Female Culture is Being Pornified

After reading Jen Hatmaker’s latest blog post for Oprah Daily, I stopped to ask myself: What would the male equivalent of this article be? Would it be a former pastor, decrying the chains of his former faith and marriage and exulting in his new lifestyle of supplements and sex? Would it be a “manosphere” voice, boldly declaring he was no longer going to be a fool for the anti-man monogamy complex? Would it be a one-time Christian author and “Big Eva” spokesperson, explaining how the injustices of conservative Christianity have made him realize that he can only be his true self with a “Bronze Age mindset”?

I ask because Hatmaker’s piece hits the feminist equivalent of each of these notes. Here, and in the surrounding promotional commentary around her new book, Hatmaker makes one thing clear: She’s done taking orders from the Bible about how to be a woman. From the beginning of the piece, Hatmaker makes her complaints clear. Purity culture horribly twisted her mind, to the point where she wore a one-piece swimsuit on her Mexican honeymoon. Grim stuff, indeed. “These misogynistic narratives kept the men in power and the women subservient,” she writes. Those narratives include the pro-life narrative; being brainwashed by the patriarchy is the only reason any woman would oppose “reproductive rights.”

“When my internalized misogyny asserts its conditioned response to defend abusive systems,” Hatmaker writes, “my body overrides it immediately. She knows. She tells me the truth. She always tells me the truth.” Whether that sentence means anything, I will leave for you, the reader, to judge. But the point is this. In what she has described elsewhere as her “sexual renaissance,” Hatmaker is clearly done with the script that traditional Christianity handed her about sex. The submissive, modestly dressed housewife is dead, killed by a divorce, a lesbian daughter, and the content standards of Lifeway.

This isn’t idle mockery. What Hatmaker is doing here may not be grammatically coherent, but it is big buisness right now for American women. “Divorce lit,” both fiction and nonfiction, is booming. Outlets like The New York Times are falling over themselves to praise polyamorous female voices, especially if those voices can tell a story, like Hatmaker can, about a prior life trapped in heteronormative prison. American women are breaking left politically and by themselves relationally.

Multiple people have told me that what Hatmaker is selling in her new memoir is going to resonate with women in their churches. It’s important to point out that this isn’t ongoing reckoning for #MeToo. That movement has largely dissipated. Hatmaker’s article is not a call to take back Christianity from abusive men. It’s a call to take back women’s bodies from Christianity.

This is, of course, unremarkable in the general world of feminist ideology. In the evangelical world, however, it’s still not that common to see former ministry figures embrace such an openly sexed, therapeutic spirituality. When deconstruction narratives happen, there is usually at least a pretense of a more intellectual shift. What Hatmaker is offering is a more primal narrative, something in the spirit of, “I left the tradition of my past not primarily because it stopped making sense or started hurting people I love, but because I’m tired of feeling bad about the things I want to do.”

Which brings me back to the question at the start. What is the male equivalent of Jen Hatmaker’s memoir? I think one reason the question is harder to answer is that it’s almost impossible to imagine male-coded sexual liberation ever being sympathetically treated in general media. Here’s a challenge: Read the plot of the 2021 Netflix film The Lost Daughter, a film widely praised for its empowering story, and try to imagine every detail staying exactly the same, except that the main character becomes a man and a father, rather than a woman and a mother. Would that movie have seen the light of day, much less be nominated for anything?

When you speak Hatmaker’s logic with a male voice, you get Toxic Masculinity. A man who’s tired of being told to control his urges is a rapist. A man who talks openly about his post-divorce sexual renaissance is a walking red-flag. A man who said his masculine body “always knows the truth” is going to be the opening anecdote in dozens of paywalled Atlantic pieces about gender.

Further, all of these things would almost instantly be identified as artifacts of the pornification of male sexuality. But it’s time to acknowledge that female sexuality can and has been pornified, too. Jen Hatmaker, Miranda July, and others are resonating with female audiences in part I think because they help them talk down their sexual scruples. When discussing the sexual revolution, conservatives are often afraid of implicating women as the agents of vice. And for good reason: The biggest beneficiaries of steamrolling gendered difference and frying female fertility will always be men. But the OnlyFans era challenges the typical perception of women as the seduceable gatekeepers against the male invaders.

Pornographic culture in the 21st century is not comparable to sex trafficking or an ancient near eastern harem. This is the era of “romantasy,” a surging and often erotically charged literary genre that plays to the lust of well-read housewives every bit as efficiently as Game of Thrones.

Romantasy novels often have explicit sex scenes, referred to online as “spice” or given the reclaimed label “smut”. Kerri Maniscalco, author of Throne of the Fallen, says that spicy books allow a “safe space for readers to explore their own fantasies” in an unapologetic way. “It’s really interesting to see readers online exploring that too and not being shy or ashamed”. HarperCollins’s Roberts says that seeing an “increased reader demand for spicy new adult books” led to the publisher’s Magpie imprint planning a dedicated list of romantasy titles, called the Midnight Collection, which will launch in spring.

The high demand among female readers for explicit content coincides with both the leftward polarization and the heavy social media use of American women. This is, notably, the exact same pattern that male porn use typically follows: It meets demands stoked by a lot of time online, and then it builds out plausibility structures for particular ideologies.

I think this raises some important questions. For example, as I’ve mentioned before, women’s ministry tends to cash out very differently than men’s ministry. Men are invited toward accountability and sharpening. Women are invited into fellowship and encouragement. This should be probably be turned around a little bit. Men could really use friendship right now, and it seems like women could use some tougher love.

I’m guessing that in a lot of church cultures, a husband who was a fan of some crude manosphere influencer would get more questions about that than a wife who was a fan of Jen Hatmaker. This imbalance is likely part of the problem. And it’s going to be less defensible the further we tread into a cultural moment that increasingly drops pretensions and urges women in churches to embrace their own sexual renaissance.