In my recent critique of the church's complicity with perpetuating damaging ideas to women about their body image, I declined to unpack a word that Tim Challies used: "availability." I was too incensed at the time to even try. Last week I found that someone else has done it for me, and what do you know, it was a man!
Jonathan Fitzgerald, at his Patheos blog, is spot-on in his unearthing of what the concept of availability really means. Fitzgerald also echoes Dan at On Journeying with those in Exile, who points out that lust is usually framed as a male-centered issue. This is why I wanted to share the most compelling parts of Fitzgerald's post, "Viewing Women through the Lens of their Availability."
Challies refers to availability three times in his post. He describes a woman letting herself go as one who "by dressing as she does...makes a statement to her husband about her regard for him and her unavailability to him." He says that a woman's appearance should "display beauty, availability, respect." And one of the internal beauty marks is, according to Challies, a wife's availability to her husband.
Fitzgerald points out:
Most men unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) view women through the lens of their own satisfaction. That is, because of our historically patriarchal society, the reach of which touches everything from popular culture to our interpretations of scripture, we have come to regard women—and particularly wives—in light of their utility and availability to men.
[...]
What Challies describes is not biblical, but cultural, yet so tied to common interpretations of scripture that skeptics and believers alike assume the Bible advocates for this kind of misogyny. But it is not biblical for men to see women through the lens of our own happiness and wellbeing. When we do this, beauty is actually defined by "availability" to meet the needs of men.
Fitzgerald notes that the idea of "biblical womanhood" actually masks "the actual and harmful desires that they express. These terms say less about what it means for a girl to be 'godly,' or what the Bible says about womanhood, and more about the expectations that a particular cultural bias burdens women with." I would add that, taken to the extreme, viewing women as "available" opens the door for intimate-partner violence and sexual assault.
What an excellent critique of the fact that our harmful cultural biases have snuck their way into the church!
Comments