I am not sure that any young people read this blog, but, if they do, this post might be a good one to get some parental guidance on first.
I generally sleep like a pre-Cambrian rock, but occasionally I wake up in the middle of the night, and am wide awake for an hour or so. That happened last night, and so I found myself treated to some of the wonders of late-night television. On this occasion, the array from three channels included George Bush live from some G-8 thing, a panel discussion of comedians trying to be funny while sitting down, and a couple of perky, sales-clerk type women trying to sell people dildos. A significant bit of their spiel included appeals to lesbians, and as I bade farewell to this sales-patter monstrosity, a thought struck me which I thought I would pass on. Let me state the conclusion first, in roughly the form it occurred to me, and then add some comments afterwards.
Lesbians who use dildos are no more lesbians than a man who uses an inflatable love doll is gay. His sexual practice is obviously deranged, but for a man to use a cheap inanimate knock off of a real woman is not homosexual. For women to do the corresponding thing should get us to a similar conclusion. Rejection of the male is one thing. Pathetic attempts to imitate, duplicate, or replace the male are quite another.
Fine, Wilson, okay. Any reason for bringing it up here? Well, yes. If you believe, as I do, that confusion about our sexual roles and responsibilities (those assigned to us by God) explains a great deal about why we are so confused about everything else, then cutting through the sexual fog becomes a moral responsibility. If popular appeals to sexual egalitarianism (and the corresponding doctrine of ultimate sexual plasticity) causes clear thinking to fly out the window, then we as Christians ought to be doing what we can to get that window closed. If we refuse to point out the confusions and pretensions because we are busy gazing demurely off in a more edifying direction, we are not going to be of much use. Our innocent ignorance will be no match for their corrupted ignorance. A number of years ago my wife had to take a sweet young Christian girl aside because she had somewhere picked up the notion that dildo was a synonym for dummy, and was using it freely that way in general conversation.
When egalitarian sexual dogmas (and the consequent attempts at naming) trump the most obvious realities in a situation, surely that should bring us up short? When large numbers of people are blind to something so obvious, then surely that something needs to be discussed? I am not denying that genuine lesbianism exists, as Paul states in Romans 1. A woman can turn away from the natural use of the man to another woman, and do with her what a fellow woman can do — which is to say, not much. But phallocentric lesbianism is an oxymoron, and here I stumbled across some merchants of an entire industry, a significant portion of which is dedicated to selling phallic toys to lesbians. Well, then, my argument goes, they aren’t lesbians then.
A man with an inflatable love doll is displaying some kind of weird and pathetic fear of/hunger for a real woman. He has a desperate need for the feminine, but because of his sinful insecurities, he cannot bring himself to do what it takes to win a real woman. But the need remains, a need for which a factory somewhere has contrived to approximate a solution.
And the same kind of thing is going on when a woman has a desperate need for/fear of the masculine, but is so sinfully insecure that she resorts to something like this. In understanding the issue, one of the things we need to do is identify the root of the problem, which is the abuse of women by means of a blustering and abdicating masculinity, making women resentful and afraid of real masculinity, and yet having a deep need for the masculine anyway. The results are pathetic, extending in every direction. The membrum virile with batteries is a truncated male love doll, and is some perverse manufacturer’s testimony to the sorry state of the modern male. And this testimony is unfortunately true.