So . . . what's a better way?

 Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. . . . Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  ~ Luke 12: 32-34

It’s a little late to be posting on the Superbowl halftime show, I know, but I’ve honestly been wrestling with it this long.  My knee-jerk reaction was a lot of adrenaline with some criticisms of their artistic choices, but I wasn’t going to write about it until a friend of mine posted a comment on Facebook.  She said, “I've noticed that some of the biggest naysayers about the Superbowl halftime show are women. Which leads me to the age-old question: Why are women so hard on other women? Why can we support and uplift each other? Why do we have to tear each other down just because it's not our ideal form of expression? I thought the show was incredible and I was super impressed with these two artists. #womensupportingwomen"

She makes a good point.  Nothing brings out the claws faster than another woman doing something that we disapprove of or that we feel we couldn’t do.  I think part of the reason I reacted so strongly to the show is that it brought out a sense of inadequacy in me.  I’m not that athletic, and I’m younger than both of those ladies.  Furthermore, if I were going to compare my sexiness with the sexiness of the women on screen, in my own mind, I would lose (My husband disagrees, but that’s not quite the point.).  Those two women have created a current of desire around themselves and turned it into a cultural marker, a name and a reputation. Being that kind of sexy elevates a woman in the eyes of the world.  My husband’s cousin (he’s twenty) called them goddesses.  What woman doesn’t want to be desired like that, to be rated a “goddess”?  I, for one, would be uncomfortable hearing that in public, but there is a large part of my secret soul that would enjoy it.  

But the Superbowl halftime show is more than just an opportunity for women to compare themselves to other women, and it’s also more than just a “form of expression.”  It’s an international platform with messages that are conscientiously chosen. And to see Shakira dancing on her back in front of a man or Jennifer Lopez exchanging stylized kisses with all her dancers on stage raises deep questions.  Why do these women feel the need to do this?  Has our culture become so desensitized that musical artists can’t succeed without pushing the sexual envelope?  Do they feel like they have to let everything hang out in order to stay at the top of their (admittedly) difficult industry?  Or is this their chosen message to the girls (and boys) of the world?  A woman’s success is bound up in her beauty, and it’s for sale for the right amount of success?  In this case, the price of a ticket to the Superbowl.  

Honestly, the more I’ve thought about this show, and the feedback that it’s getting, the more my feelings have changed from disgust to pity.  I was disgusted by the overt sexuality.  Watching people kiss lots of other people is not my idea of entertainment.  But I also felt like something was wrong, even in the moment.  I’ll focus on Jennifer Lopez because I know more about her career.  I thought she looked preoccupied.  Even in her pregame interviews, her eyes didn’t have a lot of life or excitement in them.  And during the show, she seemed self-conscious about what her costumes were revealing.  My husband even speculated that someone had moved the camera angles on her because she made several impromptu attempts to cover herself, and those gestures weren’t nearly as smooth as the rest of the choreography.  I don’t know J.Lo’s music very well, but I have enjoyed a couple of her films (The Wedding Planner and Monster-in-Law come to mind) and seen a few clips from her auditions and early career.  The difference in her charisma between those films and the halftime show was striking, and I had to wonder if the impact of being an international sex-symbol was hitting home.  

It’s got to be hard to be that sexy at 50.  She’s obviously had surgery to maintain the youthful look in her face.  But what forces make her feel that she has to be?  She is an entrepreneur, a titan of the industry a household name.  If she can’t age gracefully and stand on who she is as opposed to what she’s willing to put out there, who can?  

For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers, the authorities, the principalities of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  

Ephesians 6:12

There’s a spirit in our culture that I call “sex for success,” and it was very evident here.  Two beautiful and capable women hold their sexuality out for the world to see and, to be frank, get a rise out of.  Being sexually shocking keeps them on people’s minds, and people, to get more of that thrill, will go back to them.  Their sex appeal has brought them a certain kind of power.  This is not new.  Other names that we could attach to this side of sex for success would include Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah, Cleopatra, Eleanor of Acquitaine, and Elizabeth I of England.  All of these women used their sexual appeal as a means to control the men around them and create a power that they might not otherwise have had in their societies.  I am not judging because for many of these women, the alternative was domination, disinheritance, or in the extreme, death.  The fact remains that this is what they did.  They stirred feelings to manipulate the people around them.  This is the offering side of sex for success. 

The other side of sex for success is the demanding side, and this side we are also familiar with.  This is when a person in power demands sex in exchange for success or money or sometimes even in exchange for being allowed to live.  This is what #MeToo is all about and also the numerous trainings that teachers and other mandatory reporters have to take in order to recognize sexual abuse and harrassment.  It was present in the ancient world when cities were razed and the victors took the women and in households of the powerful at different historical times when it was basically illegal to say “no” to a nobleman.  And lest this sin be attributed only to men, let’s not forget Potifar’s wife.  

These two situations are sides of the same coin, strands in the same rope, and they show up all over the place: the offering and accepting of a child bride, the pornography industry, human trafficking circuits, advertising, political scandals, the Epstein “suicide.”  The demanding of and offering of sex and the favors that go with it is a major moving factor in our society.  Sex is a powerful appetite that grows when you feed it, and because it involves the entire person -- physicial, emotional, psychological, and spiritual -- it captures an entire person.  Ancient fertility and intimacy religions tried to use sex as a means to interact with the divine.  They saw it as a means to worship the gods who would then offer success and stability.   In the modern age, we seem to have moved it to an individual exchange.

At the heart of it all is fear, pride, and selfishness in varying proportions.  The ancients believed that if their gods were not so appeased, their societies would fail.  Today, we fear fading from the spotlight or possibly growing older or losing the thing we’ve staked our identity in.  We fear being left out of the circles of power or just going to bed hungry.  And so we turn on or demand the sex.  Because pride demands that we never let our beauty or our animal magnetism or our power fade from the spotlight.  We never want to come to a point where we have to step back and learn to use some other part of ourselves, or horror of horrors, relinquish the center of the stage.  And so we demean ourselves, or we force others to demean themselves, and then we draw other people into the pit of unsatisfied, unrequited, unsustainable sexual desire or activity.  This spirit leads people to treat other people as a means of satisfying their own appetites. Those appetites might be sexual or economic or psychological, but no matter what, the other person is not a person.  They are a fan, a ticket, a purchase, an influence, a stepping stone, a solution, an object.  

I say “we” deliberately.  Even if you turned off the halftime show as soon as you realized what was going to happen, there are so many other temptations from this spirit.  It is that widespread in our society.  Most people, I believe, haven’t gone as far as the demanding or the offering sex, but we have all been subject to the fears and the appetites that drive us to turn other people into solutions. And even while we deplore this spirit and what it does to society, we should be aware of our own weaknesses before we judge those performers on the world’s biggest stage, who are really just people after all.

Sex is such an easy thing to abuse that it is very easy to be completely negative on the subject.  But it is a good, natural, and necessary part of every human being, very close to our cores, and that’s why watching people misuse their sexual gifts is so painful.  It could be so much more.  Let me close by throwing this question out to my friends and brethren, the ever critical Christians:  how do we use our sexual gifts rightly, to benefit the kingdom of God?  Denying our gifts is foolish, and from those to whom much has been given, much will be required. How can we use our masculinity or our femininity and our beauty and charisma to build up treasure in Heaven, especially since it is so often used to build up treasure on earth?  If a young woman with all of J.Lo’s beauty and dynamism and Shakira’s spirit and movement walked into your church and said, in complete sincerity, “I want to use my whole self to serve the Lord in the public arena, but I’m not sure which way to go,” what would you tell her?