Saving the best for last
"Human beings drink because we want to be known, and because we are afraid of being known. We drink because we want to know, and because we are afraid to know."
We’ve shared thoughts on both wine and Andy Crouch before. Now we combine the two by offering an article on alcohol written by Andy Crouch, The Pleasures and Perils of Fermentation.
Originally delivered as a speech during a Christian college Alcohol Awareness Week, Crouch considers Genesis 9 (Noah gets drunk), John 2 (Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding party), and University of Michigan football. Crouch uses these stories to show how our supposedly individual choices regarding drinks actually have far-reaching communal effects. When should one drink? When should one not drink? How much is appropriate? How often? What is healthy? What is good? Crouch offers this:
"The crucial question for all our moral choices can be put this way: Which story are we joining? Which story are we joining with our choices? Are we joining the story of shame, or the story of grace? Are we joining the story of anonymity and loneliness, or the story of restoration and community?"
Gate,
I found your introduction to Crouch’s article intriguing; I was particularly interested in finding out more about his take on the contrast between the stories of Noah and the Wedding at Cana. However, when I read the piece, I was disappointed–in fact, quite disturbed–by Crouch’s blatant sexism.
Consider what Crouch writes here:
“It’s hard to talk about alcohol without talking about sex, and you can’t talk about sex these days without talking about alcohol. One of the most remarkable developments in the last twenty years has been the rapid rise of binge drinking not among college-age men, but among college-age women, 40 percent of whom have had more than 4 drinks in a row in the last week. I have a theory about this. I believe that drinking for college-age women is largely a way to make sex easier–to ease the pain of hooking up, the pain of anonymous sex. Sex with someone you’ve made no promises to, for whom you haven’t changed your name, is indeed anonymous, without-a-name sex. It’s also story-less sex, with no history and no future. When it stops feeling good, it hurts, because sex is made to change our names, to change our stories. And when it doesn’t change us, it leaves us empty and lost, stranded outside the story we were made to live in. It’s a shame–and because it’s a shame, it doesn’t just affect the individuals who choose it. It leaves all of us, like the father in the gray shirt, like my friend Harold, like the crowd at that game, stranded outside the best story.”
Putting aside the first sentence, which doesn’t seem to make sense, Crouch’s “theory” about the rise of binge drinking among college-aged women seems to be based entirely on the notion that women are completely dependent on men in their sexual relationships. He writes “I believe that drinking for college-age women is largely a way to make sex easier.” Nowhere in this paragraph does he discuss the adverse affects of drinking or sexual relationships on college-aged men. Only women are discussed, and Crouch makes a point of mentioning more than once that the only way women can have fruitful sexual relationships–actually, the only way they can have sex that doesn’t “hurt”–is by taking some man’s “name.” Not get married, mind you; the only way for a woman to avoid “pain[ful]” sex is to actually take some other person’s name, because “Sex with someone you’ve made no promises to, for whom you haven’t changed your name, is indeed anonymous, without-a-name sex.”
To read Crouch here, one would think that no man has ever been frightened by sex or unprepared for a sexual encounter. Has no man ever been hurt sexually? Has no man ever drank to steel himself for a sexual encounter he wasn’t ready for? According to Crouch, these (feminine?) emotions only affect women. Crouch even goes so far as to imply that it is those women who get drunk to numb the pain of their “anonymous” sex who are responsible for incidents like the unfortunate one at the football game.
In this story, Crouch makes it clear that the problem with that incident is the women involved. “Rather than rebuff or ignore” the drunk young man’s “lewd and loud attention,” the young women find “his behavior pretty funny” and encourage him. Foolishly, Crouch seems to suggest, one of these women doesn’t even realize what she should or shouldn’t find amusing, and, finally, she has to be “protect[ed]” by a man. The man turns out to be her father, the implication of which being, I suppose, that having given her her current name, he was her sexual guardian until such a time when she could take on the name of another man who will then have the responsibility of “protecting” her from being “hurt” from then on.
Now, just to be clear, if the behavior of the man in that story was as Crouch described it, I agree that he should be ashamed of how he acted. However, Crouch’s manipulation of this story into the familiar narrative that women are somehow to blame for the behavior of their abusers–along with his insulting suggestion that women are dependent on men and it is only those men’s names that can protect them from “pain[ful]” sex–is also shameful. It’s too bad that Crouch’s interesting approach to this biblical question is sullied by his backward attitudes toward women.
Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
It seems that you’re stating a claim: “Andy Crouch is sexist with backwards views of women” and then reading the essay only to prove your claim. Regardless of the truth or untruth of your claim (and I don’t think the essay at hand establishes it as true), such a reading entirely misses the actual point.
The essay is not perfect. Crouch himself acknowledges, “As with all talks, it falls short of my standards for writing, but it still seems worth sharing.”
Finally, we should all be wary of publicly denouncing someone else’s person. There are ways to express potential concerns without slandering others…in this case especially, where the “other” is ultimately involved in the same Story as us.
Gate,
Thanks for the reply.
In response to your claim that I missed the point of Crouch’s essay by focusing on that essay’s sexism, I will repeat the sentiment from the final sentence of my previous post: I think Crouch provided an interesting reading of these two passages. However, the sexist attitudes on display in the piece completely overwhelm this interesting reading and render it practically worthless. Crouch has sandwiched some reprehensible ideas between some interesting ones; please excuse me for not wanting any of that sandwich.
As for your claim that I denounced and slandered Crouch. I reread my earlier post, and I can only find two places where I denounced him. I never slandered him. In my first paragraph I wrote that when I read Crouch’s essay “I was disappointed–in fact, quite disturbed–by Crouch’s blatant sexism.” In the final paragraph, I wrote: “It’s too bad that Crouch’s interesting approach to this biblical question is sullied by his backward attitudes toward women.” Neither of these statements are slanderous; both are statements about what he wrote. I think that Crouch’s essay is blatantly, classically sexist, and that this sexism is evidence of a backward attitude towards women. I suppose whether or not you agree with these opinions has a lot to do with whether you are convinced by my reading of the essay.
Your wider point seems to hinge on whether or not the sexism in the essay (which you don’t comment on) is proof of sexism on the part of Crouch. In other words, does this essay prove that Crouch “is” sexist? No. However, it is a sexist essay, and Crouch is its author. For that reason, I have no problem identifying the blatant sexism in the essay as being Crouch’s blatant sexism and the attitudes shared in it as being Crouch’s attitudes. Despite the fact that this essay fell short of his standards for writing–not for thinking or belief, but for writing–he still felt it was worth delivering to a group of college students and later sharing with the world on the internet. He has taken ownership of these words, and they are his until he disowns them.
Finally, I disagree with your final statement, that the fact that another person is a Christian should make one especially wary of denouncing their ideas. I’m not sure how the Christianity of another person should make us any more or less careful in criticizing that person. Criticism should always be cautious. The issue of sexism is one that is especially important in the PCA these days, and when a Christian promotes sexism and sexist ideas in their writing, that sexism should be roundly, loudly denounced.
Sorry I took so long to reply.
John