As the old parable goes, you don’t boil a frog by dropping him into a pot of boiling water. He’ll leap for the heavens as soon as his toes touch the water. No, you must first entice him with a warm bath, before you gradually turn up the heat and cook him before he can sense the danger.
As silly as the image may be on its own, it calls for solemn reflection when we are the frog and this cultural moment is the water. The frog is desensitized to the heat of the water, but we have become desensitized to an increasingly secular approach to human identity and sexuality.
The Celebration of Folly
But here’s where the rubber meets the road: desensitization to publicized sexuality has gradually softened our standards and opened the door for the awkward opportunity to celebrate folly. What do I mean by “the opportunity to celebrate folly”? Well, just ask American Eagle Outfitters.
Recently, the trending clothing brand came under fire for its denim ads featuring blond-haired, blue-eyed, actress Sydney Sweeney. In tandem with the color of her skin, the tag line, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” has led many to accuse AEO of “Nazi propaganda,” promoting “eugenics” and “white supremacy.” Despite the company’s rejection of such motives, its accusers remain frustrated with the ads’ “racist” tone and reliance on traditional standards of beauty to capture male attention.
On the other side of the fence, the ads have been met with celebration. The excitement over traditional sex-appeal has been expressed in sentiments such as, “We are SO back!” and “The world is healing.” This is what I mean by “the opportunity to celebrate folly.” The ads are overtly sensual in their tone and in their visuals—a virtue for the billboards of Time Square.
Unfortunately, being men committed to God’s design for human sexuality within a culture of “you do you,” we are so accustomed to choosing the lesser of two evils that we’re at risk of forgetting that the lesser evil is still evil. Our desire to oppose disordered standards of beauty in the marketplace might tempt us to join this head-over-heels celebration of heteronormativity (the promotion of heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation), but lest we find ourselves sweating like the proverbial frog being boiled alive, this is an opportunity for Christian men to sharpen their senses.
A View Toward Sharper Senses
We mustn’t let the atmosphere of oversexualization numb our commitment to the sanctity of private, monogamous sexuality. The temperature of the water, so to speak, keeps us from blushing at ads which would have shocked men of a bygone era.
I get it—it’s everywhere. It’s impossible to avoid. And there’s no sense in pretending as though we’ve avoided the pot in which our culture is cooking. But we still wield the responsibility to call sin sin and to gather wisdom to discern between beauty and almost-beauty. The misuse of sex to sell is still a sad and dangerous reality even if the kind of sex isn’t as distorted as it could be. We might be happy that a trendy clothing brand has inched away from the brazen display of sexual ambiguity, but let’s not be fooled into thinking that such ads are neutral in the war for the souls of men.
And speaking of that war, here’s a call to remember the age-old struggle between those two women Folly and Wisdom, for it continues to color our current events—
“Wisdom cries aloud in the street,
in the market she raises her voice;
At the head of the noisy streets she cries out,
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
If you turn at my reproof, look,
I will pour out my spirit to you;
I will make my words known to you” (Proverbs 1:20-23).
“The woman Folly is loud;
she is seductive but knows nothing.
She sits at the door of her house;
she takes a seat on the highest places of the town,
calling to those who pass by,
who are going straight on their way,
‘Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!’
And to him who lacks sense, she says,
‘Stolen water is sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’
But he does not realize that the shades are there,
that her guests are in the depths of Sheol” (Proverbs 9: 13-18).
