I wrote Spirituality and Sex Ed: The easy agreements before I began writing about different ideas of Christian Masculinity, and since then, I realize the idea that we could all agree on teaching healthy relationships is a bit more complicated than I thought it was. What I believed as progressive principles to healthy relationships are apparently not without a lot of challenge from the extreme right. Originally, I stated that youth should learn how to compromise without compromising themselves, and that, as teens grow older, this means teaching a “yes means yes” approach to all aspects of a physical/sexual relationship.

Unfortunately, according to the “Wild at Heart” masculinity, these aren’t the parameters of a healthy relationship. Gender roles mean real differences in the way men and women should respond in a relationship.

Case in point: one of the interviews that brought up “Wild At Heart” for a volunteer position at my previous job. A man who came to volunteer at our ministry began talking about his life and mentioned that while he was jobless, he still thought it was more important to “be the man” and have his wife quit her job (that she enjoyed and through which she was making enough money to support them).  The family was currently on state benefits because of this man’s belief that a woman should not work outside the home, especially if “male headship” was threatened.  At the end of the conversation, he mentioned that they weren’t actually married yet, but that he felt married in the eyes of God and so they began to live like they were.  He made it explicit that Wild at Heart had influenced his views, influencing his decision to force his (not) wife to leave her job.  She sat in their truck outside the entire time he was in the office, which always personally bothered me.

Healthy relationships aren’t being taught in schools.  The gender stereotypes taught in schools today propagate the notion of women yearning to be dependent.  Because women’s bodies create uncontrollable urges in men, they are ordained the gatekeepers of sexuality.  In “Just Say Don’t Know”, a (PDF) report by the Texas Freedom Network on the state of sexual education in Texas, there is a chapter devoted to how gender roles are taught.  53 Texas districts use WAIT training, which teaches youth that women need “financial support” and “family commitment”, while men seek “domestic support” and “admiration”. Another curriculum states that “a girl is out of place when she pursues [a man]… It’s messed up!”  Like Wild at Heart, women are both non-sexual and the reason for men’s sexuality.  A review of the WAIT curriculum found that

“Young women are taught that they are not sexual beings and young men are taught that their sexual urges are frequently out of their control.  In so doing, the curriculum places all of the responsibility for refusing sexual activity on the shoulders of young women.”

“Our research shows that the more girls buy into stereotypes about how they are supposed to behave in relationships – most notably not to express or act on their own feelings and focus on others – and about treating their own bodies as objects, the lower their self-esteem and the more depressed they are.  It is critical that there is now empirical evidence of the presence of such stereotypes as well as of the actual damage they cause.  (my emphasis)”