Not All Men Are Creepers

The Rest on the Flight to Egypt by Gerard David, 1510.

By Mary C. Tillotson

Today, in the Catholic Church, we celebrate the feast of St. Joseph, one of the more important feasts on our calendar. We honor St. Joseph as the spouse of Mary and foster father of Jesus; as such, he’s a model for husbands and fathers everywhere. He’s a patron of families and workers and all sorts of other things.

This is one of my favorite paintings of St. Joseph. The Holy Family is on its way to Egypt, and St. Joseph is in the background, cutting firewood or harvesting food – doing what he can to make things a little more comfortable for Mary and baby Jesus.

St. Joseph is a good reminder that not all men are creepers – something even virtue-minded people too easily forget.

Remember those modesty debates we used to get into, especially in college when we didn’t have anything more important to talk about? My women friends and I would trek back to our dorms afterward and wonder the same thing aloud: do men exist who aren’t creepy and gross? Here are all these church-going, door-opening, chivalry-endorsing young men who claim they are involuntarily fixated on our private parts unless we’re wearing long skirts and turtlenecks, or whatever their particular standard was (it varied). Let’s all find a convent – quick.

Lovelace (the movie)

I hadn't heard of the move Lovelace till I ran across a review in Verily, but based on the IMDb parent guide, I'm not sure I'll go see it. (Maybe I'll get the book.) My college media law textbook was quick to note that, while some people think the sex/porn industry is demeaning to women, it's actually great! because it's the only industry in which women consistently make more money than men.

That may be true - female bodies seem to be in greater demand than male ones; anyone glancing at the grocery store's checkout line magazines or watching any movie or TV show can attest to this. But no human being's body should be demanded. Whether or not Linda Marciano's experience was typical, I don't think we should be surprised to find this kind of abuse in an industry that sells images of women's bodies for sex and nothing else.

I'm not saying sex is bad. As a Catholic, I believe sex is good, when it is an expression of love, commitment, and self-gift between married couples, when it is freely given in that relationship of trust. But sex-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else, sex-sans-relationship - that kind of sex is very bad.

Here's Mary Rose Somarriba's move review at Verily:

Lovelace isn’t the movie you expect. 

It’s the story of how Linda Marciano got her fame in America. It was 1972 and her name was in lights on the cinema marquees. She was the star of the X-rated movie Deep Throat. 

Cinema marquees, you ask—really? Yes, really. One could say it was a transitional cultural moment. Porn was crossing from the private sphere into the mainstream, and Linda was the center of attention. She was that mysterious woman with the surprising sense of humor and that secret talent. She had a prime spot in the limelight and on Hugh Hefner’s guest list. It was the time of free love, free expression, and free speech. She was America’s first porn star.
Except she wasn’t free. 

The film Lovelace (starring Amanda Seyfried and Peter Sarsgaard) expertly tells the two stories of Linda—the story you’ve heard and the story as it happened. Linda, whose real name isn’t Lovelace, was in fact coerced by her pimp and husband Chuck Traynor into performing in prostitution and pornography. Often forced to perform sexual acts at gunpoint, Linda sustained years of mental and physical abuse and lived in constant fear of his next violent beating or threat to her family. 

Perhaps most tragic of all is that when she finally escaped, no one believed her. Linda published her biography Ordeal in 1980, bringing her story to the public. But, with the rare exception of praise from such anti-porn feminists as Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin, the book was largely unread and forgotten. Lovelace struggled to make ends meet for the rest of her life until 2002 when she died in a car accident at the age of 53.

Read the rest of her review here!

NFP and teamwork

not empowering

By Mary C. Tillotson

It always surprises me when I find yet another person who is totally shocked to find out that there’s some actual science behind Natural Family Planning. Women bleed for a few days every month for most of their adult life and nobody bothered to wonder why? The article I saw most recently insisted that, while there was legitimate science to NFP, “The Catholic Church’s official stance condemning contraception is, in my view, dubious and disempowering to women.”

Taken out of context, NFP is disempowering. I’m envisioning college parties where women only attend if they’re in Phase 3 (infertile), high school girls encouraged to keep track of their physical symptoms, and, when they’re fertile, say “catch me next week!” to their teenage boyfriends. Despite being way more fertile than women (compare the number of gametes average men and women produce), men get to have sex whenever they can find a phase 3 woman; women are confined to certain days out of their cycle. Disempowering to women? Absolutely. Men obviously have the upper hand.

But NFP isn’t just another form of birth control.