She's Asking the Wrong Question

"Men, who needs them?" That's the question author and single woman, Connally Gilliam, poses in an excerpt from her book, Revelations of a Single Woman. (The excerpt is running this week on Crosswalk.com.)

What a question. I'd say it's the wrong question. It makes me wonder, what's a woman who professes Christ doing asking a question that feminists ask rhetorically?

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of Scripture knows that as women, we owe our very existence to the fact that Adam was lonely. God, in His love for Adam, formed a helper from Adam's side: another human, but different from Adam. Because of man, God made woman.

And it's not just husbands we need.

We need our dads. Without them we literally wouldn't be here. Hopefully they were the source of provision and protection God designed them to be.

She spends a lot of words disclaiming her assertion that we do need men, focusing on their fallenness. As in, "men – like women – are fallen image bearers and can be schmucks as fathers, brothers, colleagues, friends, or husbands, and more often than not as strangers. They can spark deep, angry breaths and elicit sad, weary sighs." Though she mentions in passing that women are fallen, she repeatedly reminds readers that men are. It's as if she assumes women are redeemed but is afraid to suggest, or doesn't really believe, that men can be.

And as the great granddaughter of an Orthodox cantor in the Jewish synagogue, I learned at a young age that the word "schmuck" is not to be used in polite company. Either Gilliam doesn't know what the word means or she does and knew her Christian publisher would never run the English equivalent.

In the end, hers is an anemic vision of why women need men (because a compliment sounds better coming from the lips of a guy than a girlfriend). It left little doubt as to why I found her book so discouraging and lacking in practical, biblical wisdom for single women who desire marriage.

This chapter bothered me when I read it in Gilliam's book and it's still bothering me now that I've read it again online. I think I know why. She's asking the wrong question. If I were doing the asking, my question would be, "Since we as women need men so much, what can we do to encourage their biblical masculinity?"