Jesus to erase damaging memories.
A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being
seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable w ay to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain— the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and
credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical m inistry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.
Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in
the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized
in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy. ” 8 She describes
years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate
into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do
men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a
woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships
him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful
to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her
man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10
Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,
Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and
his feelings. ” 11
Morgan’s achievement in
basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission
and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches
women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a
Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source
book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed
undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship
only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and
pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on
how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves
Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman
to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for
which religious women pray.
No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In
Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered
child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through
singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was
very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she
was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and
herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her
father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my
memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive
to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed
herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.
She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to
marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every
“No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several
occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he
simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip
to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her
fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He
hounded her.
Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on
her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by
definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated
Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.
From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a
woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who
manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every
