Friend of a Friend: a recent recalcitrant relationships rant

I have a friend who has had two relationships fall apart lately because the women he's dating want to go further physically than he does. Women who are pretty hardcore into shaping their lives around their faith it seems. And it's like they think that because he's not willing to go further than kissing that there's something wrong with him. Maybe like he's less of a man because he's not letting his sexuality override his dedication to chastity. Well, bullcrap. I call shenanigans.

Look, I realize that women in our society are overrun with a negative narrative about their body image. That pretty much every woman out there is being emotionally (and maybe even sexually) abused by advertisements and women's magazines. I get it. And it makes me really sad, because I think women are beautiful people, and they're getting the crap beat out of their self worth. It's especially devastating because I think that woman need to feel wanted, and more important than that, they want to feel beautiful. So they're trying to fill that need while all the while everything they see and hear tells them that they have to look a certain unobtainable way to be beautiful, and if they aren't beautiful, they can't be wanted.

But my friend is trying to honor that inner beauty. Trying to say that the person inside the body is more important than the body. And more than that, I think saying that beauty is not this thing that all the messages out in the air say that it is. And that she doesn't have to be that kind of unobtainable beauty to be wanted. He's trying to treat them like people, rather than objects. Which, having read Lauren Winner's Real Sex, is the whole point of chastity, taking the consumer mentality out of relationships.

But these women don't know how to handle that kind of relationship. They're told by the things they consume that they not only need to consume, but need to be consumed. That being used as a disposable totem of self-worth bestows self worth on them. But that's not the story they're supposed to be listening to as people trying to follow Jesus.

When someone like my friend doesn't consume them like they expect form all these twisted narratives, they reject him. It makes me want to shout at someone(if Love and Logic hadn't taught me that shouting is ineffective). I want to shout at the faceless culture and tell it that it's ruining these women. It's telling them all the wrong stories. Stories that sneak in and cut their throat. Like I've said before, I do think there's a secret society running everything in the world. Thing is, it's all of us. So what can ya do other than speak and hope someone hears you. And at the same time, I want to yell at the women, "Come on, ladies, he's treating you right. Woman up to not being a sex object. You're worth more than that. And he sure as swearword is, too."