Do Women Make Men Do Things? Part 1

The Paradox of Women's Agency in Christian Discourse

Photo by Jacob Morrison on Unsplash

The Myth of the Neck

There’s a very funny scene in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding in which 30-year-old daughter Toula has just been told by her father Gus that she cannot go to college. Toula is shattered, and tells her mother all is lost. “Ma, Dad is so stubborn! What he says goes. ‘Ah, the man is the head of the house!’”

Not at all deterred, Toula’s mother reassures her. “The man is the head,” she says. “But the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.”

Sure enough, in the next scene, Toula’s mother and aunt have already hatched a scheme to get Gus to put Toula in college. It works. Gus never notices.

Now: in the context of this movie, this is a funny scene (which my dad quotes all the damn time). It is funny because comic character Gus thinks he is in control. In fact, the women around him are very good at making him think this, while they are busy making money, directing the business, running the household, and marrying men whom Gus hates. Gus is a good man and a good father, but his belief that he is in control is silly indeed. 

However, the fact that Gus isn’t in charge of his family doesn’t mean this is a general state of affairs for men. Many men are not as hapless as Gus is. Nonetheless, we have a peculiar way of talking in Christian spaces as though, even when men are in control, the people who are actually pulling the strings and driving society are women, because of their ability to control men and their ultimate responsibility for male behavior. This ability is not limited to the household, either. It is a general ability that we believe women have, and one that we hold women accountable for. 

Women, we believe, are the necks of all men. They are the ones who cause men to do things.

Let me give you some examples.

Women Make Men Irresponsible, Detached, and Spiritually Immature

Women, by being women who meet their own material and spiritual needs as a community at church, and by attending churches at a higher rate than men do, make men not want to go to church.

According to David Murrow, with their emphasis on community and charity, women make men (who are, apparently, not interested in these things), not go to church.

Of course, it would be good if more men went to church, and there is nothing wrong with creating more programming at church that would attract men as well. But this is not the argument of this paragraph. It’s noticeable that the thing that makes the church “impotent” and repellant to men is just women being there. Specifically, it’s women doing things that make it possible for them to go to church (having Sunday schools where their kids can get educated, establishing nurseries where fussy kids can be taken out of service), make church a place of friendship and socialization for them (forming committees, choirs, teas), or serve the general community (soup kitchens). 

None of this behavior is objectionable, and the fact that church would be impossible for many families to go to church at all without these services doesn’t even enter into the equation. 

The problem is that by being women, out in the world, doing things, women make men do things. By volunteering and serving at churches as women, women make men want to avoid church.

The idea that women speaking, leading, acting, working, and being themselves is inherently oppressive to men is pervasive in Christian media. We have, as Gregoire et. al. have noted, Dobson worrying that women talking wears out and exhausts men. 

In For Young Women Only, girls asking boys to do their fair share of group projects makes them angry and depressed.

This was one of the most common justifications of male leadership I remember hearing growing up in church. If men see women leading worship or music, or teaching Sunday school, they will not want to participate. They will sit back and not act, and won’t take the role they are supposed to have in the church. Because women caused it.

DeMoss summarizes this nicely in Lies Women Believe. When women act in the face of actionless men, they make men want to not act… even more, apparently. 

So whether a particular man started out as passive or not, one thing is certain: women need to be careful to make sure they are not causing men’s passivity. Even if the men were already like that. 

We could say a lot about how the above examples all betray a lack of information and awareness about their subjects. For instance, there’s the fact that women are more religious than men in most countries and religious groups, not to mention that men actually do just talk more than women. However, the rightness or wrongness of the underlying complaints here isn’t really the issue. The more central point is that even when men are exhibiting near universal trends, such as not being religious, or when boys and men are not completing their responsibilities, the default explanation for their behavior is that women are causing it. 

Women Make Men Sexually Out of Control 

Girls and women, in the world, in their bodies, are able to cause men to indulge in out-of-control lustful behavior, even if they have the self-control to keep it in their heads. According to Shaunti Feldhahn, a guy is not capable of not imagining a woman naked, and himself having sex with her, when he is faced with a woman showing cleavage or a shorter skirt.

Feldhahn is clear that men are responsible for what they do themselves (good), but the message is incredibly confusing. On one hand, they are responsible for their actions – but on the other hand, they are biologically incapable of not reacting (strongly!) to a woman’s body! Because women cause men’s actions. 

This is similar to the further argument in For Young Women Only that boys and men are biologically unable to stop themselves from having sex with a woman at a certain point of arousal. 

Note that this is not really treated as a comment on male entitlement. This is a comment on how women need to be careful of their ability to make men do things. If you don’t want a man to blow through your boundaries, don’t even get close. Because women make men do things. 

This language has devastating implications for protecting women from sexual assault. In She Deserves Better, Gregorie et. al. report women who felt responsible for their sexual assaults after the fact, or who were abused by men who weaponized this language to mitigate their own responsibility.

It’s worth noting that “can I wear this sequined minidress to youth group” is hardly ever the conversation we are having in church. The conversation we are usually having in church is girls and women dressed like girls and women. And as I have discussed at length, policing girls and women in normal clothes is itself a fetish-creating activity. The process of subjecting women and girls to surveillance, and remarking when some aspect of their body is newly visible, encourages men to look closely at women, objectify them, and have a sexual response. 

This is not a situation women are in control of. However, it is a situation we insist on describing as though they are in control of it. Women, in their clothes, doing their normal activities, make men feel sexual feelings beyond their control. Because women cause it. 

Women Can Make Their Husbands Be Better or Worse 

The ability of women to both change their husbands is at once strenuously insisted on and strenuously denied. On one hand, women do not lead men, they follow them. On the other hand, women’s lack of leadership is reasonable and wise because of the incredible amount of influence women have over men. This creates bizarre situations in which an author both says that it is not a woman’s job to change her husband (rather, she should submit to him), but also finds endless ways to make her responsible for his behavior. 

Let’s take a look at Nancy DeMoss’s book Lies Woman Believe. On one hand, DeMoss says that “it is my responsibility to change my mate” is a “lie women believe.” DeMoss writes that thinking it is our responsibility to change others invariably leads to frustration and conflict… The fact is, she her  (a woman) cannot change her husband’s (or her children’s) heart” (340).

And yet, women are still the ones who cause their husbands to do things. The reason God hasn’t changed your husband, DeMoss says, is because you’re trying to change him.

Likewise, women CAN get their husbands to change, by being godly and submissive. This can make their husbands want to be more spiritual.

Furthermore, women can pray. Men will defensively resist a woman correcting them, but they will listen to God.

DeMoss then ends with a story about a woman who, in fact, did change her husband. Instead of correcting or challenging her husband, she started backing off and letting God change her husband. After sixteen years of waiting, God created the changes in her husband that she needed to see in her marriage. 

So it seems women actually can change their husbands, and it is their job. They just need to do it by changing their own behavior to inspire change in their husbands – not to confront him about his own. 

Gary Thomas’s book for wives Sacred Influence is generally optimistic about the ability of wives to influence their spouses. Women have a tremendous amount of ability to make their husbands into “the men you (sic) need him to be.” In fact, nearly every problem with one’s husband or marriage can be solved in one of two ways: 1) wives can be nicer to their husbands and 2) wives can have more sex with their husbands.

If your husband is always out of the house with hobbies, have you tried complimenting him?

If there’s no intimacy in your marriage, have you tried lying back and thinking of England?

If your husband is cheating on you, have you tried making him your only priority?

So again, women clearly can make men do all kinds of things – stop having affairs, be more intimate, spend time with the kids. They cause men to sin by having jobs (as in the Diana example above), by only wanting to have sex that doesn’t pain or disgust them, or by telling their husbands they need to come home and contribute. Of course men are responsible for their actions — but can we really blame them for responding to the way way women instigate their behaviors? Shouldn’t we be glad when a marriage heals because a woman motivates better behavior? In both constructions, women are assumed to be the agents behind men’s actions.

What are the Takeaways of This Kind of Language?

What is the ideological landscape we take on and reify when we use this kind of language? When we can find women as the background instigators from every male action (and inaction) in Christian spaces, what are we showing we believe about women? 

1. Women causing men to do things is their default state and it is usually unconscious. Sometimes they cause male action by being difficult, talking too much, making men angry, or making men aroused. Sometimes they cause male action just by doing things that they mistakenly believe are harmless, like wearing jeans or going to church. It doesn’t matter if women are attempting to make men do things or not. They just are. Women exert a constant gravitational pull over men, whether it is by having a female body, using their female voice, wanting things, doing things, spending time with each other, or serving the community. The female ability to make men do things cannot be stopped, it can only be acknowledged and hopefully redirected.

2. The influence women have over men is usually bad. This is particularly true when women aren’t trying to influence men. Women volunteering at church and being the majority of Christians, whether they are aware of it or not, is causing men to spiritually fail. Women being out in public with young female bodies causes men serious difficulty. As in Lies Women Believe, women who earn money, manage their financial affairs, discipline their kids in the face of their husbands refusing to do these things, may be saving their families from disaster – but the salient point is that by acting to help their children they are hurting their husbands.

Women don’t need to be hurting people or sinning to hurt men. By being active, public, living individuals, they cause men lustful, angry, apathetic, and useless. The only way to prevent this is for women to be more passive, more covered up, more quiet, more supportive, and more invisible. 

3. There is only one acceptable way for women to make men do things, and that is indirectness, kindness, and hope. It is not okay for women to ask men to do things, tell them to do things, question something they’re doing, or hold them accountable for something they’re doing. Instead, they need to harness the 24/7 unconscious ability they have to make men do things, and they need to use it to get men to do the things men ought to be doing. This is usually done by being kind, flattering, supporting, and encouraging to men, dropping hints, saying things elliptically, and making men happy, often with sex. In response, men will, hopefully, eventually, do the thing they are supposed to do. Women are also encouraged to pray for this event to take place. If the steps are executed correctly and women use their powers for good, we are usually assured that men will respond and the desired outcome will result. 

In Part 2 we will discuss the consequences of this kind of thinking, and then provide what (I hope) is an obvious response to this to cause us to start looking out for, and resisting, this thinking.