A few years ago, we were driving across Kentucky on a Sunday afternoon. We’d spent the morning with a partner church in the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky, and, on a whim, I’d looked up whether any events were happening that afternoon in Lexington. Turns out there was an art fair going on in a downtown park that I thought might be a fun way to break up our trip.
We found a parking spot, walked a few blocks lined with old trees and historic brick buildings, and soon came upon the art fair. Pop-up canopies had been set up to line three sides of the rectangular park. The art fair was typical of the sort you’d see in a Kentucky city, a mix of local artists, unique glass, metal, or wood craftsmen, Christianish rural art/kitsch, food vendors, and the ever-present New-Age, hippy, witchcraft-adjacent types who are super nice until they find out you are a Christian missionary, or, God forbid, a Republican.
During a particularly broke season of our early married years, we sold Central Asian chai in these sorts of markets, and many of the markers that signaled which tribe someone belonged to – whether a vendor was a gaudy rainbow pagan out to scold or proselytize, or a wary Christian creative simply trying to sell some merch and not get banned next year – are still largely the same.
It was September, but a hot day, so the kids were quickly getting thirsty and a bit worn out. There were also a few booths with some disturbing or crude art that we weren’t eager for our kids to see, and I could also tell my wife would appreciate some time to wander without fielding a “Mom! Can we buy this?!” request every 30 seconds. So, I offered to take the kids and to find a spot where we could sit in the shade.
We secured some expensive cold drinks and headed into the center of the park where there were more shade trees as well as a music stage. As we neared the stage and sat down underneath an old oak tree, I could tell that our timing had been good. They were just about to start another round of live music. There were half a dozen hand drums set up on stage, and we settled in for what I hoped would be a fun American culture moment for our kiddos.
The drummers took their seats and soon began a rousing North African-style beat. We sat up and watched eagerly, recognizing a style of music not too far off from the rousing beats of our Central Asian picnic line dances. What happened next we never could have seen coming.
Emerging from somewhere behind the stage came a line of white, American grandmas, or at least grandma-aged women seemingly in their 60s and 70s, dressed as Egyptian belly dancers. They were carrying baskets, they were wearing heavy makeup, they were baring excessive amounts of their midriffs, their thighs, and their cleavage, and they were progressively jiggling and gyrating their way straight toward us.
Have you ever seen that scene from The Emperor’s New Groove when Yzma, the ancient and bony upstart queen, yells out, “I bet you weren’t expecting this!” and, to the horror of the other characters present, bares her thigh? Comic relief ensues as it’s revealed she’s just hidden a dagger there, which she means to use to kill the others, and she had nothing sensual in mind.
Well, unfortunately for me and my children, these old ladies were not hiding any daggers, nor intending to kill us. No, they were trying to be sensual. They were trying to be 20-something Egyptian belly dancers, seductive and alluring. But they weren’t 20-something North Africans. They were American grandmas, perhaps even great-grandmas. But they didn’t seem to know that. The warm, dignified, modest, and motherly bearing of a good woman their age had been jettisoned in favor of… something else.
Once I snapped out of my state of wide-eyed paralysis, I looked around me. All the other parents had their phones out, recording, smiling, and clapping and swaying to the beat. None of the other adults present were even smirking or joking about the absurd combination on full and unashamed display in front of us. Younger women present were hollering genuine and suggestive encouragement to the dancers. And even the other kids seemed to be enjoying the show.
My kids, to their great credit, resembled alarmed turtles trying to retreat into their shells. We’d thought we were coming to a fun art fair with some live music. But we’d found ourselves trapped in an alternate dimension, one in which we were apparently the only ones able to see and feel that something about this whole scene was very wrong. What we instinctively felt to be unlovely, inappropriate, bent, and wrong, everyone else seemed to find fun, attractive, kid-appropriate, and sensual.
At least that’s what they showed externally. No doubt some in that crowd felt some sense of ick but decided to hide it. As for me, I’ve seldom ever identified more with that kid from The Emperor Has No Clothes.
I leaned over to my shell-shocked offspring, “You guys want to get out of here?”
They nodded vigorously. We made our retreat, back into the sunshine and heat. Back into reality.
What exactly had we just experienced? What in the name of multilayered moral baklava had we just escaped from?
To be clear, there is nothing wrong at all with sensuality within marriage for older men and women. This is good and right and holy. Grandpas and grandmas, within their exclusive marriage relationship, should be attracted to one another sexually and continue to enjoy all of the good gifts that come along with that. Sarah laughing and mocking the possibility of sexual pleasure at her age is an indication that her marriage with Abraham was not in a healthy place. There’s nothing icky or inappropriate at all about good, married sexuality in the latter years of one’s life.
No, the belly dancer grandmas were not repellent because they were still sexual beings, even at their age. They were repellent because they were a gyrating display of not only public sinfulness, but unnatural or disordered public sinfulness.
Scantily clad young women dancing in public for the enjoyment of a crowd is always sinful and wrong. But it is the sort of sin that falls within a category of natural sins. It is the sort of societal sin that is near-universal because it hits closer to God’s good design for men, women, and sexuality. By their created nature, young women of childbearing age are, generally speaking, sexually attractive to a wide range of men in their society. Most people and societies understand this intuitively and seek to navigate life accordingly, whether they are seeking to guard against this or take advantage of it.
Our host culture here in Central Asia recognizes this truth, though it overreacts to it. Girls are given almost as much freedom as boys until they hit puberty, at which point the family massively clamps down, traditionally never letting a young woman go anywhere without a family guardian who can later vouch for her pure conduct and continued virginity. Similar restrictions continue throughout a woman’s life, until menopause. Once a woman is visibly no longer of childbearing age, the freedoms of her childhood return. She is then almost as free as an older man is, and it’s not uncommon to see older women here relax into a second lifestyle of shocking boldness, even including things like smoking, swearing, and publicly berating terrorists who are acting shamefully. Older women no longer wear makeup; they are free to go out alone, and they are treated with great respect, and no longer with suspicion, not only by their families, but by the community at large.
Most human societies have understood from nature that the good and natural seasons of a woman’s life should be reflected in their own public conduct and how the public treats them. Yes, there’s a wide spectrum of how cultures seek to work these things out. But even most fallen human societies throughout history and around the world would never seek to display their oldest women in sexually provocative ways. Depraved though these cultures are, they know enough to understand that the natural sins of old women should be different from the natural sins of young women. And the natural sins of society toward younger women should be different than those of society toward older women.
That is, unless they are a society that has been given over.
Romans 1 talks about how God gives idolatrous societies over to their sins so that they exchange natural passions for unnatural passions. Men burn with desire towards other men; women desire women. And, presumably, grandmas are put forward as seductive belly dancers.
This is the category I must employ to make sense of what we saw that day in Lexington, Kentucky. As we’ve seen in so many other areas of sexuality, much of Western society, even places like Kentucky, has been given over by God to unnatural passions. Even their sin is now against nature, rather than being in some way according to nature, as it used to be. In their case, evil is good, good is evil, men can get pregnant, girls can marry girls, and 70 year-olds should be sexy belly dancers.
Thankfully, this kind of moral insanity doesn’t last forever. Common grace means that self-evident morality understood from nature is a lot like one of those planets with an elongated orbit around the sun. It may rush past the center and careen far out into black and empty space, but just give it enough time, and it will reverse course and once again swing back toward the center. Cannibalism, open homosexuality, transgenderism, betrayal as a virtue – all these sorts of things have a limited shelf life. Nature itself, but especially the open proclamation of God’s revealed word, eventually restrains the open practice or toleration of these unnatural, society-destroying sins. Alas, every culture will go through periods of temporary insanity, where they stop being able to feel and understand even a common-sense or pragmatic morality.
I remember once seeing a Facebook post from a Melanesian friend, commenting on an American pro-transgender news report. A direct translation of her comment would be, “Look at this – the whiteskins have lost their minds!”
Now, it wasn’t that long ago, perhaps even as recently as her great-grandparents’ generation, that her own society was a cannibalistic one, trapped in its own temporary insanity. They’ve since course-corrected, largely due to Christian missionaries and Western colonial laws, such that now the metaphorical planet is much closer to the sun, at least when it comes to the badness of eating other humans, and, apparently, the badness of transgenderism (though they’ve got a ways to go yet on polygamy).
But that day when the belly dancer grandmas were bearing down on me and my children in that Kentucky park, I completely agreed with the sentiment. The whiteskins really have lost their minds.
May the grace of God, both by nature and by the Word, bring us back to our senses.
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