This is a penis home. I am not a penis home.
Megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, who was once a rock star in the evangelical world, has recently fallen from grace under accusations of plagiarism, abuse of power, and “spiritual bullying” with his ideological machismo. Much of the criticism stems from his anonymous rantings on a church message board in 2001 decrying how America has become a “pussified nation.”
Here are some of his musings on men, women, and penises.
The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may see, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.
While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.
Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another man’s home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home.
As Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism writes, this is a rather, um, explicit way of articulating a fairly common idea in evangelical Christianity: Despite assurances that men and women are equal before God, it’s men who were the primary creation, and women were created to satisfy men — to be men’s “helpers” or “homes.” Gotta love that homophobic conclusion and, of course, the way that all women who aren’t your wife are considered other men’s literal property, which squares nicely with evangelical ideas about women’s purity. As Anne explains, “Every woman is some man’s future wife, and that man owns her body even before they meet.”
Driscoll goes on to say that a husband should learn to make his “home” happy and a wife should rejoice at seeing her husband’s penis “rise to greet her” (brb, throwing up), but as Ann notes, “This sad attempt at mutuality fails when the one party is described as a penis home.”
Maya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.
