“You don’t want to hear the song I wrote this week?” I asked, nodding toward my guitar.
“Don’t you understand what we’re doing here yet?” she replied incredulously. “You will never be able to write a song that matters if you don’t believe that you matter. First things first. Go home.”
I walked back to my dorm room fuming. Did she have any idea how much I was paying for this class? For this school? My family wasn’t made of money. I actually wanted to learn something in my classes! I opened my dorm room door and threw my guitar down onto my bed. I had been writing songs on my acoustic guitar for years, but it was while recovering between surgeries that I began writing a song a week and playing in coffee shops around my hometown, as my health allowed. And so when I was finally well enough to return to school, I had approached Blue and asked her to do an independent study on songwriting and performance with me. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be. Last week, Blue and I had spent fifteen minutes going through a Mary J. Blige album jacket, discussing what the artistic director was going for in each photo, and what my own style choices—or lack thereof—said about me.
“You know what your jeans and T-shirt tell me?” she had asked. “Nothing. They say, ‘I’ve got nothing to say. No unique point of view.’ ”
I had been wearing a bright orange T-shirt that read: Support Wisconsin. Eat Cheese.
“What does she know?” I said, pulling the shirt out of the back of my drawer where I had stuffed it after class last week and putting it on. “This shirt is awesome.”
* * *
I wound up at Sarah Lawrence College—one of the most liberal and experimental colleges in the nation, the kind of place where someone like Blue Jones taught—entirely by accident. My senior year of high school I had applied early decision to Biola—which is an acronym for Bible Institute of Los Angeles—where I had planned to train to be a missionary, in preparation for my career as a traveling missionary actress. When I left to spend the second half of my senior year studying abroad in Australia, everything was set. I would return from Australia in August. Two weeks later I would start school at Biola.
But the night I returned from Australia, I was still burning with anger at what my youth pastor had done, and gotten away with doing, to young girls in too many churches. Talking with my parents in the living room the night that I returned from Australia, I admitted that I no longer wanted to be a missionary. I still loved our faith, but I couldn’t be its spokesperson anymore. I told them I would probably transfer to a secular college where I could major in theater, something I couldn’t do in any Bible college I’d found, after my first year of school.
“Why go to Bible college at all then?” my dad replied.
My eyes widened.
“Sounds like a waste of money we don’t have to me. Your mom and I haven’t seen you in six months. We’d rather you not leave again in two weeks. Definitely not to go to a school you don’t want to attend.”
I looked over at my mom. Her eyes were even wider than mine.
“Take a year off. Work. Go to community college. Figure out what the right school is and apply there,” Dad continued. My mom sat frozen beside him, a look of terror on her face. But, as a staunch complementarian believer in male authority, she wasn’t about to challenge my father. And, for once in my life, that worked out for me. The following morning, I called Biola and told them I wouldn’t be coming after all.
A year later, I found myself at Sarah Lawrence College, just outside New York City, knowing almost nothing about the school besides its brochure promises.
“You’re different,” the brochure cover read.
I folded the flap back.
“So are we,” it continued.
Oh.
That was good.
“At Sarah Lawrence, you don’t learn what to think; you learn how to think.” I had to stop and set it down for a moment. Such a place existed? For the first time, I felt as though I had found a place in which a misfit like me might just fit.
As it turned out, however, being “different” in your midwestern evangelical Christian community isn’t the same as being different in . . . wherever my new classmates were from. My fellow Sarah Lawrence classmates had constructed beautiful dresses entirely out of tampons for their high school proms. They performed secret brass band concerts in campus elevators, shocking me with a tuba in my face when the doors opened on the third floor. They worked through bad breakups by spending entire nights alone in their dorm rooms making ocean-themed piñatas that they hung from the ceiling, replacing their usual lightbulb with a blue one and imagining themselves living under the ocean—far, far away from their ex-boyfriends.
Here, this lifelong misfit felt like a painfully average, fanny pack–toting tourist visiting a foreign land. I quickly became known as the gosh-darn-sweetest girl on campus, a real salt-of-the-earth type, sugar and spice and everything ugh. People often stopped me on campus and asked why I was smiling at them.
“Do I know you?” they’d press when I told them that I was just being friendly.
“No. I’m just being nice.”
“Oh. Okay,” they’d say, narrowing their eyes.
“I’m from the Midwest,” I’d explain.
“Ohhhh,” they’d respond with understanding.
Within weeks of starting school, I had earned the following nicknames: “The Milk Maid,” “The Token Straight Girl,” and “The Gap Girl,” a title bestowed upon me when I made the grave mistake of admitting that I shopped at the Gap, apparently an embarrassingly mainstream choice.
I didn’t tell many of my new classmates when I started losing a lot of blood, or when the pain from the undiagnosed Crohn’s disease got worse. I just smiled, popped a handful of ibuprofen, and carried on. When everyone came back at the end of spring break the first year of college and I wasn’t in class—because I was on the other side of the country undergoing surgery—I imagine most people never would have guessed why I, the most smiley girl on campus, wasn’t there.
* * *
While my classmates finished their first and second years of college, I underwent four surgeries and lived at my parents’ house. When I was well enough in the months between my third and fourth surgeries, my church asked me to become a youth group leader for ninth-grade girls. Though I was still healing and couldn’t leave the house more than a few times a week, I said yes. I was more clear-eyed about the church’s challenges than I had ever been, and I thought my presence there could make a difference. I imagined myself giving that group of girls the truly unconditional love and support that I had yearned for when I was their age—providing all the best evangelicalism had to offer and none of the worst. But when the girls started coming to me with stories about being called stumbling blocks and asking me what I thought of what other leaders said about the gender and sexuality expectations they were required to meet, I didn’t know what to say.
Okay, I’d tell one girl while sitting beside her on a park bench during one of my weekly one-on-ones. So, another youth group leader told you that if you masturbate you will ruin your sex drive, emasculate your future husband, and destroy your eventual marriage. The girl nodded. Well, what do you think of that? I’d listen, urging the girl to look at the issue from multiple angles and not immediately assume that the other leader was right, though I never contradicted the leader either. Or, Alright, I’d say during a small group. One of the leaders said that if you call a boy, he will see you as unfeminine and won’t want to date you. Let’s assume that’s true—which it may or may not be. If it is true, is he the kind of guy you would want to date? Someone who would judge you like that just for calling him? I closed almost every one of these conversations with a phrase that became a mantra for me in those months: Take it with a grain of salt. Take what this leader said with a grain of salt; take what that leader said with a grain of salt; take what I say with a grain of salt; take it all with a grain of salt. It was the only advice I felt I could offer with integrity.
>
After about six months, I retired from the role. I told the girls it was because I was still too sick. But really, it was because I was still growing up. Still being the “good girl”—the one on the answering machine with the high-pitched voice hoping not to upset her teacher, the one too afraid of how the church would react if she were to admit to a ninth-grade girl what she really thought about her being called a stumbling block, to open her mouth and say it. Those girls needed a grown woman to mentor them, and I wasn’t one.
A study published in Youth & Society surveyed thirty girls and women between the ages of eight and thirty, half of whom were members of “conservative” communities—those that traditionally teach that women must be subordinate to men—and half of whom were members of “egalitarian” communities, where it is taught that the genders can hold all of the same roles in the church, family, and society. Interestingly, the greatest discrepancy the researchers found was not among the children, but among the women over the age of twenty. Women from both the conservative and the egalitarian communities described feeling more comfortable with themselves and gaining a sense of voice at this age. However, the difference lies in how they felt about that. Women from the egalitarian communities viewed it as a strength and a sign of maturity. The women from conservative communities, on the other hand, saw it as a personal weakness, a sign that they were too selfish or aggressive, which led them to “struggle to be more passive.”1
The researchers write:
One 25-year-old woman, J., expresses the more comfortable she is in a relationship, the easier it is for her to express herself and to disagree with the other person. She views this as bad because a mature Christian should not disagree or be angry: “It’s wrong, it’s a sin. It’s very much a sin to be angry no matter, I mean no matter what the result or why or whatever.”2
A report in the Vatican newspaper based on a study of the confessions heard by a ninety-five-year-old Jesuit scholar, which was backed up by the Pope’s personal theologian, found that the number one sin confessed by women is pride.3 Yet I don’t think this means women are more prideful than men. Rather, I think women are more likely to notice their pride and categorize it as sinful because it contradicts the gender expectations they’ve been raised with in secular and religious society.
As opposed to a bat mitzvah or a quinceañera, evangelicals ought to have a funeral at the beginning of girls’ adolescence. When you’re a girl you’re allowed to be who you are. But as you get older, you have to put that person to death. Because after puberty, you’re dirty. So now you have to be what’s expected of you. You always have to fit some kind of role or be whatever a woman is supposed to be instead of actually who you are. (Jo)
Sometimes just growing up—becoming confident, becoming self-sufficient, forming one’s own opinions—can feel like a sin to a complementarian woman. But, what if it’s just the opposite?
In her groundbreaking essay “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Valerie Saiving Goldstein argues that the Christian focus on the sinfulness of pride is rooted in the faith’s historic masculine leadership. She says pride may well be a sin for many men who hold power in our patriarchal society, making men’s choice to check their pride in service of others very virtuous indeed. Yet women, not being in this position of power, are more likely to think too little of themselves than too much, suffering from an “underdevelopment or negation of the self”4—something Blue Jones saw in me from a mile away. And so, perhaps, for such women, pride is not a sin, but a virtue.
* * *
When I arrived back at Sarah Lawrence College as a sophomore—my friends having moved on to junior year—the plate of glass I felt between myself and my classmates, once cloudy, was now clear. Things I had gawked at like an obnoxious tourist when I first started there, I now watched with detached curiosity: the way people casually and comfortably touched one another; the unabashed strength I saw in so many of the women’s strides. But clear or not, the plate of glass was still there, standing between me and the world I now lived in but didn’t know how to enter.
I would stay up all night in the painting studio, emerging at four AM smelling of oil paint the way most college kids smell of alcohol. I’d sneak into abandoned buildings with my guitar and write songs alone. I’d create performance pieces with my friends so wild and dark I wondered if this stuff had been in me all along. And I’d spend whole afternoons just marveling over how little about life I really knew—which is perhaps the most rebellious thing one raised to believe she and her friends alone knew the truth can do. But once my pen was capped, my guitar encased, the studio door locked tightly behind me, I went right back to being the girl I’d been raised to be.
Blue Jones was deeply annoyed by my inability to recognize, let alone dig through, all the good-girl tendencies in me that were so utterly obvious to her. She wanted me to pull forth the most raw, real version of myself from the very depths of me. And I wanted to learn a few new chords.
Blue and I spent our semester together haggling over just what our independent study was about. I thought it was about writing music and lyrics. Blue had something else in mind. Sure, I wrote a few songs while working with her, but that wasn’t the real work. And every time Blue had to explain that to me . . . again, I watched her become less and less certain about having taken me on as a student.
For Blue, art was ongoing. It was as much about the way the artist projected her voice when she yelled at her neighbor to turn down his music, or grumbled into her coffee in the morning, as it was about what she did onstage. Real art couldn’t stop and start any more than life could. So either I was that little girl apologizing on Blue’s answering machine, or I was the artist who knew how to sing from a place so low it made her gut shake.
I could be either.
But I couldn’t be both.
Before I met Blue, I had no idea how much the gender expectations I’d grown up with controlled my thoughts, feelings, and choices—even down to the sound of my own voice. I had dropped from the evangelical hand that once held me, but the heartstrings that connected me to it were still there. Like a marionette, I still danced under the church’s direction. And when Blue picked at the strings, the discordant sounds they made drowned out every other song I had in me.
After playing for Blue, I would often take my acoustic guitar off my lap and set it against her office wall, waiting for her response.
“Did you like it?” I would finally fill the silence.
“It was fine,” she might answer shortly.
But eventually she would tell me what was wrong with it.
One response in particular has stuck with me.
“It was all about your daddy,” Blue extrapolated. “I felt like it was supposed to be a woman-power song. But then, you actually used the word daddy in it.”
I shook my head. She didn’t understand. Perhaps I should play it again.
“And in your last woman-power song,” she went on, “God played the same role as the daddy character does in this one. Why do you need some daddy figure to give you permission to be a powerful woman?” Her question hung in the air.
Verse
He was seventeen and my daddy laughed, he said,
“He’ll be twenty-four ’fore he keeps up with you
You know you’re a handful, pretty girl.
’Cause you’ve got a head and you’ve got a heart and
Most guys don’t know where to start with a girl who knows
Where she’s going.”
Chorus
I said, “Daddy will I ever meet someone
To take me where I’ve got to go?”
He said, “Pretty girl,
Don’t you worry your pretty little head
You don’t need someone to take you where
You’re gonna go.
“You’re going somewhere like it or not.
You’re going somewhere
’Cause what it takes my girl, well you’ve got, you’ve got
Wha
t it takes my girl you’ve got.”
Verse
Seventeen left before my twenty-one, he said
“Listen girl, I just can’t hold on.
You know you’re a handful pretty girl.
And with another it may be easier
To get through the wear and tear
Of living this life than it is with you.”
(Repeat CHORUS)
Bridge
My daddy don’t lie to me.
I know that he’s the only man who can handle
My most anything.
Yeah, Daddy don’t lie to me.
If he tells me I don’t need him
Then I don’t.
’Cause he tells me, “girl you’re all right
On your own.”
Verse
Another one’s knocking at my door.
“Listen boy, you don’t want anymore.
They say I’m a handful, pretty boy.
So listen up and listen good.
My daddy told me everything he should
And lately I’ve learned I’m okay alone.”
(Repeat chorus)
I walked out of Blue’s office in a rage. Writing these “woman-power” songs, as she called them, was big for me. I wasn’t asking for permission from some daddy figure the way she said I was. I was claiming my own power!
“Sometimes people just have empowering conversations with their dads,” I railed to anyone who would listen over the course of the next week. “I can’t help it if that’s what happened!”
And then, it hit me.
That isn’t what happened.
My dad never actually said what I had given him credit for saying in that song. Not in so many words anyway. It was within character for him—my dad is conservative in many ways, but he is a big supporter of women’s leadership. Still, we never actually had the conversation the song described.
What actually happened is that I went out on a date with a guy from my church when I was almost fully healed from my last surgery. He called me the next morning and asked me out again. I told him that I’d love to go out again, but that next time we should just go as friends as I didn’t feel that romantic spark. Then I heard a loud sigh of relief from the other end of the phone.
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