Our assessment of power is itself deeply conditioned by all of the power structures that already exist.
When I was 22 years old, deep in the psychological and spiritual work of confronting the most blatant instance of sexual abuse in my own life, I confessed to my counselor and spiritual director that I worried that the design of male and female bodies created inherent disparity that was, in part, responsible for sexual violence. I worried that we were designed in such a way as to enable—perhaps even make inevitable—violence by men against women, which led me toward the worrying conclusion that God, at the least, was implicated in sexual violence and, at the most, was the author of it.
I explained to my counselor, with some awkwardness, that it seemed to me to be a very bad idea for the sex endowed with (usually) superior physical strength to also own the violating sexual organ. What could this mean, I fretted aloud, about God? What could this say about a creator who I’d been taught to believe loved me, but who created me inherently vulnerable to his other more powerful creations? Had God created me to be violable? Had God not just allowed—but even ordered—sexual violence?
So I sense something familiar in Stephen Marche’s November 25 essay in the New York Times, “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.” I recognize the alarm he conveys as he tries to take seriously some of the inherent (albeit general, and therefore inevitably incorrect in some specific instances) realities of human bodily existence. For him it is not a theological question, but it is still a kind of knee-jerk, and then reasoned, theodicy: It is an honest effort to answer the question, why do these things happen? How do we reckon with this horror that seems to lie so close to the heart (and gut and genitalia) of who we humans are?
But I also find familiar the oversimplicity of the assessment. It took many years beyond my conversation with my wonderful counselor, who let me wonder all of the questions I needed to wonder, before I realized at least one of the flaws in my logic: Our assessment of power is itself deeply conditioned by all of the power structures that already exist. What I mean is, if women had superior physical strength and a zillion other forms of power down through the millennia, our definition of sexual violation would not be the experience of being penetrated; it would be the experience of being consumed.
I think Marche assesses male libido as brutal not because the brutality is inherent, but because male sexual libido has been interwoven with a zillion other forms of male power, physical strength among them. Marche himself is so convinced by all of these power displays that he fails to consider female libido anywhere in his piece. He refers to the “mechanisms of human desire,” presumably referring to a great chasm between male desire, which is implicitly brutal in his view, and female desire, which, if such a thing exists in his worldview, must be inferred to be, if not passive, then perhaps…gentle?
He refers to Andrea Dworkin who said, in 1976, that “the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis,” which makes me wonder if Marche has ever considered whether women would understand their own sexual desire to be flaccid—without any overtones of power, passion, or force. Let’s take men out of the equation: Does Marche imagine sex between two women to be flaccid? Impotent? Without desire? Without power? Without risk?
Marche aims to explore the quality of sexual desire (albeit one-sidedly), but it strikes me that the more apt metaphor for sexual longing—and the one that must be reckoned with in relationships that strive for egalitarianism and health—is not the wish to penetrate (or to be penetrated), but indeed, the wish to consume.
Females have been consuming in sex since the dawn of the heterosexual sexual encounter. So what might female libido have to teach men about their own desires? And how might it helpfully address the question of whether an inherent male brutality damns us all to eternal violation?
Women, who have lived—in most cultures for most millennia—with less power than men, have necessarily had to work harder at balancing desires. Because our power has been limited, we have had to weigh options. Some of the coarsest of these negotiations have come to light in recent weeks as we’ve heard stories of women who have had to choose, in a moment, between physical survival and attempting to fight off an assailant, between living another day in a career and sounding an alarm. Some of the more nuanced of these negotiations involve children, or the demands of work and household, or the quiet needs of self and others. In a moment of sexual desire, then, perhaps women are not less driven by libido, less passionate in a momentary desire to consume, to pursue pleasure, or to pursue power. But perhaps women are simply better—because they are so much more in practice—at remembering to balance their own desires with the desires of the sexual other, or the needs of the household, or the goods of the wider culture. Because our power has been constantly checked, it is not such an affront to us to check it ourselves. Indeed, we want to: In between the violations, the monstrous brutalities and the daily indignities, we have seen the persistent power of the greater good.
And this is where my Christian theology returns, though it looks a little different than it did when I was 22. In the New Testament letter to the Philippians, the writer reflects on how Jesus embodied his own power: “Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit. But he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings.”
My tradition teaches that Jesus—who was God in flesh and therefore all-powerful, omnipotent—did not exploit his power. Rather, he “emptied himself”; he gave it up.
Women—in boardrooms and in bedrooms—have been following that example for a long, long time. In many cases, we’ve followed it too far and are now making important corrections to the course.
Men, it’s your turn.
Naming the brutality of your sexuality as an impediment to equality demeans the sexuality of women—in both hetero- and homosexual relationships. It also smacks of excuse-making, not to mention self-hatred. It’s time to complicate your understanding of your own sexuality, and of mine. Male libido is only brutal when it is unchecked by other powers and other goods. It’s time to check your own power and so start making the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, breath-by-breath negotiations of needs that women have been making for millennia. We’re more than ready for you to come along.
Shea Tuttle is co-editor of Can I Get a Witness? (Eerdmans, forthcoming), a collection of stories about American Christians who worked for social justice. Her essays have appeared at Role Reboot, Jenny, The Other Journal, and The Toast. Shea has a master of divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and is a current student in the master of fine arts in writing program at Spalding University, concentrating in creative nonfiction. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, daughter, and son. Find her on Twitter @SheaTuttle.
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