Do Women Make Men Do Things? Part 2

Truth and Consequences

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about a tendency in Christian discourse to talk about women as though they have power over men. This power is usually constant and unconscious, and is exercised whether women are aware of it or not. Usually, the outcome of this power is negative (women cause men to sin or to fail in their responsibilities), but women can use this power for good. By being encouraging, affirming, complimentary, and sexually available, women are able to cause men to achieve things: namely, they’re able to get men to be sexually ethical and to meet their basic responsibilities to their church and community.

This should all sound completely nonsensical. However, it’s not just a silly thing to say — it’s also harmful. What are the consequences of this kind of thinking?

What Happens When We Insist Women Have Power Over Men?

I can think of a few key consequences:

1. All mistakes become, in part, women’s mistakes. Even if men are ultimately responsible for their own actions, we acknowledge that they are, by nature of being men, constantly under the control of women. 

This means that even if men are responsible for themselves, there is a real extent to which their responsibility is always shared with women.  Women are either carelessly exerting control over them and failing to prevent this, or they are actively causing men to fail. 

This is, of course, complete ridiculous. There is no innate female ability to make anyone do anything. There is no human ability to make anyone else do anything.

If I may sound something of an eschatological alarm here, it’s also not how Paul seems to think about personal responsibility. Paul taught us that all of us will be tested for our work, and all the construction we have done on God’s church will be tested with fire. There no sense in this text that at God’s judgment, any of us will be able to point at another and say “Couldn’t she have asked differently?” 

God will not ask you what she was wearing, or what she said, or what her attitude was.

2. Women’s actual lack of agency and input in churches becomes invisible. 

A significant portion of churches and seminaries still prevent women from holding teaching positions in prominent places, or, when they do, subjects them to such an extent of scrutiny that they are no longer able to work. Any reasonable person could describe the American church as it presently stands as a place in which women lack meaningful influence. Nonetheless, the myth of female influence and control means that this obvious fact is ignored. 

Let me use an example that I often hear when people justify men enjoying spiritual power over men. Men may be the CEO, and women are the employees. Nonetheless, an employee is no less valuable than the CEO, in the eyes of the law or the eyes of God.

This is a galling and grim analogy to the role of men and women, but even still, employees enjoy key protections than men deny women in the church. In a work environment, an employee does not make the same level of decisions their boss does. They do not have the right to have authority that their boss does. However, they are protected in that they are not held accountable in the way their boss is. If a boss makes a boneheaded decision, and the employees carry out their wishes, in most reasonable circumstances the employees are not asked to take responsibility for the failure in the way their boss was. They were, after all, following orders. 

The myth of female control erases this. By insisting that women are the agents behind men’s actions, men get the authority and responsibility of the CEO, but their employees, the women, take the blame for their failures. Has a male pastor used his authority to destroy his church and victimize a woman under him? Well, the fault is not entirely his. It is shared with his employee, who caused the action. Has a husband been mistreating his wife? Well, he is in the wrong, but his wife must have been doing something to bring about this tragic state of affairs. 

In the working world, the buck is supposed to stop with the boss. In the church, it stops with the employee. We insist that the subordinate, the person with the least power, actually holds the most power through a mystical ability to bring about actions that harm her from her male overseers. She holds none of the authority, but because she causes male actions, she deserves the accountability – not him.

The reality is that if women had the power men insist they do in the church, you would not be able to publish a book that is heralded in marketing as the magnum opus of Protestant theology on sex if you don’t seem to understand what a female orgasm is. But you can, at least before women catch hold of it, because of the ways in which women have been sidelined from the process of developing and teaching theology.

We can assign women responsibility for men’s actions, but they clearly do not have it. There is no mythological structure that can overcome the terrible, and yet darkly hilarious fact that women do not have a voice in the church even when their voices are desperately needed.

3. The business of being a woman becomes exhausting and frustrating as women have responsibilities heaped at their feet while the tools to complete them are taken away.

If we agree that women are responsible for male actions, but direct action from women on men is unacceptable, the tools that women have at their disposal to avoid harm and liability become incredibly important as they become incredibly unreliable. Women are reduced to manipulation and scheming at best, and a hope and a prayer at worst, to prevent the negative outcomes for which they will be expected to answer. 

So let’s say you are an evangelical girl who would like to protect herself from sexual exploitation. What are your options?

Well, you can’t be cautious around boys and men. You have to continuously believe the best about them and commit to supporting and encouraging them. You have to acknowledge it is harder for them to behave sexually than it is for you.

You can’t say no to authority figures, you’re supposed to trust them without thinking about it too much.

What you can do is dress modestly so that men will not be forced to be aroused to the point that they want to exploit you. However, at the point that they want to exploit you, your options are essentially completed. Likewise, because your body makes it very difficult for men to not want to exploit you, there is always more you could do on the front end to change their actions instead of yours. 

You are not allowed to protect yourself. You are only allowed to use your ability to control men to make them want to protect you, because this is a power you are believed to have. 

Let’s say you’re a woman who wants men to go to church. What can you do? Well, you can’t volunteer at church to make it run more smoothly, or serve in the community, or take on leadership roles to steer your church’s ministry. That would feminize the church. You certainly can’t 

Your options are to pray, and to exert your passive feminine influence in such a way that men will want to go to church. Does this seem like it’s far fetched? Well, you better hope it isn’t. When men don’t go to church, it will be your fault.

We have taken away the power tools from an all-women construction crew and we are furious when they have provided us with no house. We have bombed the barns and tractors of women farmers and we have nothing but rage when they grow no crops. We have given women ordinary hats and asked them to pull rabbits out of them, and we do not understand why they haven’t. 

It is because women have no magic. We cannot pull rabbits out of hats. We can’t spin straw into gold. We can’t bring about change by the force of our desires without any tools to bring our desires into being. But we have been told that women have this power, that women by virtue of being women can simply change men and the world around them with the power of their indomitable sweetness, and we are incensed that they will not use these abilities.  

We are not asking women to do what they were born to do. We are asking women to make bricks without straw. There is nothing noble or empowering or subversive about this. We have simply set people up to fail, and we cannot stand that they are failing.

The Actual Truth

This is the actual state of affairs:

1. Women can’t make men do jack. 

   Come on, guys. This one is obvious. Does the world really look like women are actually holding a shocking amount of influence? Does it really seem like we can get men to do things? If we could, wouldn’t women have civilized maternity policies in the US? Wouldn’t someone have made a concerted effort to address sexual abuse in more denominations? No one can make anyone else do anything. We as women certainly can’t. Women have no magical powers. I surely believe in the importance and efficacy of prayer, but even the Bible doesn’t think prayer is a replacement for direct action.

We live in a culture that is quick to victim-blame not only for sexual exploitation but also for domestic violence – did she instigate this behavior, did she do something to bring this violence about, did she cause the man to do what he did? But if women were such master manipulators, if we really did hold this kind of power over men – why are women being raped and abused so often in the first place? If women have such a striking ability to cause men to hit them, wouldn’t we have stopped it by now? 

Do men really cheat because their wives force them to go after women who will offer them the support and decency they so richly deserve? Does the fact that men leave sick and dying wives at a horrifying rate change this narrative at all? 

If women had power over men, we would not use it in the way we are so often credited with using it – namely, by getting ourselves beaten and raped. This is, apparently, as far as our power extends. We cannot make men listen to us, respect us, protect us, stay with us, value our bodies, value our minds, father our children, pay us equitably, clean our homes, or hold our hands when we die. 

If we had power over men, this would not be how we used it. The world is far too cruel to us and our daughters to suggest any other state of affairs is the case. 

Which brings us to the second bitter truth: 

2. The idea that women can make men do things is a pretext for male irresponsibility.

It’s interesting that women don’t seem to get credit for being the ones who plant massive churches, write bestselling books, give popular sermons, or record worship albums when their husbands do. In the examples we’ve seen above, it seems that women can bring about positive male behavior, but this seems to be limited to getting men to meet the normal responsibilities of life and family (i.e., be involved with their kids, spend time with their families, keep their marriage vows). Generally, men’s accomplishments seem to remain men’s, while men’s quotidian obligations are shared between men and women. 

But men’s failures? Yeah, those belong to women. 

Kate Manne, alluding to Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar, calls this the “honorable Brutus” problem. Despite the fact that Marc Antony claims (and this is just going off the text here, we’re not gonna get into the ironies of Julius Caesar in this article) he could see no evidence that Julius Caesar was ambitious for more power and to be a despot, he had heard from his friend Brutus that Julius was in fact a tyrant, and needed to be killed – and Brutus is an honorable man, so he must have been telling the truth. Manne uses this as a launch to the similar and contemporary problem of the “good guy” problem: if a woman makes allegations against a man, and the man is known to have been a “good guy,” the hunt is then on to find the reason why the woman is in the wrong. There must be some instigation, some fault on her end – even if she is telling the truth, she has to bear some kind of responsibility for what the man did, or there must be some other thing causing the man’s actions. Anyone following the Mark Rivera case in Wheaton, IL will be familiar with this dynamic.

3. The quest for finding the secret key that makes women influential without using her words or direct action is a joke. 

I apparently can’t get through an article without making a Dune reference, but there is a device in the Dune series called the Voice. The Voice is a power by which women from the Bene Gesserit religious order are able to use a carefully curated vocal pitch to override another’s faculties and cause them to follow your instructions. This takes time and practice, but once one has identified the appropriate tone, one can cause another to do nearly anything.

The reason why the Voice is such a captivating idea is because it is science fiction. It is not real. There is no tone, syntax, or style of speaking that can overcome human faculties that can cause someone else to do what you want them to dot. In the same way, there is no way women can talk to men and be heard and respected by a man who has already chosen not to respect or listen to them. 

Nonetheless, the promise that women will finally be heard once they “find the pitch,” continues to be dangled in front of women’s faces. 

In Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (not a Christian book but probably familiar to most of us in its gender essentializing tendencies), the tone is modal verbs. Men will not do what they’re asked to do if women use the word “can.” “Can you change the baby’s diaper?” will not result in a man changing a baby’s diaper. Rather, women must ask using the word “would.” A man is much more likely to help around the house if a woman asks him “Would you change the baby’s diaper?” 

(Of course, this assumes that the correct way for a woman to get her husband to help around the house is making constant specific requests, which assumes that managing the home is her responsibility).

In The Five Love Languages, the tone is not asking, or complimenting. Telling a man that he is good at lots of things will make him do things that need to be done around the house.

As we saw in Part 1, sometimes the tone is silence – not saying anything brings about the best result. Sometimes the tone is sex – being more sexually available to one’s partner will make him a better partner. Sometimes the tone is being more affirming, more encouraging, more submissive, and more quiet – 

But this is a tail chase. There is no reason why a man cannot or will not respond to the sentence “Can you change the baby’s diaper?” unless he is already more interested in something besides the comfort of his baby or the workload of his wife. He is not a malfunctioning robot who cannot process verbal input. The problem is not that his wife needs to be more grammatically precise. The potential vagueness of the question (“I am ABLE to change a diaper, but I did not hear a request to do it!”) is a pettifogging cop out.

Likewise, there is nothing magical about women’s silence in that it perfectly communicates her desires to men, which they subsequently leap to respond to. Compliments and sex are not communicative requests about difficulties in the household. There is nothing remarkable about the male brain that it suddenly develops psychic powers once it feels good and has had an orgasm. People in relationships need permission to communicate clearly, and they need to do this in a context where there is a mutual understanding that they both deserve equal respect and acknowledgment. 

The insistence that a woman can suddenly make a man care about her needs once she “finds the pitch” is just another iteration of victim-blaming. It is insisting that the real problem with men around her being insensitive to her needs, or failing to meet their obligations to her and others, is that she has not found the voice that will bring this about. 

A better way forward is for us to all acknowledge the simple fact that we can only change ourselves. Certainly it is better to to call one another to account with charity, and to encourage one another, than to tear each other down. But this must happen in a context in which everyone has full license to speak, with a full expectation of being heard.