about changing things?

It seems to me, part of the problem is more of a cultural/generational one. In the last couple decades, many churches seem to have adopted such a “seeker-friendly,” church-as-entertainment mindset that there’s almost no sense of reverence in our attitude and attire. How many of us who worship on a regular basis put as much time and attention toward our appearance at church as we do for a date, presentation or job interview?

I remember once talking with a relative who doesn’t normally go to church about how much we had both appreciated a visit to a more formal, traditional service. After all, we weren’t going to church because it was just like every other program or ritual available to us; we were going because it offered something unique. Just as you behave differently at a museum or a symphony, the sense of reverence that church service modeled seemed appropriate to the service.

I’m not trying to make a case for instituting a dress code or moving away from jeans-wearing … but if offices and some schools have no problem doing so, why should church be any more casual? Besides, if the challenge of dealing with immodesty is that it tends to wind up pitting one sex against the other, a move toward slightly more reverent attire asks change of all of us.

Coming back to my question of addressing the problem of overly sexy dress, then, I would make a few general recommendations.

For men troubled by revealing attire

1. Examine your own dress habits to see if there’s anything you can do to show more honor for God in your own dress.
2. Pray for the women of the church, that God would help them find their identity less in their bodies and sexuality, more in being God’s beloved daughters.
3. Look at your own interactions and relationships with women to see if you’re giving more attention to their sexuality (which can happen with praise, gaze and criticism/correction) than other aspects of their personality.

For women troubled by or dealing with revealing attire

1. Build rapport with and pray for women who seem to be dressing more provocatively before you even consider saying something about their dress. Correction and criticism are best received in the context of a loving relationship and, in fact, that very relationship may help meet the needs driving the tendency to wear revealing clothes.
2. Examine your own dress habits to see if there’s anything you can do to show more honor for God in your own dress. I know from experience how scary it can be to dress more modestly, when you don’t feel very attractive or able to get the male attention you long for without accentuating physical assets. But in my experience, whenever I’ve tried to trust God with this, He has always honored my obedience (see chapters 2 and 12 in Sexless for more on this).
3. If you feel that you really need to say something to another woman, do so very prayerfully and remember the admonition to correct with gentleness. If there’s ever a verse I haven’t heard preached on that needs to be, it’s probably Galatians 6:1. Remember that the goal should not be to shame another or protect your own “purity” from their impurity, but to help others grow toward becoming the people God created us to be. When correction affirmation is balanced with loving affirmation that makes clear your feedback is not an attack on the person, it has a chance of doing real good. Ultimately, though, only God can change people’s hearts and mend our broken sense of identity. In that, He probably needs our words of correction for others far less than we think, and our prayers for them far more.

Friday morning morality play

First off: a few announcements. The book is due out in less than three weeks, so if you haven’t yet pre-ordered your copy, it will be in bookstores soon. And if you live in the Oakland area, I too will be in a bookstore, at least the night of April 18. Tell a friend and then come down and join us at A Great Good Place for Books, in the heart of Montclair. (If you would be interested in helping set up a reading or other event in your city, email me about getting involved with my street team. We have a limited number of free copies of the book as a thank-you to those who get involved.)

Secondly, if you’d like a break from my voice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a column today that mentions the blog: “Sex rules are best laughed at.” Check it out if you’re looking for a funny read and a breezy digest of several recent sex studies.

In a study of a different kind, we did an interesting exercise in a training session yesterday that I thought I would share. I know: sounds dorky, right? But actually, I found that it provided an interesting barometer of the character traits we value. If you want to “play along,” find a piece of scratch paper and make a list with the names Ivan, Abigail, Gregory, Sinbad and Slug and prepare to rank the five characters on a scale of 1 to 5, least to most reprehensible.

The story: ‘Alligator River’
Once upon a time there was a woman named Abigail who was in love with a man named Gregory. Gregory lived on the shore of the river. Abigail lived on thee opposite shore of the river. The river that separated the two lovers was teeming with man-eating alligators. Abigail wanted to cross the river to be with Gregory. Unfortunately, the bridge was washed out. So she went to Sinbad, a riverboat captain, to take her across. He said he would be glad to if she would consent to go to bed with him preceding a voyage. She promptly refused and went to a friend named Ivan to explain her plight. Ivan did not want to be involved at all in the situation. Abigail felt her only alternative was to accept Sinbad’s terms. Sinbad fulfilled his promise to Abigail and delivered her into the arms of Gregory.

When she told Gregory of her escapade in order to cross the river, Gregory cast her aside with disdain. Heartsick and dejected, Abigail turned to Slug with her tale of woe. Slug, feeling compassion for Abigail, sought out Greogry and beat him severly.
Abigail was overjoyed at the sight of Gregory getting his due. As the sun sets on the horizon, we hear Abigail laughing at Gregory.

I know, I know: it’s not exactly up to the standard of Hemingway, but still it led to an interesting discussion. The assignment, you see, was for each of us to individually rank the characters from best to worst, after which we were put in groups to develop a group ranking. This was where the differences really emerged, however.

Whereas I thought Ivan’s hands-off approach was probably the healthiest of all of them, the rest of the folks in my group deemed him worst because of his passivity and lack of compassion. And whereas they all thought Gregory was cruel for spurning Abigail, I found little evidence of his love for or interest in her. To me, she seemed like a desperate, aggressive woman, unwilling to let anything thwart her efforts to get the fulfillment of her desire. Gregory certainly should have made it clear to her what his standards were, but it doesn’t exactly sound like he encouraged her to go so lengths for them to be together.

Another point of disagreement was the character of Sinbad. Once each group had reached their collective ranking, all of us compared our results. While my team agreed that Sinbad was rather mercenary, we did give him props for consistency and being very upfront about his ethical standards (perhaps this is why I liked 3:10 to Yuma). The other groups tended to rate him as the worst, however, because of his willingness to abuse power and take advantage of Abigail’s neediness.

Your thoughts?

Carded (thoughts on a Single No Kids income)

Persistence (which may be stubbornness by another name) is a funny thing. Take shopping. Sunday afternoon, I had some downtime between a leisurely lunch and my church’s evening service. With thoughts of recent monetary birthday gifts reducing the normal guilt of impulse shopping, I wandered into the Ross in downtown Berkeley.

More than an hour later, I had filled a basket with several boxes of cards I fancied, plus a few other sundries I had convinced myself would be excellent small gifts for several girlfriends’ upcoming birthdays. When I realized I had less than an hour to walk the 2.5 miles to church, however (I’m cheap like that), I decided to forego the long lines for the register and put everything on hold.

The lady said they could only keep six items for me, but after paring the cards down a bit, I went on my way with happy plans of collecting everything Monday after work — was not Ross open until 9 p.m.?

Monday came, I made the post-work walk to BART (another 1.5 miles or more — not much to a former New Yorker), and wound up in Berkeley sometime around 6. After dropping some shoes off for repair, I unexpectedly wandered into the Half-Price Books on Shattuck.

Let’s just say that by the time I left (around 8 p.m.), all thoughts of possibly spending my birthday loot on a new teapot from Ross had vanished, and I was happily weighed down with a stack of used piano books, two super-discounted pop CDs released during my early college years, and a couple other books. In light of these burdens, my subsequent discovery that Ross actually closed at 8 p.m. seemed almost a bit fortuitous, since the walk from BART to my home takes about 10 minutes. I resolved to try collecting my hold items after work Tuesday.

When I finally breezed through the discounter’s plate-glass doors last night, however, it was to discover that Ross holds items only one day, and though the various sections I’d shopped appeared largely undisturbed since Sunday, all six of my items had evidently caught the eye of other choosy shoppers, alas. There was a brief window of hope, when one of the fitting-room attendants suggested my hold items might have been stashed in the stock room prior to reshelving, but a mid-length wait later to chat up that woman’s manager proved fruitless. He didn’t even offer to take a look in the stock room.

Smarting a bit from this lack of sufficient sympathy over my loss of that one favorite $3 box of cards, I glanced at my watch and swiftly improvised a back-up plan: swing by the El Cerrito Ross, near my home BART stop. The next northbound BART even showed up moments later, enabling me to alight outside Ross #2 with 20 more minutes of shopping time.

I made my way to the card section and almost instantly spied the one remaining box of my prized vintage-look cards, nestled under the cluttered pile of journals and thank-you cards. Victory!

After a bit more browsing to find the perfect soy-candle gift (since I have recently learned that regular paraffin candles not only perpetuate our reliance on oil, but also produce more pollution), I made my way to the L-shaped line that stretched an alarming number of aisles toward the back of the store.

The thing about stores like Ross, you see, is evidently their discounts are partly funded by some scheme to staff stores — and registers — with the smallest operational crews possible. Maybe it’s some covert hazing scheme to test their customers’ desparation for cheaply priced goods like Tight on Time (an exercise DVD) and probably expired bags of coffee. Even when all three registers are fully manned, I swear the average checkout per customer is 20 to 50 percent slower than the post office.

So, like any girl cheap enough to wait a further 45 minutes in order to drop $3 on cards, I pulled out the latest baby sweater I’m knitting and settled in for the weary slog up to the cash registers. The blessing or curse of knitting, though (depending on your perspective) is that it leaves your mind free to wander — and, in my case, to ponder how much time I’d committed to buying the box of 12 cards wedged under one arm while I worked the rows back and forth.

I’m still not sure what I think of it — forget the appalling math of just how much such time would be worth to my employer; how did this vast time investment compare to how long I spend catching up with friends, or writing weekly letters to my siblings abroad?

When one woman standing in front of me asked what I’d found, I described my card mission. She said that I’d been lucky, then finally gave up on the line and put her things on hold. But as I watched her go, the card find seemed more like one more act of God showing kindness to the very undeserving. However much I hope the friends who ultimately receive the cards enjoy them, my three-day odyssey is in many ways a mad-cap act of selfish indulgence that, as a single girl with few obligations (except to moi) I’m free to do.

That doesn’t mean it feels right, though. Lately, when I recognize a certain commitment to get things no matter what (such as the discontinued red shoes I once spent several days trying to track down online and even from the manufacturer), there’s a certain check in my heart. What am I doing? Why am I investing my fleeting energy, time and youth in this?

Maybe in some ways it’s just the gradual process of recovering from the intensive months of book-writing that’s to blame for my shocks at leisure and needless consumption. But when I go to such great lengths to track down 12 pink-and-green cards, I have to wonder what it says about my values — not those I’d spout to you if asked, but those I act on almost without thinking.

Mostly strangely of all, I can’t always discern whether these pricks of conscience come from my connection to God or now living in a place so concerned with justice and using sustainable-everything resources.

More musings from the Spinster Ward Life coming ... sometime.