When Good Men Write About Sex

An awful lot of "good men" keep writing bad things about sex.

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In a recent issue of X-Men (stay with me) the super villain Magneto is waxing about his old friend-slash-arch nemesis Professor X. “He is a good man and we must be wary of good men,” Magneto says. “For what will they not do to show us how good they are?” 

The danger of bad men is that they will do something bad. The danger of good men is that they will get lost in the hall of mirrors of their own goodness, unable to conceptualize anything they do as anything but good. There’s no need to be curious about other perspectives. There’s no need to listen to the feedback and critiques of others. When you’re good, you’re the only one who matters, and every action comes pre-justified by your own goodness. It’s a dangerous situation, and the greater danger is that we get lost in that hall of mirrors right along with them.  

I thought about the danger of good men while watching last week’s dust-up around Joshua Butler’s sex article. If you missed it, The Gospel Coalition ran an excerpt from Butler’s upcoming book which amounted to a lengthy, extended metaphor about how becoming a Christian is like having sex. My grandma reads these, so I don’t really want to get into the specifics of Butler’s comparisons, but it’d be flagged by any half-decent porn blocking software. (If you missed it, I clowned on a few screenshots of it on Twitter.) 

I don’t want to write about the article itself much. A lot of people have done a lot of good and highly recommended work explaining where this writing went wrong, both in how Butler talked about women’s bodies and his lack of a consistent soteriology. I especially appreciated this thread of its mishandling of biblical metaphor, which doubles as a good education in literary devices. Instead, I want to focus on some of the defenses that we heard and always hear when this stuff happens, explain why I think this defense just perpetuates the damage, and then look to a possible solution from the art world.