Complementarian Sexual “Asymmetry”: Why Denny Burk doesn’t like “The Great Sex Rescue”
For all intents and purposes, “The Great Sex Rescue” by Sheila Gregoire (2021) should be a considered a revelatory breakthrough for complementarians.
After all, if the central essence of complementarity is the Christ-like, cruciform love husbands should have for their wives, then data and analyses showing where the evangelical church has fallen short in teaching husband-and-wife relationships should be celebrated. Here is a chance to take up the gauntlet of benevolent and sacrificial manhood, recognizing that, as Piper and Grudem (1991, p.80) in the second chapter of Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood emphasize, biblical male headship will never, ever, “involve selfish, unilateral choices.” The husband as leader will “always strive for the ideal of agreement. He will take into account the truth that her sexual needs and desires carry the same weight as his own in developing the pattern of their intimacy.”
Ideals aside, the actual relational patterns that Sheila Gregoire uncovers are pretty damning: Evangelical teachings have primarily emphasized male pleasure, with female pleasure secondary and nonexistent. Evangelical books have taught women that male desire is something that should govern sexual relations, so much so that they are obligated by God not to withhold from their husbands what God created them to need. According to research she conducted in writing her book, this has resulted in high levels of sexual pain and dismal levels of sexual pleasure and sexual desire among Evangelical woman.
In short, masculinity and feminine sexuality have been respectively defined as demand and obligation. Emerson Eggerich’s selective formulation of “love and respect” is similar: respect (obeisance) is an imperative that men demand, and that women are obligated to satisfy.
One significant aspect of biological sexual difference is the existence of the clitoris, an organ that only biological females have that exists for nothing else except sexual pleasure. However, the primary focus in Greco-Roman and Western civilization has exclusively been the phallus. Phallocentrism is loosely justified from an interpretation of biology and an ideology of male physical superiority (based on the Grecian one-sex formulation) and patriarchal power. This is based on ancient science and carried over by Aquinas and other theologians who accepted Aristotle’s natural law as truth. The main tenets of this are as such: that the penis represents male power as embodied in the act of penetration and that the penis and male biology in general is the ultimate and superior sexual existence around which the identity of females/the penetrated is defined. This means that female sexuality does not exist, or is secondary (perhaps where it serves and enhances male pleasure).
Berg (2020) provides a very insightful description of phallocentric equivalence of penetration and power in the Roman empire, writing:
Furthermore, it is necessary to comment on the socially assumed role of women and slaves as being “penetrated” in contrast to the implicit role of men as “penetrator” (Dover 1989; Halperin 1990; Winkler 1990; Richlin 1992). Jonathan Walters adds an insightful complexity to this discussion in his fine distinction between “males” and “men,” arguing that “not all males are men, and therefore impenetrable” (1997:32). According to Walters, only vir, that is, a free Roman adult male, was deemed to be sexually impenetrable but able to penetrate. In fact, in ancient phallocentric society including the imperial Roman world, men or women could fulfil the passive role of being penetrated. However, custom and social stigma associated with passive sexuality limited who might perform the penetrating role to those who are inextricable from the phallus (Parker 1998:47). Some scholars (Winkler 1990) consider the “penetrator and the penetrated” relationship to be more or less “natural,” involving a more powerful individual exercising sexual power over a less powerful one such as the praetextatus (a pubescent male), slaves devoid of either social identity or gender, and women. This paradigm of the penetrator-penetrated, however, seemed to be intimately related to and culturally accentuated by the ancient Mediterranean gender ideology, the Roman history of slavery, and sexual violence expressed in war and rape. In these cases, women, likewise slaves, were subject to male sexual dominance which was nurtured within the broader pattern of the Roman social hierarchies.
Regardless of the gender of the penetrated, the role was considered to be feminine and this passive feminine role of being penetrated was largely taken up by females (Skinner 1997:7)… In a nutshell, in the heterosexual act of procreation, the male penetrator should desire the female, who is always of dominated and penetrable status. Also, the Roman penetrator-penetrated binary is inherently linked to the Roman history, which is decorated with cases of sexual exploitation and violence (Moses 1993:50). The extended Roman history of war provides us with many classic examples of sexual exploitation and violence such as slavery and rape. We know all too well how slaves, regardless of gender, were sexually exploited at the free disposal of slave masters in the Roman world (Joshel 2010; Harper 2011). War-rape as an act of intimidation by invaders against the conquered was an integral aspect of Roman military conflicts with its subjugated civilians, mainly women, girls, and, at times, boys (Tacitus II. IV, “the revolt of Civilis and the Batavi”). Scholars note that Greek, Persian, and Roman troops employed rape as an adjunct to warfare and committed mass rape of women as a punitive measure (Phang: 253–254, 267–268; Gaca 2011:77–85). Even though there is no exact word in Latin equivalent to the nuance of the modern English word “rape” or “sexual violence” (Deacy & Pierce 1997), the Roman literary tradition shows that the act of rape and sexual violence against slaves and women were widely covered under a variety of legal terms (Nguyen 2006:75–112).”
The imperial Roman society venerated machismo. In this social milieu, a free Roman man should be ready, willing, and able to express his dominion over others, male or female, by means of sexual penetration (Williams 1978:18). Correspondingly, it was a taboo that a free Roman man allow anyone to penetrate him in any manner whatsoever as one’s corporeal freedom was intimately tied to one’s free and superior social status (Segal 1987:137–70; Saller 1991:153; Veyne 2002:61).
Roman iconographies of military victory depicted “defeated peoples as women being sexually subdued” and their conquests were characterized by “sexual humiliation, rape, and death”. (Johnson, 2007, p.163). The penetrator-penetrated paradigm is a political philosophy, a philosophy of power.
Here is an example: Pornography as an industry is largely phallocentric. Pornography is mostly designed for men and centers male pleasure, with women functioning as instruments of this pleasure. Sexual satisfaction is synonymous with conquest and sexual desire with acts of violence. While evangelicalism largely condemns pornography as an aberrant and sinful sexual practice, it must be noted that evangelicals in America are heavy consumers of pornography, and as consumers, shape the pornography industry by the kind of pornography that they demand.
Gender essentialism, the belief that this phallocentric penetration-as-dominance ideology of biological sex determines masculine and feminine traits and behaviors, dates back to Aristotle’s natural law (Bem ,1983). Bem describes these traits as a polarized view of gender, with masculinity described as active and authoritative, and femininity as passive and obeisant”. Gender essentialism originated as a philosophical belief, became a religious doctrine in European Christendom, and evolved into a scientific, evolutionary form in the 19th century together with racial science and biological determinism tied to constructed categories of race and class that became central to imperialism. Of course, for Aristotle, superiority and rule were synonymous, and thus, slaves, barbarians, Scythians, were similarly born to be ruled.
The Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, and the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) have featured Doug Wilson’s writings. Recently, on the CBMW website, Naselli (2022) identifies Wilson’s position in the evangelical world as in the “Courageous” camp of evangelicals who are the most vocal on political issues such as gender roles, though more extreme and possibly separatist than those in the “Careful” camp. The difference between these positions, defined first by DeYoung (2022) on The Gospel Coalition is that while “Carefuls” call for a “celebration of biblical manhood and womanhood”, the “Courageous” evangelicals openly decry the emasculation of men and the evils of feminism. In any case, what I am about to describe here comes from a book by Doug Wilson (2012), that was quoted (and then retracted) by Jared Wilson (Wilson, 2012) on the Gospel Coalition website.
A final aspect of rape that should be briefly mentioned is perhaps closer to home. Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.
When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.
But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.
True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours.
– Douglas Wilson, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 1999), pp.86–87.
To summarize:
- Sexual relations are essentially, invariably, and necessarily, a relation between a dominant male penetrator who “ conquers, colonizes, plants” and a passive female who “receives, surrenders, accepts.”
- There is no such thing as an “egalitarian pleasuring party” — equally pleasurable sex. There is only a relationship between penetrator and penetrated, one of authority and submission.
- Rape, rape fanstasies, and BSDM is a “caricature” that come about when society rejects and “rebels” against “authority and submission” as an “erotic necessity”.
Note that Wilson is a firm believer in just war, natural law, Greco-Roman classicism, and Christian nationalism, so this is all entirely consistent in his worldview that glorifies global domination and imperial violence as a Christian imperative.
On March 1, 2023, Josh Butler released an excerpt of a new book (Butler, 2023) on The Gospel Coalition, a reformed evangelical Christian web platform. His main thesis was that “sex is an icon of Christ and the church”, and he formulated heterosexual sexual relations, strongly polarized according to the patriarchal “complementarian” tenets of both The Gospel Coalition and the conservative reformed tradition, to describe the ideal male sexual and marital role as that of “generosity” in the act of ejaculation , namely, “giving extravagantly”, not just of “your resources but your very self” (para. 10). He described he feminine role as “hospitality”, “where the wife welcomes her husband into the sanctuary of her very self” (para. 11). The man gives, the woman receives, and he stresses the “distinction” (para. 13). Then, he goes to describe this very vividly as the relationship between “the church” and Christ.
This is a picture of the gospel. Christ arrives in salvation to be not only with his church but within his church. Christ gives himself to his beloved with extravagant generosity, showering his love upon us and imparting his very presence within us. Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world.
Inversely, back in the wedding suite, the bride embraces her most intimate guest on the threshold of her dwelling place and welcomes him into the sanctuary of her very self… She has prepared and made herself ready, anticipating his advent in eager anticipation. She welcomes him into the most vulnerable place of her being, lavishing herself upon him with extravagant hospitality. She receives his generous gift within her — the seed of his Word and presence of his Spirit — partnering with him to bring children of God into the world. (para. 17–19).
The sexual imagery in this excerpt resulted in some criticism and “serious objections” that forced The Gospel Coalition to retract the article. Yet, prominent complementarian theologians DeYoung (2023) and Burk (2023) wrote pieces decrying the more explicit allegorical references to Jesus Christ while affirming the power-based gender polarization Butler expressed. Burk (2023) emphasizes that marriage is indeed an “assymetrical reality” (para.10) that he believes “progressive” and “egalitarian” criticism react “viciously and vociferously” (para. 9). In response to this criticism, he underscored the importance of the asymmetric penetrator-penetrated relationship, one that he then contrasts with the “mutual” emphasis on “physical climax” of “some egalitarian writings on sex” as being “selfish and small” (para. 11). DeYoung similarly pushed back against “virulent critics” whose primary objection was to “any asymmetry between men and women in sexual intimacy”, writing,
Yes, Butler did not word things as I would have said them. But was the underlying point he described not true? The man enters, the woman is entered; the man disperses seed, the woman receives. These are biological givens, according to God’s design. No amount of grievance and protestation can change these realities. (DeYoung, 2023, para. 9).
No, sir. Sheila Gregoire, among many others, did not express horror because of the biological transmission of sperm. That’s not the issue, and you know that. The thing that you, Wilson, Butler, and Burk have in common is a shared, political and power ideology in which penetration means power. Burk makes this extremely clear when he rejects the mutual-but-different pleasure Gregoire (2021) emphasizes as egalitarian: what he objects to is the decentering of phallus as being the be-all, end-all of sex.
Sheila Gregoire in her writings on sex has been exceedingly detailed and clear in this regard, and in no way has she claimed male and female biology are the same, only that both male and female sexual pleasure are important and should be recognized.
What Wilson (2012), Butler (2023), DeYoung (2023), and Burk (2023) describe is also consistent with the that of the late, widely read, evangelical author Elisabeth Elliot, who in the landmark publication of the “complementarian” position, “Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood”, wrote of the “essence of femininity” as being that of “utter and unconditional self-giving”, servanthood, “obedience”, having “no ambition for anything but the will of God”, and self-negation, with “exceptional women in history” having the “special gift- a charism” when they “made themselves nothing” (p.403). This is not something that applies to men equally. This is the point of the entire book (Piper and Grudem, 1991), that men and women occupy distinct roles of authority/leadership and submission/obedience. She thus positions a wife in relation to her husband in a relationship of surrender, a sexual relation that she believes that is typological of femininity in opposition to feminism.
Think of a bride. She surrenders her independence, her name, her destiny, her will, herself to the bridegroom in marriage. This is a public ceremony, before God and witnesses. Then, in the marriage chamber, she surrenders her body, her priceless gift of virginity, all that has been hidden. As a mother she makes a new surrender — it is her life for the life of the child. This is most profoundly what women were made for, married or single (and the special vocation of the virgin is to surrender herself for service to her Lord and for the life of the world).
The gentle and quiet spirit of which Peter speaks, calling it “of great worth in God’s sight” (1 Peter 3:4), is the true femininity, which found its epitome in Mary, the willingness to be only a vessel, hidden, unknown, except as Somebody’s mother. This is the true mother-spirit, true maternity, so absent, it seems to me, in all the annals of feminism. “The holier a woman is,” wrote Leon Bloy, “the more she is a woman.” Femininity receives. It says, “May it be to me as you have said.” It takes what God gives — a special place, a special honor, a special function and glory, different from that of masculinity, meant to be a help. In other words, it is for us women to receive the given as Mary did, not to insist on the not-given, as Eve did.
Feminine receptiveness and submission represented in the act of penetration are thus fundamental to Evangelical patriarchal and complementarian sexuality. Detractors have tried to argue that Elliot is making a general statement about Christian spirituality and that this applies equally to men, but this is a profound decontextualisation: Elliot is literally writing in a book about the essential differences between men and women and telling us that this is the different, essential, meaning of being a woman.
What Elliot is not doing is saying that surrender and obedience are good Christian things to do in general, in imitation of Christ: rather, she is positioning women in the role of self-negating subordination in relation to men.
Elliot dangles back and forth between her descriptions of religious devotion (i.e. Mary the Mother of Jesus and Amy Carmichael) and her description of what women are in relation to men and what brides are in relation to grooms in a deliberate act of making female subjection to God and to men as synonynous and an expression of both her essential created nature as well as her spirituality and religious devotion. Elliot specifically describes sex as surrender and receiving, exactly the way Doug Wilson does.
Burk’s use of the term “selfish” parallel’s Elisabeth Elliot, who contrasts a woman who “makes herself nothing” and a woman who is selfish. Under this view, female existence that is not obeisant and self-erasing in relation to men is inherently evil and selfish. How dare you exist, how dare you also assert that you can and should experience pleasure, that sex is not a one-sided possessive/sacrificial act. Shame on you, selfish egalitarian!
The egalitarian rejection of asymmetry necessarily backgrounds procreation and foregrounds pleasure and physical climax. Physical climax becomes the necessary focus of some egalitarian writings on sex because it’s something that, at least in principle, can be mutual. This is the entire point of books like The Great Sex Rescue. — Denny Burk (2023)
It is simply not true that Burk (2023) is referring to a couple (both male and female) as selfishly preoccupied with sexual pleasure, because he starts out the paragraph by decrying the “egalitarian rejection of assymetry”. He himself makes the focus on gender equality vs. difference with regards to physical climax.
In simultaneously affirming Josh Butler’s penetrator-penetrated view of sexual relations as a biologically-derived “asymmetry”, Denny Burk is literally telling us what complementarianism is, what it stands for, and how it defines maleness and femaleness.
- Burk identifies a call for equal or mutual sexual pleasure for biologically distinct men and women as egalitarianism, and thus something complementarianism is innately opposed to.
- Why is equal or mutual sex necessarily anti-complementarian and egalitarian? Egalitarianism is a political movement for women’s equality — so what does it uniquely have to do with sex? Because it is a rejection of the asymmetry of power central to a penetrator-penetrated political paradigm.
- Complementarianism, if we are to go by Denny Burk, Elisabeth Elliot, and Doug Wilson, is a defined not by gender difference but by power assymetry.
Denny Burk’s construction of complementarianism equates pleasure with power, sex with authority. Once you advocate for equal sexual pleasure, you are an “egalitarian” calling for equal power. Similarly, in Doug Wilson’s construction, by calling for equal pleasure you are rebelling against authority and submission and rebelling against a polarization of gender ideals centered around an ideology of phallic rule.
I am sure that once the above becomes clear, there will be a scramble to reframe, re-define, qualify, etc. in order to preserve the complementarian apologetic. Piper and Grudem (1991) initiated this way back in the beginning, when they reassured us that authority and submission in the complementarian frame is never abusive, never authoritarian, never selfish, and always loving, always benevolent, always mutually beneficial. This is nothing new, because this is also how the ancients described both marriage and slavery.
The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. (1 Corinthians 7:4 KJV)
The word here is for power is exousia. It means authority, and would have been understood in the Greco-Roman world as being political and possessive. According to Scripture, sex involves the voluntary and mutual exchange of power, power that belongs not only to the penis-holder, but also the person who has a clitoris, vulva, and vagina. The physically penetrated person also has authority — this is good, beautiful, Scriptural, and true.
Ironically, the underlying assumption is that if you want wives to have the orgasms God designed them to have, if you make female sexual pleasure and the clitoris existent the way God designed, then you might as well say there’s no such thing as gender. CBMW-esque complementarianism seems to be based on the assumption that if you take away the power/pleasure difference, you take away male and female difference.
In short, male power is the thing that makes men, men. Subjection to male power is what makes women, women.
The truth is, this is CBMW’s main contention with egalitarianism: they have just never been honest about that fact. They claim over and over again that egalitarians erase all biological and sexual differences, when in fact, the term and concept of gender complementarity was first coined and used by egalitarians (Giles, 2015).
Schreiner (2020), writing on the CBMW website, notes that CBMW’s primary definition of masculinity and feminity solely relates to power and authority.
The possible weakness with the Piper’s description is that every relationship is defined by an authority relation, but there is more to say about manhood and womanhood.[44] According to the Scriptures, authority-submission seems to be part of what it means in certain relationships as male and female, but other relationships should be considered as well.
…To put this more precisely, brothers and sisters don’t exist in authority-relations, so what does it mean to be a man who is a brother or a woman who is a sister? I find it interesting that the dominant way of addressing men and women in the Christian community according to the Bible is through the image of sibling.
The view that that the essential difference between males and female is that of exousia (authority and power) in direct contradiction to Scripture but in accordance to Aristotleian natural law.
As I recently proposed in a new series on a position called “cruciform complementarity”, the hybrid between Scripture and Aristotleian natural law has always resulted in a lot of awkward twisting of one or the other to make two things that a fundamentally contradictory fit together. Aquinas, Augustine, and the magisterial Reformers like Luther and Melanchthon struggle to reconcile with natural law the premise that women were made in the image of God (Vorster, 2016).
There is a tremendous amount of double-speak in complementarianism and a sincere attempt to make a power-authority framework sound mutual and as little about power as it possibly can be. No doubt, in the near future, we will be hearing about complementarian female pleasure and how it is so much better than egalitarian female pleasure because submission makes bliss even more blissful.
The qualifiers expressed by Piper and Grudem that I cited earlier in this article have never stopped complementarians from celebrating the abusive teachings of Doug Wilson and Mark Driscoll, despite the claim that complementarianism naturally and inherently opposes this kind of vulgarity. Where the penetrator-penetrated paradigm persists, women will always be objects, owned, and obligated.
Those who claim that the authority of the husband rests in his ability to pull out the “final word” card must realize that as the penetrative possessor, he is entitled to, and can demand, sex. There is nothing stopping him provided he frames this demand as being that of generosity and service, and indeed obedience to God and the command to procreate. The woman subordinates herself to this demand, seeing it as a “final decision”, representative of God’s will. She makes a sacrifice to him and sees it as an expression of obedience to God.
Supreme authority in both church and home has been divinely vested in the male as the representative of Christ, who is Head of the church. It is in willing submission rather than grudging capitulation that the woman in the church (whether married or single) and the wife in the home find their fulfillment. — Elisabeth Elliot.
When you honor your husband, you honor God. When you obey your
husband, you obey God. The degree to which you reverence your husband is the degree to which you reverence your Creator. As we serve our husbands, we serve God. But in the same way, when you dishonor your husband, you dishonor God. — Debi Pearl (2004), “Created to Be His Help Meet)I mean this: a man is the highest manifestation of God in the earth. Why? Because man has been given divine dominion. Man has been given divine dominion in the world… Now, God created man initially to rule over everything in his world…. and I don’t mean generic man; I mean sexually male man, just the maleness of man — that man, from the sexual viewpoint has been given the dominion of God. Man is a sovereign in the world. He is the delegated authority and majesty of God. — John MacArthur (1976)
Josh Butler’s Jesus is a penetrator because, for all in intents and purposes, in the complementarian world, the penetrator is god.
