One of the revolutionary sexual issues raised by early feminism was 'objectification'. This is the process whereby women are turned into objects for males to consume. The uses of women's bodies in glamour modelling and in pornography have been seen as key examples of oppression, in which the complex possibilities of femininity are reduced to a series of sexualised body parts. What is both intriguing and depressing is that - long after many of its battles for sexual equality have been won - western society is more preoccupied than ever with the multi-million pound business of pornography and more prone than ever to the display and consumption of the objectified female form.

What is more, it seems that many women are freely choosing to embrace a culture that thrives on the impersonation of an over-sexualised femininity. We live in an era when Playboy is a powerful mainstream brand name: its line in stationary is one of the best-selling brands of all time, with particular popularity among adolescent girls. The soft-porn star Jordan has 'written' two best-selling autobiographies, both of which have been purchased by a mainly female readership. At Cambridge University, female students have recently established a pole-dancing club to perfect their raunchy dancing techniques! In Channel 4's current series of Big Brother, one of the contestants boasts the largest breast implants in the UK whilst one other young woman arrived into the house dressed in a Playboy bunny outfit. Meanwhile, cosmetic surgery becomes an ever more popular option and eating disorders continue to haunt young women with intense fears about their shape and body weight.

Perhaps it is time to take note of the Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, who pointed out the primacy in the Judeo-Christian tradition of what he called the I/Thou relationship. This bond of communication between God and individual human beings is the ultimate antidote to objectification, in which we merely treat 'the other' as a useable thing. Trinitarian faith also expounds the view that the Godhead is not a single object but a communicative unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, bonded together by divine Love. Practical Christianity makes its business to share that divine Love, which all humans - whether male or female - need in order to survive and thrive.

So are there any evangelical feminists out there in today's church? If so then surely they should be pondering the strange fact that in today's liberated conditions, so many women seem to be embracing the very process of over-sexualisation that feminist pioneers struggled so hard to pinpoint and reject. Perhaps it is the job of such new thinkers to point out the relevance of the concept of sin - the human tendency to lapse back into old forms of enslavement, which it was thought had been escaped. The 20th century has provided all too many examples of political revolutions that morphed back into the tyranny from which humans had first sought freedom. Perhaps one of the saddest of these reversions would be the self-willed return of women to age-old forms of gender bondage.

Perhaps it will be for the evangelical feminists in our midst to indicate that only with the 'new birth' spoken in Scripture, comes the strength not only to opt for freedom but to make it last.

Philip Orr

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Date for your diary:
4th November, 2006 - Centre for Contemporary Christianity Annual Conference
From here to eternity - Christian Spirituality for a changing world
Guest Speaker: Dr Marva Dawn
Armagh City Hotel