From Barbara Ehrenreich, Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Doubleday, 1986)

Chapter 5: Fundamentalist Sex: Hitting Below the Bible Belt

The women filling the auditorium were well-dressed, their hair meticulously arranged, their makeup carefully detailed. A hint of past, better times surrounded them, a whiff of the fifties in the tight control of their look. They were there to learn how to maintain that image: The theme of the seminar they were attending was "How to Be Beautiful Inside and Out." The work- shop was part of a larger conference sponsored by the Christian Women's National Concerns, one group in the proliferating network of Christian right organizations. According to sociologist Joanne Young Nawn, an observer at the session, undergarments, those objects of beauty that are neither inside nor out, occupied a large part of the discussion. The need for a good bra was emphasized, since the sight of an erect nipple can apparently induce a man to uncontrolled lust. The audience was told that light, silky bras are too suggestive, especially during brisk cold weather, which makes the nipple stand out.'

To Nawn, the workshop was a “downright prurient” lesson in the embarrassingly detailed requirements for women who act as guardians of morality. Sitting on their pedestal of feminine modesty, they are expected to be totally womanly—sweet, passive, nurturing—yet a the same time they are held responsible for the lewd reactions of every passing male.

According to the sex experts of the religious new right, women must take responsibility for the way men treat them because men can’t control themselves. The male is a victim of what one conservative Christian book calls the “Y chromosome factor,” something in the male genes that makes “sexual arousal. . . much more quickly stimulated through eye contact.” According to the authors, fundamentalist therapist George Rekers and his equally conservative colleague, minister Michael Braun, once they are stimulated, men cannot be expected to rein in their urges. Women must no longer tempt them by wearing, “even to public worship. . . clothing that would have been considered the attire of a prostitute fifty years aog.” Such dress creates a “problem” which can be solved if “Christian women will. . . accept the fact that they will be hopelessly out of style.” But there is a silver lining for a woman who wears the proper attire. She has the privilege of providing “a feminine mystique that ennobles a man.”

Detailed fashion commentary may seem inappropriate coming form spiritual leaders, but the assumptions of the Christian right are theocratic: All aspects of one’s life are theoretically subject to religious law. Yet in the last decade, the sexual revolution has penetrated even the self-enclosed word of right-wing fundamentalism. And the Christian right is fighting desperately to keep out---or to co-opt-the challenge.

Until very recently, Protestant fundamentalism occupied a peculiar backwater of American culture. Beaten back in the Scopes trial in 1927 (where, though Thomas Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution, in spirit the agnostic rationalism of Clarence Darrow prevailed), fundamentalism retreated to rural and small-town America--especially the Southern Bible Belt. While mainstream Protestantism became increasingly secular in outlook-and spiritually undemanding -fundamentalists withdrew into a rigidly patriarchal and puritanical subculture of their own. But the sixties politicized fundamentalist leaders like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who emerged in the seventies determined to enter the mainstream culture and combat the "Satanic forces" represented by feminism, the civil rights movement, gay liberation, and atheism. By the mid-seventies, fimdarnentalist leaders like Falwell and Pat Robertson of TV's evangelical "700 Club" had joined with more secular political right-wing leaders like Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, and others, to build a powerful network of fund-raising and lobbying organizations, political action committees, and publications. This network constitutes what is known as the Christian right, which ranges ideologically from Billy Graham on what might be called the liberal wing to--on the far, far right -paramilitary groups that urge white Christians to take up arms for the coming confrontation with Jews, nonwhites, and atheists. On this spectrum, Falwell and Robertson represent the mainstream of the Christian right.

While not all fundamentalists became political conservatives, any more than all conservatives became true believers, the Christian right (which designates its own enterprises and beliefs simply as "Christian") has emerged as a major political and social force in America. Its leaders see nothing wrong with mixing religion and politics. "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country," Falwell has said. It is this ambition to run America as a "Christian republic" that alarms less theocratically oriented Americans. But there is no denying that the Christian right has struck a responsive chord with a considerable segment of the American public. By the mid-eighties, 40 percent of adult Americans were calling themselves born-again Christians, and another 20 percent counted themselves as evangelical Protestants. Some twelve to twenty million people were tuning into the huge Christian broad casting empire.

The message put out by these media gospels, whether overtly political or not, is deeply authoritarian, and the ultimate source of authority is the Bible. Hardcore fundamentalists stand their ground on the principles of biblical inerrancy: If it's in the Bible, it's the law, no matter how times have changed in nearly two thousand years. Yet new ideas representing a unique interpretation of the Bible, if not a departure from it, have found their way into the fundamentalist world. Feminism was far too radical for most fundamentalist women, but the women's sexual revolution, which appeared without fanfare or formal organization and exerted its influence first in the privacy of the bedroom, infiltrated even this corner of conservative America.

Within fundamentalist ideology, it is automatically assumed that women will marry. Like men, they are said to be governed by genetic programs, primarily those that create the need for marriage and maternity. "I was created to be the wife of Bailey Smith and the mother of his children,," explains Sandy Elliff Smith, whose husband served two terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early eighties. (Smith is known for his comment that "God Almighty does not hear the prayers of a Jew.")

There is nothing wrong, however, with using a little innocent deception to advance God's marital designs. "There aren't many things more upsetting to the male ego than a female super-brain," advises one book for single Christian women. "If you're blessed with an un- usual set of brains, use them, won't you, to keep from showing them too much?"

Once married, fundamentalist couples base their relationship on Ephesians 5:22-28:

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church; and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.

This can be and has been interpreted in different ways by different people. A small group of women within the evangelical* movement see in the passage a message of mutual submission" between husband and wife, a sharing of power, a willingness to compromise. (* Evangelicals, according to one view, generally "tolerate a somewhat broader range of Bible interpretation and cultural outlook," while for historian George Marsden, "a Fundamentalist is an Evangelical who is angry about something.")

Fundamentalist interpretations emphasize the submission of the woman to her supposedly loving husband, but some hard-liners, by coupling Ephesians with a passage from I Timothy, infer that in principle all men have authority over all women:

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. (11:14)

Rekers and Braun interpret Timothy to mean that women are incapable of an active role in life by divine intention. According to them, Paul (the author of the letters to Timothy and the Ephesians) was going back to the creation story in order to draw

upon principles of proper leadership that are expressed in human sexuality.... God does not act arbitrarily. God doesn't flip a cosmic coin in eternity and say, "Heads, I'll make man first." There was a plan to it. And when, under the pressure of satanic assault, that order of leadership was reversed and Eve initiated action, the result was catastrophic.... It is no wonder that Satan assaulted Eve first; she was woman, made by God to be ever so sensitive to spiritual input. She was made to respond, and Satan lured her to take independent initiative.,,

THE "SECOND COMING"

One would think there was no hope for a sexual revolution given such doctrinaire, misogynist notions. But some fundamentalist women have proved themselves neither as docile as they are expected to be nor as ashamed of their "original sin" as their men might like them to be. They have learned to fight with the weapons on hand, receiving advice on guerrilla warfare from an unlikely source. In the early seventies, a born-again Christian housewife in Florida began to push the idea that if wives would act like homemaking Playboy Bunnies, they might gain a power advantage over their indifferent or domineering husbands. Her name was Marabel Morgan and her discovery of what women could do to transform their marriages won her millions of followers (and millions of dollars).

Morgan developed her principles of total womanhood after a typical argument with her husband, a wealthy lawyer named Charles. One evening he informed her that they were having dinner with business associates the following night. When Marabel pointed out that she had made other plans for the evening, Charlie said in "an icy voice, 'From now on, when I plan for us to go somewhere, I will tell you twenty minutes ahead of time. You'll have time to get ready and we'll do without all this arguing.""'

Rather than throwing dinner in his face, Morgan submitted. Like the chastised child he considered her, she went to her room, but instead of sulking, she came up with a plan. "I'd tried to change Charlie, and that hadn't worked. Now I would have to change me." On the face of it, Morgan's newfound strategy was antithetical to feminism, yet it provided her with an area of initiative and control in an otherwise dependent life. While the scheme was centered on Charlie, and utilized the most traditional of society's expectations of what men wanted, there was little accommodation for Charlie in the actual plan; he was the object. Morgan's program involved what theologian Martin Marty has called a "costume fetish [that] would dazzle Krafft-Ebing." In her books Total Woman and Total Joy, she advocated that wives dress up as cowgirls and pirates (mini-skirted versions), spies (with nothing on under the trench coat), elves, pixies, and strippers (with tea-bag tassles for those who couldn't afford costumes). Dressing as gorillas suited Morgan's piquant sense of sexual play as well. Men were not completely left out of the fun either. Morgan described one husband who came home as a scuba diver, changing in the men's room of the local gas station before arriving goggled and tanked at the door. Sex was to be inventive and unexpected. Wives were encouraged to have intercourse under the dining room table, on diving boards, trampolines, and bales of hay. Even the mundane bedroom was to be jazzed up with candies, edible massage lotions, and perfume-sprayed sheets. All this was aimed at making the husband feel he was king of his home and master of a one-woman harem. "It is only when a wife surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him ... she becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen" Throughout the latter half of the seventies, millions bought this message through Morgan's books and Total Woman seminars. Total Woman, her first book, sold more than half a million copies in hardcover and had a first paperback print run of two million. The seminars, often sponsored by churches, cost about fifteen dollars, well within the range of the many lower- middle-class women who sought her help. Churches were quick to support Total Woman programs because, as Marty has pointed out, Morgan and her disciples were "massively evangelical," expecting "an imminent and literal Second Coming."

Morgan was born again, she says, after dropping out of Ohio State University and becoming a beautician. "There with the water running," she has written, "I was born again. I had asked Him to take me before, but I had never got any answers. This time I asked Him to take me and he took me. There was no bolt of lightning. Only peace. I was tickled to death.""

Despite Marty's tongue-in-cheek comments, many religious leaders took Morgan very seriously. The number of books sold were testimony to the need women felt to be "totaled," as the critics put it, by Morgan. Beyond that was the dawning recognition in the seventies that women and their sexuality could no longer be smothered under the sheets. Arguments on the merits of Morgan's ideas flew thick and fast in the popular and religious press, with the majority of commentators calling for an end to Total Womanhood.

Many religious observers were shocked by its message. "What hypocrisy," wrote liberal evangelical John Scanzoni of Morgan's advice that Total Women greet their husbands dressed only in an apron and black stockings, "telling a wife she is subject to her husband and then encouraging her to use sex to manipulate him." Jim Wallis, who represents the left wing of evangelical thought, complained that "evangelical wives and single women can now look like Hollywood starlets and feel good about it.""' And journalist Joyce Maynard wrote, "The image of women presented in Total Woman is an ultimately demeaning one, and it demeans men as well; it represents women as weak and empty-headed complainers, obsessed with material possessions. I do not like to think what would happen to a Total Woman if her husband died." Probably no worse than would happen to her fundamentalist sister who had never paraded nude before her husband- all fundamentalist women are considered equally helpless, while Total Women at least have the benefit of "a book which simply reassures them," as Maynard wrote, "that sex is not sinful.""

Despite Scanzoni's misgivings, Total Woman was not primarily about manipulating men. It provided women with a frequently successful way to manipulate themselves out of an untenable situation. Morgan was overtly advocating submission, but she was decidedly subversive between the lines. In her books and interviews she displayed a spunkiness, an independent streak that belied her message. She publicly hinted that after working so hard to shake up a traditional marriage, it's a little difficult to go back to being suitably passive. "I rarely have to compromise," she once gloated, a surprising comment in any marriage. To Scanzoni and Wallis, Morgan may seem manipulative, but in a sense her idea that women should get something in return for their efforts, rather than merely submitting or sacrificing, is a decidedly feminist idea. If we are to service men and their homes, Morgan implicitly argued, why not get paid? Morgan received a new refrigerator-freezer soon after initiating her Total Woman techniques. Other rewards were flowers, perfume, lingerie, and jewelry. Soon enough, of course, she could afford these on her own.

But the biggest and best prize was a new sex life. In Total Joy, Morgan sounded as if she'd read either The Sensuous Woman or Our Bodies, Ourselves, both banned in most Christian bookstores. Women were encouraged to enjoy not only the playfulness and unselfconsciousness of sexuality, they were told to get pleasure for themselves. "Have him apply rhythmic pressure [to the clitoris] and don't give up,"" she advised. While her instruction wasn't very explicit, coming as she did out of a cultural milieu that had tried its hardest to ignore the social upheavals of the sixties, this was definitely revolutionary. Instead of a docile, possibly frigid wife for whom the vagina was the only thinkable sexual organ, Morgan held up the vision of a woman doing who knows what in her daily bubble bath.

In addition to a new sex life, Morgan tempted women who had been raised in the isolated fundamentalist tradition with a taste of the wider world. "I want to do something. I don't know what. Someday I wish I could travel," a Total Woman told Joyce Maynard while relaxing in her bubble bath with a glass of wine, preparing for her husband. "You have to understand, things were very different when I was dating. Today, all these kids living together and not married.... All these new things. Orgies and couples that switch off and girls having careers and living with their boyfriends. It's not for me. But you wonder about it." As the bubbles disappear in her bath, the woman murmurs, "I have my own checking account. It, you know, makes you feel more human.... Still, if I were doing it all over again, I wouldn't get married 1uite so soon." Morgan's message, whether salvation for unhappy housewives or merely a spark for a tired marriage, was a sharp break from traditional fundamentalism, which claimed, according to Christian commentator Lewis Smedes, "Sexuality is nature's strongest competitor for . . .loyalty to Christ. 'You cannot love God and sex."' Given the choice (most fundamentalists assumed there was none), they'd have to give up sexual pleasure and concentrate on God instead. Morgan, operating out of the newly changed mores of the sixties and seventies, tried to turn the forbidden into something "as pure as cottage cheese," but with a little spice added. "Costumes provide variety without him ever leaving home," she wrote, promising men (and women) the same exotic thrill a secret affair might give.

Morgan's genius lay in eliminating the hang-ups that made sex inaccessible, while retaining the taboos that made it exciting. Traditional fundamentalist revivalism had drawn much of its dynamism from repressed sexuality. Anarchist Emma Goldman wrote of being nauseated by the "vulgar manner, . . . coarse suggestiveness, erotic flagellations and disgusting lasciviousness" of the early twentieth-century evangelist Billy Sunday. In Goldman's view, the "atmosphere of lewd mouthings and sexual contortions . . . goaded his audience to salacious hysteria."" For a sexual rebel herself, she seems to have had little sympathy for those who found their sexual expression where and how they could.

The steamy character of revival meetings has carried over to the present day, although less overtly "lewd" even by our more relaxed standards. The AU-American pretty girls who sing their way through meetings, the beauty queens from Anita Bryant to Wonder Woman Lynda Carter who espouse fundamentalism, are an integral part of the television gospel scene and serve a purpose similar to the beautiful model selling cars in commercials. Morgan built on the subhn-Anal erotic ap- peal of evangelism, moving the sexy girl into the home, giving the man a reason to come home at night and the woman a reason to welcome him.

Despite the criticism from some of her more liberal coreligionists, Morgan's impact on fundamentalist culture was profound. In the late seventies, books on sexuality suddenly began to appear on the shelves of Christian bookstores. These books were written by preachers and important fundamentalist leaders and usually coauthored with their wives--few men seemed willing to handle X-rated material alone. Many of the leaders no doubt recognized in Morgan's sometimes belligerent tones the same note of dissatisfaction they were hearing from the women in their own communities. There was an obvious market for Morgan's sexy, eccentric religion.

The response was a sudden proliferation of Christian sex books and manuals. As Jeffrey Hadden, coauthor of Prime Time Preachers. The Rising Power of Televangelism, put it, the new attitude seemed to be "if God gave you the plumbing, you might as well enjoy it." Some book titles, like Tough and Tender, Celebration in the Bedroom, Intended for Pleasure, sounded as if they had been lifted from porn shops and blue-movie marquees, while others took a more homely and simple approach. In Do Yourself a Favor: Love Your Wife, Pastor H. Page Willams of Cairo, Georgia, offers the "talking cure" for sexual troubles:

It is in talking with your wife that you let her take off your clothes, so to speak. She "talks off" your shirt of self-righteousness, your pants of self-sufficiency, your undershorts of self- pity. This is what stimulates her sexually.

Some books contain surprisingly explicit examples from the Bible and real life on how to achieve a richer sex life. Reverend Tim LaHaye, for instance, advocated rereading the Song of Solomon for information on clitoral stimulation. LaHaye has long been a member of the national board of the Moral Majority, and in 1985, while working as a lobbyist for "traditional values" in Washington, he was described as "one of the shrillest of the Fundamentalist ideologues."''' But LaHaye, writing with his wife, Beverly, was encouraging rather than shrill when it came to sex. The LaHayes provided specific positions: "the wife lying on her back with her knees bent and feet pulled up to her hips and her husband lying on her right side." This is the position described in the Song of Solomon, said the LaHayes, quoting verses 2-.6 and, here, 8.3, "Let his left hand be under my head and his right hand embrace me." Following the interpretation of a Christian sexologist, they take this to be the best position for a man to "fondle" or “stimulate" a woman--i.e., masturbate her rather than rely on intercourse. They emphasized the centrality of

clitoral orgasms, described the physical changes a woman goes through as she approaches orgasm, and advocated mutual masturbation rather than intercourse on the first night together (the wedding night, of course) because it "increases the possibility for both to experience orgasm.

"Everywhere we go to speak . . . the one question we can count on is, 'What about oral sex?"' wrote religious therapists Clifford and Joyce Penner, the authors of The Gift of Sex. And according to the LaHayes, they were, at one time, receiving a question about oral sex almost every week: "Husbands tend to desire this experience more than wives, but recently, because of the many sex books on the market, there seems to be increasing curiosity on the part of women." The Penners, fairly liberal, approved of oral sex. The LaHayes were much more cautious. They pointed out that many people felt guilty about it, that venereal diseases, especially herpes, could be spread this way, and "some girls find it harder to reach orgasm in marriage by the conventional method after they have had the premarital experience of oral sex." (It is not clear whether the marital experience of oral sex has the same devious effect.) Arkansas doctor and religious leader Ed Wheat and his wife Gaye admitted in their book Intended for Pleasure that the Bible doesn't forbid oral sex, but the practice "definitely limits the amount of loving verbal communication that the husband and wife can have as they make love."

While most of their peers were ambivalent about oral sex, the Reverend Charles and Martha Shedd, wed for nearly forty years when they published their book, Celebration in the Bedroom, had moved beyond oral to anal sex. The Shedds have been full of truly evangelical zeal over their newfound sex lives. They told a national audience on the Phil Donahue show that God had instructed them to "have more time . . . to celebrate in the bedroom," necessitating a move from their large congregation in Houston to a smaller, less time-consuming church. And later in the same show, they dismayed the LaHayes, also Donahue's guests, by admitting to a "whole drawerful" of vibrators, which were also "inspired" by God. Whether explicitly or by suggestion, these books indicated (and continued to do so in the eighties) that submission, the cornerstone of fundamentalist thinking on women, was out when it came to sex. But only when it came to sex. Reciprocal pleasure was important, at least in this area of Christian life. Even here, sex was a commodity of sorts, just as it had become in the rest of American culture. Men were told if they wanted to keep a woman contented and in the home they would have to change their sexual practice. "Every wife has the right to be loved to orgasm," insisted the LaHayes, repeating Morgan's message that sex is the reward for being a good wife. Once men were "selfish lovers.... Sexual pleasure from the 'little woman' was assumed to be their divine right.... Such men were (and some still are) sexual illiterates." Today, said the LaHayes, the 'modern" Christian man must educate himself to "tailor his affectionate passions to her emotional needs." In what amounted to a virtual parody of seventies ideas about sexual give and take, the Charlie Morgans of the fundamentalist world were being asked not only to provide their wives with new couches and refrigerators but to take care of their physical needs as well.

Have orgasms and bubble baths and wine created a sexual revolution among fundamentalists? Is a newly discovered zeal for mutually satisfactory sex capable of transforming a way of life based on literal interpretations of the Bible, strict adherence to authority, and the submission of women? In many ways, today's pro-sex Christian leaders seem to have merely absorbed the messages of the women's sexual revolution into their authoritarian culture. Certainly there are some areas where fundamentalists don't even pretend to be interested in change. Premarital sex still amounts to spiritual destruction. In Your Half of the Apple. God and the Single Girl, Gini Andrews wrote that premarital sex

tears living fibers apart . . . when you get up and put your clothes on and go home (or he does), you are not the same as you were. There's been a real n-tingling of life itself, and because God intended this to be a permanent, one-for-life arrangement, you are damaged when you try to treat it as something casual.

To avoid the damage, Christian women were advised to pray with their dates before setting out for the latest movie or disco, and to avoid dark corners. At Jerry Falwell's Liberty University as recently as 1981, there was little point in praying before going out. Students were required to obtain written permission from the dean to go on dates, and only double dates were al- lowed. An interracial date had to be approved in writing by both sets of parents. Going out to a disco was grounds for suspension. To encourage students to obey these rules, uniformed guards with American-flag patches on their shoulders stood watch over a bridge that was the only exit from campus.

When single men and women fail to live up to fundamentalism's regulations, the lapse appears to have greater consequences for women. According to the LaHayes, "Many a married woman suffers today from guilt and shame caused by indulging in [sexual intimacy] before meeting her husband. . . . We know of cases where couples had to leave their home churches after marriage because the wife couldn't face the man she was previously so intimate with before breaking the engagement.

Men, apparently, suffer no such shame and can remain in their home church with irnpunity. Not surprisingly, many Christian women end up believing that being single is a punishment to be endured for as short a time as possible. "It's terrible to be single," says TV star Lynda Carter, who surely has had her choice of interesting men to date. "You're dating different people, and you don't know who to believe and who not to believe. You're constantly insecure without a mate or a real friend."

FUNDAMENTALIST S/M

Despite the appearance of change, much remains the same in the fundamentalist world, proof that even the most feminist aspects of the women's sexual revolution can be co-opted by male authority. For the long term, the impact of a more modern, feminist--or feminoid-sexual ideology remains to be seen. New attitudes may be taking root that will someday be a powerful influence on the lives of fundamentalist women. For the short term, the changes are mainly superficial. Fundamentalist women have hardly moved forward, despite Marabel Morgan and the proliferation of sex books. Little can touch the bonds that hold most of these women in place because the prerequisites for independence-- education, careers, worldly experience-are not there. The traditional fundamentalist family tends to treat women as servants, moral misfits, or virgin goddesses--anything but equals. For many couples, sex is still something done by a man to his partner in the dark. While Marabel Morgan is pushing Saran Wrap party clothes for at-home wear, many women are still changing into their nighties in the bathroom and crawling into bed in the dark, to do whatever an inexpert and insensitive husband demands.

Not that sex is always a perfunctory duty. Repression, as the Victorian era showed, can offer up its own rich lode of sexual imagery, which relies on being unacknowledged and illicit for titillation. As Morgan proved, roles play an important and acceptable part in fundamentalist sexuality. In role playing, it is not just important to have--and be put in--one's place, but all participants must know exactly what that place is. Fundamentalists like to define exactly what men and women are, using the old standbys about men being “aggressive, dominant, logical, independent, active, ambitious, and task-oriented," while women are "submissive, intuitive, dependent, nurturant, supportive, patient, and person-oriented.”

Such concrete definitions can force a woman to flee into the more flexible world of the imagination. For fundamentalists, the sultry femme fatale can also be the Lilith side of Eve, who was created to be the good girl, "God's helpmate for man," as Dr. Wheat says. While the dogma may call for a quiet unassuming woman, the Biblical message of her evil heritage is part of woman's sexual secret; a reason to be despised, objectified, and desired-particularly in a darkened bedroom. In real life the seductress has too much autonomy to be a fundamentalist woman.

Another fantasy, more accessible to the light of day, emphasizes the submission and helplessness of women. During the seventies one Christian sex expert even endorsed teaching women how to act out the exciting game of "little girl." Helen Andehn, founder of Fascinating Womanhood, which was almost as popular among Christian women as the Total Woman program, recommended that her followers, when settling an argument with their husbands, "stomp your foot.... Or, beat your fists on your husband's chest, pouting: 'You hairy beast.... How can a great big man like you pick on a poor little helpless girl? I'll tell your mother on you."' For fashion pointers, Andelin sent her "domestic goddesses" to the little girls' department of their local stores to see what the pre-pubescent crowd was wearing. While Total Women were shopping for sexy negligees, Fascinating Women were searching-not all that successfully, if you were a full-figured gal-for what would be kinky stuff in any other context. Mary Janes and anklets, gingham and ruffled dresses. Morgan at least restricted her fetishes to the sexual act. Andelin's consurned a woman's life; she dared not step out of character and ruin the image by appearing intelligent, competent, or the least bit independent. Fascinating Womanhood was a life sentence.

Women's helplessness, their submission to their role if not their man, could be dangerous. Despite the promise that the submission of the wife will be matched by the kindness of the husband, fundamentalist imagery sometimes vies with that classic of sadomasochism, The Story of O. Bev LaHaye has called on wives to adopt the attitude of Jesus Christ: "The willingness to be humbled, to be obedient unto death, and to be submissive." LaHaye's instructions to the "spirit-filled" wife could match the rules 0 was presented with upon entering the chateau where she was to be held in bondage by its male caretakers. Compare these two quotes.

LaHaye:

As the woman humbles herself (dies to self) and submits to her husband (serves him) she begins to find herself within that relationship. A servant is one who gets excited about making somebody else successful…You can live fully by dying to yourself and submitting to your husband.

O:

you hare here to serve your masters…you will drop whatever you are doing and ready yourself for what is really your one and only duty: to lend yourself . . . you are totally dedicated to something outside yourself.

The tone might just be silly if it weren’t for the seriousness fundamentalists have attached to wifely submission. If the line between normal and perverse sex is as thin as experts in the fifties thought, fundamentalist women are walking on a razor’s edge: They are expected to submit and ultimately enjoy their degradation. The idea of pleasure never occurs to O, old-fashioned masochist that she is, but Bev LaHaye promises excitement in the service of a total master. Yet she offers no recourse for the times when a master's whims take a malicious turn. Andelin's naughty little girl getting spanked, Bev LaHaye's "excited" servant are both symbols of women's brutalization in right-wing Christian culture. There are few alternatives for the woman who doesn't conform. Rekers and Braun claim there are times when a wife can refuse to submit to her husband, as in "the sad story of a Christian wife whose non-Christian husband encouraged her to extend her sexual favors to a business associate in order to help the husband close a big deal." That example leaves quite a bit of room for abusing the principle of wifely submission. Even the books dedicated to helping men treat their wives better assume that women need to be dominated. "When you bully your wife and push her around and overpower her with cursing and anger, you are really sick. You have a sick marriage," warned Pastor H. Page Williams. But he was not surprised some men fell into this pattern. "The reason this is such a big temptation is because a woman wants to be ruled. Her great desire is to be subject to her husband, because God has ordained it so ... that's the curse of a woman . . . her desire to be ruled leaves her wide open to be abused." His solution? A call for absolute, but enlightened monarchy-the man must be a "good king" in his castle

Some fundamentalist ministers show no sympathy for women, despite what they may see and hear in their offices. "Wife-beating is on the rise because men are no longer leaders in their homes," one minister told an interviewer. "I tell the women they must go back home and be more submissive. I know this works, because the women don't come back." University of Texas sociologist Anson Shupe described one woman he interviewed whose second husband had been beating her for four years. When she finally got up the courage to see her minister about the problem, he told her the abuse was her "payment" for divorcing her first husband.

Except for a small group of evangelical feminists, there is surprisingly little outcry from within fundamentalism against the principle of absolute male rule. According to evangelical feminist Virginia Mollenkott, Jesus was a feminist, calling on the early Christians to treat each other, man and woman alike, with greater kindness than their culture had previously shown. "Jesus was calling for mutual submission" in the context of that era, she says. But she and others like her are fighting an uphill battle in the face of many women's conviction that submission is something they can live with and adapt to. In Who Will Save the Children, a documentary film by Vicki Costello, Mary Morris, young and fresh-faced, sits with her minister and her husband, describing not only why she is opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment but why, thanks to the new direction fundamentalism has taken, she no longer needs the ERA. "You don't have to be a doormat anymore. That's not what submission means. It means we're equal but we each have certain things we do better than the other. Like diapers. I change diapers better than he does."

Even women committed to the idea of submission have their way out when they need one. Women who could never dream of making a Total Woman's demands on their man can still get through the long day of washing clothes, making beds, cleaning up after everyone-and through an equally long night of joyless sexual relations.--by pushing God's presence in their lives to the ultimate, but perhaps obvious, end point. They dream of a love affair with Christ.

Gini Andrews, for example, calls on single women to dedicate their lives to Christ and not some male's sex drive: "Which is freedom: being the love-slave of the Lord Jesus Christ who went through physical, mental, and spiritual anguish beyond your wildest imaginings to buy you back from Satan's camp, or being slave to a human being's sex drives-yours and/or his?” Other women turn to God for relief from an unhappy marriage. "I prefer to snuggle up under Jesus' love in bed," one woman told sociologist Nawn. Or they may resort to the more encompassing fantasy of yet another woman who imagined her husband fading from her life. "A lovely young wife," as Ed Wheat described her, she said that it was

often difficult dressing to go out for the evening with her husband because she knew in advance that he would not treat her the way she longed to be treated. So she developed the habit of thinking of the Lord Jesus as her friend and escort for the evening. "It helped me tremendously," she said. "I looked my best for Him, I behaved myself for Him, and I was constantly aware of His steadying presence with me.”

A Boston area wife told radio producer Aimee Sands, "I like a man who knows he's a man. Somebody that can be tender when it's necessary.” Somebody that can tell you to cut it out when you're being foolish. There are not many men around today. Jesus Christ is real to me. No other man satisfies.” Fundamentalism has given some women a place for their passions, by letting them turn on to someone who can't push them around the way a mere mortal can.

This is not just a fantasy that women conjure up in private, nor are they expected to feel embarrassed about it. Ministers themselves often set the stage for the dream, referring to sexual intimacy that "could never be complete without the three persons-man, woman and God." The Wheats, offering yet another interpretation of the Song of Solomon, explain a mysterious voice in the bedroom King Solomon shares with his lover as "God Himself . . . the only One [who] could be with the couple at this most intimate time." Andrews advised single women to get in the habit of going on dates with God or even taking him shopping: "Ask Him to help you find the right dress, or the new car, or even the gloves you had in mind. You may be surprised at what good taste He has and find you've spent far less money than you'd feared.”

As an outlet for unexpressed frustrations, this fantasy of a love affair with Jesus is both a part of religious doctrine and beyond it. Nawn, in her analysis of the Christian right, has pointed out that fundamentalism has "put God the man back into religion." God is depicted as a physical participant in fundamentalist life, not an ethereal, divine presence. Compared to the actual men who run the lives of the women on the Christian right, God is a psychological amulet, a more loving consciousness than that provided by many conservative fundamentalist husbands.

Jesus may make it possible to survive one's marriage to a good king, bad king, or a violent one, but the underlying theme of the relationship is still sadomasochism. The spokesmen of the Christian right don't call it that, for pointing out its correspondence to a known sexual “variation"--in itself a highly secular notion--would open up the prospect of alternative sexual and social themes. But the ritualized partnership, the role playing, the overwhelming concern with power and authority, match the sadomasochistic game--with a critical difference. This is no game; it doesn't end when the sexual encounter is over; there are no rules allowing the woman to end the scene. Better orgasms and more sensitive partners can't make a difference because they are bought at too high a price: accepting a slave mentality not just for a finite sexual encounter but for an entire life.

Ironically, while feminist ideas about sex have been moving into fundamentalist culture, fundamentalist ideas about monogamy have been moving into the mainstream. Fundamentalists may be trying to work new sexual techniques into patriarchal marriages, but sex outside of marriage remains the work of the devil. Most religious conservatives regard extramarital sex as a kind of mark of Cain branding women's psyches with the "searing knowledge that something unique was lost along the way." But we can also see in the ranting against this extramarital experience the fear that male authority might be undermined. When Bev LaHaye comments that men can distinguish between sex and emotional commitment but women cannot, she is really saying women must not make this distinction. When women are not dependent on one man to fulfill their needs, men have lost control over them. The fear of women’s sexual independence has become a major theme of the eighties, one that indicates not only the growing strength of the Christian right, but the powerful, lingering influence of sexism in American culture.