Challenged
A teenager gets space in the Washington Post to explain why he refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home because it has drawings of naked laydeez.
Brian Grasso is a freshman.
As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke.
My first challenge came well before I arrived on campus, when I learned that all first years were assigned “Fun Home,” a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. The book includes cartoon drawings of a woman masturbating and multiple women engaging in oral sex.
After researching the book’s content and reading a portion of it, I chose to opt out of the assignment. My choice had nothing to do with the ideas presented. I’m not opposed to reading memoirs written by LGBTQ individuals or stories containing suicide. I’m not even opposed to reading Freud, Marx or Darwin. I know that I’ll have to grapple with ideas I don’t agree with, even ideas that I find immoral.
But in the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29.
So? It’s a sentence in a book. There are many sentences in many books. Just pointing to a sentence doesn’t tell us much. Maybe Jesus was wrong.
If the book explored the same themes without sexual images or erotic language, I would have read it. But viewing pictures of sexual acts, regardless of the genders of the people involved, conflict with the inherent sacredness of sex. My beliefs extend to pop culture and even Renaissance art depicting sex.
Sacred shmacred.
He’s so proud of his dull little “beliefs.” They’ve been making people narrow and censorious for 20 centuries, but he’s bursting with pride in them. He’s eighteen and he doesn’t know much yet, but he has his important serious beliefs. And the Washington Post thinks it’s worth publishing them.
I decided to post about my decision on the Duke Class of 2019 Facebook page to comfort those with similar beliefs. I knew that my decision wouldn’t be well-received. How could it in a country where, according to one study, more than three-quarters of American men between 18 and 24 years old have viewed pornography within the past month.
But though many students denounced my decision publicly, almost 20 people privately messaged me, thanking me for my post. I received many messages from Christians, but a message from a Muslim man stood out. The man, currently a sophomore at Duke, wrote, “I’ve seen a lot of people who just throw away their identity in college in the name of secularism, open-mindedness, or liberalism.” Is this really what Duke wants?
Ah there it is again, the ever-present worship of “identity.” If your “identity” is being closed-minded and incurious and and narrow, then yes, that is what any good university wants – it wants you to expand and enrich that small pinched identity. It’s doing you a favor.
Granted, you can do that without watching people fuck in class, but you can’t very well do it while treating your “beliefs” as off-limits.
Matthew 5:28-29, eh?
Funny how he’s taking verse 28 literally, unlike verse 29.
(He looked and was offended!)
Hmm. I wonder if Grasso – when attempting in his daily life to abide by what he considers to be Jesus’s anti-porn injunction (I’m porn-critical btw) – shuns depictions of stereotypical male-centred heterosexual sexuality with the same degree of care as he does depictions of lesbian sexuality.
Because if he does, I imagine he would be obliged to never consume any kind of printed or visual media, and never venture out of his home, lest he put himself at risk of coming into contact with anything equally or more pornographic than the Bechdel work he describes. I’m guessing – and I may be wrong – that depictions of or allusions to the practice of heterosexual masculinity – which are everywhere and almost unavoidable in our society – don’t cause him to object or alter his behaviour in quite the same way.
I raise this because I was raised by fundamentalist Xtian parents. My observation was that behavioural/ moral directives in the Bible were given more or less weight and more or less adhered to depending upon whether or not they were consistent with what the believers found to be culturally familiar (ie. the norms white heterosexual people speaking english who were gender conforming and not too highly educated or well read)
So, he’s never read the Bible then?
A couple of phrases really stood out to me:
Why would you be opposed to reading any of these authors? For that matter, in the context of a learning and educational environment, why would you be opposed to reading any author, no matter how repugnant or filled with dross, in the context of critical examination of an idea?
Here Jesus (putatively), puts the onus on the observer, not the woman. He could actually gaze upon the naked women in the sketches for all sorts of valid reasons and be true to his faith, if he does so without lust. Instead he projects his failing (lust) onto the work he is being asked to analyse.
Quite how he manages to walk down the street or watch a music video, read a magazine or sit in a class with his female classmates I have no idea. maybe that’s the rub. If conservative Christians had there way we would all be dressed and acting as puritans again.
There are Bible-oriented colleges he could go to instead. If I went to one of those and then complained about their rules and reading materials, I’d be both an idiot and in the wrong. Don’t go somewhere and then demand it change 180 to resemble some other place you could’ve gone.
“Here Jesus (putatively), puts the onus on the observer, not the woman. He could actually gaze upon the naked women in the sketches for all sorts of valid reasons and be true to his faith, if he does so without lust. Instead he projects his failing (lust) onto the work he is being asked to analyse.”
There’s that Zen story about the two monks which ends “are you still carrying that woman? I put her down hours ago”.
But then reading about Buddhism is probably against his upbringing too.
Particularly relevant in light of yet another recent article on how trigger warnings are destroying higher education (destroying it, I tell you!). Apparently one would have been useful here, to prevent those sinful lustful thoughts!
Heaven forbid college would lead to open-mindedness! (Heaven being the key word here – he apparently DOES believe heaven forbids that). What a shame.
The only thing I’ve ever had a student refuse to read is an article in Skeptical Inquirer that presented the scientific evidence for global warming. That went against his sincere belief in the Heritage Foundation, which he obligingly shared with me in many words and links to demonstrate how wrong I was. Religion takes many forms.
If the “portion” he “read” contributed to his decision, seems like it had to have included the sexytimes parts? In which case, hasn’t the damage been done? Not to mention, it’s a graphic novel; it doesn’t take that long to read. If you’ve read a “portion,” you’ve spent a lot of the required time already. [I have read Fun Home; it is definitely worth reading.]
There’s sex in all kinds of college-level reading. (Where I went to school, they actually assigned this: http://www.amazon.com/Reign-Phallus-Sexual-Politics-Ancient/dp/0520079299/. I can’t say I remember much about its thesis, but there was a lot of nudity.) He should probably get over it or go to school somewhere else.
Perhaps if he’d taken a more scholarly approach to the work, he wouldn’t have found himself filled with lustful thoughts?
I’m confused. If this man is really as innocent as he claims then surely he wouldn’t recognise “erotic language” if he fell into a bucket of it.
But surely he’s not looking at a woman lustfully, he’s looking at a drawing of a woman, lustfully or otherwise. In what way has he committed adultery with that drawing in his heart?
The bible isn’t saying “don’t think lustful thoughts”, it’s saying “don’t look at a woman lustfully”, which seems altogether different to me.
Well, his making the news reminded me I meant to read that book* someday, anyway.
I had a friend had some Dykes to Watch Out For around in the day. Remember it vaguely as ‘has moments/not usually really my thing’, but Fun Home really sounds pretty stunning, by all accounts.
(*Yes, Bechdel’s, not the bible. Have read that. Can’t say it lived up to the hype.)
Huh. He chose to opt out of that assignment. I am looking forward to learning more about his college career and the usefulness of his approach to doing assignments. On the other hand I would be glad to never hear of him again after he returns to his dark little bubble wrap lined cave.
I thought of that, too, latsot. There were drawings, frescoes, and statues at the time that had plenty of eroticism. Specifying “looking at a woman” suggest that *maybe* the idea was “do not objectify people” rather than “don’t think dirty thoughts”. Trying to express progressive ideas in a time and language that were less than ideal for getting the meaning across has been suggested as an issue behind conservative vs. liberal interpretations of verses.