This is an installment of the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project. You can read the full list of questions here and the posting plan here. The first six participants whose stories I’ll be posting are Melissa and Haley, Lina and V, Latebloomer and Katy-Anne.
4. Did you experience peer pressure regarding sexuality and/or purity? How did you respond to it? Did you ever see yourself as a role model or example for others in the purity movement?
This is an installment of the Religious Fundamentalism and Sexuality Project. You can read the full list of questions here and the posting plan here. The first six participants whose stories I’ll be posting are Melissa and Haley, Lina and V, Latebloomer and Katy-Anne.
3. What did you believe about non-fundamentalists and their attitudes towards sex? Where did your impressions come from?
This just in from the Department of Unintended Irony: Michelle Duggar makes a public statement about modesty, just to be sure you know how modest they are – too modest for the beach – in case you were straining your neck looking for their modest stairstep children in the crowd while you immodestly sunned your heathen midriff. After all, they’re so modest, they wouldn’t want you thinking and worrying about them too much!
Michelle Duggar poses with her family in the hospital after delivering a baby.
Michelle Duggar: We Don’t Wear Shorts – Or Go to the Beach!
[UPDATE 7/1/12: The above link is apparently not working. You can still read Michelle Duggar’s blog post, however, here: Michelle Duggar on Modesty and Bathing Suits.]
Okay, guys, I’m turning off my snark filter. Really. It’s starting to overheat.
Before I go any further, you may be interested in checking out Libby Anne’s post Carefully Scripted Lives: My concerns about the Duggars. I am going to talk a bit below about isolation and doctrines of modesty and purity, two things that Libby Anne explains alongside the other less savory bits of the Duggars’ lifestyle. If you’re not familiar with the Christian patriarchy movement, that post should put the rest of my post in context for you.
Might as well quit now, kid. Your classmate is already doing Advanced Calculus.
Dear Baby Boomers and Generation X,
Believe us, we bloody well know.
Earlier this month, Wellesley high school teacher David McCullough, Jr., delivered what was perhaps the world’s first commencement dirge to a crowd of teenagers on the first day of distinction many of them have ever experienced. Graduation from high school, he informed them, is a shiny induction to the hordes of mediocrity. McCullough even took it upon himself to remind the youth of their eventual funerals. (You know it’s a problematic speech when Rush Limbaugh loves it.) What parting words did the teacher have for those who survived his twelve-minute lesson on nihilism? The paradoxical exhortation to go forth and live extraordinary lives! Because, apparently, we can?
This is not a paradox.
I recently read Teach Your Children to Succeed by Putting Obstacles in Their Way by Eric Sentell on Role Reboot. The heart of Sentell’s essay is his story about a day from his youth that he looks back on as a “source of pride, self-reliance, and independence.” He was sixteen years old and in need of an inspection from a mechanic to drive his truck legally. He ran into complications in the form of a burnt-out taillight and no one to fix it for him. The story is a short one, allegedly telling of his resourcefulness in dealing with this problem without reliance on his parents. While I agree with the premise that kids ought to be left to their own devices frequently to develop their independent problem-solving skills and confidence, I do want to point out the gendered landscape in which boys and girls develop (or fail to develop) such skills. I do not think that Eric Sentell is an arrogant man; I don’t know him at all, so I couldn’t comment on his person even if I wanted to. I do, however, see a number of references in his story to circumstances that are not available to many boys, and not to any girls at all. In other words, the article is packed with unacknowledged privilege and traces of sexism. Let’s go through this thing piece by piece. Read the rest of this entry »
From Busty Girl Comics.
In my previous posts on the modesty doctrine, I’ve written about how, as a teenager, I believed that the only solution to the problem of male lust was to have a sexless body. This desire for androgyny contributed directly to my eating disorder, as I deliberately tried to purge myself of curves. Is self-starvation extreme? Yes. Is it illogical as a response to the modesty doctrine? Not at all.
I posted this excerpt from Feministe’s article on the Stuyvesant school dress code on Monday, but it bears repeating:
Beyond the treatment of young men as uncontrollable animals and the treatment of young women as rape-bait, the Stuy dress code enforcers also appear to fall into a common problem with dress codes generally — defining an “appropriate” body. As the students quoted in the Times article implied, some of them technically met the dress code but were still told they were “inappropriate,” not because of what they were wearing, but because of how it looked on them. I don’t know what those students look like, but I’m going to guess it comes down to boobs and butts. Flesh is what’s often considered “inappropriate” — B-cup boobs in a turtleneck are fine, but double-Ds are not; straight hips in a pencil skirt are fine, but curvy ones are not. It’s the body that’s being policed, not the clothes.
The modesty doctrine isn’t about clothes, it’s about bodies. It’s a method for punishing women who do not conform to an idealized, asexual, inoffensive body type. The “offenders” are women with large breasts, wide hips, or discernible “booty.” The modesty doctrine claims that the right clothes conceal a woman’s figure, and that the wrong ones expose her curves. The problem is, some women have figures that cannot be concealed. Even denim sack jumpers will reveal a curvy woman’s hips or breasts when she moves. When I was rebuked for my clothing as a teenager, it was often identical to the clothing all the other girls were wearing. The only difference was that I had “developed” first. The modesty doctrine defines some bodies as inherently problematic. Read the rest of this entry »
If you haven’t checked out Libby Anne’s “Raised Quiverfull” project yet, you’re missing out!
Raised Quiverfull: Adult Children Respond
The project is ongoing. The Introduction, along with the sections on Living the Life, A Gendered Childhood, and Homeschooling are complete. Keep checking in for the sections on Purity, Questioning, Relating to Family, Coping and Helping Others.
Below is Libby Anne’s description of the project:
Nine young adults who were raised in families involved in the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements have come together here to answer questions about their upbringing, their questioning, and their transition to lives in the normal world. Ranging in age from their early twenties to their early thirties, all have questioned and left the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements and all but one blog against what they see as the destructive results of those movements.
These nine young adults come from an array of backgrounds (no two families in the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements are identical) and have today arrived at a variety of perspectives (while all have in some form questioned, rethought, and rejected the ideas behind the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, their current positions on religion and family are not identical). One is male, four are students, five are parents, and two (Melissa and Sarah) are siblings.
(Note: This is cross-posted from Love, Joy, Feminism. The original is here.)
By Libby Anne
My mother taught my sisters and I that our bodies belonged to our father. She told us that if we wanted to alter our bodies by a piercing or tattoo, that had to go through him – even if we were adults. She told us that once we married, our bodies would belong to our husbands, and we would likewise have to get permission from them to alter our bodies in any way.
Christian Patriarchy teaches that every female has a god-given male authority, or male “head,” to whom she must submit. And submit means obey. Christian Patriarchy teaches that God speaks to women through their god-give male authorities, and that by obeying these male authorities they are obeying God. In fact, some go so far as to argue that a woman is justified in breaking the law or even sinning if she does so on the order of her god-given male authority, because God will honor her decision to submit to and obey the authority he has placed over her. (Somehow I don’t think law enforcement would do the same.) Read the rest of this entry »
My homeschooling experience was basically the opposite of this.
Having already covered what I think were the benefits of my homeschool education, now it’s time to look at some drawbacks. They probably aren’t what you think.
The main problem I had with homeschooling was having no way to measure my own intelligence. It was easy for me to buy the line that I was stupid, awkward and worthless because I never knew where I stood in comparison to my peers. I knew that I tested at college level reading and writing in middle school, but I didn’t think that made me intelligent. I just thought I was a gifted stupid person. This was only reinforced by the homeschooling mothers in my church bragging incessantly about their boys’ academic performance and personal accomplishments. When I talked to the boys themselves, I automatically deferred to them on politics and economics because they controlled the jargon. They took liberties to correct me until the conversations became tiresome. Later, I realized that they were simply parroting lines from Atlas Shrugged (which I refused to read). Read the rest of this entry »
I liked being homeschooled. To this day, I have no problem with it. Nonetheless, I will scrutinize my experience a little bit and discuss how I think things could have gone better. Hence splitting up the topic into good, bad and ugly, like I did with homemaking. Let me state up front, however, that I am not anti-homeschooling. I would consider homeschooling my own child up to a point (8th grade). I believe homeschooling actually did shelter me productively from things that could have made my childhood exponentially worse, as you’ll see below. Without further ado: “the good” in homeschooling. Read the rest of this entry »
The Phoenix and Olive Branch 