Study: Evangelical Christianity Makes Men Super Insecure About Their Dicks
We probably could have guessed that.
www.wonkette.com
Last week, we met Trump prophet Jeff Jansen, who was on a jag about how incredibly manly Jesus was, going around whipping people all the time and what have you. He then used Macho Jesus as a cudgel to attack what he felt were Christian men who were not masculine enough. This was not too unusual. Evangelicals love to talk about manliness and how women are supposed to be subordinate to men and all that other crap.
Of course, if you ask me, religion is mostly a scam initially perpetrated by men who wanted some divine justification for oppressing women and then later wanted divine justification for oppressing various other groups, but people seem to disagree with me about that.
A recent study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion suggests evangelical Christianity and its focus on masculinity and manliness may be making the men who practice it super insecure about the size of their dicks — which, in turn, may make them act like total dicks. As crappy as biological essentialism is, there is little question that some men have done some pretty shitty things and behaved in pretty shitty ways over the course of history as a result of their dick insecurity.
The study came to this conclusion by analyzing Google Trends in various states and comparing states with a lot of evangelicals in them to states with few evangelicals in them, and seeing that there were overall more searches for things like "male enhancement pills" and "penis enlargement" in the states with more evangelicals.
The abstract states:
The whole study is actually very interesting, and not just a snarky "LOL, evangelical men are insecure about their dick size and that is why they are terrible to everybody" kind of thing. It examines the fact that, in evangelical Protestant culture, one's actual place in the church and level of authority is dependent on having a penis — in that people without penises are meant to be subordinate to those who have them.
It also examines the emphasis in that culture of accusing men of being "wusses" or "pussified" or otherwise not living up to some sort of masculine ideal. Because it's not just that women are supposed to be subordinate and submissive, but that men are supposed to be dominant and controlling. It's not just that women are supposed to pop out 17 babies for Jesus, but that men are supposed to make that happen. Toxic masculinity hurts men too, as we say.
Making people feel bad about something they can't help is a crappy thing to do to people to begin with, but it also becomes a problem for the rest of us in that it creates a pretty serious toxic masculinity situation among those men, which in turn frequently leads to those men trying to oppress or abuse other groups of people they feel are a threat to their masculinity.
They get this shit at home and then they take that act on the road and use it to force their own misery-inducing ideas about gender and sexuality on the rest of us. They get angry at trans people and non-binary people for existing, they get angry at cis men who don't live up to what they've decided their masculine ideals are, they get mad at women and feminists and mothers for supposedly de-machoing all of the men somehow. And, to be entirely frank, dick insecurity is frequently at the root of various forms of racism and ethnocentrism.
The idea that the size or shape of our secondary sex characteristics has anything to do at all with our personal characteristics is hardly just an evangelical phenomenon, and it hardly just applies to men. Just ask Jessica Rabbit, a cartoon who famously said "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." But it is clearly being taken to an extreme in this subculture, and it's not working out too well for anyone.
