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I don't know who should be angrier after witnessing these comments, men or women:

On the October 28 edition of the NBC-syndicated Chris Matthews Show, during a discussion of the Democratic presidential candidates' stances on Iran and other national security issues, BBC Washington correspondent Katty Kay said that Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) "has to be able to stand up and appear particularly tough, because she's a female candidate." Kay added: "I think there's a lot of reticence still about how tough a woman would be as commander in chief. I don't think she can afford to stand up there and be soft on this particular issue [Iran]." Kay's comments echoed those she made on the September 30 edition of The Chris Matthews Show, when she asserted that Clinton's "calculation is that she can't stand up there as a woman and sound soft" and claimed that Clinton "knows that as a Clinton and as a woman, she's got to come across as somebody who is prepared to use military action if it's needed."¹

The transparent conclusion is that the ready use of military force is tough and manly and good: as a female president, she has to be willing to stand bow-legged, steel cajones² hanging loose, and intimidate others with taunts, mockery, and other bellicose gestures. In other words, she needs to act like a warrior.³

How different this would all look if Ms Kay had said instead: "She knows that as a courageous president, she's got to come across as somebody who is prepared to use nonviolence and wise diplomacy if that is what is needed."

We have to move away from the stodgy prepossession that confrontation must occur in a one-dimensional box, that violence is a first choice, that we ought to behave as if we are stuck forever in Hobbes' state of nature, where the life of man really is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Civilization has no purpose if it cannot move us past the many mistakes of human frailty.

1. Media Matters, news summary, October 28, 2007.
2. See "Blair refused three offers to stay out of Iraq," Guardian, April 19, 2004, for President Bush's compliments regarding Britain's Prime Minister Blair's "cajones."
3. Probably a Maori warrior. See also the controversial claim, "'Warrior gene' blamed for Maori violence," ninemsn, August 8, 2006; "Maori 'warrior gene' claims appalling, says geneticist," New Zealand Herald, August 10, 2006.

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I've gone over this before, but perhaps not from this angle. I maintain that, if the nuptial bed is the standard for the proper Christian man's response to sexual desire, everything outside of that is mere pretense. This pretense is not only the act of prostitution but also the autoerotic deed aided by such items as the blowup doll, apple pie, farm animals, and other men.¹ To this list, which may never be exhaustive, we can now add pavements and bicycles:

EDINBURGH, Scotland, Oct 27 (UPI) -- A man who admitted having sex with a bicycle in a Scottish hotel has been placed on the sex offenders' register for breach of the peace.

Robert Stewart admitted to the crime Friday in Ayr Sheriff Court and is to be sentenced next month, Britain's Telegraph reported Saturday.

Stewart was discovered last October by two maids who entered to clean his room during a stay at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr, Scotland.

"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex," a sheriff's spokesman told the court. The shocked witnesses told the hotel manager who told the police.

Stewart, according to the Telegraph, is not the first person convicted of sex with an inanimate object. In 1993, Kar Watkins, an electrician, was arrested for having sex with pavements in Redditch, England.²

But the point isn't any specific kind of sexual aid (the variety of which continues to surprise me), but how, even though "permissible" from Paul's perspective, all sexual pretense outside of the nuptial bed always stands in opposition to God's standard for the natural relationship between a man and a woman.³ I think this must mean that a married man who enters the nuptial bed and engages in love-making as if in relationship with someone or something other than his wife, does not therefore behave in accordance with God's standard. Men—perhaps some women, too—know whereof I speak. A man who treats his wife sexually as if she were a mere sex aid stands outside of that relationship.

1. By "apple pie" I am referring of course to the crude 1999 film American Pie; by "other men" I am referring to homosexual acts.
2. "Man admits to sex with bike," UPI News, October 27, 2007.
3. See 1 Corinthians 6:12-20.

Hillary must be macho

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