Tag Archives: lust

One of the reasons that I cannot identify as evangelical is their refusal to acknowledge the full image-bearing nature of women.

For the most part, the complementarian portrayal of the “godly woman” is abusive, silencing the voice of women and taking away their will, quenching the work of the Holy Spirit except through the mediation of men.

It’s horrible.

Perhaps you have heard this: “Men love to lust; women love to be lusted after”.

Sigh…where does one begin?

Sometimes a connection is obvious, sometimes it isn’t. This statement takes the beautifully varied and wonderful personalities of  women and crams them all together into a box, defined by men at their worst: lust. To say that a woman’s desires and dreams are shaped by the worst thing that we see in men turns women into “god-made sex toys” to be defined and used by men.

Ugh. We should probably think about our words.

I would even challenge the first part: “Men love to lust”. Christ-like men don’t, ladies. They struggle with it, they repent, they flee from it because they hate it. And they war against it – not by turning their weapons on the fellow image-bearers, but by prayerfully changing the way that they look at their sisters.

“View younger women as sisters, older women as mothers” Paul wrote. This is what we love and what we desire. Lust is a hated enemy.

But I digress – back to “Women love to be lusted after…”

There is a song from many years ago called “Peek a boo” by Siouxie and the Banshees. She describes the brokenness and hopelessness of a sex worker in blunt and brutal terms. There are women who make a living being “lusted after” by men, but is this the same as saying that they “love to be lusted after”?

It worries me when male pastors say things like this. Instead of seeing the pain and hopelessness of women in a situation like this, it seems to me that they are trying to quiet their consciences by convincing themselves that their own lust isn’t harming anyone, because “women love to be lusted after.”

Sin? maybe they would acknowledge that their lust is sin, but really it isn’t hurting anyone.

I think that it would be better to acknowledge the distinction between what we call “lust” and the pursuit of beauty. These two things are not the same.

Lust is exploitative, abusive, cruel, self-absorbed, demanding, devilish.

It turns our God-given desire for beauty into a consuming desire to possess and destroy that which is beautiful. The devil was a murderer and a liar from the beginning, and this is his best work. To take the created desire for union, intimacy and longing for beauty and turn it into ugly, cruel hatred.

And then to hear a pastor refuse to acknowledge the difference between the two simply crushes and destroys the woman who has been a victim of male lust her whole life.

When you strip away everything from that horrible quote, you are simply left with the rapist saying “But you liked it, didn’t you?”

I died a little inside writing that one.

Women, as image bearers of God, desire beauty. It is how we all were created. Before the fall warped and twisted everything, men and women both were created beautiful and with the longing to be seen and known.

After the fall, men and women both still want to be seen and known and acknowledged as valuable.

Unless they are among the small minority of voluntary sex workers who desire to monetize the lust of men, I have never known a woman who desires to be “lusted after”. They dress the way that they dress for all sorts of reasons: To be accepted by their peers; to fit in; to be acknowledged; to hide themselves; to be recognized as desirable…the reasons are as varied as they are for all image-bearers of God suffering from the alienation and brokenness of the fall.

But please quit saying that women love to be lusted after. It is cruel, hateful and abusive – and above all, it isn’t true.

No woman wants to be the starring show of your sick fantasies. Just sayin…