regards as a suicide attempt.
A male religious mentor picked up the pieces. Stapleton took her
own experience of breakdown and recovery and from it shaped a
kind of faith psychotherapy. Nick’s transformation into Jesus has
already been mentioned. A male homosexual, traumatized by an
absent father who never played with him as a child, played baseball with Jesus under Stapleton’s tutelage—a whole nine innings.
In finding Jesus as father and chum, he was healed of the hurt of
an absent father and “cured” of his homosexuality. A woman who
was forcibly raped by her father as a child was encouraged to remember the event, only this time Jesus had his hand on the father’s shoulder and was forgiving him. This enabled the woman to forgive her father too and to be reconciled with men. A woman who as a child was rejected by her father on the occasion of her first
date—the father did not notice her pretty dress—was encouraged
to imagine the presence of Jesus on that fateful night. Jesus loved
her dress and found her very desirable. Stapleton claims that this
devotional therapy, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables
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
