Newsflash: Being a Subject Different From Subjecting

It is, perhaps, one of the perennial temptations of the apologist to get too clever by half, to allow the phrase to defeat the argument. A particularly dangerous tactic in this regard is the tactic of reversal, in which the apologist takes the accusation leveled at him and replies, "Why yes I do. And that's a good thing!" Marc Barnes of the Patheos blog Bad Catholic finds himself floundering in this rhetorical tar pit in a recent post in which he attempt to fend off the accusation that traditional morality seeks to "enslave" women, subjugate them, make war on them, etc. He writes:

The liturgical chants and battle-cries accompanying and bemoaning the war on women are true in an erotic context.

The man who loves does wish to “control a woman’s body,” with an ardor rivaled only by his desire for the beloved to control his own. For what on earth is the sexual act, if not an attempt to control the body of the beloved? This is obvious in the physical sense, as the lover tries to “control” the other’s body into experiencing ecstasy, but it is also true when considering the nature of sex itself: If sex is the ultimate physical expression of erotic love, and love is desiring the good of the beloved, than sex — in its fullest — is the physical attempt to bring the beloved to his or her ultimate good, and thus an obvious attempt to control.

Similarly, the lover does desire a “slavery for women,” and for one woman in particular, a desire overwhelmed only by his desire to be enslaved by her.

Now, maybe I'm just a stodgy old married guy, but I don't actually think that slavery is a very good analogy for love. But let's leave that aside for a moment and accept the standard poetic conceit. Here's the problem: There's a big difference between offering yourself as a slave to someone and wanting them to do the same to you, and wanting to enslave someone. It's the difference between gift and domination. A relationship could work well in which each person wishes to serve the other's every desire: in which, according to the chosen metaphor, each person is a slave to the other. But that only works if they both want to be the slave. If, in any relationship, one or both members want to be the master while the other is the slave, you have a recipe for strife and unhappiness in abundance, not to mention a fair amount of cruelty.

This, really, is the problem with the metaphor. It's all very well for the poet to say, "I want to be your slave," but if his beloved takes him up on the offer by behaving like a slave owner, the poet is going to be dreadfully unhappy. (Which, come to that, brings us to another whole genre of often tiresome poetry.) Even if we accept the metaphor of wanting to be a slave to the beloved, a loving relationship is one in which each wants to be a slave to the other, but neither wants to enslave the other. Being a slave is not the same as enslaving, it's the opposite.

The same problem comes with the attempt to turn "control a woman's body" into a positive. Sex in which both man and woman strive to control each other's bodies is not going to work out well. In seeking to "control" one seeks to make the other do what one wants. If we assume that the lover wants his beloved to get what she wants (say, sexual release) one might assume this would work out to the same thing. But in actual interactions between people "I want to make you do what you want" is very different from "I want to give you what you want".

The inversion and capture method of apologetics is appealing in its cleverness, but the fact is that there are a lot of expressions that you really won't want to capture and make your own, indeed that you can't make your own without expressing your beliefs as something rather distasteful. In this case, terms like "control a woman's body", "enslave women" and "war on women" are not terms that Christians should seek to adopt and turn to positive meaning. It doesn't come off as some clever turn of phrase that makes one appreciate Christian love and a Christian understanding of sexuality in a new light. It just comes off as too clever by half and makes Christian morality sound vaguely nasty.