The word misogyny became part of our sons’ vocabulary before they learned to master multiplication. Given the abundance of testosterone in our house (three sons, no daughters), one of my parenting priorities became teaching them what it meant to respect, value, and honor the opposite gender. There were times when I took this mission a bit too seriously. I remember the drill sergeant tone used as I communicated to my five year old after he refused to heed a girl’s no on the playground; “When a girl says no to you, stop what you are doing. Immediately. The first time she uses the word. Do you understand?” It wasn’t simply that she was disinterested in ramming construction vehicles together; I was projecting to his senior prom and a date who had no interest in being fondled.
Along those lines, we’ve asked our sons not to date until they turned 16 hoping to spare their potential girlfriends the heartbreak which accompanies sexual involvement without the requisite maturity to undergird such choices. We’ve helped them to expand the culture’s narrow grid for beauty so that they would be free to appreciate the inherent beauty of all women, regardless of their nationality or body type. Our hope has been that all of this intentional parenting would allow our sons to see women as ones created by God to co-labor alongside of them.
It should come as no surprise to learn that I loathe the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. Rather than portraying women as valuable and worthy daughters, it serves them up as soulless sexual objects available for instant consumption. The models, who I’m certain are lovely women, seem oblivious to how they betray both themselves and their gender by normalizing this objectification.
The message sent by their seductive eyes, enhanced breasts, and unnaturally hairless bodies, is a dissonant chapter in the narrative we’ve offered our sons–one that’s been impossible to skip over. Years back, as my son and I approached the grocery checkout, his eyes riveted on the beauty gracing that year’s SI cover. He looked at her, and then plaintively at me, and back again. I flipped the magazine around in the rack and willed the tears to stop. On the drive home, he asked, “Momma, why was that woman posing in such a weird way? You always told us that women have to keep their breasts covered in public unless they are nursing but I didn’t see any baby. Why was she doing that?”
How could I possibly explain to my then six year old the complexities of human brokenness, of why a man might prefer a flat, one dimensional representation of woman in place of an actual flesh and blood human being? How could I despoil his imagination with the reality that one day, he too would be faced with this temptation?
I fumbled for words. “Relationships are hard. Remember how you believed that your stuffed dog Cuggie was real? How you would talk to him and play with him especially when you were frustrated with your brothers?” I saw him nodding in the rear view mirror. “Sometimes men want to pretend too so they look at those magazines and imagine that the models are their girlfriends or wives. These imaginary friends don’t make trouble or ask for anything. Didn’t Cuggie always do whatever you wanted?” Again, he nodded. He then got quiet and looked out the window for some time.
Finally, he asked, “Don’t you think adults who pretend like that get lonely and bored?”
“What makes you think that?” I punted back.
“Well, sometimes you are mean and yell at me which Cuggie never does but you also read to me and make my birthday cakes and take me to the playground. Cuggie can’t do that. If I had to choose, I’d pick you over him.”
He got it as a six year old. These conversations have continued and this son is now 18–almost ready to launch. Will these lessons stick? When he’s free from the accountability of our home, will he continue to honor and respect women? Will he fight for them to have equal opportunities? Will he have the courage and wisdom to opt for a relationship with an imperfect woman who will simultaneously disappoint and love him? Or will he succumb to the lies proffered by Sports Illustrated and choose Barbie whose placement on SI’s cover defines misogyny far more profoundly than this mother’s words ever could?
Josh Larsen recently wrote in a Think Christian article, “When Barbies – or Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues – cultivate our desires in a way that drowns out what God would have us desire, we’re headed in the wrong direction.”
My sons and their generation have the opportunity–and dare I say, the hunger–to lead culture in a different direction. One that esteems women and recognizes them as co-heirs. We must hope and pray that they look to God rather than contemporary culture to cultivate those desires.
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