Male violence against women. We need a cultural change, and men are shirking the job.

The Epstein Files have made it indisputable that we need a cultural change to prevent the rampant misogyny and himpathy that enables predatory men to exploit women, girls and minors.

Don Hennessy says,

We need a cultural change. And I regret to have to say this, but the only people who will create that change are men, and men are shirking the job, they won’t do it. They’re quite happy if their own particular circumstances are okay, they don’t want to engage with anybody else, they don’t want to challenge other men who are abusive.”

I believe the men who founded complementarianism (CMBW) wanted to bulwark the Patriarchal ideology that husbands are entitled to get sexual gratification regardless of how much it might hurt or demean their wives.

Because they were professing Christians, they wanted to focus on what happened in marriage and the church. But they were shirking the job of wider cultural change which would contest the predator-enabling ideology that harmed Don Hennessy when he was a young man.

Hennessy says 

as a young man I was studying to be a priest in the Catholic Church, and I was severely abused on a number of occasions by other men. And that left me kind of puzzled about what a man was, and what a man should be. And it took me some quite time to realise that these guys were all the same, they were all operating from the same principle, which is their gratification is what they were entitled to. And it didn’t matter how hurt or how damaged the person, the target, might be. They just saw it as their right to have their own sexual needs gratified.

In domestic abuse, I believe the marital bedroom is the battle ground. I believe this because Don Hennessy and his colleagues at the Cork Domestic Violence project spent years studying and listening to men who abuse their female intimate partners, and they came to the conclusion that men who commit domestic abuse are sexual offenders who are even more devious than pedophiles. See part 4 of my Don Hennessy series.

The founders of CBMW were all deeply uncomfortable with how feminism was influencing the church and society at large. They founded CBMW to resist those influences. They were uncomfortable with both second wave secular feminism, and evangelical feminism.

I am not saying that all the men who founded CBMW are wife abusers. But like Don Hennessy, I think that they’ve been shirking the job of creating the cultural change that is needed. They are quite happy if their own particular circumstances are okay, they don’t want to engage with anybody else, and they don’t want to challenge other men who are abusive.

In her 1975 article, What Is the Woman’s Desire? Susan Foh referred to the rise of feminism and the concern it raised for the church. Her interpretation of Genesis 3:16 provided the perfect theological excuse for abusive men to shift the blame for their evildoing to their wives. See my article How Susan Foh’s interpretation of Genesis 3:16 fed steroids to abusers.

The founders of CBMW loved Susan Foh’s article.

It is good to see more Christian men moving from complementarianism to egalitarianism, but most of those men are still shirking the job of cultural change on the wider front.