The Deep Descent to Coarseness

In addition to her full time job, my wife works several days a week at a greeting card shop. A few months ago, one of her co-workers caught her eye and gestured silently for her to look at the T-shirt one customer was wearing. She saw a well-groomed man in khakis. But it wasn't until he turned that she saw what the shirt said (blanks added by me): "F--- me. I'm bored."

There was a time back in the 1970s when I deluded myself with the notion that the Women's Movement, with its emphasis on equality of the genders and its rejection of what it called "the objectification" of women would enlighten us all. Men wouldn't regard women as objects to be used and sex would be more than a way to pass the time. Sexual intimacy would, at the least, reflect a mutual giving between two people who cared for each other.

The Women's Movement did bring many wonderful changes (and some not-so-wonderful ones) to our culture, opening up unprecedented opportunities to women, not to mention a new sensitivity to the rights of women within traditional marriage and family relationships.

But in many ways, we seem to have moved toward more sexual objectification of women. That's deeply disturbing!

And, it appears that women and men both accept a male-dominated notion of relationships that would make the Rat Pack blush.

In today's Washington Post, Jabari Asim, writes about Hip Hop's Tough Guy Romance. According to Asim and a twenty-two year old recent grad of Howard University and hip-hop fan, it's been twenty years since rap has produced a song that was romantic, LL Cool J's "I Need Love."

Instead, most rappers these days see women as objects to be used. Asim writes of being jarred from a reverie while filling his car's gas tank recently. (How many of us can say that we've been in reveries while pumping gas lately?) Says Asim:

The sun was shining, the weather was balmy and it felt like the kind of morning when even the most dedicated company man would entertain thoughts of skipping work. But work, unfortunately, was precisely where I was heading, as soon as I finished pumping gas.

The atmosphere didn't change all that much when a car pulled up near mine. The young man inside had a booming system that blared music powerfully enough to rattle the windows of the service station. I didn't mind. The music had a charming lilt, and the lyrics, though indecipherable, suggested a mellow day much like the one unfolding before me.

The song, I later learned, was by T.I., a popular Atlanta rapper. This particular tune was from his CD called "Urban Legend." In it, T.I. explains that he won't be spending time with his friends because he plans to spend some quality time with his significant other.

As the lyrics of the first verse became clear to me, I actually smiled, remembering when my friends and I began to seriously consider notions of commitment, responsibility and intimate adult relationships. Like my buddy Mark, T.I. was telling his friends that he was comfortable where he was. Then the chorus kicked in and he proclaimed, "I'm chillin' with my bitch today, I'm chillin' with my bitch today."

It's no secret that our popular culture's increasingly tepid offerings on romance reflect a general downward slide in the culture at large. Americans have trouble maintaining committed relationships between consenting adults, so we can hardly blame our artists for showing the same ignorance in their songs, literature and movies. Despite knowing all that, T.I.'s lyrics made my ears itch. In my lifetime, we've descended from Stevie Wonder's "My Cherie Amour," in which he borrows a metaphor from Shakespeare to compare his love to a summer's day, to R. Kelly, who tells a young lady that she reminds him of a jeep. After "Chillin With My Bitch," how much farther can we fall?

I'm on record as favoring the overthrow of the culture of romance. We've made little gods and goddesses of romantic feelings so that when other feelings appear in our relationships, we mistakenly conclude that the relatinships must come to an end. Love, as I often say, isn't always what we feel; it's the commitment and charity we demonstrate often in spite of how we feel at a given moment.

But even romance would be preferable to picturing a woman with whom you're in a relationship as a bitch.

Of course, I was stupid to think that the women's movement was going to change the ways people think. Although I've been writing a lot about the Ten Commandments lately, the Bible itself asserts that no proscriptive rule and certainly no adherence to social customs can bring about the transformations of psyches, spirits, and cultures I once hoped that the women's movement would bring.

I entertained these naive notions, of course, back in my atheist days, when my confidence in humanity as the highest expression of intelligence and rationality was at a blissfully irrational level.

Since then, I've come to believe that there is really only one way for us to see the kind of mutuality and respect among genders that is the polar opposite of "Chillin' With My Bitch." That's through Jesus Christ.

When you look at Jesus Christ in the Gospels, you see a Savior Who was countercultural not only for His own time, but for ours. In first-century Judea, women were prohibited from speaking with men in public. But Jesus conversed with women publicly all the time. Women weren't supposed to play prominent roles in the ministries of religious teachers. But women were the first ones to tell the world that Jesus rose from the dead.

In the early church's history, as recorded in Acts, women played a prominent role as teachers and sharers of the Good News that God has declared Himself for the human race, offering new life to all who turn from sin and entrust their lives to Christ.

In discussing the mutuality that is to characterize marriages, the New Testament book of Ephesians begins by saying:

"Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." (Ephesians 5:21)

In other words, the key to making marital relationships work is for husbands and wives to mutually surrender any pretenses they may have about being more important than the other one as a way of expressing gratitude Jesus Christ for the new eternal life He gives. We are, as in all of our relationships, to see the Christ in one another and engage in mutual service. (Matthew 25:31-46)

As a pastor, over the years I've been privileged to see quite a few men, most of them married, come to faith in Christ or to renew their relationship with Christ. This has almost always led to conversations with their wives in which they tell me: "You can't imagine what a difference has come to ______. I feel like we're becoming a team. He's stopped being so difficult to be around."

This change, of course, cannot be proscribed. But we can pray for it. We also can work toward it by sharing Christ through life styles we model and the words we speak about Christ. Only Christ can prevent a deeper descent into dehumanizing coarseness.

[Two posts have looked at related themes. See here and here.]