Bob Herbert’s op/ed column, “Why Aren’t We Shocked,” in today’s New York Times is must reading for Christians. You’ll need a hard copy of the newspaper because the column is not available online except for “TimesSelect” subscribers, all ten of them.
Herbert takes up the cultural roots behind such actions as the recent Pennsylvania gunman who separated girls from boys, killing only the girls. Herbert, correctly I think, identifies an increasingly violent misogyny in American culture fed by commercial corporatism and sexual libertarianism. He opens his column with a caption from an Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirt for sale in a mall near you: “Who needs a brain when you have these?” Herbert wonders why, after ten years since the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey, we are still watching the sexualized images of this prepubescent child dancing around in make-up and high heels. He further points to gangsta rap depictions of women and commercial advertisements of products such as Clinique makeup that evoke imagery from pornographic depictions of women.
Herbert concludes:
You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.
Bob Herbert and I would disagree on the solution to this problem. He sees more egalitarian feminism as the answer; I would argue it is the conspiracy between feminism and libertarianism that provoked this plight. He would probably find the solution in a more rigorous application of the ethics of Gloria Steinem. I would find it in an application of the woman-affirming Christian ethic of Peter, Paul, and Sarah.
But, even if just for a moment, we can agree that something has gone horribly wrong in a commercial culture in which women are regularly depicted as objects of loveless sex and ruthless violence.
