Response to “50 Shades of women’s roles” by Gary Wood from Sacramento, Calif.
Alikay and Editor,
I applaud your pluck.
Nevertheless, some of your brush strokes are a wee bit broad. Assuming that “Fifty Shades of Grey,” is about dominance and submission, the assertion that these ideas are central to traditional Christian teaching is unacceptable.
You assert that Christianity teaches many of the same qualities presented in the Fifty Shades series and suggest that a dominant, controlling man is considered attractive while an innocent, submissive girl is portrayed as the ideal woman. Where in “Christianity” is any dominant man considered attractive? Perhaps some misguided segments of Christianity and ACU’s subculture hold such views, but not all of “Christianity.”
Paul’s instruction for wives to submit to their husbands, was in the context of male dominated cultures, yet husbands are instructed to an arguably higher standard””to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Christ, the physically present embodiment of the creator of the universe, made himself a man of low standing, little reputation and built his following from rejects, the forsaken and the lowly. Jesus was hardly dominant or controlling when riding on the back of a donkey, washing his disciples feet or remaining silent while being falsely accused.
Following Paul’s instruction to use Christ’s love as the example would require men to similarly give up on a daily basis their standing, power and reputation, even to the point of death, to demonstrate unconditional love to their spouse. Who wouldn’t yield to a daily demonstration of that kind of love, whether man or woman?
When contemplating the ideal Christian gender roles, rather than thinking of the chains and whips used in our depraved pop culture’s most recent literary up-chuck, consider instead the whips and chains used on Christ’s first followers (perhaps even reading on the subject in the most popular book of all time, the Bible). These courageous people lived lives contrary to their cultural norms in the manner taught by the one to whom they willingly submitted and called Lord or Master. Isn’t that what we should really be getting at, anyway?
