My New Band Is: Trophy Wife
Happy International Women's Day!
Once a week at least, a white Evangelical dude does something stupid on the Internet and I feel compelled to explain, as an ex-Evangelical (Southern Baptist-turned-heathen) why this particular strain of American Christianity is not as fringe-y as you think it is.
Yesterday’s Internet famous Bible-wielding loudmouth was Pastor Stewart Allen Clark of Missouri who gave a recent sermon telling women that they needed to do a better job of looking good for their husbands. “I’m not saying every woman can be the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump,” he said, “Most women can’t be trophy wives, but you know ... maybe you’re a participation trophy.” He also told them that even if they can’t look like Melania Trump, they shouldn’t look “butch,” a misogyny/homophobia two-fer.
Happy International Women’s day!
Unsurprisingly, Allen Clark (who, full disclosure, I may have referred to on Twitter as “a raging douchenozzle”) is not suggesting that men are obligated to look like Brad Pitt at Melania’s age, and he is no infallible physical specimen himself. (Neither am I, but I don’t run around demanding that men look like .. well, anything, on my explicit behalf.) Allen Clark looks like a generic normie white guy of a certain age: second gen mom jeans, LensCrafters’ best -6.00 prescription glasses circa 2008, a close haircut that’s so non-descriptively plain that to give it a name would give it unearned airs, and a physical stature that is quite possibly the exact average of all men, ever. There’s a whole ‘nother MBNI to be written about why Melania Trump specifically might be this guy’s ideal (and when I run out of other column material I will probably write it.) But the reality is, he idealizes a certain aesthetic and thinks it’s a moral failing when women don’t at least try to conform to it.
We all know what those impossible aesthetics look like for men and women. But it’s only acceptable for men like Allen Clark to demand that women meet them. Women can’t do that. In fact, there’s an entire meme devoted to how unreasonable, but also hilarious, it would be if women did this on the regular. If women evaluated men like Allen Clark primarily on the basis of his sexual desirability, maybe he’d have more empathy for the damage he’s doing to young women in his church audience.
Here I should note that men are evaluated by stupid unreasonable standards all the time. This phenomenon even has a label: toxic masculinity. The difference: standards for women demand that they be sub-human—existing solely as vehicles for male ambition, genetic continuation, and sexual satisfaction, with no needs or agency of their own. Unreasonable standards for men demand that they be super-human with no vulnerability.
Neither of these things are good, but personally, I’d like to try the other unreasonable standard for a change.
But as insufferable and sexist as this guy is, he’s not really saying anything out of the ordinary for conservative white Evangelicals.
Everything Is Eve’s Fault
Even if you don’t recognize the specific tropes of Evangelical strains of Christianity, you’re probably familiar with the concept of original sin and the story of Adam and Eve. But to recap:
God made Adam, in his image. His image, not hers, not theirs. (In the Evangelical reading, God, an omniscient superpower, cannot be gender fluid because He is the The Alpha and The Omega; the end, all be all; is very binary about everything for some reason.)
Anyway, God decided that Adam needed a companion, because Adam was lonely, or maybe couldn’t tolerate being alone for long periods of time, which actually makes Adam sympathetic because that’s why we’re all glued to our phones.
So He made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. Why He needed to do that is never explained (did conjuring a human from nothing only work once?) but the implication is that Eve/woman is a derivative of man. And a piece he could ostensibly live without. God did not make Eve out of Adam’s skull. (Which would have been funny, but this God I grew up with has no sense of humor, either.)
Anyway, then the plotlines form: God makes a tree with fruit that looks delicious and tells Adam he can never eat from the tree, because God is kind of a sadist about these things. A talking snake shows up (this is Satan, who has subsequently destroyed the brand equity of snakes for thousands of years) and tells Eve that she should try the fruit and she encourages Adam to do it anyway. And he does, because he could not help himself in the face of literally the only woman he’s ever met, and then everything goes to shit and this would have never happened except for evil dumb tempress Eve who cannot be trusted around delicious fruit or talking snakes. Now we have suffering and wars and sickness because Adam let a woman talk him into something.
And this is the very first story involving humans in the Bible. It is a portrayal of temptation that originates from a woman who duped a man into doing something he knew was wrong. It doesn’t get particularly better from there.
One of the Southern Baptist codas to this story that I heard growing up was that women experience pain in childbirth because God is punishing them for their role in The Fall. You can’t even innocently experience normal pain as a woman who’s Southern Baptist without being told it’s somehow your own fault.
But Back To The Raging Douchenozzle
Pastor Allen Clark’s formulation of how women should function in families and in society is derived from the idea that women are created by God expressly to serve as “helpmates” to men. Women bear their children, support them in whatever it is they want to do, satisfy them sexually, and if you can’t do one of all of those things, you’re not living up to your Christian potential as a woman. There’s a particular interpretation of a verse in the New Testament that can be paraphrased as “wives submit to your husbands.” It gets taken very literally, and not in a fun mutually consensual “in-bed” sense, which by the way, everyone likes statistically. (Submission fantasies are the most popular fantasy for men and women alike. Apparently, we all get tired of making decisions in modern life and it’s a relief to have someone else in charge.)
Wives “submit” in this context treats adult women like children who should be obedient. It says they have (potentially) input, but not authority. It says men know better, even when they don’t. It also says that when bad things happen to women, it’s because they did not submit on some level.
And deep down, a lot conservatives really do believe that women deserve the bad things that happen to them. “Single mother, product of divorce” has a very different connotation than “single father, product of divorce” especially in Evangelical circles.
Many conservative women believe they deserve this, because they do believe God did not create men and women as equals. (My mom is one of them.) The onus is on women to perform a role where the only performance metric that matters is how well the men and children they’re supporting do.
But you live in this world, whether you realize it or not. Evangelicals just have a more extreme version of it.
This is not completely different from the way society at large views men and women, by the way. We’re more likely to attribute mistakes men make to external factors and mistakes women make to their own personal flaws. (You see this most obviously in the workplace, where it’s often quantified and documented.)
Conservative Evangelicals just embrace it in a more extreme way. When Democrat Doug Jones ran against Republican judge Roy Moore in my home state of Alabama in 2017, my firm did a poll to gauge attitudes toward Moore and how they aligned with Evangelical messages. I had a theory that a large number of white Evangelicals would overlook Moore’s sexual misconduct because they would find a way to blame it on the women, or in Moore’s case, girls. And they did, doubting in many cases that the multiple reported incidents had happened, and in some other cases, arguing that it was okay.
Some of the women I talked to during the race argued that it was okay for a thirty-something Moore to pursue teenagers and pointed to their own stories of getting married in their teens (which my own parents did at 17 and 19 respectively). If Moore was a pedophile, were they?
The issue of consent was never discussed because in their minds, Moore’s victims consented to something. Talking to him. Being there. Whatever. There were also the usual horrible cliches: the victims asked for it somehow, looked mature for their age, Moore was just being a man with manly appetites.
Even now, when I talk about that race to people who are understandably shocked that Jones didn’t win in a landslide against a pedophile, I tell them the frame is different for them. In the minds of white Evangelical voters who pulled the lever for Moore, Moore never actually did anything wrong. He is a godly man, with normal male appetites.
This was true of a lot of Evangelical women and Trump, too. It wasn’t that they weren’t offended by “grab ‘em by the pussy”, it was that they believed him when he said “when you’re rich, they let you do it.” Anyone whose pussy got grabbed by Trump must have been pursuing something for herself.
Trophy Wives and Trad Wives
It’s fitting that Allen Clark uses the phrase “trophy wife” in this context. For this strain of Evangelicalism, wives are objects men win after a period of pursuit. They exist to make men look good. That is their entire raison d’etre.
The relationship is fundamentally transactional: men make decisions and in most cases, bring in most of the income, and women are responsible for children, housekeeping, and attending to her husband’s sexual needs. Inasmuch as their fates are intertwined as humans, or they have separate lives, it’s only in the sense that they must grow together spiritually and that includes, mutual reinforcement of traditional gender roles.
This is particularly true when it comes to sex. Men are entitled to it; women are not. There’s no such thing as female sexual entitlement because in this view, no woman actually wants to have sex except to procreate or please her man. This is also why conservatives oppose birth control in some cases even if they don’t believe it’s strictly verboten in the Bible. Why would a woman ever need to have sex for her own pleasure?
By extension, men like Allen Clark believe they’re entitled to demand that women arrange themselves and their lives for maximum sexual appeal and sometimes this comes down to men dictating what they eat, what they wear, what they weigh, and if Melania is really what they’re aiming for, whether they get plastic surgery.
There are women, “trad wives” (short for “traditional”) who choose all of this and want it. I don’t begrudge them, though I resent it when they vote in a way that strips the rest of us of our agency and rights.
But it’s hard to argue that anyone really chooses it when they grow up in a culture where it’s the default. So I feel bad for Allen Clark’s wife and the wives of every man in his congregation who believes this stuff, and I feel worse for girls who grew up with it, the way I did.
But on some level, all girls grow up with it.