Thursday, November 8, 2012

Some Arguments for Complementarianism

The erudite Steve Hays blogs at Triablogue among other places and carries out some exceptional ad hoc debates online. The following was part of a recent article entitled Amputee-identity disorder detailing one of his recent debates regarding abortion. This section regards complementarianism, the biblical idea that men and women were created by God to complement each other by positionally fulfilling different roles in order to reveal truths about God. These contain some observations I had never thought of before and I wanted to pass them along without further comment.

steve hays
    November 3, 2012 at 10:09 PM
    i) You act like TGC advocates arranged marriage. If a woman doesn't want to have "habitual sex," then don't get married in the first place! No one is forcing them into marriage.
    ii) You have no concept of marriage. It doesn't even occur to you that marriage requires mutual accommodation. You seem to imagine that in a relationship with someone else, you should never ever have to do anything you don’t want to do. That doesn’t work in marriage–or friendship.
    ii) Paul's command (if that's what you’re alluding to) requires mutual accommodation (1 Cor 7:3-4). It's not a command to wives, but a command to couples. A command to husbands and wives alike.
    iii) Is it actually true that men want sex more often than women, or is that, itself, a sexist stereotype?
    iv) Take the hook-up culture on your average college campus. You can't have sexually active single men without sexually active single women. So why assume that women are less interested in sex than men?
    v) Or is that even though women are (allegedly) less interested in sex, they offer sex because that's the only way to hang onto their boyfriend? If they don't offer sex, he will dump them.
    But even if that's true, that's damaging to feminism. For that means women are so emotionally dependent on having a man in their life that they will do things to keep him which they find personally disagreeable.
    vii) Another explanation is that women are trying to keep up with other women. It's a female competition. Every girl has to have her own boyfriend.
    But if that's the case, it makes women look too emotionally weak to resist peer pressure.

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