A Little Kinkiness For Your Wednesday

While attempting to look up something in Greek on Google, I stumbled onto this highly disturbing website (don’t worry, no pictures). Apparently there are quite a few people, who are actually organized in some bizarre fashion, that believe that part of a Christian marriage include frequent spanking of the wife by the husband! Now the website goes to great lengths to stress that this is a consentual arrangement, and decorates itself with soothing colors, feminine fonts, and pictures of teacups. And it is apparently run or at least heavily contributed to by one or more women. However if you look at their blog and the fascinating articles, you will see tips for paddling an uncooperative wife (approved by wives themselves, no less) and how to discipline your teenaged daughter to “spank the demons out of her”.

Whoa. Now, if a brisk spanking is what gets you off then paddle away (just leave me out of it). But once you bring “God says” into it, then you don’t know whether its consensual because it is what you and your wife are into or if it is because she thinks she’s going to hell if she doesn’t let you smack the hell out of her bare bottom every Sunday before church. This is just a controlling, kinky, and destructive mindset. You can see how twisted this is by reading the article “explaining” why Christian Domestic Discipline (CDD) isn’t domestic violence. It’s written by a women who was in an abusive relation, got out of it, and then married someone and introduced this idea of spanking to her husband to make her feel loved and disciplined. That doesn’t make it different that makes it exactly the same! It just proves that the only way she feels love is through physical pain and violence.

As for the daughters… I don’t even know what to say about that! Spanking any child is a murky idea at best (I was spanked and I preferred that to a loss of TV or dessert, but I wasn’t spanked very hard…in any case we won’t be spanking our children). But the idea of a father spanking his adolescent daughter at all, much less without all or most of her clothes on is and trying to justify it with scripture is… horrifying…revolting…criminal. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, and I’ve heard a lot of repressive and crackpot theories, but this really takes the cake.

Their Biblical support for it is noticably lacking as well, as nowhere in the Bible does it actually say it is ever permissible to beat your wife. The best they can do is point to the verses that say “wives submit to your husbands” and point out that sometimes, but not always, the word for submit is the same used elsewhere in the Bible for a child submitting to his parents. And since Proverbs speaks of disciplining children with a rod, obviously God wants us to beat the crap out of both children and wives.

I don’t suppose anyone thought that maybe the verses were just talking about making sure you discipline your kids, rather than physical beatings. And even if the author of those proverbs was himself referring to an actual “rod”, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what God means for us to do. And of course these people convienently ignore verses in the New Testament (which I personally count much more relevant to my faith than the Old Testament, though the OT isn’t without its pearls of wisdom - just need to be taken with a grain of salt and a shaker of context) such as

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” - Galatians 2:28

Which is clearly about equality, no matter social status, and is carefully phrased to emphasize the new status of the lowest members of the contemporary totem pole (Jews, slaves, women) with their more honored counterparts. Not to mention the bit in Ephesians right before Paul gets into the wives and husbands and submitting bit where he says “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesesians 5:21, italics mine).

Now I once asked a very independent minded yet conservative Christian woman what she thought about all the stuff in Paul’s letters about wives submitting, and she said two things. First, there was a first century cultural context to it that we need to remember, and that Christ always treated women as complete equals in word and deed and that was enough for her. And secondly, that it’s clear from surrounding verses that God wants both husbands and wives to mutually submit and love each other. But the verses focus on what tends to be the weaker point for each. She said she often thought that is was much harder for many men to remember to act out of love when things got heated, so Paul says “don’t forget to love your wife!”, and that it was much harder for many women not to just nag and be passive agressive until they get their own way when things weren’t good, so he says, “don’t forget the respect!”. But that the whole picture is one of equality and mutual respect and submission to another out of love, regardless of the failings of the participants (I know many relationships where these traits are reversed) which to me is a beautiful picture of marriage.

And all that aside, these crazy people can’t deny that the Bible also says, “love your wife as your own body”, which mean that those husbands ought to be lining up for whippings of their own.

~ by lycaon on December 19, 2007.