Madness is gladness
Gladness is madness
Goodness is badness
End me my fear
Darkness is lightness
Dullness is brightness
Blackness is whiteness
Sadness is cheer
Lunacy, Lunacy
Madness is sanity
Truth is profanity
Hear me, oh, hear!
Great Lord of moonlight
Give me your badness,
Twirl me with madness
And end me my fear!
So sings Eleanor, from the fantasy series The Archives of Anthropos while she dances under a spell by the god Pan. Eleanor, a seemingly sweet and innocent girl, struggles with deeply ingrained fears. She carries dark secrets and is crippled by fears of just about everything, especially men.
This changes one day when she is lulled into accepting lies of false courage and selfish empowerment. True courage, like love, is selfless; ultimately doing the right and best thing for a higher purpose than one’s own fear or desires. Yet this world so easily convinces us that selfish bravado and boosting our own ego is the same thing. In this way, Eleanor is lead into a trap of lies about how to end her fear. Ideals of self-confidence, worth and beauty enticed her to swallow seemingly empowering lies.
It doesn’t stop there, it never does. One lie leads to another as the darkness seeps throughout the soul. Eleanor learns to hate. She says to her friend, John: “Its hate. Its like armor all around me. Fear can’t touch me now.” Instead of wrestling with the deep rooted burdens on her heart, Eleanor blocks all emotions; love, fear, grief and pain for the numbing emptiness of hate.
Hatred soon begins to eat away at her. That’s the thing about hate…its like leprosy. It desensitizes you to its destructive actions and slowly kills you without you noticing. Eleanor quickly finds herself acting on impulses without thought as to why she does something…yet this seems trivial because of her deadened state. Red flags no longer bother her or catch her attention as she is consumed by the drive of darkness.
Once she is adequately benumbed to truth and light, the hole left in her life leaves her lusting for new things: power and control. She is allured into the mindset of woman’s sexual power over men. Why fear what you with only your body can so easily control? Thus we find her dancing under the moonlight with her chilling song of worship to darkness. She is fearless; a princess of the night…a far cry from the timid shadow, the whipped and beaten creature she once was. Dirtied and broken from years of abuse, enslaved to fear…through darkness she is transformed into a powerful, erotic figure.
Frightening, isn’t it?
Yet this story is true…it is the story of so many lost girls…from the anguished desire to overcome fear to the sanctuary of hate. From the longing to be a courageous, beautiful confident princess to the lust for power satiated in the sexual potential of the body. From the beaten, broken child to the dancing woman of the night.
The problem is, this black power, this sensuality…it doesn’t fill the hole left inside. It leaves her waking up the next morning with nauseating knowledge of her own filth. It deepens the despair, chokes out the hope, leaves her never fulfilled but addictively pursuing more just to deaden herself to the pain just below the surface.
For Eleanor, she is rescued from the darkness by her friend and future husband, John. He pursues her through the night despite the hurt he must bear to fight for her even as he fights with her. He eventually succeeds in tearing off the lies she carries close and forgives her the pain she caused him.
By your beauty, which confesses
Some chief Beauty conquering you, –
By our grand heroic guesses
Through your falsehood at the True, –
We will weep not! earth shall roll
Heir to each god’s aureole –
And Pan is dead.
Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth,
And those debonair romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus’ chariot-course is run:
Look up, poets, to the sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.
As these words are heard overhead, Eleanor is saved. They are actually a few stanzas from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, The Dead Pan (see my last post). The poem beautifully depicts the fall of the old pagan gods at the feet of Christ in His death and resurrection. He is the Truth, the real Song, and the conqueror of all the false gods we worship.
The imagery in the story is clear: the lies and power of darkness holding and warping Eleanor is broken by the love of Christ through John. There is hope and freedom for her, though she will bear the scars from her affair with the night.
Yet there are so many girls and women out there still chained in that dance. Human trafficking is still an up and coming world issue in terms of overall awareness but it is the second greatest industry in the world. People are enslaved for the purposes of factory work, domestic servitude, child soldiers, organ trafficking, sexual exploitation and more. Each of these areas are intertwined with others…for example, millions of children are forced to work long days as slaved before being used sexually at night. Here in the US, girls are daily lured into brothels and prostitution rings. Many come from abusive homes, some are runaways, others think they will be brought to a better job.
The worst part for me is the attitude towards prostitutes. We see them as dirty, disgusting women who are choosing a life of immorality. But so very many are prisoners with no choice. The fact is, even the ones who would say that they are quintessential prostitutes don’t really have a way out. Interview any number of them and you will find out about regular beatings, rapes, even stabbings from both pimps and customers. Talk to law enforcement, run away, get help…these things hold a death sentence from those trapped in the underworld.
Yet who are arrested, mocked, spat upon? These women. Not the men who create the demand…the good standing citizens who use and abuse these women. Not the billions of porn viewers and makers who fuel the fire. Not the even greater amount of people who buy into a culture of objectifying women…from Hollywood to teenagers.
I don’t mean to sound like a feminazi on a women’s rights rant, but this is the reality of our world today and it is time to stop doing something about it.
It is time for guys to be thought masculine and strong without objectifying women. It’s time for male abuse victims to get help without shame…the vast majority of men who are abusers were abused themselves and were unable to get help and break the cycle. It is time for young guys to be mentored and to hear about how to be a man of character and true strength. Time for guys to know how destructive sexualizing women truly is.
And its time for the world to see all the Eleanors out there for what they and we truly are…scared, hurt little girls. Instead of looking down on them, criminalizing them, and judging them without ever knowing them we could try giving them the love they so desperately need.
This is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing…the fight and cause to which I will give my years. Right now, I am doing research for an organization known as Global Centurion in fighting the demand for sexual exploitation. When I am in Mexico this summer I will be doing research on sexual exploitation and victim services in the face of cultural taboos. I hope after I graduate to pursue a career in fighting human trafficking and sexual exploitation. This fight has claimed my heart and after a lot of prayer I feel God’s calling on my life in this area. May wherever I go from here be for His glory.
