Sex, Submission, and Evangelicals: Doug Wilson's Controversial Words

Evangelicals have been beset by another controversy, and this one’s a doozy.

Jared Wilson was attempting to critique Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that I have no plans to read ever.  But the bit he excerpted from Doug Wilson to make his point was, to put it mildly, not well received.  The main offending part:

A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.

The comments on the post are instructive, as are both Jared and Doug Wilson’s (no relation) replies.  Rachel Held Evans is worth reading too, to get a sense whence the controversy springs.

The disagreement, at first blush, appears to be driven by semantics and the responsibilities that authors have for the unintended consequences of their words.  Jared Wilson’s suggestion that beneath all this is a wariness about authorial intent strikes me as interesting, but not quite complete.  Authorial intent is a helpful guide, but cannot be solely determinative of the meaning of the passage.  To refer to a cup as a “shoe” and then object when readers don’t get it would be an authorial error, and strikes me as just as “postmodern” in its approach to meaning as those dastardly deconstructionists.  We ought not be, I don’t think, semantic voluntarists.

That case study is, of course, more obvious than the one under discussion, the one where all this really counts. Here the question is not one of reference, but rather the range of connotations that the above words have and whether the author is responsible for the whole lot of them, or only those they intended.

As to that, Doug Wilson suggests that it does us no good to use different words and that people looking to find offense invariably will.  Perhaps.  And given the rush to judgment by their critics, I sympathize with that complaint.  The problematic excerpt should have raised a question before it issued forth in condemnation, but the "dismiss first and then move on" culture is one we are all now complicit in.

But I am not convinced we cannot use other words, even if it deprives us of vast portions of our rich linguistic heritage (and as a conservative, trust me, this is hard to say).  The emptying out of our language pool may have good reasons or bad, but in certain cases it is prudent to work to avoid the offense.  And the upside is that redrawing the boundaries may, as Chesterton might have argued, cause us to find a more innovative and expressive stock of images that themselves are more accurate.