Slate on Christian Young Adult Novels
Though evangelical books have had a hand in creating this more moral era, the larger takeaway from the Christian books is not that girls should imagine themselves as subservient wives, but that they should prepare themselves for adulthood. Certainly heroine Candace Thompson sees marriage as her ultimate goal when she is choosing a boyfriend. But she also wants someone “who valued what she did, would take her seriously, would help her grow as a person, and would love and respect her.” That’s not a girl preparing for a life as a doormat; it’s a girl learning about the importance of emotional strength. It’s a girl who refuses to settle for a so-so boy who is not on track to be a good man. As far as girlish escapism goes, it’s better than holding out for a Prada purse.
4th of July From Two Continents
This was our 4th of July last year; eating horse steak and mashed potatoes on our window in Mongolia. Kim was pregnant and we were packing up to surprise our family and friends with an early return.
This was our 4th of July this year; fireworks in (cloudy) Seattle, surrounded by good friends. Kim is pregnant again - now officially in the third trimester!
It’s amazing how much things can change in only a year. We’re thankful for God’s goodness and faithfulness, and for the people He has put around us. We’ve been blessed by great family, friends, and communities in California, Mongolia, and now Seattle. If you’re in one of those places and one of those people, thank you.
The Omega Male: Now An Animated Feature
Remember the Omega Male coverage in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate that I pointed to this week? The thing is, by the time a topic gets to the point of being commented on in mainstream media it is already pervasive. What seemed like timely cultural commentary on what looks like a far-reaching issue looks fatally late after coming across this story about a new animated feature for kids, Alpha and Omega.
From the Slate post:
It’s about a boy wolf and a girl wolf who get relocated by well-meaning park rangers thousands of miles from home and have to find their way back. On the journey, the usual adventure and romance ensues. The twist: SHE is the alpha and HE is the omega.
From the movie’s synopsis:
Quick-witted Humphrey (voice of Justin Long) likes to frolic with friends and play video games with squirrels; disciplined Kate (voice of Hayden Panettiere) likes to call the shots and hunt caribou. Normally, an omega wolf like Humphrey would never stand a chance with an alpha wolf like Kate, but when they’re both transported halfway across the country they must work together to get back to their natural habitat.
Sidenote: was this Dennis Hopper’s last movie?
These two came this week and I can’t wait to start them after I’m done with the Bonhoeffer bio. Then again, chances are I’ll take an early peek…
Why You Should Become Familiar With The Term “Omega Male”
He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. - Hanna Rosin
There has been significant attention in the media recently about changing roles between men and women; most notably in The Atlantic, Slate, and the New York Times.(Interestingly each written by women) One of the major themes in the trend that the articles point out is the rise of two things: The Omega Male and women who don’t need them.
The entire article in the Atlantic is worth a read, but I wanted to highlight a few paragraphs I thought were especially insightful.
“As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”
“American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man.[Emphasis mine] “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.”
“At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.”
Here’s the thing; you might be this guy. You might know one, or ten, of these guys. The Omega Male is not a phenomenon; which is why we need to familiar with it and them.
The Complications of Roles
This is clearly a loaded subject; packed with a slew of issues like the following:
- Sociological: the well documented prolonging of adolescence into emerging adulthood.
- Philosophical: according to the New York Times article, questions of self-understanding.
- Pop-Cultural: as the references in each article to movie and TV characters illustrate, the media that helped to create this phenomenon is selling it back to us and perpetuating it. I could’ve sworn there was a line in Fight Club about this.
- Economic: are cultures without America’s vast economic luxury facing the same cultural issues? Are Belize, Rwanda, or Ecuador struggling with the same confusions?
The end result of all of it is wide-spread confusion over the roles of men and women, love and sex, relationship and friendship.
The Omega Male and the Church
What none of these articles have touched on is how this has invaded and effected the church. Like any other social entity, the church tends to overemphasize certain things to the detriment of others. Beneath the din of culture war issues like abortion and gay marriage, we have to ask if the church been faithful in teaching young people about proper roles for men and women. In large segments of the church that clumsily “embraced the arts” in the last 7 years, did they spend as much time teaching those same artists what the Bible teaches about what a man is, what a woman is, and how they should interact in friendships and relationships?
The Omega Male and the gender roles confusion associated with them are only recently being popularly analyzed and diagnosed, but by the time issues reach a popular level they are already ubiquitous. This would make it a good time for the church to ask how it can teach Omega Males to be men; to contend for the faith (Jude 3), to treat girls as sisters (1 Tim. 5:2), and to work hard like a farmer, sharing in suffering, competing by the rules like an athlete (2 Tim. 2:1-6) - all activities that Omega’s aren’t prone to do but about which the Bible is clear.
For further thought-provoking commentary on men, women, & relationships, I strongly suggest this video.
