Free Touched by a Vampire by Beth Felker Jones

to believe that girls are emotional and boys are aggressive. Different products are advertised to girls and to boys. You can walk down the toy aisles of your local superstore, and it’s easy to see which is the boy aisle and which aisle is stocked for girls. The girl aisle is full of bubblegum pink, princess dresses, and toys for playing house. The boy aisle has a nice selection of wheeled vehicles and action figures equipped for battle. Though the “toy aisles” for teens and adults aren’t quite so obvious, things are still carefully marketed to the two genders.
    While everyone knows it’s not as simple as all that, we certainly have models about what normal—or even ideal—women and men should look like and act like. We say thingslike, “She’s a girlie-girl,” or “Boys will be boys,” and everyone has a pretty good idea of what we mean by these expressions.
    We dress baby girls in pink and baby boys in blue. Seems normal and natural, right? It’s hard for us to imagine baby clothing any other way, and it seems particularly odd to think about putting a little boy in pink. This gender rule isn’t natural though. That is, it doesn’t follow from anything inherent in the way God created baby boys and girls. In the United States, pink and blue color norms for baby clothes didn’t take root until the 1920s. 11 In fact, at the time, some people even argued that pink, as a strong, manly color, was obviously more appropriate for boys. The point of this example is that the things we assume are “natural” for boys and girls, like Bella’s assumption that fighting must be characteristic of boys, aren’t necessarily as natural and normal as we believe. And Christians have an especially good reason for raising this question.
    As Christians, we learn from the Word of God that we have to be suspicious of the ways we tend to see things. We live in a sinful world, under a condition of sin, and sin influences our viewpoints. It affects our ability to see what is true and what is false. It affects our ability to distinguish between what is natural (as God intends it to be) and what is sinful (the way selfish human beings want it to be). Paul talks about this in the first chapter of Romans. Because of sin, human “thinking becamefutile” and “foolish” human “hearts were darkened” (verse 21). God shows us how God intends things to be, but our ability to see those things clearly has been damaged by sin.
    Sin messes up our way of looking at the world, which means we need to be suspicious of ourselves when we’re convinced we know exactly how things ought to be. We need God to heal our abilities to see and know the world. Questions about women and men, about what it means to be male and female, are areas where we especially need to keep these two things in mind. Because being male and female is natural, because it’s a basic part of who we are, we tend to think we get it. When we’re overly confident, though, we’re likely to be deceived.
    Rules and ideals about what it means to be male and female have done a lot of damage in this world. For instance, ideals about thin female bodies are linked to anorexia and bulimia as well as to the feelings of self-loathing so many girls and women feel when comparing themselves to fashion models. Ideals about muscular male bodies are becoming more tyrannical too. Ideals about male power and female weakness are linked to violence against women and the choices of many women to act weak, step down, and let men take the spotlight. These are just a few examples of the ways that stereotypes hurt people and interfere with both men’s and women’s abilities to serve God with all that they are. If a woman or a man doesn’t fit the mold for what people expect women and men to be, that person is often mocked or socially isolated.
    The self-erasure we see in Bella is a harmful feminine stereotype, a result of sin and not of what God wants for girls. The crazy demand to be a superhero