But what actually gets to me more than the fact of the short sentence, as maddening and infuriating as that is, are the completely tone-deaf and unbelievably oblivious reactions of Turner's friends and family to what he did. The saccharine letters of support that they wrote to the judge, and the fact that the judge was either credulous or biased enough to believe them.
The victim voiced our collective outrage more eloquently than any of us could ever hope to, so I won't seek to re-express it here. But I would like to make a few observations. As a teenager growing up in a very evangelical home, I was subscribed to Brio magazine (published by the infamous Focus on the Family). That magazine, over and over and over, more than any secular magazine I've read before or since, focused on sex. And the not-so-subtle point that they strove to make about sex was that men are visual creatures, and it is the responsibility of women to ensure that we don't tempt men by allowing too much of ourselves to be seen. I wish that magazine had online archives so I could search it for quotes, but it will have to do that this is the phrase I remember repeated in every issue: Men are visual. They were indoctrinating adolescent girls with the idea that they are the gatekeepers of chastity. Not boys, who can be forgiven if they barely control their hardwired natural urges, but girls.
This "boys will be boys" mentality is rampant and actively encouraged in many churches. The polarization of gender norms in conservative Christian communities, easily interpreted as a reaction to the ascendance of the LGBTQ movement, has led to jaw-dropping pronouncements from widely-respected church leaders about the role of women in society. Witness Mark Driscoll, who referred to women as "penis homes" and underscored the need for dominant males in his infamous lament on the "pussification" of America. Also witness the judgment of John Piper that it's okay to read female Bible scholars, even though physically sitting under their teaching is sinful, because in the event of the former, you can't see them. Or how about the following sinister marriage advice from Doug Wilson, espoused by The Gospel Coalition: "The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts."
The chilling implications for women however are only half the story. The course this plots for men is a hundred times more frightening. It excuses the basest discourse and behavior towards women in the service of strengthening what is perceived as a faltering national masculinity. So when an incapacitated, unresponsive woman is dragged behind a dumpster, raped, and photographed by a man, the narrative that's constructed is this: Brock succumbed to peer pressure and drank too much. It's not fair to base the next ten years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank. He's the only person being held accountable for something other people do all the time. He can no longer attend Stanford and will never swim in the Olympics. He's lost his appetite for steak. This is enough punishment for 20 minutes of action. "Your honor, please be kind and merciful to my beautiful son," his mother pled in a three-page letter that never once mentioned the victim, but made sure to narrate how Brock had asked his girlfriend to the prom. "He is suffering."In case we need to be reminded, the victim was found on the ground, in a fetal position. Her dress was pulled up to her waist. Her underwear was on the ground, her hair was knotted and covered with pine needles. Her blood alcohol level was .22, and she was unresponsive for hours after being brought to the hospital. One of the men who held Brock until police arrived was crying so hard from what he'd seen that he couldn't talk. Brock had made several aggressive passes at the victim's sister earlier in the night. He had the presence of mind to pause and snap pictures of the victim in situ and send them to his friends. Brock (the good kid who fell in with a bad crowd) had previously been arrested for underage drinking with a fake license, was known to do LSD and MDMA, and photos have recently surfaced of him smoking a pipe. And yet, ad nauseum, Brock was defended by his parents, grandparents, sister, and friends as someone who could never be the monster he was depicted as at trial. In fact, they barely assigned Brock any blame at all. His only mistake, they said, was excessive drinking.
"The stallions hang out in bars; the geldings hang out in church," quipped David Murrow, erstwhile Sarah Palin employee and founder of the creatively named "Church for Men". In an effort to attract the "stallions", Murrow has been actively working to transform the latter community into something resembling more of the former. His equally creatively-titled book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, describes the ideal manly man with more precision in the exemplary character of "Cliff":
Cliff is a man's man. On the job he's known as a go-getter. He's a good provider who loves his wife and kids. He's well-respected by his neighbors. Cliff drives a humongous four-wheel-drive pickup. He loves the outdoors and takes every opportunity for a little hunting and fishing. He enjoys a cold beer and a dirty joke. (3)Real men love to drink and sexually objectify women. Boys will be boys.
Mark Driscoll, famous for announcing he would never worship a guy he could beat up, takes it further: "Latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers do not represent biblical masculinity," he advised his congregants with surprising specificity, "because real men - like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist - are dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes. In other words, because Jesus is not a limp-wristed, dress-wearing hippie, the men created in his image are not sissified church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal." Let that sink in for a second. Aggressive. Assertive. Nonverbal.
All three of these adjectives describe the actions of Brock Turner.
Now, is this "new masculinity movement" responsible for Brock Turner's actions? Far from it. Brock Turner is responsible for Brock Turner's actions, something of which not only his friends and family, but also the California judicial system seem woefully unaware. And yet it's hard not to see the connections emerge between a discourse that encourages men to return to the cave, and the excusal of Brock's brutish behavior toward a helpless woman.
There's something else I'd like to include here. David Tombs, a British liberation theologian, wrote an article in 1999 about the crucifixion of Jesus, in a different light than most scholars (I'd venture any scholar). Leaving aside the obvious cognitive dissonance for Driscoll of worshipping a man who was literally beaten within an inch of his life before being impaled with railroad spikes, Tombs considers the last hours of Jesus' life in parallel with more contemporary situations of state violence. Specifically Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. In these situations, sexual abuse and humiliation are all too often employed as weapons of terror (rape, forced nudity, mocking, etc.). Certainly, there are elements of this in the Gospel accounts. Jesus is stripped of his clothes, multiple times, and mocked. He was publicly naked as he was flogged and as he hung on the cross. After detailing these events, Tombs reminds us that "when the textual presentation is stated like this, the sexual element of the abuse becomes clear; the assertion is controversial only in so far as it seems startling in view of usual presentations." (104) His observations on the practice crucifixion make this explicit:
In a patriarchal society in which men competed against each other to display virility in terms of sexual power over others, the public display of the naked [crucified] victim by the "victors" in front of onlookers and passers-by carried the message of sexual domination. The cross held up the victim for display as someone who had been - at least metaphorically - emasculated. (101)Tombs stops short of venturing whether Jesus experienced sexual assault, which may be a disturbing to consider (if so, it's worthwhile to pause and question why). However he does note that it was a frequent occurrence, and that there is considerable overlap between between assault and sexual humiliation (witness the impulse to take photos). (107) "An a priori judgment that Jesus did not and could not suffer sexual abuse," warns Tombs, "may accompany an unexamined assumption that Jesus was not in fact fully human, a form of docetic heresy which denies the real form of Jesus' physical suffering... To say that Jesus could not have been vulnerable to the worst abuses of human power is to deny that he was truly human at all." (109)
There are many profound implications here, but there is one in particular I'd like to emphasize. I think it's communicated best by a Rien Poortvliet painting, which the artist included in a book of works illustrating the life of Jesus. This one depicts a Roman soldier, costumed in the tunic he recently stripped from Jesus and won as a gambling prize. He is jovial, making an "okay" sign and grinning in the shadow of the cross to which he's nailed his exposed victim. The real man. The caption is brief:
"A little fun. Boys will be boys."
Men are not excused, nor their behavior mitigated, by an ideal of hyper-masculinity propped up by bigotry and egosim. The concept that men are hopeless slaves to their passions, that an inner rapist waits just beneath the surface to be unleashed by an episode of binge drinking, or peer pressure, or a judgment-impaired girl, lies quite diametrically opposed to the image of the crucified Christ whom Christian men are called to emulate. Without making any assumptions about the religious identification of Brock or his family, I can observe that, conservative bellyaching aside, this country is still very much a "Christian" nation, and evangelical discourse remains ascendent in the wider culture. It's time for men to step up and take back control of that discourse, to model themselves after the true prototype of masculinity and speak out against our shrugging acceptance of sexual assaults because alcohol, or promiscuity. Or because boys.
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