"Men, this upcoming summer we need to guard our sisters from lust--and this will affect what we wear. It is evident that women are visual, and we know of Biblical examples that show this. Potiphar's wife! The allegorical Israel in Ezekiel 23! There are significant Biblical precedents demonstrating that God created women to experience strong visual attraction to the opposite gender, so we need to take the biological perspectives of women into consideration when we take off our shirts at swimming pools or beaches this summer. All sorts of movies from films like Captain America and Thor to 300 showcase attractive shirtless men. Men take off their shirts with normality in our culture. It is difficult for our sisters in Christ to ever find relief from the constant struggle with their visuality. Because of this, we men are obligated to help them in their struggles. If we Christian men really love our sisters in Christ, we will not enable them to commit the sin of lust by exposing our bodies so inappropriately. If we show as much of our bodies at the beach as men usually do, we cause or can cause our sisters to stumble and sin. Besides, is it not merely indecent to go shirtless at the beach? It is simply immodest and no one needs to see us uncovered that way as it is. Wear shirts and save your bodies for your wives."
If this sounds stupid and like a complete distortion of the Bible and reason, then congratulations! You probably understand why evangelical modesty teachings are ridiculously illogical! Now, what I wrote is addressed towards a hypothetical male crowd, whereas Christians endorsing modesty address their speeches and articles to women, though the basic reasoning and arguments remain the same. But I've thoroughly refuted the alleged Biblical and moral justifications for "modesty" elsewhere [1]. These ideas are false because 1) neither the Bible nor reason reveals a standard of modesty (meaning all such judgments are subjective and arbitrary), 2) they (the teachings) often confuse attraction for a sinful impulse, 3) they add to the Bible when the Bible says to not add to its commands, 4) they view the human body as dangerous and tempting when it is objectively good according to Christianity, 5) they sexualize beauty, attraction, and the human body (none of which are inherently sexual), 6) they pretend that responsibility for sin rests anywhere except the hearts and minds of the sinner, 7) they imply that sexual feelings are uncontrollable and sinful, and 8) they teach that men are very visual and sexual beings but women are not, at least not to the same degree. The latter is particularly damaging, since it trivializes female sexuality, disregards the fact that personality has nothing to do with gender, and conditions people to expect men to be sexually aggressive, even when such a thing is unwanted.
But I will not refute many of these again in detail here. Instead, I will focus on a particular assumption embedded in these beliefs--8) above. According to the Christians who support these teachings, men are very visual/sexual beings but women are not, and this amounts to the key reason that some Christians direct asinine modesty teachings almost exclusively at females. Why, for instance, do Christians morally condemn bikinis and tell women to wear more while swimming (how much more they should wear nobody agrees upon because it's a 100% subjective judgment that has nothing to do with the Bible or logic!) yet not tell men to wear shirts while swimming with the same concern and frequency? Why the double standard, evangelicals? As summer approaches and legalistic Christians resume their idiotic crusades against bikinis and the human body, I want to illustrate how one of the fundamental tenets of evangelical modesty teachings--the belief that men are visual but women aren't--is laughably untrue. Better yet, the Bible tells us so!
One of the most fun ways to refute evangelical Christians is to show that the Bible they claim to honor contradicts them when they cling to certain positions. Ultimately, this strategy alone dismantles and refutes many evangelical beliefs. Three such beliefs I have done this with on my blog are the fallacious doctrine of eternal conscious torment, the alleged legal irrelevance of Mosaic Law, and the idea that the thieves crucified alongside Christ deserved Roman crucifixion. Here I will show that the Bible and reason oppose the evangelical myth that men are visual but women are not.
If evangelicals accept the authority of the Bible, then they must admit that the Bible never teaches that males are hypersexual, hypervisual beings that all or always struggle with sexual lust. Instead, it not only never says that God made either gender to experience constant hypervisuality but also clearly teaches that women are sexual and "visual" just as men are--and it provides multiple examples of this! Potiphar's wife sexually harassed Joseph and perhaps almost adulterously raped him (Genesis 39); the allegory in Ezekiel 23 uses the vehement visual lust of a woman to represent the spiritual adultery (idolatry) of Israel; Paul mentioned that widows can have very strong "sensual desires" in one of his letters (1 Timothy 5:11). The Bible clearly teaches that women have sexual desires just as men do and that women are "visual", which means attracted physically or sexually to the opposite gender by sight of bodily beauty. Interestingly, the Quran concurs with the Bible on this point. Islamic belief assigns the name Zuleika to Potiphar's infamous wife. In Surah 12, according to the Quran, Zuleika invited some female friends to prepare food and, when Joseph entered the room, the women cut their hands from the distraction of finding Joseph so physically attractive. Before this event they, according to the Quran, mocked Zuleika for her attraction to Joseph, but afterwards they understood her experiences. I find it amusing that a Muslim text directly teaches what many Christians will not acknowledge--women are visual and sexual beings just like men are!
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| Christians who think women are not visual and sexual beings just like men are (though men do not have the hypervisual or hypersexual natures attributed to them) do not understand the Bible, women, or why relying on cultural beliefs as evidence for a position subverts and rejects reason. |
Really, the idea of God creating men with extremely high levels of sexual desire and hypervisuality and women with dramatically lower levels of sexual desire and visuality is the idea that God intentionally created uneven sexual desires between men and women and thus purposefully created a very problematic difference between the two genders. Now, complementarians might argue that this arrangement will reveal God's glory by having two different types of beings come together in a marriage relationship supposed to glorify God--but this is nothing more than a contrived explanation built around an unbiblical belief, as complementarianism rests on fallacies and misinterpretations of the Bible [2]. When analyzing this issue objectively, it becomes clear that there is no obvious reason why God would ever want to completely mismatch the degree of sexual desire in men and women. In fact, it would be to create something that would inevitably produce conflict and a wedge between married men and women, which is the opposite of the goal of marriage, as marriage is intended to unite a couple together into "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).
The fact that women are "visual" and that men are not as "visual" as society stereotypes them to be has also found some support from modern sexologists [3]. Women are reported to look at erotic images just as long as men do and to act in ways typically associated with male sexuality when they ignore societal ideas. Of course, women themselves have admitted that they are visual too and that they are not less sexual beings than men. In addition to this, the "visuality" of men or women varies from individual to individual, meaning that stereotypical cultural assumptions amount to nothing but inherited fallacies. Female friends and acquaintances of mine say things that blatantly contradict the way the church and society claim women are not visual or are less sexual than males. However, the visual attraction that people can have for members of the opposite gender (note that I said can have, not constantly have) does not constantly overpower them all the time. This is why men and women can gather together, for instance, at a beach or swimming pool while wearing very little or nothing and recognize that the situation is not sexual, nor are the exposed male and female bodies around them. Men and women can admire each other physically without any desire to have sex despite the fact that God has made both men and women to generally find each other's bodies attractive. Just because someone finds a person attractive does not mean that the former will actually be physically attracted to the latter, and even if attraction does occur the attraction does not necessarily signify the presence of sexual desire. Why is this so hard for evangelical Christians to comprehend?
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| Evangelicals prove their ignorance and inconsistency by condemning one but not the other. Of course, condemning either bikinis or shirtless males is an example of the type of extra-Biblical, legalistic, irrational, subjective nonsense that Jesus harshly rebuked when he criticized the Pharisees for adding to his moral laws. |
Men and women can both admire each other's bodies without sin and take comfort in the fact that God did not create opposing natures in them--and can stop assuming that stereotypes and societal constructs are true. The church, of all places, should be full of people who understand that women are "visual" and otherwise sexual beings, and who understand why. When people referring to the two genders commit the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of appeal to popularity, they gravely damage how men and women view both themselves and each other. God may have made humans--not just men and not just women--to be visual and sexual beings (although the extent of this varies drastically from person to person and asexual people do exist), but that does not at all mean that these elements of general human nature must overpower our reason and self-control, constantly hang over everything, and impede true fellowship!
[1]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-folly-of-modesty-part-1.html
B. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-folly-of-modesty-part-2.html
[2]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/why-ephesians-5-does-not-teach-rigid.html
[3]. https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/turns-out-women-have-really-really-strong-sex-drives-can-men-handle-it/276598/
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