#decontruction

Deconstructing Superman and God

A long time ago, back in the mid-’80s, I took a university class called “The American Character.” It was part of the Liberal Studies program. (The first of four majors I would go through.) I remember writing a paper about how our Judeo-Christian values appeared in American pop culture. I compared the Superman mythos to that of Jesus. I wasn’t the first person to notice the similarities between…

It’s strange that I’m so riled up about a show I never even watched, but I am.

I saw a positive review of the final episode that defended Daenerys’s outcome. Like so many reviews, it praised the show’s longtime tradition of “subverted expectations.” It praised Daenerys’s deconstruction of the tropes of “returning rightful ruler,” “noble conqueror” and “white savior,” as others have. But then it also praised the ending for subverting the trope of “Girl Power fantasy.”

That annoyed me.

Not all subverted expectations are created equal.

It’s one thing to subvert the trope of “the rightful ruler returns.” It’s good to raise questions about the nature of a “rightful ruler.” It’s also well and good to deconstruct the trope of the noble conqueror and especially of the white savior. Those tropes are problematic and deserve to be deconstructed. If Daenerys’s downward spiral were played out by a male character, it would mostly be fine.

But how is it good to deconstruct a “Girl Power fantasy”? Didn’t that critic realize why Girl Power fantasies hold the appeal they do? It’s because traditionally, girls have had too little power. It’s because so many women and girls today feel the patriarchy’s feet in their faces.

Imagine if a story like Daenerys’s were played out by a black man. One who at the beginning is totally marginalized and abused by white people in a very racialized way, but who claws his way to power, triumphs over his enemies, saves other marginalized people, and seems poised for the ultimate glory. But then the weight of all the trauma he’s faced crushes his psyche, and he gives in to his “violent instincts” and becomes a mass-murderer. In the end, a white person “saves the world” by killing him and then another white person takes over his position of power.

Would anyone dare praise that storyline for “deconstructing the cliché of the virtuous minority underdog”?

If you use shame as a means to control, you are engaging in abuse.

I guess the problem with people spewing all their hate and shame on me because they insisted that I fit into a certain mold – all growing up and in my early 20’s, is that I already had low confidence. It wouldn’t have worked at all if I had a loving family surrounding me and an inner witness that “I am lovable and capable.” But my dad worked hard to undermine any such confidence in me from a young age. Maybe it was his demons finding prey, and he wasn’t aware of it, but he has been very unpleasant, extremely narcissistic to me since I was a very young child and even a toddler/baby.

When someone is already grappling with self concept and struggling to find a way in the world, it is cruel and unusual punishment to say terrible things about them – running down their character, only because they are not conforming to your ideal image of a good capitalist slave.

Trust me, if I had the ability, I probably would have – because I really, really like pleasing people to stay out of the line of fire, which I learned how to do growing up with a grandiose and a vulnerable narcissist- and if I’m being honest, my extremely high grades were probably a strategy for this. But I digress.

I didn’t have the ability to do what these people were expecting of me. This is why they call it a DIS-ability. Because it’s something that’s required in a certain society or circle that a certain category of people CAN NOT DO. We were born with the genetic incapability of doing such things. To then say that it’s a character issue is gaslighting, and ultimately, narcissistic abuse – but when it comes from those in positions of ministry, those who stand in as God’s representatives on earth, it takes on a whole other layer of significance, darkness and harm. It’s taken me 22 years to get healed of these things, to learn how to regulate, how to stand in my truth, to admit that they happened and release forgiveness and the blocks.

They say that abuse is confusing, and it is even more confusing if you’re autistic with social processing deficits.

And it’s not fair. They injected their toxic negativity into me where it didn’t belong so that THEY could feel better – making me carry their trash around inside of myself, which I don’t have to tell you messed up my internal workings at the deepest levels and stole energy that I would have otherwise been using to build my own life. This is why it’s tantamount to rape.

The other thing is – and maybe the most important – that it’s not at all biblical. Forcing someone to fit into a modern capitalist jack-of-all-trades masculine woman stereotype is nowhere in the bible. Outside of Eden, there are many other systems of government and self-sustenance mentioned (other than capitalist democracies,) that run the gamut from communes to monarchies – and none of them are denounced as evil.

If I chose to live off grid and never work a ‘real job’ in my life it wouldn’t make me any more or less spiritual, because it’s not a spiritual issue. But their small minds probably didn’t even think of this, let alone weigh what they were doing on the scales of justice. Because metacognition is only for the self-aware and the socially responsible. And no, they were not.

Did they not consider the words of Christ to Martha when she complained that her sister wasn’t working hard enough? “She has chosen the better thing.”  (I have dealt with work refusal in other posts.)

have led me to more, deeper reflections on the journey so far, my deconstruction journey. It began with pain: the pain of the unfulfilled promise of purity culture, the promise of a happy, ‘perfect’ marriage.

I was 24 when I married a 30 year old Christian man who had never lived outside of his parent’s basement, worked part time and said his life goal was ‘ministry.’ He didn’t want to go to school for it though, so it was just a sort of windy, breezy thing to say to put off those who would question his path in life. Everyone in his circles sort of hallowed him; put him on a pedestal as this super-spiritual, really amazing guy. That was the mask, and I believed it too. I had no reason not to.

I found out after we got married that he was extremely addicted to video games. He had hidden that behind purity culture – we never lived together, never gave too much of our emotional selves to each other either. This was all outlined as the right way to do things. Purity culture teaches that sex giving your whole self to another person, and sex should only happen within a marriage, so unless you are ready to get married, you should guard how fully you know a person, emotionally as well as sexually.

He ignored me all the time and thought that once or twice a year was a good amount of dates to sustain the marriage. We never talked, and he hated spending time with me, even at meals. It was a rush through dinner that I had often spent an hour making – he would spend minutes gobbling it up, even coming to the table after we had finished, and then back to his computer games. I was broken hearted and dying inside. I had done everything ‘right,’ according to the church, from the time I was young and still I had been given a completely crappy marriage. That’s why when this platitude is repeated from the platform at church I feel like standing up and calling out my dissent.

I considered that I might just be a statistic, the odd one out whose marriage didn’t work because ‘the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike,’ meaning that bad things happen to good people as randomly as they do anyone else because we live in a world we can’t control. As I was holding this possibility inside, I began meeting more (formerly) devout Christians whose marriages didn’t turn out good, even though they diligently followed the recipe set out in purity culture.

I realized that I was not alone in this experience – and that a surprising number of people actually ended up in the exact same boat as me – seemingly perfect on the outside, with an empty marriage on the inside.

One man I met had married a woman who couldn’t ever have sex because of undisclosed sexual abuse trauma from her past. They had sex something like twice in 14 years, and she thought he should just live with that, like that.

Another was a man who had been physically abused by his wife every time they got into a disagreement. She would throw and break lamps, punch and scratch him.

Another good, godly man married a communal narcissist who was excellent at her job but made her distain of his job clear at home every time they had a disagreement. When he started standing up for himself, she blamed their marital conflict on him, served him divorce papers on Christmas Day, took custody, engaged in parental alienation and stole $20 000 from his savings account.

A woman on fire for missions went to Africa to serve and fell in love with a Christian man there. They got married, and lived happily together for two years. When they moved back to Canada he stayed with her for 6 months before leaving for days/weeks/months on end and cleaned out her savings account of $35 000.

Another man married a woman who was fine sometimes but went through extreme periods of mental illness where she abused him emotionally and verbally.

Another woman married a man who carried on affairs with other women and men for the entire 25 year marriage. When she went out, he would invite his gay male friends over and rape, molest and abuse their children. This went on for years under the guise of ‘trying to make it work.’

These aren't just imagined scenarios. These were flesh and blood people that I met and saw the pain in their eyes, their body language, their words.

While the actual divorce rate in the church isn’t anything close to 50%, (it’s more like 12.5%,) this is still a staggering statistic for a holy people following a supposedly perfect formula for a great, fulfilling, happy marriage.

To follow the churchianity logic: If purity culture is the perfect recipe for marriage, and if once we are married (because we’ve had sex and therefore our spirits are bonded for life) we are committed to stay with that person unless they physically cheat on us...unless we can prove they have cheated on us…then these people should have stayed in their marriages and tried to make it work?

This no longer added up to me like it had in the past. I had stayed, I had prayed, I had done inner healing, counselling (together and alone), I had changed the way I used words in conflict and in requests, I had worked harder and done all the housework without complaining, I had reported to other believers, I had gotten prayer more times than I could count, I had set up an accountability structure for myself and my (now-ex) husband, and he still wasn’t IN the marriage.

 I had to be wrong about something…

The teachings I had been given didn’t set me free to live better with God – they kept me in a relationship with a neglectful, covert narcissist for almost 13 years. Neglect is also abuse, which is something I hadn’t been aware of – but I learned firsthand throughout the course of my marriage. I knew that the first year was supposed to be hard, but maybe not this hard.