“For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil, but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol; she does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it. And now, O sons, listen to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth. Keep your way far from her…” (Proverbs 5:3-8)

Screwtape is at it again! In my reading this morning I landed upon the part in the book where this tricksy demon was disclosing a major strategy the dark world uses when trying to secure the damnation of an ordinary young man...snare him with “Satan’s type of woman.” If you can get a foolish man to become intoxicated with the allure of a pretty face and the smooth curves of a shapely form, the poor sap is done for! This statement may at first sound sexist, but if you were honest, you know it to be true. The best way to lure a young man off the path to God is through a beautiful woman with a polluted heart.

As a father of two boys in High School, this discussion in The Screwtape Letters really piqued my interest. It all started with this bit of advice from one demon to another:

“There must be several young women in your patient’s neighborhood who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.”

Very simple advice, link a man to a noxious woman through marriage and you render him useless. If you are like me, you shy away from this type of discussion in public. It is dangerous to be talking openly about the possibility of a woman being dangerous in our politically correct world, but you can’t deny its reality! For crying out loud, in 1982 Hall & Oates got famous for warning men about the dreaded maneater, it was one of their most famous songs…

(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater
(Oh-oh, here she comes) Watch out boy she’ll chew you up
(Oh-oh, here she comes) She’s a maneater

Screwtape pictures “Satan’s Type of Woman” with possessing 4 insidious qualities that lure and trap an unsuspecting man. I am determined to warn my boys of these 4 qualities because I have seen them to be true in some very scary women over the years. And if you are a mom reading this, please, train your daughters not to be this way. As Proverbs 5 says, “Her feet go down to death…She does not ponder the way of life.” In other words, sensual women are usually ignorant women; and destruction is the end result when a man is caught in her wily ways.

Quality 1: Satan’s Type of Woman Focuses Only on the Physical

Screwtape says, “In every age, a general misdirection of what may be called sexual ‘taste’ is produced. This they do by working through a small circle of popular artists, dressmakers, actresses and advertisers who determine the fashionable type.”

This is so true, in any given culture taste is determined by master manipulators (Advertising is more influential than you think); and for many women, acquiring this sexual “taste” is a matter of extreme importance. In fact, for Satan’s woman, they are convinced this “taste” is their source of power over others. Men may dominate others through their strength and talent, but maneating women have learned to use their beauty and sensuality as a weapon to gain control and advantage. In our present-day pop-culture, this type of power is used very effectively by the most brazen. 

Let me give you one obvious example: “Kim Kardashian has 50 Million followers on her Instagram.” Do you think people follow her because of her intellectual brilliance or divine moral example? No, the way she initially became famous was by producing a sex tape…and she hasn’t stopped peddling smut ever since. Now she and her sick sisters drive current fashion and public interest. “She’s a maneater…Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up.” And Beyonce` isn’t any better. She sells her poisonous wares, all the while her feet are dragging men down to Sheol.

Quality 2: Satan’s Type of Woman Lives With a Chronic Horror of Getting Old

It is one thing to hate wrinkles and old age, it is quite another thing to be horrified of it. This quality, which is the logical outworking of the first quality, ultimately places the worth of a person solely on their looks. When the idea of “beauty as power” takes hold of a woman’s heart, it ultimately grows into the pathetic belief of “beauty as personal significance.” 

If you marry a woman who only sees her worth dependent on the right facial creams, eyeshadow color and fingernail polish, you, my dear man, are in trouble. Every person ages, and with age comes wrinkles, brown spots and gray hairs. If your wife becomes obsessed and convinced that she can defeat this aging process, life with her can quickly turn to misery the older she gets. I once heard of a woman who for the first seven years of her marriage woke up one hour ahead of her husband so she could put on make-up, fix her hair and brush her teeth. She would then slip back into bed silently ready to impress her husband when he woke up. Why would someone do this? Because they really believe that beauty equals worth. Jimmy Soul in his song, “If You Wanna Be Happy?” expresses it like this:

I saw your wife the other day!
Yeah?
Yeah, an’ she’s ug-leeee!
Yeah, she’s ugly, but she sure can cook, baby!
Yeah, alright!
If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So for my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you

Proverbs 31:30 puts it like this, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” So son, don’t be fooled. Because as my dad would say, “Beauty is only skin deep, but Oh those seven layers!”

Quality 3: Satan’s Type of Woman is Constantly Striving for the Impossible

This is very similar to quality number 2, and it is reached when obsession turns to habit. It is o.k. if a person is simply trying to slow the inevitable, but danger ensues when they believe it is possible to maintain the 23-year-old body they once had until the age of 70. They say to themselves, “I can achieve the type of beauty I see in magazines and models, the perfect body is possible. All I need is the right diet, workout plan, vitamin drinks, exercise equipment and positive motivation and I will achieve and maintain true perfection.” It is commendable to want to stay in impeccable shape, but it is not possible to ever arrive there.

If you marry a woman who will never be satisfied until she reaches perfection, guilt and feelings of inadequacy will be like a dark cloud perpetually hovering over your house. Joy and rest will be sacrificed for constant calorie counting and navel-gazing. This behavior is nothing more than a sign that your woman is obsessed with self. There is a new god in town…the idol of health and beauty. Don’t forget what the true God says in 1 Timothy 4:8, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” 

Screwtape says slavery to self will be achieved when “Making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.” And these days with Photoshop, Instagram, Botox and silicon, the demands are way too much to keep up with. If your woman is not careful, her inability to reach perfection will be cause for her constant depression…and your misery. You want a woman who will enjoy life, not be crushed daily by impossible expectations.

Quality 4: Satan’s Type of Woman is Type 2

Beauty is of two types: Natural and…how shall I say it? Let me paraphrase C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape so I won’t get in trouble:

“There is a beauty that is naturally amenable to God – readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, colored all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness. There is a second type of woman, and the fool desires brutally. Her beauty is best used to draw the man away from marriage altogether…but when married, the man would tend to treat this type of woman as slave, an idol, or accomplice…in this second type, there can be a felt attraction, wrongly called love, that is an evil that the fool wants; it is that ‘tang’ in the flavor which he is after.”

My translation of this paragraph: Type 2 woman has a beauty that is rooted in seduction, sensuality and lust. Lewis sums her up like this, “it is the visible ‘animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes…there is a Beauty, that in a sane hour, he may even describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.’”

This type 2 kind of woman appeals to the sniffing, hungry, unthinking brute that is inside of the man. This is the kind of woman the fool sees more as a piece of steak than an actual child of God. And I have seen when men bite, they eventually will regret it, because marriage to a type 2 woman is a disaster. A woman like this will have no time for love of God and neighbor because her love of self is all-consuming. As a pastor who has performed a lot of weddings, I have seen it time and time again: Men with type 2 women will sit in my office looking like trained lap dogs who are at the mercy of their demanding new masters…the man-eating bride.

Over the weekend the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was on. As my family and I were watching it there was a scene with mermaids, but they were not your normal kind and caring mermaids, they were monsters. Beautiful faced sea creatures who only wanted to lure men to the bottom of the sea so they could feed on them. I said to my kids, “Finally, someone is depicting mermaids as they were intended to be. These mythical creatures come from the Greek sirens, beautiful women who lure sailors to their deaths.” And then I turned to my oldest son and said in my best impersonation of Capn’ Jack Sparrow…

“Mark my words laddy, as you swim in the waters of High School, if you are not careful, you too may be dragged to your death all because of a beautiful face.”