The Degrading Nature Of Sexual Stereotypes

The total myths that men are hypervisual, hypersexual beings by nature and that women are asexual/demisexual beings by nature can be immensely destructive and disheartening--but evangelical Christians rarely acknowledge this.  They can truly make people of both genders feel like less than what they actually are.  I will not focus on refuting this myth yet again here, as multiple times before I have proven that visuality has nothing to do with gender and varies subjectively from individual to individual.  What I want to communicate is how dehumanized this myth can make men feel.

Years ago, when told this bullshit by my evangelical parents, it felt very disappointing--degrading even--to be told that I would not be able to help objectifying females.  Of course, this was an untrue prediction.  But that does not change the fact that I certainly felt disgusted at being told this about myself, much less told something that is objectively untrue about myself and about men in general.  Likewise, it felt very degrading to be told that my significant other, should I ever enter a romantic or marital relationship, would at most be sexually attracted to me when a legion of trivial relational factors allowed for it.  The rigid gender-based lack of mutuality here was disturbing to me.  If I was going to be sexually attracted to my significant other, I wanted that to be reciprocated.

Yet I was told repeatedly that just because she is a woman, my girlfriend or wife would not sexually desire me, despite the fact that I would allegedly be mad with sexual feelings for her.  In fact, her own sexual feelings, if she would have them at all, would supposedly be so unpredictable, so contingent on a myriad of random variables, that I would be lucky if she ever actually wanted to have sex with me because she wanted to, and not for some reason related to developing a relational attachment.  Additionally, I was told that I would be, at least for a time, obsessively bent on engaging in any form of sexual activity with her that I could.  Well, neither I nor other men I know are dominated by hopelessly omnipresent sexual desires.  As an asexual and as a rationalist, I now mock the asinine, unintelligent predictions of the evangelical imbeciles I was raised around.  Thanks to them, I had to live surrounded by degrading expectations.

As paradoxical as it may seem to some, even as an asexual I still have the desire to be sexually desired by any significant other I have.  I have described before how, as an asexual, I would greatly prefer that my spouse would rely on her own hands and things like morally legitimate erotic media to deal with her sexual desires [1], but that does not change the fact that I still would prefer for my spouse to find me sexually attractive in some way (and that I would still engage in sexual activity with her).  As for the asinine idea that women don't experience strong sexual urges by nature of being women and that they are not visual, although logic disproves these myths in full, and the Bible contradicts them as well, hearing so many women deny this foolish claim has proven very relieving for me in one regard.  I deeply appreciate the transparency and honesty of the numerous female friends in my life.

The trivialization of female sexuality and the grotesque exaggeration of male sexuality alike are abominable, irrational, contra-Biblical things that the evangelical church encourages.  As usual, as with almost everything else, I look at evangelicalism here with disgust.  These ideas produce a lack of emphasis on female sexuality in marriage, a denial of a basic component of life as a woman, and can severely hurt people of either gender, by assuming that men are helpless slaves to objectifying sexual impulses (and sexual attraction is not itself objectifying, regardless of its potency) and that women are asexual or demisexual beings.  In any future marriage of mine, there will be no denial of female sexuality, and there will be no gender-based inequality in the celebration of sexuality.

Fuck evangelicalism, and may these false ideas, and all other evangelical fallacies and errors, fade away along with the entire power of the evangelical church.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-marital-benefit-of-erotic-media.html