I. SEX ROBOTS FOR JESUS
I once listened in horror to a podcast subtitled A Good Woman's View of Sex on the Love and Respect Podcast that appeared to answer just this question.
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| She doesn't need your respect. Photo via collider.com |
If you're not familiar with Love and Respect, it is a popular Christian marriage book written by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. The book purports to rescue and redeem marriages through the universal application of a simple gender binary:
Women need love; Men need respect ("desperately"—his word, not mine). It's all based on this verse:
However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. (Ephesians 5:33)
Although Eggerichs repeatedly says in the book and throughout the "Love and Respect" franchise that both men and women need both love and respect, his application of these two concepts proves otherwise.
Essentially, he places any need or desire women have for respect and puts it under the heading "love." He places any need or desire men have for love and puts it under the heading "respect." A woman's core need is love. A man's core need is respect. If you put a gun to a man's head and asked him to choose, he would choose respect; if you put a gun to a woman's head and...you get the idea. If I just keep saying this over and over again, you'll eventually buy into it, right?
The truly "revolutionary" concept in "Love and Respect" is not the idea that husbands should love their wives (which as Eggerichs points out, is old hat by this point), but the idea the wives should unconditionally respect their husbands (109).
Yeah, you heard that right. Husbands deserve unconditional respect, especially when they are undeserving.
It's important to emphasize here that in this context respect has everything to do with power. The key to respect is for the wife to consistently demonstrate by word, deed, and tone of voice (or even better, silence) that her husband is in a hierarchically superior position within the marriage.
A man's power is his God-given right. A woman's power lies in respecting her husband—she gives power away (unconditionally) in order to get it back. Make sense? I didn't think so.
Now, back to A Good Woman's View of Sex, which is, now that I think of it, demonstrably the worst possible title for this podcast.
In the podcast, a good woman writes in (we'll call her "Martha") to describe a painful marriage. Martha believed that in order to honor God and be a good Christian wife, she needed to make every effort to meet her husband's sexual needs.
Therefore, she went from "never saying no to sex," because that would be sinful, to initiating sex with her husband every third day, without fail, although he continued to treat her poorly. Basically, he came to expect regular sex. He refused to ever initiate, but would subtly punish her if she didn't offer herself up to him every third day.
In her letter, Martha describes weeping uncontrollably in the shower, knowing that sex would be expected of her that day—knowing that if she did not initiate as expected, her husband would treat her with even more coldness and contempt than usual.
This story is upsetting—this wasn't just a woman submitting to unwanted sex with a selfish and emotionally distant husband because "that's what Jesus would want," but a woman who took it a step further and became the only person in the marriage to initiate sex—emotionally (possibly physically) painful sex that she did not want, but believed God required of her.
In essence, she became a sex slave within her own marriage.
Okay, now we get to the good part. How do Eggerichs and his son Jonathan Eggerichs respond to this letter? Do they mention the concept of self-respect? Do they tell Martha that no, Jesus does not require her to die emotionally every third day in order to meet her husband's sexual needs? Do they perhaps suggest that Martha's husband might want to be married to and have sex with a fully realized, equal human being with thoughts, feelings, inclinations, or a will of her own? And if that doesn't interest him, she should think about getting out of what sounds like an abusive marriage?
No. No, they do not.
Instead, Emerson Eggerichs says stuff like, "I honor you for your obedience to Christ" and "If you worship Christ in the sexually intimate area, [. . .] you are touching Christ's heart" and "this is a good-hearted woman" (refer back to the title of the podcast). At one point, he calls a wife like Martha a "goldmine" for sexually starved husbands everywhere. Most husbands would kill for such regular sexual activity. Who cares that she has to shut down every other aspect of her humanity?
"Love and Respect" the book devotes an entire chapter to "Sexuality—Appreciate His Desire for Sexual Intimacy." Because everything in this book is drawn along a gender binary, men have sexual needs and women have emotional needs. For men, "sex is symbolic of his deeper need—respect" (250). Eggerichs equates respect with sex, and let us not forget the oft-repeated phrase "unconditional respect."
Although Martha's story might seem like an outlier, it's hard not to see it instead as the logical conclusion of "unconditional respect": unconditional sex, or "Sex Robots for Jesus."
Now, let's talk about Jessica Jones.
Watching the new Netflix series was as bracing as the Atlantic ocean in December. I've never seen the issue of abuse tackled like this before—somehow it takes a woman with superhuman powers to show the effects of mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Jessica is nobody's fool, but even her superhuman abilities and dour wit don't save her from the harrowing trauma of an abusive relationship.
What the show makes plain is that mental and emotional coercion can be just as powerful as the threat of actual physical violence.
Kilgrave abuses Jessica through the use of mind control. He wines and dines her as his perfect, ideal woman, going on and on about how much he "loves" her even as he turns her into his sex slave. As the show demonstrates, the worst kind of emotional and mental abuse eventually destroys a person's will. It breaks down their humanity. Over time, they have no willpower left to resist the abuse, no ability to say, "No."
Christian marriage advice, on the other hand, uses spiritual coercion to guilt women into unwanted sex. It's essentially a form of mind control—the woman submits her will to the "will of God," losing some of her own humanity in the process.
If you tell a devout Christian woman, "This is what God requires," you don't need to put a knife to her throat.
So when you encourage a woman to treat herself as less than human—when you praise her for making herself into a sex robot whose only purpose is to "respect" her husband by meeting his sexual needs—when you tell her that Jesus is pleased—then yes, you are encouraging and enabling abuse.
II. RESPECTING YOUR ABUSER
Ending an abusive relationship (that I initially didn't recognize as abusive) has caused me to more carefully examine words like "love" and "respect."
I've learned that if someone does not respect you as a human being, they cannot love you. Lack of respect, not lack of affection or care (often confused with love) is the cause of abuse. And as bell hooks puts it, "Love and abuse cannot coexist."
In "Love and Respect," Eggerichs addresses the question of whether his conception of "respect" will cause abuse:
Eggerichs fails to admit that he is putting powerful, ready-made, "biblical" (his word) tools into the hands of the abuser. Will reading "Love and Respect" turn an ordinary man into an abusive jerk? Doubtful. But an abusive man would have a field day with the concepts presented, and could easily use them to further control and manipulate his wife or girlfriend.
Here's why:
The words "love" and "respect" are deliberate. They are words favored by abusers.
I can't stop hearing Kilgrave's voice in my head:
"Jessica! Jessica! I love you!"
My abuser said the same thing (minus the Jessica part). He told me, "I still love you." And then he indirectly threatened me (but only because he was trying to help me and he didn't want to see me suffer!)
Hearing "I love you" from an abuser creates a huge amount of cognitive dissonance: "But he told me he loved me! Over and over again with tears in his eyes!"
Only when I began to see that the "love" itself was abuse did the fog start to lift.
And then there's that other word: respect. I've written about how another abusive man in my life used to repeatedly say, "You don't respect me!" By "respect" he meant exactly what Eggerichs means in "Love and Respect". He meant, "You don't submit your will to me. You don't treat me as being above you. You won't give in to me."
You see, respect as Eggerichs conceives of it—that is, the respect men "desperately need"—is always a hierarchical value. Men need this kind of respect in order to feel like men. It's an odd setup, where men are the more powerful entities (by God's design), but without a woman following them around all the time telling them how much they respect them, men collapse emotionally, spiritually, and probably sexually (Eggerichs writes that "respect beats a dose of Viagra any day!"). It's a spiritual variation on a common theme: men need women to prop up their fragile egos.
I can still remember the time I told my ex-boyfriend that I respected him. He lit up like a Christmas tree. I don't even know why I said it—maybe the love/respect doctrine had trickled down to me somehow. I had just confronted him with some things that he had said and done that troubled me—so perhaps this was my way of restoring equilibrium in the relationship.
I wonder whether I used "respect" like Trish Walker does with Kilgrave in "Jessica Jones"—to prevent him from turning, and tearing me to pieces. Now, this is a type of respect that I can relate to—the kind of respect that I pretend with men so that they will stop hating me, stop abusing me, stop treating me with contempt, or just simply leave me alone. Did my "respect" keep my ex-boyfriend from treating me abusively later on? No. It didn't.
Joy Eggerichs, the daughter of Emerson and Sarah Eggerichs, talks candidly on her website (billed as "Love and Respect" for the current generation) about being in an abusive dating relationship where the guy would tell her she was being disrespectful in order to manipulate her. By her own account, she went to her parents and asked them if she was really being disrespectful.
Luckily, she got out of that relationship. But here's my question: Why would Joy (as an adult, presumably) need the outside validation of her parents to confirm that she was being manipulated? Why would the progeny of the love/respect dynasty fall prey to a common tactic of abusive men?
Perhaps because the only guidance that "Love and Respect" gives about abuse is that we need to somehow discern between "good-willed" people and evil people, without giving any real guidance on how to tell the difference.
III. LOVE AND RESPECT AND ABUSE
Eggerichs grants that at times, women might need to submit to God instead of to their husbands, for example, in cases of physical abuse.
Later on, however, he relates the story of one woman who went back to her previously abusive husband (he repented), but was still struggling to show him respect. She writes:
Basically, the husband abused his wife, but she is the one who needs to work on her rebellion, contempt, and disobedience. This reeks of Stockholm syndrome. Any time a thought arises within this woman's mind that even hints at self-respect, anger, or, I don't know, boundaries around being abused, she beats it down as a sign of rebellion—against God!
And this is not the first abused wife in the book jonesing for more ways to unconditionally respect her husband. In another story, a woman emails Eggerichs wanting more resources and guidance about respect, but fails to mention how her husband once threw a dish at her, cutting her face.
Eggerichs' response to her selective account of her marriage: "What a woman!"
I'm not kidding. Her husband threw a plate at her face and she needed to learn more about how to respect him (he apparently repented while sitting in jail).
The connection between "Love and Respect" and abuse is not a coincidence. The false binary between love and respect is textbook spiritual abuse—"scriptural" mind control.
IV. CONTEMPT IS FOR WOMEN
Eggerichs deliberately uses the word "contempt" only in the context of a wife having or showing contempt for her husband—as if contempt, the opposite of respect, were a gendered phenomenon.
Women treat men with "contempt" (the word or its variations appears a total of 48 times in the book, always gendered female), while men are "harsh" (20 times, gendered male). Notice that women are described as contemptuous more than twice as often as men are described as harsh.
Men are never described as having or showing contempt for their wives. Why is that? My theory: It is impossible to show contempt for someone who is already beneath you, see also the phrase "beneath contempt." Eggerichs encodes his own misogynistic attitudes into his use of language.
It goes further: women are overwhelmingly portrayed as the ones responsible for marital problems and strife. I believe this is also deliberately gendered: women are the ones expected to buy the marriage books. They are the ones who should shoulder the emotional burden of improving a troubled marriage—see the previous two stories from women who were abused.
Eggerichs' overwhelmingly gendered use of the word "contempt" sends women a clear message: It's your fault; it's your responsibility.
On the Love and Respect Now blog, writer and former missionary Alece Ronzino writes about her husband at the time literally throwing the book "Love and Respect" at her and saying, "Maybe this will teach you how to respect me like you should instead of accusing me of having an affair."
What do you know. He was having an affair.
Mindblowingly, Alece concludes this story by affirming her own ongoing struggle to respect her ex-husband despite his manipulation, abuse, and infidelity.
Yes. The moral of the story is: How do I continue to show respect to a man who has betrayed me and treated me with overwhelming contempt?
In a way, I appreciate the incredible effort Joy and Alece make to shoehorn even this traumatic story into the love/respect binary.
But on the other hand, someone throwing a book titled "Love and Respect" at you is the equivalent of a gigantic, neon, glowing sign that reads, "GET THE F*** OUT OF THIS ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP", not a gentle suggestion that maybe you need to learn some respect.
Trying to demonstrate unconditional respect to a person who is only interested in manipulating and abusing you is, needless to say, a very, very bad idea. Telling an abuser or a controlling person, "I respect you," doesn't tend to make them less abusive or controlling. Instead, as I found in my own personal experience, they are more likely to escalate the abuse.
If you are in an abusive relationship, the last question on your mind should be, "How do I respect my abuser?" That's hyperbolically equivalent to asking during an attempted murder, "How do I show my murderer that I genuinely admire his skill with a knife? Perhaps a mid-stab compliment is in order."
Notice that I used the "C" word to describe how a man treated a woman. I think my use is perfectly valid, and anyone who tries to convince you that it is impossible for a man to have or show contempt for a woman is either delusional or has a deeper agenda at stake.
Going back to Martha's story, I can't imagine a greater expression of contempt for another human being than to use her body but reject everything else about her.
What Eggerichs and Eggerichs fail to acknowledge in their podcast is that this woman's supposedly godly and praiseworthy behavior only caused her husband to treat her even more like a sexual object and less like a human being.
V. SEX ROBOTS AGAIN
As far as I can tell from reading Joy's comment on Alece's post, women can potentially save "disobedient" men by showing them respect. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes people are just evil (there's that helpful advice again).
Wives saving their disobedient husbands through unconditional respect is a huge theme in "Love and Respect," based on these verses:
Eggerichs' comments in the "Good Woman" podcast make so much more sense now—Martha is literally worshipping God by having sex with her husband. She may be dying on the inside, but all that matters is that her vagina is winning him to the Lord.
Eggerichs claims that it's not like she's being "tortured" or "crucified" or anything. I feel like the fact that he even uses these words implies the opposite. She is crucifying her own will. She is crucifying her emotions. She is crucifying her body. She is emotionally tortured every three days over a two year period.
And to be consistent here, isn't that what women are supposed to do? Be Jesus for their husbands? Die a little more each day so that he might "live"?*
Sex Robot = Sex Martyr
VI. LOVE AND RESPECT AND JESUS
I have yet to read a single story in the entire love/respect canon that describes a woman standing up for herself and saying, "No." No, I will not abused. No, I will not stay in a situation that puts my life at risk. No, I will not stay in a marriage in which I am emotionally and sexually degraded.
Women are being counseled to trust the love/respect doctrine over their own self-preservation instincts—and I'm not just talking about life-threatening situations, though of course those exist.
I'm talking about preserving your life—your emotional, spiritual, rational self—precisely the self that abuse seeks to destroy. Precisely the self that, according to Christianity, Jesus died to save.
And that's probably the primary reason that "Love and Respect" the franchise makes me so f***ing angry, and what makes it so spiritually abusive at its core:
"Love and Respect" uses the gospel of Christianity to keep women enslaved in hierarchical, if not abusive, relationships, where they are told to subjugate their anger, their intuition, their analytical abilities, their desire for meaningful work and a career, their sexuality, their bodies, their voices, and their facial expressions* to the overriding goal of "respecting" their husbands.
So I'm going to call "Love and Respect" what it is: a false doctrine. Idolatry. A dangerous, misogynistic, and abusive ideology masquerading as the biblical, magic pill solution to all male/female relationships.
VII. LOVE WITHOUT RESPECT IS ABUSE
It feels ironic to read a book about how much men need respect when I've been writing about how disrespected I've felt in relationships with Christian men.
Usually, love or romantic feelings are used to justify or gloss over disrespectful behavior—so that the men who have treated me the most abusively or disrespectfully are also the ones who have expressed the most love, affection, and attraction.
When a man tells me that he "respects" me, it's usually after he has treated me in an incredibly disrespectful way—this seems to indicate that men understand how manipulative the words "I respect you" can be.
I've struggled with how to characterize this lack of respect for women in the Christian world. It's more than a simple lack of respect. It's not even contempt, because "contempt" implies that you actually see the other person.
I think it really comes down to the idea that women are less human or not fully human. This is the only way I can explain the abuse, especially as it coexists with "love." It's the only way I can describe a man who violates my boundaries even as he sheds crocodile tears over the depth of his love for me.
"Jessica Jones" captures just how terrifying it is to have such a man tell you he loves you.
Give me respect any day.
*Eggerichs makes a huge meal out of the fact that men are willing to die for their wives. He uses this willingness to die to justify a man's inherently superior station in the marital hierarchy. I once watched a baffling video clip of him telling women something like, "Remember that your husband would die for you. He may never open up to you emotionally, but he would die for you" as if this were somehow sufficient consolation for having an emotionally distant husband. I just picture lonely women rocking themselves to sleep every night saying over and over again, "He would die for me, he would die for me, he would die for me..."
Given the statistical probability of a man ever having to die for his wife, what about the slow death of living in an abusive or unloving relationship? What was that saying again: "Death by 1,000 Cuts."
*"A simple application is that a wife is to display a respectful facial expression and tone when he fails to be the man she wants" (43)
*"Right or wrong, men interpret their world through the respect grid, and a wife's softened tone and facial expressions can do more for her marriage than she can imagine."
*"Love and Respect" includes two letters from wives who have learned how to control their facial expressions (191, 302) and the glowing effect it has had on their marriages.
All pages numbers are from the Kindle edition of "Love and Respect."
Therefore, she went from "never saying no to sex," because that would be sinful, to initiating sex with her husband every third day, without fail, although he continued to treat her poorly. Basically, he came to expect regular sex. He refused to ever initiate, but would subtly punish her if she didn't offer herself up to him every third day.
In her letter, Martha describes weeping uncontrollably in the shower, knowing that sex would be expected of her that day—knowing that if she did not initiate as expected, her husband would treat her with even more coldness and contempt than usual.
This story is upsetting—this wasn't just a woman submitting to unwanted sex with a selfish and emotionally distant husband because "that's what Jesus would want," but a woman who took it a step further and became the only person in the marriage to initiate sex—emotionally (possibly physically) painful sex that she did not want, but believed God required of her.
In essence, she became a sex slave within her own marriage.
Okay, now we get to the good part. How do Eggerichs and his son Jonathan Eggerichs respond to this letter? Do they mention the concept of self-respect? Do they tell Martha that no, Jesus does not require her to die emotionally every third day in order to meet her husband's sexual needs? Do they perhaps suggest that Martha's husband might want to be married to and have sex with a fully realized, equal human being with thoughts, feelings, inclinations, or a will of her own? And if that doesn't interest him, she should think about getting out of what sounds like an abusive marriage?
No. No, they do not.
Instead, Emerson Eggerichs says stuff like, "I honor you for your obedience to Christ" and "If you worship Christ in the sexually intimate area, [. . .] you are touching Christ's heart" and "this is a good-hearted woman" (refer back to the title of the podcast). At one point, he calls a wife like Martha a "goldmine" for sexually starved husbands everywhere. Most husbands would kill for such regular sexual activity. Who cares that she has to shut down every other aspect of her humanity?
"Love and Respect" the book devotes an entire chapter to "Sexuality—Appreciate His Desire for Sexual Intimacy." Because everything in this book is drawn along a gender binary, men have sexual needs and women have emotional needs. For men, "sex is symbolic of his deeper need—respect" (250). Eggerichs equates respect with sex, and let us not forget the oft-repeated phrase "unconditional respect."
Although Martha's story might seem like an outlier, it's hard not to see it instead as the logical conclusion of "unconditional respect": unconditional sex, or "Sex Robots for Jesus."
Now, let's talk about Jessica Jones.
Watching the new Netflix series was as bracing as the Atlantic ocean in December. I've never seen the issue of abuse tackled like this before—somehow it takes a woman with superhuman powers to show the effects of mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Jessica is nobody's fool, but even her superhuman abilities and dour wit don't save her from the harrowing trauma of an abusive relationship.
What the show makes plain is that mental and emotional coercion can be just as powerful as the threat of actual physical violence.
Kilgrave abuses Jessica through the use of mind control. He wines and dines her as his perfect, ideal woman, going on and on about how much he "loves" her even as he turns her into his sex slave. As the show demonstrates, the worst kind of emotional and mental abuse eventually destroys a person's will. It breaks down their humanity. Over time, they have no willpower left to resist the abuse, no ability to say, "No."
Christian marriage advice, on the other hand, uses spiritual coercion to guilt women into unwanted sex. It's essentially a form of mind control—the woman submits her will to the "will of God," losing some of her own humanity in the process.
If you tell a devout Christian woman, "This is what God requires," you don't need to put a knife to her throat.
So when you encourage a woman to treat herself as less than human—when you praise her for making herself into a sex robot whose only purpose is to "respect" her husband by meeting his sexual needs—when you tell her that Jesus is pleased—then yes, you are encouraging and enabling abuse.
II. RESPECTING YOUR ABUSER
Ending an abusive relationship (that I initially didn't recognize as abusive) has caused me to more carefully examine words like "love" and "respect."
I've learned that if someone does not respect you as a human being, they cannot love you. Lack of respect, not lack of affection or care (often confused with love) is the cause of abuse. And as bell hooks puts it, "Love and abuse cannot coexist."
In "Love and Respect," Eggerichs addresses the question of whether his conception of "respect" will cause abuse:
Will the concept of biblical hierarchy lead to abuse? [...] Yes, this is possible, but because it is possible does not mean a woman should refuse to allow her husband to be the head. If a husband is evil-willed, the abuse will happen anyway, no matter what the family structure is. Any hierarchical role given to him has nothing to do with the abuse. The evil-willed man always treats those around him abusively (207).
I absolutely disagree. Shrugging and saying "Evil be evil" or "Abusers gonna abuse" is both misleading and f***ing irresponsible.
Eggerichs fails to admit that he is putting powerful, ready-made, "biblical" (his word) tools into the hands of the abuser. Will reading "Love and Respect" turn an ordinary man into an abusive jerk? Doubtful. But an abusive man would have a field day with the concepts presented, and could easily use them to further control and manipulate his wife or girlfriend.
Here's why:
The words "love" and "respect" are deliberate. They are words favored by abusers.
I can't stop hearing Kilgrave's voice in my head:
"Jessica! Jessica! I love you!"
 |
| Nightmares for days |
Hearing "I love you" from an abuser creates a huge amount of cognitive dissonance: "But he told me he loved me! Over and over again with tears in his eyes!"
Only when I began to see that the "love" itself was abuse did the fog start to lift.
And then there's that other word: respect. I've written about how another abusive man in my life used to repeatedly say, "You don't respect me!" By "respect" he meant exactly what Eggerichs means in "Love and Respect". He meant, "You don't submit your will to me. You don't treat me as being above you. You won't give in to me."
You see, respect as Eggerichs conceives of it—that is, the respect men "desperately need"—is always a hierarchical value. Men need this kind of respect in order to feel like men. It's an odd setup, where men are the more powerful entities (by God's design), but without a woman following them around all the time telling them how much they respect them, men collapse emotionally, spiritually, and probably sexually (Eggerichs writes that "respect beats a dose of Viagra any day!"). It's a spiritual variation on a common theme: men need women to prop up their fragile egos.
I can still remember the time I told my ex-boyfriend that I respected him. He lit up like a Christmas tree. I don't even know why I said it—maybe the love/respect doctrine had trickled down to me somehow. I had just confronted him with some things that he had said and done that troubled me—so perhaps this was my way of restoring equilibrium in the relationship.
I wonder whether I used "respect" like Trish Walker does with Kilgrave in "Jessica Jones"—to prevent him from turning, and tearing me to pieces. Now, this is a type of respect that I can relate to—the kind of respect that I pretend with men so that they will stop hating me, stop abusing me, stop treating me with contempt, or just simply leave me alone. Did my "respect" keep my ex-boyfriend from treating me abusively later on? No. It didn't.
Joy Eggerichs, the daughter of Emerson and Sarah Eggerichs, talks candidly on her website (billed as "Love and Respect" for the current generation) about being in an abusive dating relationship where the guy would tell her she was being disrespectful in order to manipulate her. By her own account, she went to her parents and asked them if she was really being disrespectful.
Luckily, she got out of that relationship. But here's my question: Why would Joy (as an adult, presumably) need the outside validation of her parents to confirm that she was being manipulated? Why would the progeny of the love/respect dynasty fall prey to a common tactic of abusive men?
Perhaps because the only guidance that "Love and Respect" gives about abuse is that we need to somehow discern between "good-willed" people and evil people, without giving any real guidance on how to tell the difference.
III. LOVE AND RESPECT AND ABUSE
Eggerichs grants that at times, women might need to submit to God instead of to their husbands, for example, in cases of physical abuse.
Later on, however, he relates the story of one woman who went back to her previously abusive husband (he repented), but was still struggling to show him respect. She writes:
My heart's desire is to win my husband to the Lord through my respectful behavior. I must admit I have to "mull over" some of your teaching, but it IS biblically based, and the Holy Spirit keeps revealing my rebellion, contempt, disobedience, etc. I keep asking the Lord for strength to implement your suggestions, and He is so faithful!This letter creeps me out.
Basically, the husband abused his wife, but she is the one who needs to work on her rebellion, contempt, and disobedience. This reeks of Stockholm syndrome. Any time a thought arises within this woman's mind that even hints at self-respect, anger, or, I don't know, boundaries around being abused, she beats it down as a sign of rebellion—against God!
And this is not the first abused wife in the book jonesing for more ways to unconditionally respect her husband. In another story, a woman emails Eggerichs wanting more resources and guidance about respect, but fails to mention how her husband once threw a dish at her, cutting her face.
Eggerichs' response to her selective account of her marriage: "What a woman!"
I'm not kidding. Her husband threw a plate at her face and she needed to learn more about how to respect him (he apparently repented while sitting in jail).
The connection between "Love and Respect" and abuse is not a coincidence. The false binary between love and respect is textbook spiritual abuse—"scriptural" mind control.
IV. CONTEMPT IS FOR WOMEN
Eggerichs deliberately uses the word "contempt" only in the context of a wife having or showing contempt for her husband—as if contempt, the opposite of respect, were a gendered phenomenon.
Men are never described as having or showing contempt for their wives. Why is that? My theory: It is impossible to show contempt for someone who is already beneath you, see also the phrase "beneath contempt." Eggerichs encodes his own misogynistic attitudes into his use of language.
It goes further: women are overwhelmingly portrayed as the ones responsible for marital problems and strife. I believe this is also deliberately gendered: women are the ones expected to buy the marriage books. They are the ones who should shoulder the emotional burden of improving a troubled marriage—see the previous two stories from women who were abused.
Eggerichs' overwhelmingly gendered use of the word "contempt" sends women a clear message: It's your fault; it's your responsibility.
On the Love and Respect Now blog, writer and former missionary Alece Ronzino writes about her husband at the time literally throwing the book "Love and Respect" at her and saying, "Maybe this will teach you how to respect me like you should instead of accusing me of having an affair."
What do you know. He was having an affair.
Mindblowingly, Alece concludes this story by affirming her own ongoing struggle to respect her ex-husband despite his manipulation, abuse, and infidelity.
Yes. The moral of the story is: How do I continue to show respect to a man who has betrayed me and treated me with overwhelming contempt?
In a way, I appreciate the incredible effort Joy and Alece make to shoehorn even this traumatic story into the love/respect binary.
But on the other hand, someone throwing a book titled "Love and Respect" at you is the equivalent of a gigantic, neon, glowing sign that reads, "GET THE F*** OUT OF THIS ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP", not a gentle suggestion that maybe you need to learn some respect.
Trying to demonstrate unconditional respect to a person who is only interested in manipulating and abusing you is, needless to say, a very, very bad idea. Telling an abuser or a controlling person, "I respect you," doesn't tend to make them less abusive or controlling. Instead, as I found in my own personal experience, they are more likely to escalate the abuse.
If you are in an abusive relationship, the last question on your mind should be, "How do I respect my abuser?" That's hyperbolically equivalent to asking during an attempted murder, "How do I show my murderer that I genuinely admire his skill with a knife? Perhaps a mid-stab compliment is in order."
Notice that I used the "C" word to describe how a man treated a woman. I think my use is perfectly valid, and anyone who tries to convince you that it is impossible for a man to have or show contempt for a woman is either delusional or has a deeper agenda at stake.
Going back to Martha's story, I can't imagine a greater expression of contempt for another human being than to use her body but reject everything else about her.
What Eggerichs and Eggerichs fail to acknowledge in their podcast is that this woman's supposedly godly and praiseworthy behavior only caused her husband to treat her even more like a sexual object and less like a human being.
V. SEX ROBOTS AGAIN
As far as I can tell from reading Joy's comment on Alece's post, women can potentially save "disobedient" men by showing them respect. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes people are just evil (there's that helpful advice again).
Wives saving their disobedient husbands through unconditional respect is a huge theme in "Love and Respect," based on these verses:
In the same way, you wives, be submissive to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your chaste and respectful behavior. (NASB, 1 Peter 3:1-2)Which Eggerichs shortens to:
The apostle Peter reveals that husbands who "are disobedient to the word" (meaning they are undeserving of respect) "may be won . . . by . . . respectful behavior."Notice that the burden is on the wife to save her husband. And how does one save a husband? By having sex with him as often as possible—um, I mean, by respecting him.
Eggerichs' comments in the "Good Woman" podcast make so much more sense now—Martha is literally worshipping God by having sex with her husband. She may be dying on the inside, but all that matters is that her vagina is winning him to the Lord.
Eggerichs claims that it's not like she's being "tortured" or "crucified" or anything. I feel like the fact that he even uses these words implies the opposite. She is crucifying her own will. She is crucifying her emotions. She is crucifying her body. She is emotionally tortured every three days over a two year period.
And to be consistent here, isn't that what women are supposed to do? Be Jesus for their husbands? Die a little more each day so that he might "live"?*
Sex Robot = Sex Martyr
VI. LOVE AND RESPECT AND JESUS
I have yet to read a single story in the entire love/respect canon that describes a woman standing up for herself and saying, "No." No, I will not abused. No, I will not stay in a situation that puts my life at risk. No, I will not stay in a marriage in which I am emotionally and sexually degraded.
I'm talking about preserving your life—your emotional, spiritual, rational self—precisely the self that abuse seeks to destroy. Precisely the self that, according to Christianity, Jesus died to save.
And that's probably the primary reason that "Love and Respect" the franchise makes me so f***ing angry, and what makes it so spiritually abusive at its core:
"Love and Respect" uses the gospel of Christianity to keep women enslaved in hierarchical, if not abusive, relationships, where they are told to subjugate their anger, their intuition, their analytical abilities, their desire for meaningful work and a career, their sexuality, their bodies, their voices, and their facial expressions* to the overriding goal of "respecting" their husbands.
So I'm going to call "Love and Respect" what it is: a false doctrine. Idolatry. A dangerous, misogynistic, and abusive ideology masquerading as the biblical, magic pill solution to all male/female relationships.
VII. LOVE WITHOUT RESPECT IS ABUSE
It feels ironic to read a book about how much men need respect when I've been writing about how disrespected I've felt in relationships with Christian men.
Usually, love or romantic feelings are used to justify or gloss over disrespectful behavior—so that the men who have treated me the most abusively or disrespectfully are also the ones who have expressed the most love, affection, and attraction.
When a man tells me that he "respects" me, it's usually after he has treated me in an incredibly disrespectful way—this seems to indicate that men understand how manipulative the words "I respect you" can be.
I've struggled with how to characterize this lack of respect for women in the Christian world. It's more than a simple lack of respect. It's not even contempt, because "contempt" implies that you actually see the other person.
I think it really comes down to the idea that women are less human or not fully human. This is the only way I can explain the abuse, especially as it coexists with "love." It's the only way I can describe a man who violates my boundaries even as he sheds crocodile tears over the depth of his love for me.
"Jessica Jones" captures just how terrifying it is to have such a man tell you he loves you.
Give me respect any day.
*Eggerichs makes a huge meal out of the fact that men are willing to die for their wives. He uses this willingness to die to justify a man's inherently superior station in the marital hierarchy. I once watched a baffling video clip of him telling women something like, "Remember that your husband would die for you. He may never open up to you emotionally, but he would die for you" as if this were somehow sufficient consolation for having an emotionally distant husband. I just picture lonely women rocking themselves to sleep every night saying over and over again, "He would die for me, he would die for me, he would die for me..."
Given the statistical probability of a man ever having to die for his wife, what about the slow death of living in an abusive or unloving relationship? What was that saying again: "Death by 1,000 Cuts."
*"A simple application is that a wife is to display a respectful facial expression and tone when he fails to be the man she wants" (43)
*"Right or wrong, men interpret their world through the respect grid, and a wife's softened tone and facial expressions can do more for her marriage than she can imagine."
*"Love and Respect" includes two letters from wives who have learned how to control their facial expressions (191, 302) and the glowing effect it has had on their marriages.
All pages numbers are from the Kindle edition of "Love and Respect."
