A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
A sermon preached by Galen Guengerich
All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City
June 1, 2014
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος – Thus begins the oldest and one of the most
influential stories in all of Western literature: Homer’s Iliad, composed nearly three
thousand years ago. The Iliad and its sequel, the Odyssey, were the Hunger Games of
the ancient world: epic in length, encyclopedic in scope, and wildly popular.
The very first word of the Iliad is the Greek word μῆνιν, which means “rage.” The
word refers to the rage of the Greek hero Achilles, who becomes enraged when his share
of war plunder, a young maiden named Briseis, is taken from him by the Greek
commander Agamemnon.
In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad, the story opens with these words:
The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Elliot Rodger’s 137-page manifesto, which he emailed to his parents moments
before he began his killing spree in Santa Barbara ten days ago, declares: “I hated all of
those obnoxious, boisterous men who were able to enjoy pleasurable sex lives with
beautiful girls, but I hated the girls even more… My hatred and rage toward all women
festered inside me like a plague.” Rodger adds: “Women’s rejection of me is a
declaration of war, and if it’s war they want, then war they shall have.”
It’s worth noting that the idea of sexually frustrated men going on the warpath,
whether individually or collectively, whether physically or emotionally or institutionally,
is an idea that’s deeply embedded in our culture. In the opening lines of the Iliad,
Homer assumes that it’s the prerogative of Achilles and Agamemnon – their privilege as
males – to fight over sexual possession of Briseis. Which man she may have wanted, if
indeed she wanted either of them, isn’t part of the story. Elliot Rodger’s manifesto
contains a lot of fantasies, but male sexual privilege has been all too real for thousands
of years.
There’s another moment in Homer’s ancient tale that’s worth noting as well. It
occurs in the Odyssey, which is part two of the story. Midway through a ten-year
journey back to Ithaca after defeating the Trojans, the Greek warrior Odysseus and his
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© 2014 Galen Guengerich
men sail close by an island where two Sirens cavort in a meadow and beguile men with
their come-hither music. A helpful goddess named Circe warns Odysseus beforehand
that anyone who hears their alluring voices will be doomed. His bones will join the other
dead men who have succumbed to the Sirens’ deadly charm.
Following Circe’s advice, Odysseus softens wax and uses it to plug the ears of his
men, so they will be unable to hear. He also instructs his men to use ropes to lash him to
the mast as they approach the Sirens. He warns the men that he will beg to be released
so that he can cavort with the Sirens. When this happens, he says, they should pull the
ropes even tighter around him, which they do.
Everyone passes the island unscathed – but only because Odysseus was lashed to
the mast. Left to his own devices, he would have been powerless to resist the Sirens’
allure. While their song promises knowledge, this is knowledge in the biblical sense; the
dangerous pleasure they offer is fundamentally sexual in nature. The unstated moral of
this story insists that men are utterly unable to resist the sexual allure of women.
In Elliot Rodger’s manifesto, he says, speaking of women, “I desired them
intensely, but I could never have them.” At age 14, he confessed, “Finding out about sex
is one of the things that truly destroyed my entire life. Sex… the very word fills me with
hate. Once I hit puberty, I would always want it, like any other boy. I would always
hunger for it, I would always covet it, I would always fantasize about it. But I would
never get it. Not getting any sex is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable
youth… Finding out about sex was just the beginning of my horrific downfall.”
Several years later, at age 17, Rodger came to what he described as a turning
point. He decided that sex should be outlawed. He said, “If I can’t have it, I will destroy
it.” Over the following few years, his idea of destroying sex altogether metastasized into
a plan to annihilate women and the men who engage in sex with them.
As to Rodger’s manifesto itself, which I have read, I agree with Arthur Chu, who
writes in The Daily Beast, “I was expecting his manifesto to be incomprehensible
madness – hoping for it to be – but it wasn’t. It’s a standard frustrated angry geeky guy
manifesto, except for the part about mass murder.”
Rodger’s manifesto traces his descent from sexual frustration into misogyny. He
blames women for his sexual desire and then hates them for not fulfilling it.
In this sense, Odysseus and Rodger represent two different ways of managing
male sexual desire. One sees male sexual desire, however overwhelming it may be at
times, as ultimately the responsibility of men. And if they sometimes have to lash
themselves to the mast in order to safeguard themselves and those around them, so be
it.
The other approach, which has predominated throughout Western history,
blames women and makes them responsible. If men can’t control their desire for
women, then women must themselves be controlled by men – how they dress, how they
act, and especially when and with whom they have sex and reproduce.
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© 2014 Galen Guengerich
When women through the centuries have rebelled against these political and
religious constraints, they’ve often been viewed as morally depraved, emotionally
unstable, and even physically defective. Rodger agrees with this view when he says, “I
concluded that women are flawed…They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally.
They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and
impulses… Women are like a plague that must be quarantined.”
In the wake of Rodger’s actions, many people have rushed to point out his
psychiatric condition, his parents’ divorce, his life of privilege, his obsession with online
gaming, the ease with which he purchased guns, and so on. While many of these factors
doubtless played a role in his actions, he was also a child of our culture as a whole. It’s a
culture in which freely available sex-on-demand is the presumptive basis of a satisfying
life, whether you’re a teen or a senior. And it’s mostly men who make the demands, and
it’s mostly women who live in fear of what will happen if they don’t give in. Male sexual
privilege has been built into the system from the very beginning.
In her column this past week in TIME magazine on the shortcomings of sex
education in America, Jaclyn Friedman examines the stubborn myth that sex is a
commodity that men acquire from women. “Under this paradigm,” she says, “women’s
bodies are a means to an end for men, whether that end is physical gratification,
validation of their masculinity, or both. For women, that means that sex may be about
us, but it’s not for us… If we sleep with men we’re sluts who are “asking for” sexual
assault, and if we say no we’re cruel bitches,” a crime Elliot Rodger and his ilk see as
punishable by death.
Since Santa Barbara, more and more women have been talking openly about the
constant threat and the persistent reality of the violence they suffer under this
paradigm. Social media has played a key role in this burgeoning conversation. On
Twitter, women began using a new hashtag – Twitter’s name for a topic tag – to identify
Tweets that bear witness to the wide range of sexist behaviors, including the threat of
sexual violence that all women suffer. The number of Tweets using this hashtag –
#YesAllWomen – has now passed into the millions. And on the website Tumblr, a new
page titled “When Women Refuse” invites women to share their stories of what happens
when they refuse the sexual advances of men. Many of the stories are chronicled postmortem, by friends or family members of women who have been killed.
Especially if you are a man, I encourage you to spend some time reading these
accounts, as I have. You’ll probably be upset by them, as I have been. But you’ll also
realize that the problem of sexualized violence is both more pervasive and closer at hand
than you may think. And maybe you’ll be less inclined in the future to remain silent.
Writing in Forbes magazine, Tom Watson urges us to take this social media
uprising seriously. He observes that “#YesAllWomen represents a scary,
desolate, dystopian landscape that can and should shame us into abandoning silence.”
He goes on to say, “What anyone will find in #YesAllWomen or When Women Refuse is
the absence of comfort and safety. If you’re a white, middle-aged, middle class male of
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certain Northeast background and views (like me), there are challenges in these stories…
Those challenges are valuable. That discomfort is needed.”
Even so, that discomfort isn’t always welcome. One of the biggest challenges in
addressing the issue of sexual violence is that many men – maybe most men – react to
the problem by getting defensive. I feel that in myself at times.
In Slate magazine, Phil Plait addresses men who respond by saying, “Not all men
are like that.” While this is not an unexpected response, Plait points out, it’s also not a
helpful one. Why not? Plait suggests four reasons:
“For one, women know this. They already know not every man is a rapist, or a
murderer, or violent. They don’t need you to tell them.
“Second, it’s defensive. When people are defensive, they aren’t listening to the
other person; they’re busy thinking of ways to defend themselves.
“Third, the people saying it aren’t furthering the conversation, they’re
sidetracking it. The discussion isn’t about the men who aren’t a problem. Instead of
being defensive and distracting from the topic at hand, try staying quiet for a while and
actually listening to what the thousands upon thousands of women discussing this are
saying.
“Fourth—and this is important, so listen carefully—when a woman is walking
down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesn’t know which
group you’re in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but
there’s no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitely
not in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head it’s
impossible to. This is the reality women deal with all the time.” I would add that it’s a
reality that more of us men need to acknowledge more of the time.
In my Easter sermon here at All Souls, I talked about how we respond when bad
things happen to us. I pointed out that, as long as we are alive, the bad part of the story
isn’t the end of the story. Something happens next, perhaps something better. Our
experience of God connects us with all that is past, however tragic, as well as all that is
possible, however elusive. But whether something better happens is ultimately up to us.
This realization is what the poet Maya Angelou calls, in her poem by the same
title, “A Brave and Startling Truth.” One of our finest poets and authors, Maya Angelou
died on Wednesday at the age of 86. She writes:
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
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© 2014 Galen Guengerich
My hope is that the tragedy in Santa Barbara will compel more of us to realize
this startling truth. We can create a climate where no one lives crippled by fear. For
some of us, this will require the courage to speak out. For others, it will require the
resolve to listen. For all of us, it will be a long journey. The problem of sexual violence
has been around since before Odysseus, and it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon.
Even so, the problem is now ours to confront.
As it happens, Maya Angelou can ably serve as our Muse along the way. She was
no stranger to sexual violence. Raped and sexually abused at the age of eight by her
mother’s boyfriend, she later endured a period of sex slavery in a California brothel.
Eventually, with some help, she found her way out – which is why she can say, as she
puts it in the title of her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
I close with a few stanzas from her poem “Still I Rise,” with the prayer that it will
somehow become true for all of us.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise…
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
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© 2014 Galen Guengerich