It's A Thor Point With Me

The tidal flow of popular culture has obliged me many times to remark upon what it is doing to the male sex. The concerted effort to weaken and emasculate boys and men is producing an effect which probably will be a surprise to many advocates of this weakening, but which highly-placed culture-shapers may have desired all along.

Exactly as gun-control laws never disarm career criminals, the campaign to eliminate male aggressiveness is completely ineffective upon the worst of all males. Men of good intentions, who are accustomed to exercising a conscience, are willing to listen to moral exhortations; if they can be led to believe that becoming effeminate will make them better citizens, they will try to become effeminate out of a desire to contribute better to society. But men who don't _have_ any conscience will stay just as toxic-masculine as they ever were, while sneering at well-meaning men who timidly surrender the battlefield to the evildoers. The same feminists who have worked for decades to soften up men as a category are in for an unpleasant surprise, when they look around and see that thugs and barbarians have remained as gruntingly male as ever, while the well-meaning men have become too submissive and weak  to be of any help in keeping the feminists safe.

It took me a while to fit a certain piece into this gender-politics puzzle, but by now I’ve seen just where it fits.

Comic books.

Which male superhero in the Marvel Comics universe -- I mean the print comics, not the movies derived from them -- has been subjected to THE VERY MOST MERCILESS attack of thematic castration? Not the city-wrecking Hulk; not the homicidal Wolverine; not the cynical, chaotic Deadpool; not the gruesome Ghost Rider. Any of those could actually use a mellowing influence; but NO-O-O-O.

The hero most extraordinarily singled out for humiliation and sexual-identity blurring is the dignified, chivalrous, noble, idealistic THOR: the very character who so obviously _didn't_ need to be “cured” of his valiant maleness. It was Thor who was offered up as a sacrificial ram to appease the pop culture’s demand for un-manning. It was Thor who had his Thor-ness stolen from him and conferred on a woman. Any rationale about him having become “unworthy” was only a tacked-on excuse for what someone had really wanted to do to Thor no matter what.

Just as somebody over at the B.B.C. had been wanting to change Doctor Who into a woman.

Long before the Thor series was vandalized for the sake of political correctness, there was a She-Hulk created in addition to the original Bruce Banner Hulk. She was a separate character; she didn’t have to rob the first Hulk of his Hulk-ness, even though Bruce Banner would _rather_ have been de-Hulked. Spider-Man, meanwhile, was allowed to have a daughter who inherited his powers; but she, again, was not taking her father’s identity away from him. Nope, it “just had to be” Thor, that supremely decent and idealistic male comicbook hero, who was knocked out of the game.

This exactly fits the real-world pattern: allow bums and crazies to stay masculine, but get rid of precisely the best male role models.

Thus does pop culture help to create the very conditions described in poetry by William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst // Are full of passionate intensity.”

If comicbook heroes actually existed, I would never even consider asking Deadpool for help in any emergency, if there were an unaltered, uncastrated, unvandalized Thor to call upon. So what does the pop culture do? It offers me Deadpool -- while decreeing that I can’t ask for Thor unless I’m prepared to agree to the p.c. dogma that males are inferior and making Thor a woman was an improvement.

Now, Black Panther T’Challa is noble and virtuous and admirable; but he has his own support of identity politics to protect him from being ruined by writers. He’ll be retained. But I expect the movie side of Marvel to kill off Captain America -- which, on top of the castration of Thor on the publication side, advances the purge of maleness. We are left with an Ant-Man who in the movies has been made into a clown, a Peter Quill who is required to be inferior to his leading lady Gamora, and an Iron Man who (if he survives “Infinity War”) will almost certainly retire. Even Doctor Strange isn’t allowed to be Doctor Strange unless his mentor The Ancient One is changed into a woman.

If storytellers just made up more entirely-new characters who were impressive women, I wouldn’t be so upset. But there is something mean and spiteful -- in other words, there is something perfectly typical of recent hard-left feminism -- in this policy of preferring to TAKE AWAY whatever men have and are. Worse, to take it away only from good men.

In a world heavily supplied with Islamist predators who laugh at all suggestions that they should be soft and meek, modern women may find that they have cut off their noses to spite good men’s faces.

A Sidebar for John the Baptizer, a.k.a. Baptist

   “Unless you’re a Spirit-filled believer who speaks in tongues, nothing else you do counts for anything!”

“Unless you receive all the approved sacraments from the approved sources, and recite lots of rosaries, nothing else you do counts for anything!”

“Unless you’re a FIVE! POINT! CALVINIST! --nothing you do or say counts for anything!”

It is terribly easy, poisonously convenient, for believers in Jesus Christ to indulge in a sweeping dismissal of all moral issues, in favor of the “simplicity” of arguing that _nothing_ matters even a little bit _except_ the fact of belonging to the Body of Christ-- or, more accurately, of belonging to that PART of Christendom which is favored by the person who’s talking at the time. Like many errors, this error is so damaging precisely because it is almost the truth.

It is perfectly true that, since we humans exist in a fallen state, no amount of moral activity by us can literally EARN God’s approval in the sense of God owing something to us. But the obsessive over-simplifiers fail to realize, or are unwilling to realize, that there’s more to the subject. We can’t earn salvation, ten-four, understood, awright-awready, got it; BUT in the actual experience of living, the moral choices we make become occasions for the Holy Spirit to awaken us. Our having done right in a particular situation is not synonymous with the moment of conversion, and our having done wrong in a particular situation is not (necessarily) synonymous with being a reprobate beyond all hope of salvation; but our experience of choosing and acting may produce ROAD SIGNS leading us on the way TO conversion.

A major component of the ministry of John the Baptizer was addressing, not the ultimate make-or-break decision of believing in Jesus for salvation, but a narrowly specific issue of earthly conduct: the adultery of Herod Antipas and his stolen wife Herodias. The real significance of this cannot be fully understood until we possess a certain piece of  information which is not provided in Scripture; this serves to refute those over-simplifiers who claim that there is NEVER EVER any spiritual benefit to be gained by learning facts which are found OUTSIDE the Bible. Stay with me here.

We do know from Scripture that Herodias had been married to one son of the original King Herod, and that she left this husband in favor of her brother-in-law Herod Antipas. (The fact that some sons of King Herod were pleased to have that mass murderer’s name tacked on to their own given names says much about the twisted values of the ungodly, but that’s another story.) So, Herodias and Herod Antipas were guilty of adultery; but wait, there’s more.

Herodias first was married to Herod Philip, then moved to Herod Antipas; but those who think we must never look at any non-Biblical source, never seem to ask how Herodias came ALSO to have a Herod-based name.

The original Herod was a harem owner, who begot many sons-- and didn’t quite murder all of them. One of these sons whom we don’t see mentioned in the Bible was named Aristobulus: a name handed down from the maternal side of King Herod’s family. And what do we discover if we’re willing to look at supplementary history? We discover that Aristobulus bar-Herod, a brother of Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, WAS THE FATHER of Herodias, and that’s how she came to have a Herod-based name.

Which, in turn, informs us that both of Herodias’ marriages were incest. She was married to one of her uncles, then left him for another of her uncles. (Uncle-to-niece marriages were also to occur now and then in the later aristocracies of medieval and Renaissance Europe, but that’s another story.)

Once advised of this detail in the Herodian soap opera, the over-simplifier will face a dilemma. 

On the view of over-simplifiers, as long as you haven’t spoken in tongues, or haven’t received the approved sacraments, or haven’t become a five-point Calvinist, you haven’t been converted, so nothing you do otherwise has any significance at all. Yet here we have the Herodian degenerates, already proven to be sinful by entering incestuous marriages which were forbidden by the Mosaic law; and how did John the Baptizer approach them? As far as the Bible tells us, John didn’t bother to mention the whole incest angle, though he could not possibly have been unaware of it. On a simplistic view, because Herodias’ first marriage was already innately wrong, things could not be made any worse by her moving to another incestuous marriage. “All sin is sin;” so, on the simplistic view, it was pointless for John to talk as if it would have made any difference for Herodias to stay faithful to her first uncle-husband.

But John didn’t think it was pointless. John was guided by the Holy Spirit, Who has more to offer than simplicity, simplicity, and more simplicity. The Holy Spirit provides accurate insight.

As I have said, our individual experiences of moral choice can be used by God to lead us toward Him, EVEN THOUGH those individual experiences are not one and the same thing as the moment of conversion. In “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis remarked that “Virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light.” This is true even in a state of deep ignorance. I believe that, owing to her truthless upbringing, Herodias really didn’t grasp that there was anything wrong with her being married to one of her father’s brothers; she certainly didn’t know the things we know about genetics and the passing of harmful recessive traits through inbreeding. As far as she understood, her marriage to Herod Philip was a valid one which had a claim on her. 

Therefore, even though Herodias and Herod Philip had already been in violation of Old Covenant law from the get-go, a decision by her to stay true to him would still have been a step toward righteousness from her own starting point. And God could have worked on this as part of leading her to salvation.

Thus, John the Baptizer was not wasting his breath speaking against Antipas for stealing Herodias from Philip, even though Antipas refraining from Grand Theft Niece would not have been identical to speaking in tongues or taking sacraments or becoming a FIVE! POINT! CALVINIST! God, Who remembers that we are dust, could have made use of even a highly flawed effort at moral integrity on Antipas’ part.

Dear over-simplifiers, don’t even start harrumphing at me that I’m saying Herod Antipas and those other soap-opera characters could have “earned their salvation.” I am saying nothing of the sort. What I am saying is what happens in reality: God achieves many of His goals through a process of causes and effects, not by the instantaneous throwing of an on-off switch. Even from the starting point of unlawful incestuous mating, it was possible for members of the Herodian clan to have experienced some vague notion of loyalty or affection, which God could have made use of.

Which, I am convinced, is why John DID take the trouble to address the adultery issue, even with persons who weren't in Biblical marriages.