This cryptic symbol showed up on the wall at our youth group retreat. No, it wasn’t graffiti… Susan had written it up. She challenged the youth to find a way to explain what it might mean. It’s a good puzzle.
Take a moment to guess…..
What we settled on was self-esteem, around sexuality. When a boy and a girl have a sexual encounter (of any sort – it can vary, from kissing, to having sex), the boy’s self-esteem tends to rise, and the girl’s self-esteem tends to fall.
In youth group we talk about this in terms of what someone might feel after they actually become sexually active – but actually it also applies to just the idea of sex. This puzzle really came to mind in a movie I saw recently. Here you can watch a quick clip of a video from the movie “Easy A .”
… or possibly not, due to copyright issues. I’ll try to summarize it.
Olive and Brandon are having (pretty funny) “fake sex” at a highly public party… because he’s gay, and being tormented for his sexuality, and he wants to prove himself to the rest of the guys… and she’s a friend who is willing to do some playacting to help him out of the torment he’s under.
There is a lot of complexity in this encounter, but what I wanted to point out specifically was the way they are treated after they exit the bedroom. Brandon is enthusiastically received by a whole crowd of guys – pounded on the back, huzzah-ed, toasted, etc. Olive is… well… shunned. She walks slowly down a hallway full of people but no one will look her in the eye. Brandon is seen as a true dude and a hero, while Olive is seen as a worthless slut.
What can we do? How can we build a world where boys and girls are treated equally, and where sexual encounters are about love – not about status and respect?
The culture around us is very strong, and it heavily influences the way people interact. But we work, here at MPC, and as Christians, and in the communities we live in, to create a counter-culture where people are valued for what they are more than what they do. In that kind of counter-culture there isn’t a double standard for the genders, or a “straight only” standard, or a standard age which is “the right time” for people to become sexually active. In the community of grace that God calls us to create, each person is loved as an individual.
A common danger for girls is having a falsely low self-esteem… and a common danger for boys is to have a falsely inflated high sense of self esteem. In youth group at MPC, we want to protect boys and girls from both of these dangers. One of the best things to do is just to talk about it, and be aware of the danger. We also give each other “affirmations” at the end of each retreat: written down, honest accounts of what we like about one another. Youth group members say that even years later they take these affirmation papers out to remember… “people love me!”
What else can we do to protect one another?
What do you think?