Tag: Patriarchy

  • The land of the pure

    That “God” person must be one crazy primate, given the twisted frantic obsessiveness with which its fans fret about Purity in the Female.

    Being in a room with a boy who’s not part of your family is considered damaging to the girl’s purity. Purity becomes a minefield and the only way to avoid it is, I’m sad to say this, staying at home. Inside your house. Seriously, don’t even take out the garbage because some boy might say hi and talk to you, and you would be flirting. And anyway, what if somebody saw you? They’d gossip their mouths fuzzy that you’re having a secret boyfriend and once that’s in people’s minds, you’re about as damaged as a vase somebody dropped out the 13th floor on the hard concrete sidewalk.

    And what about men? Well, men are so focused on sex even at a young age, you can’t really blame them for a slip here and there. A man who wastes his purity on, say, holding hands, will not be “as impure” as a woman doing it. And even worse: A man who admits his “sin” is considered strong, spiritually mature and godly. His purity is easy fixed in the minds of people. A woman admitting her “sin” is still damaged. The reputation of being impure will always follow her around.

    It’s all so…literal. You know? Boys expel, girls receive, so girls are always dirty and smutched while boys are always basically clean. A dirty girl can never get clean again.

    I couldn’t go out alone, or with girls only, or, much worse, with boys who weren’t related to me. Whenever I wanted to do something outside the house, I needed a male relative with me. Even at the supermarket I couldn’t move too far away from my mother (unless one of my smaller brothers went with me). My smaller brothers were trained to “protect” their sisters, us older ones as well as the younger ones. Age didn’t matter, gender did. A girl out alone, walking down the street to bring something to that nice old lady a living a quarter mile away? Can’t have that!

    But a Magic Male fixes everything, even if he’s 6 to her 15. That’s how magic is.

    Our lessons for school were different. We learned female things like cleaning, sewing, music and cooking, together with girls from like-minded families. There were meetings with other women from our community, old and young, teaching us different instruments and exchanging “secrets”. How do you get grass stains out of those jeans? What can you do when you overcooked potatoes? It was treated like secret, sacred knowledge. We were miles ahead of those secular feminists who couldn’t even boil water without burning down the house.

    We also had lessons on men. How to treat them, how to act around them, what they liked and didn’t like. Wise tips and tricks were given. Always have a glass of your husband’s or Dad’s favourite drink ready when he gets home. Don’t bother him with questions. Cheerfully eat the food you hate once a week if that’s his favourite food.

    And thank your lucky stars it will always be 1952 where you are.

     

  • When it’s a problem

    Libby Anne gets responses from people saying “yes but we home-school and we follow Jesus but we don’t fit your description.” She gently points out that if they don’t fit the description then she’s not writing about them…and goes on to provide a list of the genuine problems with “the various teachings of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull” [italics hers], not having a large family or homeschooling. Among them –

    • When parents teach their daughters to dream of nothing but homemaking and seek to kill any other desire or dream, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that boys are to go out into the world and take dominion while girls are to take dominion by doing laundry, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that women are created to serve men, that is a problem.
    • When adult daughters are expected to obey their fathers and remain under their fathers’ authority, that is a problem.
    • When parents insist that they control their adult daughters’ romantic relationships and can’t trust them to be adults and make their own decisions, that is a problem.

    She knows this from the inside.

  • The borders of my world seemed to explode

    There’s nothing like an escape narrative, is there. No Longer Quivering, naturally, is full of them – there’s a lot to escape from, and (happily) a good few women doing the escaping.

    Sierra enrolled at a Community College. She took a philosophy course. She worked at Wal-Mart. She felt uncomfortable in her godly clothes.

    Every day, I worked an eight-hour shift at Wal-Mart, and despite my best efforts to vary my wardrobe and to solicit comments on being overdressed rather than appearing strange, inevitably somebody noticed that I didn’t wear pants. “It’s Biblical,” I sighed. It was a shortcut other women had taught me to say when I didn’t want to have a long conversation about my dress…

    I felt as though the Holy Bible were plastered to my chest. There was nothing I could do to avoid mentioning it. I began to obfuscate when strangers and friends confronted me. “It’s religious,” I said sometimes. Other times, “I just like skirts.” As I looked around at my coworkers in cute jeans and tank tops, I felt less and less inclined to “witness” and wanted desperately just to go about my business without incurring questions from strangers…

    Every time I got dressed in the morning, I took a stand for the Message by donning yet another floor-sweeping handmade skirt. To dress otherwise would be to send up a battle flare, declaring my apostasy in one stroke. I’d be set upon instantly by a horde of Message women, all reminding me why Brother Branham said women shouldn’t wear pants and praying that the Lord would lead me to repentance.

    All that – and that’s only a sample – about wearing jeans.

    Then she takes a class in American literature to 1865, and she writes very good papers, and one day the professor says to her –

    Read it

     

  • Training dominion-oriented daughters

    Libby Anne spotted another deeply sinister picture of a female human being on a Vision Forum DVD.

    Will you look at that?

    It’s all the more sinister because it’s so effective – the colors and patterns are pretty, and they pull us in.

    Libby Anne is scathing.

    It appears from the cover of this DVD that daughters take dominion by doing laundry. Nice. I mean seriously, thought goes into cover images like these (we hope), and someone really truly honestly decided that the best image to represent dominion-oriented daughters is a little girl doing laundry. Because, you know, that’s how women take dominion. By doing laundry. Interesting.

    This made me wonder. What pictures do they put on DVDs on raising sons?

    No laundry.

    And there’s something else. Take a good look at that picture. That little girl has no mouth – it’s been covered up by her stack of laundry. Vision Forum has given her a niqab made out of a pile of clean clothes. No wicked feminist back-talk coming out of her, you can be sure.

  • His brazen feminist mother-in-law attacked him with vegetables

    Digging.

    No Longer Quivering has a section for nlq stories. There are a lot of stories. I’m reading chapter 2 of one story, by Tess Willoughby.

    It was the year when we went to a conference and met a pastor who advocated corporal punishment for wives, and Nate took to his teachings like a duck to water…

    Nate and I were part of the Christian separatist movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s, rooted in the belief that liberals and “secular humanists” would destroy the moral fiber of America. Christian separatists— right-wing religious splinter groups including white supremacists, Y2K survivalists, secessionists, reconstructionists, and so on—believed that the upstanding patriotic Christian Americans needed to separate themselves and create a fortress of Christian homes where the true leaders of tomorrow would be raised…

    When I was eight months pregnant with Jack, Nate ordered me to pick a paperwad up off the living room floor. I refused, and he took me by the forearm and “lovingly compelled” me to pick up the paperwad, while murmuring sweetly in my ear, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you need to learn obedience.”

    …

    I was enjoying a cozy kitchen chat with my mom when Nate interrupted with this remark: “A woman is to be under a man at every stage of her life—her father, her husband, and then, if widowed, her son.” I looked at Nate in stupefaction.  The idea of a son’s authority over his widowed mother was a new one, even for me.

    My mother had been shelling her garden peas during Nate’s little speech. She stopped, repeated “under. . .a. . .man,” and began hurling fresh peas at Nate’s balding head. Then she stalked out of the kitchen. I was ordered to gather the peas and pack the car—my visit home was over.

    Incidents like these had convinced Nate that my Mom and Dad were not Christians—at least, not biblical Christians. They were a bad influence on his family.  They needed to be shunned.

    And that’s the fun part. Then she gives birth to Jack, and Nate wants to sleep but newborn Jack keeps crying so Nate –

    Read on.

  • The death of Lydia Schatz

    The deeper we dig into Patriarchal Christianity, the more rot and corruption we find, so we dig again, and find more, so we dig again, and…

    We find for instance (via Janet Heimlich at Religious Child Maltreatment) Elizabeth and Kevin Schatz of Paradise California, who beat their adopted daughter Lydia, age 7, to death.

    The Schatzes adopted Lydia and her sister Zariah, a year older, from Liberia…and proceeded to beat them for hours on end. Lydia’s casus flagendi was getting a word wrong during a homeschooling lesson.

     According to authorities, when the Schatzes beat Lydia, they took breaks to pray. They then resumed the torture, as one held the child down while the other whipped her with 1/4-inch wide plumbing line. Lydia died from the beatings. Zariah barely survived, having suffered kidney failure and other injuries.

    The Schatzes did not come up with their disciplinary methods all on their own. They were followers of the Tennessee-based No Greater Joy Ministries, which is operated by a fundamentalist Christian minister named Michael Pearl and his wife, Debi. The Pearls’ book To Train up a Child is hugely popular among Christian homeschooling parents; it has sold more than 650,000 copies and has been translated into many foreign languages, according to the Pearls’ website. The Pearls strongly advocate for the spanking of children—even those who have committed minor infractions—saying that God demands that parents spank. The Pearls suggests that spankers use implements rather than the hand, because “hands are for loving and helping.”

    In particular, the Pearls believe that 1/4-inch-wide plumbing line is ideal for spanking children. “It will fit in your purse or hang around your neck. You can buy them [sic] for $1.00 at Home Depot or any hardware store,” notes Michael Pearl on his website. He adds that sections of the pipe “come cheaper by the dozen and can be widely distributed in every room and vehicle. Just the high profile of their accessibility keeps kids in line.” The Pearls’ book was found in the Schatz home with passages underlined. Police photographed a section of 1/4-inch plumbing pipe lying on the parents’ bed next to a children’s book.

    What else is there to say?

  • Slumber parties are sin parties

    Libby Anne examines the ideological straitjacket of Christian Patriarchy.

    The parents of Christian Patriarchy have one goal in mind: to raise children who believe and act as they do. The reason, of course, is that they see their beliefs and lifestyle as the only one that is truly Christian, and anyone who steps outside of their beliefs and lifestyle turns their back on God. Within this framework, parents of Christian Patriarchy act quite rationally.

    Vision Forum and No Greater Joy and the Institutes for Basic Life Principles tell them that if they do just so, they will turn out perfect godly Children. This is the appeal these groups have, and parents buy it. They then live by the formulas these groups present and expect complete conformity from their children…

    This is one aspect of the whole thing that I find quite opaque. What reason do people have for thinking this way of life is particularly “Christian”? What about it is specifically Christian? To an outsider it looks much more simply old-fashioned and off-the-charts strict, neither of which has anything at all to do with “Christian.”

    I suspect it’s the other way around – people develop ideas of “religion” as being about purity (especially sexual purity) and related qualities, all of which are opposed to ordinary worldly secular life – pop culture, gossip, raucous music, advertising, sexy clothes, singles bars, non-marital sex, teh gayz, consumerism, the whole vulgar package. They think of the rejection of all that as religious and then they do a back-formation in which their particular religion turns out to mandate that rejection. Only it doesn’t. It forgot to, because it didn’t know about it.

    Pascal Boyer talks about this way of thinking in Religion Explained.

    As far as anthropologists know,  people in most places conceive of some supernatural agents as having some interest in their decisions. This can take all sorts of forms. Christians for instance consider that God expects some particular kinds of behavior and will react to departures from the norm…

    For instance, religious codes like the Christian Commandments specify a simple list of prescriptions and prohibitions. But the range of situations about which people have moral intuitions or uncertainties is far greater than this. [p 173]

    And people just fill in the gaps, and assume that’s “Christian/Muslim/whatever.”

    With the Patriarchy set, the results can be pretty stringent. Libby Anne quotes from Michael Pearl:

    Over the years as our children were growing up, Deb and I offended about every family member and some of our friends by being “overprotective” of the innocent charges God sent into our care. We guarded them from any suspect company and thoughtfully planned their associations. We have not trusted, “good Christian families.” We have not participated in churches where the children were separated from us. After church, we watched them and their associations. When kids stop running around in circles, screaming, and start talking, or drawing aside, you’ve likely got the beginning of troubles brewing. Keep the little ones standing right beside you after church. They should always sit with you, never with their friends. If they go out to the bathroom, go with them. Never allow them to spend the night with friends or cousins. Slumber parties are sin parties. Never allow them to listen to music through headphones. Three-minute phone conversations, no chat rooms, no surfing the web for any reason. Parents should make it physically impossible for them to even access the web. We didn’t allow our children to spend time in their bedrooms unless they were working on a project or reading. Bedroom doors were always kept open, except for two minutes while dressing.

    Wouldn’t the Pearls have been happier with a set of robots for children?

     

     

  • If they will ever, like me, break free

    Libby Anne is, naturally, worried about her siblings.

    …it is hard for me to watch my siblings being raised with beliefs and methods I have come to so oppose. I have to watch my sisters being taught that their only role is in the home, and to see my siblings expected to obey and conform. The hardest part is watching my sisters. I hear them talk about the blessing of fatherly protection against the evils of the world and their future plans to eschew all kinds of birth control and have as many children as possible. I watch them and wonder if they will ever, like me, break free.

    That would be very difficult.

  • A whole future spread out before me

    There are a lot of them – which is good, because it means some escape, but bad, because it means this is happening to a lot of people. There’s Sierra at Non-prophet Message. She is amusing on the subject of Jezebel and makeup and faking it.

     Shaping your eyebrows can go a long way towards that neat, meticulous, hyperfeminine look that screams, “I read my Bible so much, my eyebrows shape themselves!”

    When she finally went to school – which was a community college – she discovered that she had a brain.

    I turned in my final math exam with the lightest heart I’d felt since I was a little child, since before I’d ever heard of the Message or William Branham. I felt like a little girl again, with a whole future spread out before me for the taking. “I want to be an astronaut and an archaeologist,” the small child in my head whispered. “I want to write a book, travel the world and swim with dolphins. I want to do everything when I grow up.”

    Weeks later, the final grade came in. I’d passed the math course with an A.

  • Breaking a daughter

    One way crazy religion is crazy is in putting massive pressure on people to distort their own natures and aptitudes and wants. The fancy name for this sadistic habit is “dying to self.” A “broken daughter” tells us what it feels like.

    Some people don’t seem to bother that much, but it’s always been hard for me to be as selfless as I was expected to be. You see, I’m a very private, calm, introvert kind of person. Though I grew up in a big family, I always liked being alone. I’m not much of a team player, I prefer doing things all by myself. I didn’t hate having a big family where there was always somebody, quite the opposite, I loved it. But I always tried to make room for myself in some way. That didn’t mean that I wanted to do things I liked, it was more like just being by myself doing ANYTHING really. I hated washing dishes. I loved doing it alone. I didn’t like vacuuming. It was ok as long as I was alone. Everything I didn’t like in a group I usually liked if I could just do it by myself. I treasured the quiet moments, though my hands were busy, my mind was free to wander, not occupied by yet another conversation, prayer, training or anything like that.

    In other words her brain wanted periods of rest. It’s perfectly natural and reasonable…but oh no, it’s not what Jesus would have done.

    Now my Dad was eager to teach all of us, especially the girls, that dying to self is key to life and salvation. You weren’t allowed to do anything fun, you were asked to serve others every moment of your life. If you didn’t listen to him, he’d have a speech prepared. “It always about ME ME ME. Do you think Jesus was like that? Do you think he would have died on the cross for us if he cared about himself? NO! He would have hidden somewhere and lived happily ever after! He wasnt about ME. So why are YOU?” and so on. I felt really bad every time I heard that. I started wondering if Jesus could even love me if I kept acting like this. I tried to train myself. I didn’t allow myself to do things alone. When I had to wash dishes, I called one of my smaller sisters over to help me, to teach her to be a servant and a good housewife. How to keep things in order. When I was working in the garden, I asked my brothers to do boy stuff, like carrying the heavy water buckets for me. I desperately waited for God to reward my selflessness. I gave up what I liked in order to feel as good as the people who kept raving about how great it feels to be selfless, how God rewards you for it. But I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel any different at all except that I was more stressed out than ever.

    And for no good reason; there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be alone while washing the dishes, but the patriarch had to fiddle and fidget for Jesus.

    Right now, I’m sitting here in complete silence. I’m all alone, doing stuff by myself. I’m selfish. I’m detestable. I’m lost. And I like it. God is quiet, he doesn’t bother me with his voices anymore. I now will go into the kitchen and have a coffee in complete silence, closing my eyes and enjoying nothingness. And I know that God will still be quiet.

    And no harm will be done to anyone. Free at last.

  • Women are faint copies of men

    Libby Anne’s parents always taught her that women and men are equal…sort of.

    My parents taught me that men and women were different and had different roles to play, but that men and women and their roles were also equal and of equal worth. The male role is to provide for his family and protect them, to engage in politics and spiritual warfare, to have a career and make the decisions for his family. The female role is to keep the house and home, raise and teach her children, exercise hospitality and offer service to others, and support her husband. I was taught that these two roles are equally important and that men and women were thus different, but equal.

    Except that, as she goes on to say, that’s bullshit. Just read Debbi Pearl, author of (I’m not making this up) Created To Be His Helpmeet and Preparing To Be A Helpmeet. Read her article “Learning To Become A Multi-Colored Girl.”

    As Adam was created in God’s image, Eve was created in Adam’s image. God could have shaped two clay figures and breathed life into both, but he chose to take the woman from the man’s own flesh and bone. I have come to see that tiered process as very significant, making it consistent with nature that the woman should be the helper in the chain of command.

    Oh it’s significant all right, and it’s very damn convenient. On the other hand, it’s not true. It’s a sentence in an old book. That’s all it is. It’s not even the only account of human origins in Genesis; there are two, which contradict each other. In Genesis 1:27 god creates humans “in his image”; male and female. In 2:22 god makes a woman out of a rib of the already created man. Pearl is treating the second as if it amplified the first instead of contradicting it – all for the sake of declaring her own inferiority, and ours and mine.

    Libby Anne quotes more:

    God did not create women as he did men, strongly fixed in one type or another. Being created in the image of man, we are more muted and flexible in our types.

    More muted? More muted?  

    That’s a truly extraordinary thing to say – it’s just an outright claim that there is less to us than there is to men. This of course is what a hell of a lot of people assume or pick up from the ether without realizing it; it must be, or the women in movies and tv shows and novels wouldn’t so often be non-entities compared to the men; but it’s an astounding thing to spell out.

    Libby Anne goes through the whole thing, to excellent effect.

  • He taught me critical thinking

    Another escapee is Libby Anne. She gives a ten-part account of being a good child of Patriarchy and then of being turned around.

    The childhood is by no means all horrible, even seen from the outside. Much of it is quite appealing.

    I also enjoyed gardening. We always had large gardens, and we children did a great deal of the tending and weeding, sometimes waking at dawn in the summer months to weed before the summer heat. In addition to learning to garden, I found books at a homeschool convention about edible plants and medicinal herbs and set out to teach myself these important skills. I learned that dandelions could be eaten in salads, that plantain was good for mosquito bites, and that raspberry leaves made an excellent tea for pregnant women (such as my mother). I even tried to make flour out of clover. I loved walking through marshy areas or abandoned lots looking for plants that matched the pictures in my books, becoming excited at each new find. I knew that a proper wife should be able to forage for food and prepare herbal remedies, especially if the government collapsed and the country descended into anarchy as we always feared it would.

    The proper wife bit and the descent into anarchy bit are a downer, but then that’s apparently what it was like: a mix of patriarchal doctrine and pleasantly industrious rural life.

    But the patriarchal doctrine had some thorns even then.

    My mother was constantly reading books like Me? Obey Him? as she strove to be a better, more submissive wife. This was difficult for my mother, for she was a very strong woman. I watched her war with herself as she tried to reconcile her strong spirit with the submission she believed in so steadfastly. I watched her cry over it, watched it eat away at her. My father, usually a reasonable man, became quite upset with my mother if he felt she was infringing on his authority. His most common response was to give her the silent treatment, and that was enough. In response, my mother generally first felt indignation and then blamed herself for not submitting enough and resolved again and again to do better. While my parents loved each other dearly, this tension added strain to their relationship, and I could see it.

    The sad thing is that it’s an artificial strain, a worked up strain. A reasonable man has no need to think he has an authority that his wife shouldn’t infringe on. If both had thought of each other as partners and equals, they would still have disagreed about things, but without doctrinal anger or resentment or guilt. Nonsense about authority and submission is an extra element. It’s truly sad that people mess themselves up this way. It’s a disaster that they teach their children to do the same.

    In addition to teaching me about theology, politics, and current events, my father taught me to think. He taught me critical thinking, and told me never to believe something just because someone says it, but to always question everything and follow truth wherever it leads. He taught me to never trust authority for authority’s sake and to never be afraid of truth. He taught me logic and how to recognize logical fallacies. Of course, the context of all this was learning to rebut worldly ideas and bogus concepts like global warming and evolution.

    Not patriarchy or submission or god.

    But then Libby Anne went to college…and as so often happens, the doors opened.

    I began to have theological and political conversations with a number of non-Christians. I worked hard to show them the perfection of the Bible, the evidence of young earth creationism, the evils of abortion, and the love of God.

    Strangely, I found a surprising number of my arguments rebutted by arguments I had never heard before. I was told that there were serious problems with creationism, ethical issues with the Bible, and more affective ways to decrease abortion than banning it. I turned to my resources, my books and websites on creationism, theology, and conservative politics, and I tried again. And again. And again. But some things just didn’t add up. I paused my arguments to do some serious research, and I was astounded by what I found.

    An open door.

     

  • He knew what God wanted, and what men wanted

    Woho, looky here – the opposition looks at Vision Forum.

    A former stay-at-home-daughter and now stay-at-home wife and mommy says she wishes she’d gone to college.

    All of these books taught that the world was a very dangerous place for a woman. God had designed her to be at home, creating a peaceful haven for her husband and children. The books said that any girl who left her father’s protection and went out into the world to get an education or job would end up sad and alone, because she was not living the life God willed for her.

    God wanted us to dare to live differently. His plan for women involved getting back to the family principles the home was founded on. Girls needed to be brought up knowing instinctively how to care for babies and keep house. They needed to be taught to be quiet, submissive, and modest and pure. The only way to do this, was to keep separate from the world. So my parent homeschooled and kept me from doing much of anything outside of our family circle, so that I would never get used to experiences outside the home, and I would learn to be content in my homemaking role.

    It sounded so romantic when I was ages 10-13. I was going to be amazing someday! My husband was going to be pleased that I was so good at caring for children and keeping house. I was practicing submission to my father, taking it very seriously whenever he pointed out some behaviour of mine that “would infuriate my husband someday.” He knew what God wanted, and what men wanted. If I wanted to be successful and happy someday, I had to start by pleasing my Daddy.

    In other words…….it’s just what it always sounded like: a scheme for making men happy. (It seems like a radically flawed scheme, to me, because the price of all that obedience and submission is living with an idiot. I would think an adult companion, however independent, would be immeasurably better than a kind of animated doll. But the patriarchs don’t seem to see it that way.)

    So it’s a scheme for making men happy by training girls to be slaves to the men they marry. It’s a sick little system for obliterating women so that men can use them in any way they feel like.

    Sometimes I wished that I had the chance to study more than just cooking, cleaning and sewing, and I did ask my parents if I could take some classes while living at home, but I was reminded that it would only be a waste of time and money to go to college when none of that education would apply in the home. A college atmosphere could take my focus off the Lord, and fill my head with thoughts of career and rebellion. After some begging on my part, Dad said he would permit me to take a few online courses from a very conservative school if I insisted, but it was clear that this was not what he felt was wise. He also said that I had to finish all my high school material first, and that my school work could in no way interfere with my household duties. I was so overwhelmed at the thought of trying to keep both my father and a school happy, that I gave up on the idea of further education.

    “Dad” would be a credit to the Taliban.