Venus, Purity Culture, and the Ideal Christian Woman | Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

Who decided what a “good woman” should look like?

Long before social media, paintings, sculptures, religious images, and other forms of visual culture were shaping our expectations of women. Those images did not merely reflect society. They helped define beauty, sexuality, motherhood, virtue, and even what Christians imagined a godly woman should be.

Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt is an art historian (Ph.D. from Washington University) and is a professor of art and art history at Covenant College. She’s also the author of two books: the award-winning Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art (Baker Academic 2023) and her recent book Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently (Brazos 2026), which forms the basis of our conversation today.

Chapters:

00:00 The Desire to Be Desirable

00:41 What Is a Woman?

03:39 Meet Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

06:16 How Art Shapes Christian Theology

09:58 Why Medieval Jesus Looks Like a Little Man

14:22 Five Images of Womanhood

15:20 The Venus Trope and Sexual Desirability

18:10 Why Women Learn to See Themselves as Objects

23:21 Purity Culture and the Objectification of Women

28:37 Mary, Elizabeth, and a Better Way of Seeing

33:35 The Myth of the Perfect Mother

38:02 How the Reformation Changed Womanhood

43:44 Are Women Competing for God’s Love?

46:27 Infertility, Motherhood, and Female Identity

49:30 “Is Something Wrong With Me?”

52:24 Do Fathers Get More of a Free Pass?

54:45 How Women Become “Monsters”

59:47 Does the Church Still Vilify Women?

63:45 Shaped by Trauma, Not Defined by It

65:36 A Bigger Vision of Christian Womanhood

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