Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford (Stars Playhouse 2023)

To start with, let’s get our John Fords straight. There is the pioneering movie director, whose career spanned the transition from silent movies to some of John Wayne’s iconic roles. (My wife and I got to see one of his silent films that had been presumed lost, but turned up in New Zealand.) 

 

And then there is John Ford, the 17th Century playwright and poet. This play is by the latter. 

 

Although he wrote quite a number of plays, he is best known for this one, Tis Pity She’s a Whore. 

 

The title will, unfortunately, accurately capture the misogyny in the play - although how much is Ford himself versus that of his unpleasant characters is debatable. At least as presented here, a good part of the horror of the narrative is the way the women are objectified, and made to serve as the outlets for male violence and frustration. 

 

The play was written about 30 years after Romeo and Juliet, and director Cody Ganger notes that Ford seems to have drawn some influence from it. But he added a LOT more blood, and made the story not about feuding families, but about incest. 

 

Young Annabella (Justine Luevano) and her brother Giovanni (Jesse Magdaleno) fall in love, and enter a sexual relationship which eventually leads to her pregnancy. Partly complicit in this is Puttana (Ellie Sivesind), Annabella’s nurse and guardian. 

Giovanni (Jesse Magdaleno) and Annabella (Justine Luevano)

Meanwhile, there are a pair of suitors for Annabella’s hand. There is the boorish soldier, Grimaldi (Dusty Steele), who doesn’t have much of a shot. And then there is Lord Soranzo (TJ Sandoval), who looks pretty good on paper, but who has a past that is….complicated. 

 

Soranzo has recently exited a relationship he has been having with a married woman, Hippolita (Cristina Goyeneche.) Well, she used to be a married woman, but she is presumed widowed after she convinced her husband, Richardetto (John Spitzer), to go on a dangerous voyage from which he is missing and presumed dead. 

 

Except that he isn’t. He has come back, working as a physician, and looking for revenge. 

 Grimaldi (Dusty Steele) and Richardetto (John Spitzer)

Here is where this production deviates a bit from the original source. In the original, there are three suitors, the third of which gives up fairly early, and pursues the doctor’s niece instead. This allows the scene in which Grimaldi tries to kill Soranzo result in mistaken identity and the death of the third suitor, instead of a fight gone wrong that ends in Grimaldi’s death. Unfortunately, omitting this scene and the two extra characters did make for a lack of clarity - why didn’t Soranzo die of the poisoned knife? This is a minor quibble, but I did notice that something was omitted. 

 

Okay, back to the plot. When Annabella realizes she is pregnant, she decides to agree to marry Soranzo, to save her honor. 

 

Enter Soranzo’s nefarious servant, Vasquez (Kevin Ganger.) He double and triple deals with the characters, taking whatever tack gets him the most at a particular time, and in the end betraying pretty much everyone. 

 

Vasquez first pretends to befriend Hippolita and agrees to help her murder Soranzo. After sleeping with her, of course. But he switches glasses, and Hippolita dies instead. He realizes early that Annabella is pregnant, but assumes his master got a little ahead of things - he uses this to inflame the fury of Grimaldi. 

 Soranzo (TJ Sandoval), Hippolita (Christina Goyeneche), and Vasquez (Kevin Ganger)

He then gets Puttana to reveal the truth, and assists Soranzo in plotting to murder Giovanni. 

 

And then things go pretty crazy. Let’s just say that in the end, nearly everyone is dead. Friar Bonaventura (Scott Deaton) has the good sense to see the impending disaster and get the hell out of there. Richardetto, having seen his wife die in front of him and Grimaldi fail, abandons his plans for revenge against Soranzo, and thus avoids dying. A few minor characters aren’t worth killing off. And Puttana appears to have been blinded but not killed. 

 

And when I say “everyone dies,” I mean violently and with a lot of fake blood. After fights that involve people slammed against walls, bashed in the head, and generally bloodied. It’s a mess. 

 

At the end, there is even a heart plucked out and paraded around. So perhaps a warning for violence there. 

 

There is also some simulated sex, although no nudity, and not really graphic at all. Cody Ganger is a trained intimacy coach, and the careful choreographing of both the sex scenes and the violent fight scenes show great care in making sure the actors were neither injured nor put in uncomfortable situations. 

 

When I mentioned the misogyny, I was particularly thinking of the way that every time a man became upset, uncomfortable, threatened, he seemed to go straight to “let me hit or kill a woman.” No surprise that a 17th Century play set in ancient Italy would have patriarchal norms and a sexual double standard. And no surprise that honor culture is on full display. It is still uncomfortable. 

 

Of course, it is also an unpleasant reminder that honor killings aren’t exactly limited to “those people” in the Middle East - Ford thought having one in his very English play only 400 years ago was perfectly normal. 

 

Again, though, the question as to what Ford himself thought of all this is another matter. He clearly builds up plenty of sympathy for Hippolita, even though she has attempted to murder her husband. She is still a spurned woman, now left desolate. 

 

Likewise, it is impossible not to feel bad for Annabella. Her brother is older, and the initial aggressor, but she is left to pay the price no matter what. She cannot be with Giovanni, obviously. But she does not love Soranzo at all, and, after he guesses her pregnancy, he turns vicious and cruel….just like he is to Hippolita. For all his suavity, he is really shitty person when it comes to his treatment of women. Hump and dump. 

 

There really isn’t much of anyone to like in this play. Puttana is as unhelpful as Juliet’s nurse, and too clueless to avoid betraying her ward. Father Buenaventura is notable mostly for his failure to make any positive difference, and for his description of the horrors of hell - particularly for females who have sex out of wedlock. This passage drew a lot of laughs because of its “unintentional comedy factor.” Whether Ford intended it seriously (probably) it feels now like a parody of every bad hellfire and brimstone sermon we ex-fundies ever heard. You know, the ones with a screed against sex that seems to conceal a bit too much fascination with the subject. 

 

Even the father, Florio (Randy Messick), is too clueless to actually listen to either of his children. Although he does get a chance to cut his own throat dramatically - which was done with all the delicious melodrama that a retired drama professor can muster. (We all love Randy, who did so much for theater at Bakersfield College in the many decades he taught there. It is great to see him still on stage, even in minor roles.) 

 

Thus, Tis Pity She’s a Whore is in the vein of Titus Andronicus. Everything is horrible, everyone is horrible, everything ends badly, and they all deserve it. Or something like that. 

 

A play like this can only work if the actors are able to sell it. And in this production, they sure did. Locals will recognize quite a number of local drama teachers in the cast, and other veterans of the local stage. Relative youngsters Magaleno and Luevano in the lead roles had solid sexual chemistry, and conjured tears and emotions quite convincingly. Ganger was as delicious as usual in the villain role - he seems to relish them along with the goofball characters. Sandoval embodied the utter lack of self-regulation of his character, swinging between tender wooing and uncontained fury as the play progressed. Goyeneche, Sivesind, and Spitzer tend to be on my list of reliably good veterans, and they were great here too. And, a mention of Deaton, Gary Enns, and Steele for fine work in smaller parts.

 

Stars Playhouse is in a small industrial space. Since The Empty Space moved to larger digs, I think the Playhouse is now the smallest venue here in town, and they have to make do with very little. That means creativity, and the sets and staging made the most of the resources. To a significant degree, this was done with lighting and movement. The back of the stage area was usually dark, and served to house the various props and furniture when not in use - and also for the sex scene and the heart-ripping scene. These were both at a distance, and with softer lighting. I thought it was well thought out and effective. 

 

The fight choreography was quite detailed. These were not improvised fights, but set to a music of their own, so to speak. The spring-loaded stage knives, the fake blood, and the sleight of hand needed to fake smashing blows convincingly are not to be taken lightly. Several of the moves looked like bad technique would have ended in real concussions. So props to Goyeneche and Steele for their work as fight choreographers. 

 

This is a dark play, a horror play, but was well done. The Playhouse has been tackling some more difficult works the last few years, which has been fun. In general, since the pandemic, I think local theater has been eager to branch out and do more challenging plays. The local theater crowd appears to be responding, too, as there have been a lot of sold out dates. 

 

Bakersfield has a vibrant theater scene, which is one of the best things about this town. Rather than complaining about having nothing to do on a Friday night, come on out to one of our local stages and see what is going on. 

 

Maurice by E. M. Forster

Source of book: I own this

 

Hey, this is my third annual Pride Month read. The others were Q.E.D. by Gertrude Stein, and The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. You can also check out my list of LGBTQ+ authors. 

 

Edward Morgan Forster is one of those authors that has kind of flown under the radar for decades. Everyone knows the great Victorian authors, even if they haven’t read any of them. American authors of the mid-20th Century also get a lot of press - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck - as they should. But the Edwardian authors seem to get little attention, which is a shame. 

 

E. M. Forster in particular is an egregious omission from today’s canon. I also realized that this is the first Forster book I have read since I started this blog - I loved Howard’s End very much, but then somehow never got back to him. Two things triggered this read. First was the simple fact that I found a used copy of Maurice in a used book store a couple years ago. If I hadn’t already picked Cather for last year, I would have read it then. The second thing was Zadie Smith’s excellent essay on Forster, which reminded me of why I liked him. 

 

For whatever reason, Forster was self-deprecating to a fault, never considering himself to be a good author, let alone a great one. This was unfair, for some very good reasons. I’ll let Zadie Smith explain:

 

In the taxonomy of English writing, E. M. Forster is not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or garden variety. Yet there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare bird. He was largely free of vices commonly found in novelists of his generation - what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He didn’t lean rightward with the years, or allow nostalgia to morph into misanthropy; he never knelt for the pope or queen, nor did he flirt (ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin or Mao; he never believed the novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum or foreigners swamping the cities.

 

Forster was, in a way, a bit like myself. He was conservative by temperament (as am I), but progressive when it came to the important issues of his day - class, race, warmongering, universal education. 

 

Oh, and there is one more thing: Forster was gay in an era when to be a gay man in England was to be a criminal.

 

While his sexual orientation was not exactly a well-kept secret, at least among his friends, he obviously couldn’t be open about it, or risk his freedom like Oscar Wilde. His longest relationship was with a married man - and probably the wife knew about it. Such was how things went in that time - LGBTQ people mostly had to stay in the closet if they wanted to survive. 

 

Maurice is the black sheep of Forster’s novels. Conceived in 1913, but mostly written in 1932, it was later revised slightly in 1960. Forster considered publishing it, but decided it was too risky. Instead, it was published in 1971, a year after Forster’s death. Critics weren’t all that fond of it, although it is difficult to separate out their artistic concerns from a hell of a lot of homophobia. 

 

The core problem has to do with the ending - and there are three different versions. (My copy has the 1932 version, which Forster apparently said he preferred.) The endings aren’t radically different, from what I can tell - in each case [spoiler] the ending is happy for the gay couple. 

 

And THAT is the fundamental reason that Forster felt he couldn’t publish the novel. If he had killed off his protagonist - preferably through suicide - it would have been fine. After all, there is nothing explicit in the book, unless you count a kiss. There is a brief reference to the pair of men having sex, but “I gave him everything including my body” is plenty PG. 

 

No, the problem was in the foundational message of the book: that homosexuality is a normal part of the human spectrum of existence, and that homosexual love is as beautiful and worthy as heterosexual love. 

 

Yeah, that was still a problem, even in 1960. Unfortunately, in some parts of the United States, the censors are again on the warpath, eager to suppress the truth about human (and indeed animal) sexuality in the name of religion. (You can read my recent post about the true root of anti-LGBTQ bigotry, which is misogyny here.) 

 

Maurice was inspired by the life of Forster’s friend, the poet and gay-rights activist Edward Carpenter. Like the fictional Maurice, Carpenter had a long-term relationship with a working-class man (a bit scandalous in itself, those cross-class relationships.) Forster likely also based part of the book on his own childhood and early adulthood. 

 

When the book opens, young Maurice Hall is given an awkward lecture on sex by a schoolteacher. At that moment, he realizes that marriage to a woman makes no sense to him as the goal of life. He returns home on vacation to find that the servant boy he used to play with has left, and he is heartbroken, yet cannot understand why?

 

The book then follows Maurice to Cambridge, where he has an intense (and essentially romantic) yet platonic relationship with another student. It is through this that he comes to understand his sexuality. After hypnosis fails to “cure” him, he realizes who he is. Later, he becomes involved with a working-class man, and decides to give up his social status to be with him. 

 

That is a really short summary, and omits a lot - particularly of Maurice’s inner life, which is one of Forster’s best skills. But it gives the idea. 

 

Like other Forster novels, the book isn’t primarily about what happens, but how the characters respond to it. By getting inside Maurice’s head, the book makes a compelling argument for acceptance of sexual orientation, and for the beauty of mutual erotic love, regardless of gender. 

 

One fascinating question concerns the character of Clive, who is Maurice’s great platonic love in college. It is never entirely clear what to make of Clive. He certainly seems to lean gay in many ways. Yet after an illness, he claims to have become completely heterosexual, and goes on to marry a woman. 

 

Yet this goes poorly. She is completely ignorant of sex, and freaks out on the wedding night, despite Clive’s gentleness and care. She kind of gets over it, and they do have a sex life of sorts, but it is always silent, in the dark, and they never see each other naked. And more than that, they never, ever talk about it. Yeesh. That’s really sad and depressing. Clive’s later words and actions also make one wonder if he is still gay, because he doesn’t take Maurice’s moving on from him particularly well. 

 

Clive isn’t a bad guy, either. You feel for him, even though he hurts Maurice deeply. Both are caught up in a brew of social expectations, personal beliefs, and the usual human drama involving sex and relationships. He and Maurice are not a true match, as they both eventually realize. But it still hurts. 

 

This too is classic Forster. I think he writes about heartbreak and doomed relationships as well as anyone, and his understated style allows the catastrophes to hit even harder. 

 

There are some outstanding lines in this book.

 

As soon as he thought about other people as real, Maurice became modest and conscious of sin: in all creation there could be no one as file as himself: no wonder he pretended to be a piece of cardboard; if known as he was, he would be hounded out of the world.

 

This, I think, is the experience of a lot of gay people of my generation - and even more so before. For those raised with the idea that to be gay was the worst possible sin, this seems a sad inevitability. One reason that the Fundies are freaked out about any book that explains the truth of human sexuality is that they depend on creating intense self-loathing to preserve their dogmas. And they are willing to see LGBTQ kids commit suicide as a better alternative to them finding self-acceptance of who they are. 

 

I also liked this perceptive description of Maurice’s torment after Clive “goes hetero.” 

 

A refined nature would have behaved better and perhaps have suffered less. Maurice was not intellectual, nor religious, nor had he that strange solace of self-pity that is granted to some. Except on one point his temperament was normal, and he behaved as would the average man who after two years of happiness had been betrayed by his wife. 

 

Again, Forster does such a great job of humanizing and normalizing this. And that is why the book couldn’t be published. He refused to pathologize and dehumanize LGBTQ people. 

 

Also telling is the passage in which Maurice consults a doctor. Who unfortunately is unable to actually understand what Maurice is clearly saying - that this is how he is, how he was born. 

 

Dr. Barry had given the best advice he could. He had read no scientific works on Maurice’s subject. None had existed when he walked the hospitals, and any published since were in German, and therefore suspect. Averse to it by temperament, he endorsed the verdict of society gladly; that is to say, his verdict was theological. He held that only the most depraved could glance at Sodom, and so, when a man of good antecedents and physique confessed the tendency, “Rubbish, rubbish!” was his natural reply. 

 

This raises several interesting points. First, those German researchers who studied gay and transgender people were the ones whose works were largely destroyed by Hitler. (NEVER forget that Hitler targeted LGBTQ people as ferociously as he did Jewish people.) 

 

Second, this illustrates a key part of my growth toward full acceptance and inclusion of LGBTQ people, despite growing up Fundamentalist. I started noticing that it wasn’t “depraved” people I knew who were coming out as gay. Often, they were thoroughly devout, moral and ethical people who were horrified to discover their own sexual orientation. I realized that what I had been taught was false. People were just born gay, and didn’t become that way through increasing depravity. I mean, twelve years old. Think about that. 

 

The priest in the story, while also not a bad person, is likewise completely unhelpful. He becomes obsessed with getting Alec baptized before he leaves for South America. In part, this is because he wants to make sure that the Church will not have any culpability if Alec goes wrong. Maurice nails it:

 

“I’m awfully stupid, but I think I see: you want to make sure that he and not the Church shall be to blame in the future. Well, sir, that may be your idea of religion but it isn’t mine and it wasn’t Christ’s.” 

 

I have written recently about why I think the whole “go out and make converts” thing is shit, and this to a large degree encapsulates it. It is more about “avoiding blame” than actually living how Christ taught. I feel like this is also how my parents (particularly my mom) have been in regard to me and my family. Long gone is any willingness to live in harmony and mutual understanding. Rather, she is focused on making her disapproval of us clear, so she avoids blame if we go wrong - it wasn’t HER fault. Lost entirely is the possibility of a relationship. 

 

As a final quote, I want to mention the conversation Maurice has with his hypnotist, who has given up on curing him. Instead, Mr. Lasker Jones advises Maurice to leave England, and go live some place where homosexuality isn’t criminalized. Perhaps Italy or France. Maurice asks if that will ever happen in England. Jones replies:

 

“I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

 

The same might be said of the United States, particularly the Bible Belt. 

 

In fact, it wasn’t until 1967 - three years before Forster’s death, that England decriminalized consensual male homosexual acts. And even then, the lack of free speech rights left Forster unconvinced that he could publish Maurice without criminal charges. 

 

England (and the US) still lag behind other countries when it comes to Transgender rights, unfortunately. Mr. Lasker Jones had it right - we remain disinclined to accept human nature. Particularly when reality challenges dogma - and hierarchy. 

 

One thing that struck me the most about this book was the way that Forster is able to boldly proclaim the truth. For all his self-doubts about his own abilities, for all his gentle self-deprecation, he knew the truth of who he was, and the purity of his own love. That is the single point that Maurice refuses to compromise on. LGBTQ+ people are normal and natural. Their love is as transcendent as that of cishet people. Their reality is as real as that of cishet people. The fault lies not in them, but in the society that refuses to accept human nature. 

 

A final thought about this book: the one thing the critics were right about is that this book isn’t as superbly written as, say, Howard’s End. On the plus side, Maurice is intensely personal, and that is its strength. On the flip side, because it is so personal, Forster’s rapier wit and satirical ability are not able to be displayed as fully as in his books about heterosexual relationships. The book has its dull parts, but these are outweighed by the fascinating passages, and the keen psychological perception. 

 

I guess the way I would say it is that you can start with Maurice, but don’t take it as the very best of Forster. Be sure to read his best masterpieces before you decide what you think of him. But as a persuasive work of fiction, Maurice is indeed a true work of art.  

 

Pride Month 2023: The Root of Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry is Misogyny

“Why do we no longer consider people with epilepsy to be demon possessed and treat them with exorcisms (or stoning if they cannot be cured), but we cannot adapt to better scientific knowledge of human sexuality?” ~ Me

 

This is my annual post for Pride Month. Here are my prior posts:

 

2022: Neurodiversity and Intersex as ways of understanding the LGBTQIA+ Experience

2021: Possible Christian Responses to LGBTQ+ People

2020: The Moment I Became a “Side A” [affirming] Christian

2016: (unofficial) If You Support Anti-LGBTQ+ “Religious Freedom” Laws, You Aren’t Really Different from Omar Mateen

 

***

 

The Root of Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigotry is Misogyny

 

One of the most dangerous things a person can do is read the Bible for themselves. The whole thing. Even as a kid - and definitely as a teen, I started noticing that the Bible didn’t actually say what people (Evangelicals) said it said. And also that it contained a lot that made me ask awkward questions. 

 

For example:

 

Why are male homosexual acts mentioned in the Torah, but female homosexual acts are never mentioned once? 

 

For that matter, why is the only possible mention of female homosexual acts in the New Testament really vague and seem to be about taking a male role in sex? 

 

Why does female consent to sex seem to be irrelevant in the Torah? 

 

Why does the Bible seem to endorse keeping women as sex slaves? (Concubines) And why is this never condemned anywhere in either Testament?

 

Why does the Bible say a woman can be forced to marry her rapist?

 

Why are women listed along with slaves and donkeys in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere? 

 

Why does Ezekiel’s description of the Sin of Sodom have nothing about sex?

 

Why would an entire population of men want to rape a stranger who comes to their town?

 

Why would the response to that demand be to sacrifice a helpless woman to the mob?

 

Why is there no penalty for a man who grabs the genitals of a woman, but a woman who grabs a man’s genitals gets her hand cut off?

 

Why is “sexual immorality” never actually defined in the New Testament? 

 

What does “sexual immorality” even mean? 

 

This was just while I was young. As I got older, and learned more about the original words underlying our modern translations as well as the historical contexts that the books of the Bible were written in, I had even more questions. 

 

If the Bible were meant to be the last word on sexual practices, and literally written by God, why does the Torah so closely resemble the older Ancient Near East legal codes? 

 

Why does the Torah assume that women are chattel, to be bought and sold and taken as plunder? 

 

Why did Saint Paul just make up words that are found nowhere else in contemporary writings? 

 

And why do we translate those words to mean male homosexuality, when Paul could have used common and existing words to mean that? 

 

What did Saint Paul mean to do in addressing the Domestic Codes? 

 

Since Roman freemen could rape their male or female slaves without legal or social penalty, what does “slaves submit to your masters” mean in practice? 

 

Is it a sin for a male slave to be raped? 

 

The Romans were obsessed with the idea of penetration versus being penetrated, and the relationship of those roles to social status. Does that understanding shape how we understand a ban on male homosexuality? 

 

And, of course, the really awkward ones about modern conservative Christianity.

 

Why do we consider sexual sins to be the very worst sins?

 

Why have we changed our minds about so many other things, but this is the one we cannot change?

 

Why do we no longer consider people with epilepsy to be demon possessed and treat them with exorcisms (or stoning if they cannot be cured), but we cannot adapt to better scientific knowledge of human sexuality?

 

Why are the people who are most opposed to LGBTQ people also the ones most obsessed with male power over females?

 

And for that matter, why are they significantly likely (if white) to be strongly racist? (This is a pattern borne out both by my personal experience and survey data.) 

 

These questions demand an answer, and I have been thinking about the issue for many years. And also reading and learning, and searching through the historical context for clues about why this particular issue has become so resistant to modern knowledge and increased empathy. 

 

***

 

I remember a few major epiphanies in my journey away from the fundamentalist view of human sexuality, but one of the biggest ones has to be that passionately anti-gay sermon my former pastor gave. But also, I remember one of the Patriarchy Bros (I forget which one) stating that the only viable defense against gay marriage was “complementarianism” (Christianese for Patriarchy.) 

 

That last one really got me thinking: was he right? 

 

Was the only viable counterargument to gay marriage the idea that men should rule - exert power and control over women? 

 

From there, I started researching the history of anti-gay beliefs - particularly in the ancient world - and started to realize that anti-gay bigotry didn’t just come out of nowhere. And it certainly wasn’t some divine revelation. It came from a very specific place:

 

Misogyny.

 

Let me explain this a bit. The Bible was written in a cultural context – contexts in fact – and understanding what is being said requires understanding the culture. The water in which the human authors swam and the frames of reference from which they understood the world.

 

***

 

The Old Testament

 

In the culture of the Ancient Near East - the context in which humans wrote the Torah - women were chattel. Let’s get that straight at the outset. Women were chattel, just like donkeys and oxen and slaves. They were owned by men. And this ownership was justified by a belief that women were congenitally inferior to men, subhuman, and incapable of making their own decisions for their lives. 

 

Any understanding of the sexual rules in the Torah needs to start with that basic reality.

 

Why is polygamy just fine? Why are sex slaves permitted? If you can afford a lot of donkeys - or women - go for it. That’s the benefit of being rich. 

 

If you look at the list of awkward questions at the top of this post, every single one of those makes sense if you understand that women were chattel. And also, they do not make sense outside of that context. 

 

How does this fit with the prohibition on male homosexuality? 

 

Well, if a man allows himself to be penetrated by a p---s - as if he were a woman - he is degrading himself. He is throwing away the symbol of power and dominance - his organ of penetration - and taking on the role of the dominated. He is - in essence - becoming a woman. He is lowering himself to the status of chattel.

 

And, on the other end, a man who penetrates another man as if he were a woman is degrading that man. This is the real story of Sodom and the real story of the Levite’s concubine (sex slave) - men wanted to degrade and do violence to another male. This is also why rape has always been a part of war. To penetrate the enemy - females, males, and children - is to utterly dominate and humiliate them. 

 

Again, look at the underlying belief: women are less than men. They can be raped and humiliated, bought and sold, and penetrated at will by their owners. For a man to “lower” himself to the status of a woman is shameful. To degrade another man to the level of a woman is wrong because of what it means for that man’s status. 

 

If you think about it, this also explains why Lot offered his virgin daughters to be raped, and why the Levite let his concubine be raped and murdered - women exist to be brutalized and penetrated, so it is a lesser evil to sacrifice them than to let a male be humiliated. 

 

Going deeper than that, it becomes obvious why female homosexuality isn’t even mentioned. 

 

The issue isn’t about orgasms. It is about power and dominance. 

 

You can see this in the penalty against a woman who grabs a man’s p---s. She gets her hand cut off - without mercy. (No such penalty for a man who gropes a woman.) A woman asserts dominance over a man when she grabs his d--k, and that turns the hierarchy on its head. 

 

But women getting each other off carries no particular weight. The chattel can do what it likes with themselves, as long as they do not violate the hierarchy. 

 

By the way, this question about lesbian sex - is it even sex, without a p---s? - has persisted into the modern era - I’ll discuss that below. 

 

***

 

The New Testament

 

By the time we get to the New Testament, there have been some cultural changes. Polygamy is on its way out, for example. Multiple wives means too many legitimate heirs. In a herdsman society like the OT, property rights aren’t quite as important - just split the herd up among the sons. But when land is the source of wealth, it can be diluted by too many heirs. Thus, one wife, a handful at most of legitimate heirs, and the other women a man wants can be mistresses or sex slaves who do not produce legitimate heirs. 

 

Key to understanding everything about sex in the New Testament is a work by Aristotle, Politics. He writes about the proper organization of society, including the “natural” hierarchies that he sees as key. 

 

And by “natural hierarchies,” Aristotle means that (in his view), females were males that failed to develop properly, and were thus subhuman - like children, in fact, who needed to be controlled and guided their entire lives. But there is more to the hierarchy than just gender. 

 

Namely, there are freemen at the top of the hierarchy. Below them are women, slaves, and children. This is similar to the ownership of women as found in the OT, but not quite the same. There is less of the transactional nature of marriage, and the emphasis isn’t on ownership, but obedience and submission. 

 

When it comes to sex, the key issue here is penetration. Who penetrates whom is the issue. 

 

For the Greeks and Romans, penetration was an act of dominance. A person higher in the hierarchy could penetrate someone below, but a person below could not penetrate someone higher up. 

 

(All other things being equal - a woman or slave belonged to their freeman, so adultery or abuse of another’s slave was still considered wrong - and illegal. But the reason isn’t that the slave had rights - but that the wrongdoer was messing with another man’s chattel. It was a property crime.) 

 

This led to some realities that we find abhorrent today. A freeman could rape his slaves at will - male, female, and even children. This was not considered immoral. Homosexuality was permitted, as long as the higher status person was the penetrator. 

 

(Note here: the same basic dynamic was present in American Chattel Slavery too. A white enslaver could rape his slaves at will - particularly the female ones - but there was great fearmongering about the reverse - the black man having sex with a white woman. This later became the justification for lynching, and remains a pernicious stereotype about black people and sexuality today.) 

 

So, it is easy enough to see why male homosexuality would be a problem for early Christians. In a radically equal community, one man asserting dominance over another would be problematic. Certainly, a Christian man could not in good conscience degrade another man - that is not loving your neighbor.

 

I’ll get to female homosexuality in a bit, but I want to look at how this egalitarian instinct also affects the discussion of heterosexuality. The passages on female submission, if read in the light of Aristotle and in context with the entire passages, are actually quite radical. Spouses are to submit to each other, to care for and love each other. The sexual needs of both spouses are important. (In a culture where women were considered to be sexually insatiable, a command to not withhold sex from your spouse was a pretty feminist statement. A modern application would be that men should make sure their wives orgasm.) 

 

Thus, even within the heterosexual sex act, the NT pushes back against the culture in an egalitarian direction. That this also involved a pushback against Greco-Roman tolerance of male rape is unsurprising - and this fact should play into how we interpret passages involving homosexuality. To leave out the power and rape dynamic in the New Testament context would be as absurd as to interpret stories in the Old Testament that are clearly about gang rape as being about consensual gay sex. 

 

Now, to discuss a bit about female homosexuality. 

 

The one passage (Romans 1) that might be referencing female homosexuality has been much debated in the centuries immediately after its writing. I noted in a previous post that some early church fathers believed it referred to a specific cult wherein women penetrated men with dildos. 

 

More recently, though, I found this fascinating academic article by a local college professor. (My wife took one of his classes for her BSN, and that is how I ended up reading The Sacred and the Profane.) In it, he looks at the issue of cunni!ingus. Apparently, the Romans were smart enough to understand that the clitoris is analogous to the p---s - it is kind of a little penis. Or, alternately, a p---s is an enlarged clitoris. Take your pick. 

 

What this means is that when a woman’s clitoris penetrates another person, she is taking on the “male” role - the penetrator. Hmm, this sounds interesting, doesn’t it? So, for a woman to oral s-x another woman would be to be penetrated - and that would, essentially, be a violation of the hierarchy. A woman asserting dominance, rather than being dominated. Which is why, in Roman culture, it was actually worse (from a social perspective) for a man give oral s-x on a woman - it was being “penetrated” by a woman - than it was for a man to suck of another man. At least in the latter, the social status might be equal. 

 

This started to sound familiar, from another book I read, Geoffrey Stone’s excellent Sex and the Constitution. In an early chapter, he discusses Medieval theology regarding sexuality (which is fascinating and horrifying at the same time), including the all-important question of what “sex” even is. (Shades of Bill Clinton here.) 

 

The conclusion of Medieval theologians was - surprise! - that sex was about penetration. Hey, does this sound familiar? So, if penetration wasn’t involved, it wasn’t sex. It was merely m@sturbation, which was a pretty minor sin. 

 

Thus, women could do a lot of things that weren’t sex. Particularly since the theologians had forgotten about the clitoris altogether. So, women having oral s-x with each other? Not sex. Women tr!bbing? Not sex. 

 

Women penetrating someone with a dildo? Yeah, definitely sex. It ain’t sex without a p---s, yo. 

 

So again, we see that male homosexuality is an issue, with female homosexuality an afterthought at most. I think this is helpful in understanding what the NT might be meaning when it talks about women forsaking their proper role or function in sex - that is, being the penetrated party. 

 

***

 

Now let’s fast forward to today:

 

In my own everyday life, I have found that the moments when a person’s genitals matter are really rare. In fact, for the most part, the only moments that require knowing genitals are sexual encounters with my wife - genitals definitely matter there. 

 

I also have had a handful of cases (particularly one involving an intersex person two decades ago) where genital configuration became important - but these are really rare. 

 

My wife has more moments where genitals matter - as a nurse, care can be different when it involves the reproductive system. But even there, the issue is giving appropriate care, NOT evaluating a person’s worth based on their genitals. 

 

In contrast, for cultural conservatives, NOTHING ELSE is as important to know about another person as their genital configuration.

 

I am using “cultural conservative” here for lack of a better term (although sexist comes close, and I have used “cultural fundamentalism” in the religious context) for people who believe in gender essentialism, gender roles, and gender hierarchies. As I noted at the beginning, these are the people most likely to be anti-LGBTQ+ bigots as well - they are inseparably linked. 

 

My experience has been in American Evangelicalism, but you can fill in other conservative religious traditions, conservative cultures, and so on - any subgroup that holds these beliefs about women. 

 

So let’s look at this more closely. What do genitals determine for cultural conservatives?

 

 

Do you get to lead/preach in the church? Can you do so on a truly equal basis? 

 

I have found that even in more liberal churches, it is rare to see true equality: equal representation on the board, equal time in the pulpit, equal say in major decisions, equal pay. 

 

But in culturally conservative churches - like the Southern Baptist Convention - the single most important qualification for leadership is having a p---s. If you don’t have one, you are relegated to secondary status. 

 

This flows into other areas too - a general belief that people with p---ses are uniquely qualified to be leaders, while those with v----s are not - they must instead submit and follow. 

What is your role in a marriage and family?

 

In culturally conservative circles, it is an article of faith - non-negotiable - that the person with a p---s is in charge. He gets to have the final (and often the only) say in major decisions, and the v----a person is expected to submit and obey. 

 

But there is more too: while not universal, the more conservative subcultures believe that only the person with a p---s should do paid work, particularly outside the home. (Oh yes, this was a huge reason why we are estranged from my parents. My mom never forgave my wife for working outside the home. And made things unpleasant for my wife for a decade and a half before my wife decided to get out of the situation altogether. See below for more on that.) 

 

Along with this comes the belief that menial labor should be primarily done by the person with the v----a. Things like household drudgery - cooking, cleaning, organizing - and also the childcare and the emotional labor of the family. The way you know these are considered menial tasks isn’t just that males don’t want to do them (in conservative subcultures) but also that wealthy people farm these out to low-wage people - also usually women - as soon as they have the money to do so. 

 

There is also a LOT of stigma for being a stay-at-home dad. 

 

Oh, and one more thing: does your sexual pleasure matter? Have you noticed all the ink spilled in conservative circles on how men need sex, and wives had better put out on demand? And then contrast that with how little attention is paid to female pleasure? I cannot think of a single Evangelical sex book that insists women have the right to an orgasm every sexual encounter. Most don’t even mention the clitoris. And NONE mention that most women cannot come to orgasm by penetration alone. This could be a whole post itself. But Rebekah Mui already wrote a great one. 

 

Together, this makes clear that females are assigned a lower status in conservative subcultures. 

What is your expected role in society? 

 

I have blogged about this before, and probably will again. In the most conservative of subcultures, women are relegated completely to the home, excluded from economic and political life. But even in less conservative societies, there is still a wage gap, and the expectation that if children need care, the woman sacrifices her career rather than the man. 

 

Even for career women, there is an expectation that they take on subservient roles, or prioritize family life (in a way men are pressured not to.) Leadership at the highest levels still tend to be male, although this is shifting. 

 

One could also mention the belief that men should be ruthless competitors, while women have to provide society’s compassion. 

Do you have the right to follow your calling?

 

I blogged about this a good bit in my most recent post on the Duggars. The basic belief is that women – v----a people - are subhuman and thus do not get to determine their own lives for themselves. Certainly not in the way men are. A woman cannot simply follow her calling in life, and serve others in accordance with her gifts. She must instead resign herself to motherhood, submission to males, and domestic drudgery. 

 

This was anathema to my wife, of course. She now is a manager at a local hospital, responsible for nearly 100 employees - a true leadership role. Her refusal to accept the relegation to domesticity first got her shunned by the cultic group she spent her teens in, then eventually led to her rejection by my parents. Because vagina people don’t get the right to do as they wish with their lives and bodies. 

Do you have the right to be treated with respect?

 

The further I get from Evangelicalism, the more I see the general disrespect that women are treated with in that subculture. Particularly when they don’t “perform gender” to expectations. 

 

In my own birth family, I see this too now. Respect for a v----a person had nothing to do with common humanity, but with how well that person performed the gender expectations. Unsurprisingly, this system attracts narcissists of both genders. Attention based on performance, plus the right to look down on those who don’t perform? That is crack cocaine to narcissists. 

 

So, if you actually look at how daily life looks to an egalitarian like me, we find that very few moments have anything to do with genital configuration.

 

But to a cultural conservative, every interaction with other humans turns on what genitals they have.

 

Should they lead or be subservient? Should they be seen as a colleague, or as an inferior? Do you have to treat them with the same respect? What standard of gender performance should I demand of them? Do I have to listen to them seriously, or dismiss them as having the wrong genitals to know about theology or politics? 

 

Boiled down, the question is where do you fit in the hierarchy?

 

Without knowing a person’s genitals, you cannot determine this. 

 

***

 

So what does this idea of female inferiority have to do with LGBTQ+ people?

 

Back to the idea of misogyny. I intentionally use that word rather than “sexism,” because the element of inferiority is key here. It is disgusting and humiliating for a man to “lower” himself to the role of a woman. A woman is considered not merely “less than” a man, but a degradation of maleness. 

 

Once you realize this, it is clear that the Patriarchists are indeed correct: the prohibition on homosexuality (and being transgender) depends on and is inseparable from a belief in the inferiority of women to men. 

 

As it was in the past, the real issue with men having s-x with men is “who is the girl in the relationship.” Likewise for female homosexuality. 

 

Because, for cultural conservatives, there HAS to be a hierarchy - someone has to “wear the pants,” “make the decisions,” “lead,” and so on. Someone has to be the boss - someone has to have power over someone else, and that person has to have a p---s. 

 

So, homosexual relationships challenge the idea that a true marriage can only exist if it has a power differential. 

 

Similarly for being transgender: refusing to stay in the lane assigned to you at birth threatens the hierarchy. (This is also why, regardless of what they claim, fundamentalists cannot actually - in practice - admit that intersex people exist outside the binary.) Any person who cannot be crammed into the gender binary is a huge threat to a hierarchy of men over women. 

 

For just a recent example of this thinking, here is a (laughably bad) imitation of the Screwtape Letters, asserting that egalitarian marriages are essentially gay marriages. 

 

I mean, I guess I was in a gay marriage all this time and didn’t know it? Because my wife and I shoulder the same amount of burden (or at least try to), offer the same amount of sacrifice, both lead and follow as the circumstances dictate. (Although neither of us feels responsible to God for the other - we are freaking grownups, not children.) And yes, we very much identify our relationship as “teammates, best friends, enlightened, liberated, progressive, and egalitarian.” 

 

It is sad that there are so many people who do not experience the joys of an egalitarian marriage. I greatly prefer the freedom to function in our relationship according to our gifting, rather than be forced into a gender performance that would make both of us miserable. 

 

But notice - marriage is about power to cultural conservatives. Gender is about power. Sex is about power. 

 

And in that sense, the Fundies are right - the root of anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry is the power differential - and let’s be clear, it is p---s people having power over v-----a people. And the root of that belief is misogyny - the belief that v----a people are inferior to p---s people, and can be treated with contempt and disregard. 

 

I also need to mention my parents at this point. Regular readers know we have been estranged for a few years, but the seeds were planted many years ago. Years later, the toxic fruit has poisoned everything. 

 

Early in my relationship with my wife, we decided that, although we would be flexible based on circumstances (before you have kids, you are just guessing….), the goal for us would be to split childrearing and breadwinning duties. She would go back to work at some point after the kids were born, whether that was after they started school, or, as it turned out, 3 months after each birth. 

 

This was never accepted by my parents. The idea that my wife - a woman - a v----a person - could have the right to decide how to live her life - to the same degree that a p---s person could - was unthinkable. I was blindsided by how important it was to them that a woman “stay in her lane.” As in, it was more important to them than a relationship with me. Likewise, they were willing to lose our relationship over my wife’s decision to wear normal clothing, which they viewed as an impermissible assertion of her own sexuality. (That they sexualized her body is still something I find incredibly offensive and gross.) It was seeing that my parents did not feel obligated to respect my wife the same way they would respect a man that helped me understand the misogyny underlying conservative religion. 

 

This really helped to clarify some things. The reason that Fundies cannot accept our modern understanding of human sexuality is that to do so would destroy their preferred hierarchy. 

 

For Fundies - and unfortunately a lot of people in our broader culture - the most important thing you can know about someone is their gender. And this isn’t because we expect to f--k them. It is because knowing gender tells us how we are allowed to treat them. 

 

If they are male, best not disrespect or condescend to them. And certainly, you can’t tell them how to live their lives to a significant extent. But if they are female, you don’t have to respect them. Hell, grab ‘em by the p----y - if you are a star, you can get away with anything. 

 

So, if someone tries to tell you that their choice to consider LGBTQ people sinners is about “biblical authority” or some other bullshit, remember that the REAL root of it is what it has always been: misogyny. 

 

***

 

It is beyond the scope of this post, but I have come to realize that literally everything about the sexual rules of religious conservatives of all sorts (not limited to Christianity) is based on misogyny. Rebuilding a truly Christian sexual ethic, one not based on the inferiority of women and the right of men to control them, would result in a very different (and far better) set of rules. Here is one of the best discussions of that I have read:

 

The Bible and Non-Marital Sex

 

Anti-LGBTQ hate is costing organized religion a lot of people. The polling backs this up. For younger people, this is pretty much a deal breaker (for my own kids, for sure.) As Beau of the Fifth Column put it, the reason the pews are empty and churches are losing money is simply that it is cheaper to be a good person. For me, letting go of the “Christian duty” to withhold affirmation to LGBTQ+ people was one of the most freeing experiences of my life. I will never put those chains back on again. 

 ***

 

What's up with the bleeping? Originally, Blogger's algorithms flagged this as "adult: sensitive content" - probably because I used anatomical descriptions of genitals. I knew the correct names at age 3, so I guess I was an "adult"? Whatever.