I don’t know why I read the article “Let’s Mock People Attracted To Aaron Hernandez.”
I don’t like to see people mocked.
I don’t know who Aaron Hernandez is.
I don’t follow sports.
But the picture accompanying the article in my Facebook feed showed a pro football player; that and the strange juxtaposition with the article title pushed the oddity meter high enough to draw me in. I was almost certain where all this data would lead, but I think God took it in a different direction.
Tim Baffoe, the author of the article, turns out to be a high school English teacher who also writes sports commentary for a Chicago radio station’s website. In other words, he interacts regularly with young women in his role as a teacher. Perhaps his story, as acerbic as it is, serves as a warning.
I sure hope it does.
Aaron Hernandez is an NFL player now accused of murder of a fellow football player. (I suspected as much.) He allegedly also shot another man in the face. It is now coming out that he may have been responsible for an earlier, unsolved, drive-by shooting that killed two others.
Much has been made of the culture of violence that surrounds football. When is there not a story about a football player who decked his girlfriend or molested some woman he thought he could manhandle with impunity? I’m not sure why, but people were shocked when we learned that the New Orleans Saints had a bounty system in place for hurting rival players. Shocked.
But back to the Baffoe story, which I suggest you glance through. Really, just a glance, since you’ll get the gist immediately.
In the wake of the Hernandez arrest, Baffoe encountered a number of Twitter comments by young women who felt compelled to note in a public forum that despite his penchant for murder, Aaron Hernandez is “hot.”
The groupie who swoons over the serial killer is not a new trope in our society. While I am incapable of understanding why, way too many women out there adore violent men, and the more violent those men are, the more women they attract. 
And not just homely girls who feel their only shot is with a loner who kills people, but women with advanced college degrees, who may be pulling in six figures a year. Attractive women who draw the attention of every man whenever they walk into a room. Smart women who absolutely, positively should know better, but who can’t seem to stop thinking about the bad boy.
Where the line should stop, though, is with Christian women.
But if you read on in Baffoe’s article, a Proverbs 31 verse from the Bible shows up midway in the text. And then comes more than one example of a Tweet from a woman who appears to be a Christian talking about how attractive Aaron Hernandez is—for a murderer.
I can’t recall that the woman depicted in Proverbs 31 had a thing for guys who kill people indiscriminately.
I don’t know which is worse, that Christian women find murderers attractive or that they confess that attraction in public.
Keith Green once said that going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to McDonald’s makes you a hamburger. I guess that quoting a few Bible verses and claiming to be a Christian doesn’t make it so for these women.
Still, what disturbs me is that I know they are the tip of the iceberg. Not only as an example of confused women who can’t tell good from bad when it comes to men, but as people who call themselves Christians and yet cannot tell good from evil.
At its most basic, murdering other people is the standard of wrongness. If people can’t get that right, how can they discern anything?
Somewhere, these women got just enough Christianity so as to be inoculated to its fullness. I suspect that’s where we are in the Western Church in 2013. We have an entire generation now wandering this planet who have developed enough antibodies to genuine Christian faith that they are immune to it.
Parents, Christian leaders, and the general Church itself has much to be proud of—if inoculation was the goal. I think we can mark that campaign a success.
Sadly.
I’m wondering if we are too far gone in the United States. Something is horribly broken, and I’m not sure what must be done to fix us.
Dan,
The Bible talks about a time when ‘evil will be called good, and good evil’. There has to be an evil spirit involved in some of this attaction that you talk about in your post today. This is another subject (reality) that the church never talks about. Mainly because we have little or no understanding of evil spirits. In our society and culture there are no evil spirits, just wrong attitudes or decisions.
The youth craze with ‘horror movies’ and ‘zombies’ and evil, powerful, children’s themes and movies (with violence) that are then sold as toys in the toy departmnets for children to role play (over and over again).
Usually when a people is fully given over to ‘corruption’ God destroys them. We see this in Sodom and Gommorah and in the time of Noah. We see this in the Israelites who wandered in the desert after the Exodus. We see this in God’s command that the Israelites destroy all the people and the animals in the promised land.
We can’t ‘fix’ us. We must turn to God and repent of any wrongdoing. Our society is growing more wicked not better as time goes on. We thought sin was cute in the beginning of the ’60’s. Rebellion was ‘hip’ and ‘fun’. Turning away from religion was ‘modern thinking’ and that’s where we youth wanted to go. Out with the old and in with the ‘new’. The problem was the ‘new’ was very, very old, going way back to the Garden of Eden.
We don’t know what the future holds for us in our day, but we do know that we must cling to Christ and him alone.
Linda, et al.,
See this: http://ceruleansanctum.com/2005/05/chthonic-unmentionable.html
and these…
http://ceruleansanctum.com/tag/demons
You ask some genuinely important questions which brings up a necessary conversation. “While I am incapable of understanding why, way too many women out there adore violent men, and the more violent those men are, the more women they attract.” I, too, have spent much time wondering what about these sort of men attracts women. I am of the personal opinion the answer is much more deeply rooted in society than we think. Part of the problem with this particular issue, first of all, is society’s absolute obsession with appearance. Teenage girls had the exact same reaction to the 19-year-old Boston bomber. And at some level, I think its ok to acknowledge that a person is physicially attractive–but our society tells us over and over that its the only thing that matters. Women especially are given this message through media, and perhaps that’s a bit of the problem.
Perhaps another bit of the attraction to violent men is out of some sort of rebellion, or some sort of adrenaline rush that comes with the idea of danger or intrigue. I was actually thinking (admitting to myself) the other day that I had an initial strong physicial attraction to Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who is currently holed up in an embassy in London and has been accused of sexually harassing two women. Why would I be attracted to a man like that? I’m pretty much the case you mentioned–have a college education, and consider myself fairly well-informed and intelligent, and absolutely know better. But I think the reaction was due to the aspect of international intrigue and danger (from the wikileaks stuff, NOT the sexual harassment claims) that made him seem more physically attractive than he probably would otherwise. If I remember correctly, I actually think this is a real psychological concept, that our attraction to others heightens during precarious situations. This might be a helpful concept, but certainly still doesn’t explain the mass attraction to murderers.
I don’t have answers, but I do wonder if its also in part due to the way we are taught and raised. I often find that some girls, and definitely too often Christian girls, are not taught to be overly strong or independent, and can grow up to be quite honestly be pretty needy when it comes to relationships and especially romantic relationships. So many young women allow themselves to be taken advantage of; somehow either shrug it off as okay or feel that its their fault. Whether this is due to deeply rooted insecurity or not realizing one’s identity in Christ or what, it’s a huge problem I’ve noticed that I very strongly feel the church should address, not only to young girls but to their fathers and mothers. While that’s a bit of a different issue from young girls admiring murderers, I believe the issues are related.
My main point of all this being that the reason for womens’ attraction to violent men probably has much deeper roots than a simple lack of discernment. I’d love to hear other opinions on what those roots are.
Thanks, Mary, for sharing those possibilities.
I think that some of the spoiled fruit of feminism is coming home to roost. For coming on 50 years, our culture has preached to women that they can be just as aggressive as men are, especially sexually, and it is backfiring. On the other side, we have men in the military going through desensitization training so as not to treat female military personnel with any sort of preference or additional assistance. I think this works against men in the same way that aggressiveness works against women.
I can’t see that feminism is the issue in this particular instance–quite the opposite, actually. I see a lot of young women who somehow have picked up the message that aggressiveness from men is just the way things are, whether its directed toward them or someone else. For example, many rape victims don’t come forward because they assume they won’t be taken seriously–and sadly, in too many situations they aren’t. I find that society still has a rather unhealthy acceptance of male aggressiveness, apparently to a point where young women are somehow attracted to criminals.
As a feminist and a pacifist, I don’t think anyone should be ok with aggressiveness toward anyone, no matter the gender. I think the “feminists” of the latter part of the 20th century completely missed the point of feminism–there’s definitely some spoiled fruit out there. Yet, there’s always going to be spoiled fruit in most ideologies, I think. We only need to look at the church to see that. 🙂 I wouldn’t join the military for religious reasons, but if I did, I would sure hope that men are getting whatever training they’d need to treat women as equals. I don’t really see that the military is a place for antiquated chivalry -or- sexual harrassment.
As for the issue at hand, I do also think it may be a form of rebellion–a sort of way to vicariously associate one’s self with someone who breaks the rules. I think lawbreakers and criminals tend to hold a sort of mystery and intrigue by default. The outlaws of the wild west would never be so famous otherwise. Girls may be taking this natural fascination, combining it with their raging hormones and not thinking through the implications.