Faith Beauchemin – Homeschoolers Anonymous

A Thank You Note

April 29, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on February 26, 2014.

I’ve often talked about the culture I grew up, my parents’ various toxic teachings and attitudes, and you may get the impression that my childhood was all bad all the time. That’s not even close to accurate. Today I was thinking about the things I have to thank my parents for. The ways that they laid the foundation for who I am today. When they were raising me as best they could, they were seriously misguided about a lot of things. But they were right about a lot of things too. I just don’t think they ever imagined those things would lead to me being a progressive. But, here we are.

None of these lessons were perfect, but today I am leaving aside the toxic aspects and focusing only on the good.

So, dear Mom and Dad, thank you.

Thank you for teaching me respect and compassion. I don’t remember how you did it, but it was part of my life as long as I can remember. We treat other people kindly. We are careful with inanimate objects. We are gentle with animals. This, more than anything else, laid the foundation for me to grow into a healthy member of society.

I remember when I went vegetarian, you never said one word of objection, you just asked me to suggest some meals for our menu every week. I remember long before that when a young neighbor purposely tore some leaves off the maple tree I’d planted from seed. I was so upset I cried, partly for the poor tree and partly for a little boy who could be so mean as to hurt a tree for no reason. That sense of compassion for every inhabitant of earth is your greatest legacy to me, Mom and Dad, and I thank you.

The beginnings of our garden one year when we tried “square foot gardening”

Thank you for teaching me to care for the environment. Thanks to you, Mom and Dad, the first question on my mind when I look at a new town to live in is, what things can I recycle here? Because you were recycling long before it was cool. You recycled long before curbisde pickup, before we could recycle almost anything, back when you had to take the labels off the cans and jars, long before our town started instituting a rewards system based on recycling volume which now has every person on our street doing it . We have a picture of me at two or three years old, both feet on a soup can, squashing it down to take it to the recycling center. Squashing cans and milk jugs was so much fun! So was feeding bottles into the bottle return at the grocery store.

We had a vegetable garden for most of my childhood, and taking care of those vegetables and the profusion of flowers around our home ensured that I perpetually had dirt under my nails and a working knowledge of plant life. You told me about how air quality regulations significantly improved the sustainability of American manufacturing. You took me to state and national parks. Dad, you were the first person to ever tell me about biodiesel.

Speaking of that vegetable garden,, thank you also for teaching me a strong diy ethic. It may have been because we always had a hard time making ends meet. It may have been because of how craft-y you are, Mom. Whatever the case, you taught me how to do all kinds of useful things. I can cook any meal from scratch, a skill which has really helped ease my shift to veganism. The beautiful quilt I have on my bed right now is one that you taught me how to make. You would sew us dresses from scratch, a level of commitment I just don’t have, but thanks to you I have modified more than a few thrift store finds.

Dad, every time I build a campfire I do it how you showed me. I also know how to paint a wall, how to saw a board, and how to keep a lawn looking tidy, all because you taught me.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for instilling in me a lifelong love of books and music. You kept more books on your nightstand than a lot of people have in their entire house. We would go to the library every couple of weeks and return home with five or ten books each. Mom, you read out loud to us kids at lunch time every day, and to the whole family on road trips. That was a brilliant way of getting us kids to settle down in the car, by the way, because we couldn’t be fussy or get into fights when we were busy hanging on your every word. One time, you were reading Lord of the Rings to us and were within three chapters of finishing Return of the King. So we all got in the car and took a spontaneous day trip up the thumb of Michigan just so we could finish the book.

Music was part of daily life. Whether we were singing hymns during family bible time, or putting on marching band music and making up silly dances, it was a rare moment when there was no music to be heard. I remember us kids sitting under the piano while you played it, Mom, because we wanted to get as close as possible to the sound. I also remember you playing a piece called “Midnight Fire Alarm” over and over while we pantomimed rescuing everyone and everything from a fire. Or we would all be in the living room, playing with the couch cushions (which made an excellent fort), or coloring (because you always encouraged our creative endeavors too), with a tape or a record playing in the background. Later on, you didn’t really like our teenage music choices, but you would have never told us to stop listening.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for constantly modeling generosity and hospitality. You never had much money but you were always willing to share. You would often invite people to come home with us from church for Sunday dinner. Our home was always open to friends passing through, and since we lived near the Detroit airport, that happened quite a lot.

I know you always had a lot to deal with. Raising three children on one small salary, several recurring health problems, and later on, Dad losing his job altogether. But it was never a question that we would give whatever we could to those in need. We would always donate used clothes, books, and toys. Mom, you coordinated the women at church to bring meals to people who were sick, having surgery, experienced the death of a family member, or had a baby. Whenever there was an opportunity to help anybody, we would show up. Mom, you have spearheaded a wonderful effort to make beautiful quilts for newly married couples and to make baby blankets and quilts to give to new mothers and to donate to women’s shelters. Even now that you have a full time job, you can still be found making meals for others and endlessly sewing or quilting for those in need.

I haven’t stayed true to the doctrine you taught me but in a more important way, I strive to live up to all the important values you modeled and instilled in me. So for these things, I am grateful to you every single day.

The Invisible B: Faith Beauchemin’s Story

February 20, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team1 Comment

Series disclaimer: HA’s “Let’s Talk About Sex (Ed)” series contains frank, honest, and uncensored conversations about sexuality and sex education. It is intended for mature audiences.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on February 2, 2014.

*****

Being bisexual is freedom, and it is invisibility.

I flip-flop between calling myself bisexual and pansexual. Bi is the word everyone knows. Pansexual doesn’t leave anyone out. And you see, I don’t care what your gender or lack thereof is. I’m attracted to people, not genders or genitals.

That doesn’t mean I’m attracted to every single person. It doesn’t mean I have crushes on everyone I hang out with. It doesn’t mean I’ll go home with just anyone. All it means is that I could potentially be with a person who lies anywhere on or off the gender spectrum.

To be quite honest, I didn’t know pansexuality even existed up until very recently. When I was a fundamentalist, the “being gay is a choice” narrative sort of made sense to me. I mean, everyone had the ability to be attracted to everyone, right? I read a Christian modesty book which claimed that everyone is “drawn to the female form” because it is just objectively beautiful. So I figured I must be straight because I knew I was in fact attracted to men, and any pleasure I found in female beauty was artistic, it had nothing at all to do with sexuality. Besides, all the Christian dating books had a tiny appendix tucked in the back that warned of the dangers of predatory college lesbians. So, I knew lesbianism existed but all of my associations were totally negative.

Even when I was less naïve, even when I started thinking people were born homosexual and that most gays and lesbians (like most straight people) were not predators, I still didn’t realize that bisexuality actually existed. “Bicurious” was a term I was aware of, but I thought it was a descriptor of an in-between phase, a transition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. So therefore, since I was definitely attracted to men, I couldn’t possibly be a lesbian. Simple as that. There was no other option. Monosexism was all I knew.

And that is what I mean when I say bisexuality is invisibility.

We get erased a lot. The biggest problem is what I term “Schrodinger’s bisexual” which is that a person is perceived as either straight or gay depending on who they’re in a relationship with. I’m dating a man right now, therefore everybody assumes I’m straight. You can’t typically determine bisexuality by just one interaction with a person, by one specific point in time. It doesn’t help that a lot of people talk about bisexuals as though they are “switching” between heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Of course as a woman especially I am sometimes permitted the total opposite of erasure, and that is performance. Men like the idea of a bisexual woman because their first thought is often of having a threeway. One night in a bar, a girl kissed me, and immediately a man walked up from across the room and said, “Mind if I join in?” Visions of a porn-worthy fuckfest dancing in his head, no doubt. Later, I tried to say something to a friend about how frustrating it is that no one thinks you’re bi unless you’ve actually had a homosexual experience, and he just jokingly spun a scenario where I and another woman would have sex and he would film it.

This goes back to the overarching issue of female sexuality being owned by men. If we are not having sex with them, we must at least be performing for their gaze. That’s why most threesome porn is FFM. That’s why a lot of men think that bisexual women exist to have threesomes with them, and that lesbian women could be “cured” by their magical dicks. And that is all such bullshit. My sexuality, whatever it is, is mine.

But the seemingly fluid pansexual approach is in fact deemed everybody’s property. More than anyone else’s, my sort of sexuality is approached with doubt. Everyone makes assumptions and gets to speculate about the causes and motivations behind my sexuality (no, I am not just “greedy” and I am not going to try to fuck you. No I am not disease-ridden or commitment-phobic. No I’m not going to cheat on my partner).

It’s a reminder to everyone of how truly queer-phobic our society still is.

We’ll (grudgingly, gradually) accept gay people as long as they want to be just like straight people. We might potentially on a good day accept one or two trans people, as long as they have had whatever surgery we deem “necessary” for them to pass as cis. But anyone who is genderqueer, agender, or pansexual is met with flat-out denial of their self-identification. “You’re lying.” “You’re confused.” “You just want attention.”

Do I though? No more than anyone else. I hate the fact that being honest about myself means I’ll get extra attention. But we haven’t reached a truly all-point-on-the-spectrum accepting utopia yet. In fact we’re pretty far from it.

So what’s it like being pansexual?

I’m not exactly sure. I’ve never been anything else. What’s sexuality like for all of you out there who are monosexual?

It was truly liberating, though, admitting it to myself. It was truly liberating learning that pansexuality exists. I used to fight my attraction to women, not so much because I thought it was “sinful” (because yes the story of my sexuality is also concurrent, though not especially related, to my deconversion) as because I thought if I gave in to it I would have to get rid of my attraction to men.

When I understood that it is possible, acceptable, and even (for me) normal to be attracted to all types of people, it came as a great relief.

For the first time, I was no longer trying to fit my sexuality into any mold that society had built for it. I could like what and who I liked, without feeling guilty or needing to repress anything.

Due to circumstances and the timing of me finally coming out to myself, I have never had sex with anyone but men. It’s not really a point of bitterness for me, I don’t have to experience sex with all types of people to know my orientation (much like virgins often know their own orientations before ever having sex of any kind). Right now I’m happily in a relationship and I don’t see that changing any time soon. If I die never having had sex with anyone but men, I won’t feel like I was robbed, and I will still be pansexual.

Of course there is a lot of work to be done, to make this world a better and more accepting place for those who are not heterosexual or cisgender. But “they” are right: coming out is the first step. Coming out to yourself, to embrace freedom, and coming out to everyone else, to combat invisibility.

This is me taking that first step.

*****

Faith has an open call for stories on Roses and Revolutionaries for individuals that do not fit in the gay/straight binary. If you are interested in participating in that series, read more here.

The Ideal Homeschool Girl

January 30, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team8 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on January 29, 2014.

There’s a sick little article floating around the homeschool/ex-homeschool blogosphere right now. It’s basically one college professor’s gross fetish fantasy about “homeschool girls” (meaning, his formerly homeschooled students who are actually presumably grown women). He likes them so much because they’re so feminine (“just like a Jane Austen character,” he says repeatedly, leading me to wonder how drastically this English professor has misread Austen and other groundbreaking female writers) and not like those ugly mean selfish feminists.

My most creepy-crawly feeling while reading the article came from the total objectification and dehumanization of women who have been homeschooled.

Mr. Markos, you revel in interactions with homeschooled women because homeschooled women were brought up specifically to please men like you. What goes on behind the scenes to craft that “glorious and unashamed femininity”? You see the finished product, a woman poured into the mold of a conservative Victorian ideal and seemingly content there (“enthusiastic”, you say, and I am trying to remember any of the legions of homeschool girls I’ve ever known who was truly enthusiastic about performing any part of traditional femininity that was not already rooted in her own personality). You don’t see how many girls are brainwashed, shamed, abused on a daily basis before they are finally broken down to the point where they can be thus remade.

You would admire my sewing skills, but you would never know about that winter day when me and all my homeschool girl friends were stuck inside learning to quilt while our brothers played in the snow. You wouldn’t know how badly I longed to be outside, sledding and throwing snowballs, instead of inside learning the traditional feminine arts.

Performing traditional Victorian femininity can be fun….

You might be impressed that I can draw, until you learned that most of my drawing was used to illustrate a fantasy universe that was populated by women having adventures, going on quests, fighting battles side by side with men. Or used to illustrate my Star Wars fanfic, where I piloted a space ship and spied for the Rebels. Or used to design dresses not to be sewn by me, but as part of a secret dream to move to New York City and be a fashion designer.

You’d have praised my “razor-sharp wit” when it was parroting Ann Coulter or whatever I’d learned at church that week, but now that I use it to eviscerate folks like you, it is “marred and twisted by the politics of identity and victimization.” (And see here you set yourself up to win against all critics, because if I argue that our original identities, pre-brainwashing, are not like the “femininity” you describe, I am now playing the victim card and am therefore “unfeminine” and undeserving of your time).

You might not know, Mr. Markos, anything real about these formerly homeschooled women you interact with.

Because do you know what we learn above all? We learn to hide.

We learn that our real selves are not acceptable. Anything within us that does not fit into the mold doesn’t necessarily go away, we just have learned not to show it to authority figures or, many times, to potential suitors. Those in authority over us are the ones enforcing the “ideal girl” model, so the quickest way to avoid punishment and shaming is to perform femininity as we have been taught to. Because we aren’t taught to be feminine. Where someone falls on or off the gender spectrum is, I believe, something that is found on one’s own, inside, not something that is taught (gender does not really make sense in my head, but I think that’s probably a side effect of growing up with such strict gender roles). A person can learn to perform gender traits that have no real resonance with who they are.

And wouldn’t you? If you were constantly under threat, continually told that god, your parents, and your future husband (who is The Most Important Person You’ll Ever Meet) would all hate you and shun you and turn up their noses in disgust at you if you didn’t fit this particular mold, wouldn’t you force yourself to fit it? If you were constantly told that “this is what a good woman is,” by everyone around you, wouldn’t you think that you were the problem, that you were a thing to be fixed?

You don’t know these “homeschool girls” you’re talking about, Mr. Markos.

You don’t know the actual story of their lives, possibly because the real world of homeschool women is kept very segregated from the world of men. And you don’t know how many of them will join me and my friends in the feminist camp before too long.

…but then, swinging on a vine across a chasm to escape Stormtroopers is pretty fun too.

So stop fetishizing my pain.

It is distressing to see you and so many other Christian men drooling over a neo-Victorian mold of “femininity” (that you label it “Austen-esque” just adds insult to injury). Drooling selfishly over the idea of a woman whose only purpose in life is to keep your home and to keep you happy. Drooling over the thought of a woman whose only thought is to please and serve you and maybe oh-ha-ha-ha take you down a peg or two if you are being too “bombastic” but only because she respects you so much.

Women who fit the classic “feminine” mold aren’t less human than women who don’t. I have never, and will never, think so. But you’re not saying your personal romantic/sexual preference is women who are quietly intelligent and skilled in the arts. Many people have romantic/sexual preferences, and that’s completely acceptable. What’s not acceptable is generalizing your personal and oh-so-weirdly-specific preference and turning it into what everyone born with a particular genital configuration “should be.” You’re saying that all women, in order to be true women, in order to be truly “feminine” (feminists, you say, are more “masculine” than even you! *gasp*) have to be like this. And you’re looking at homeschooled women, who were brought up in a culture that thinks like you do, and praising them for being, as you think, monolithically “feminine.” That perception is not true, not fair to homeschooled women, and insofar as it does bear resemblance to reality, is because of cultural pressures and religious threats, not because of any innate “feminine” qualities.

I’ve seen too many women (and too many people who were assigned female at birth but, surprise, aren’t female, because yes Mr. Markos gender is not the same thing as what you consider biological sex, and conflating the two as you do causes untold damage), myself, my friends, my sister, unspeakably harmed and psychologically and physically abused all for the sake of fitting into that false ideal mold. I’ve seen peoples’ vibrant personalities little by little give way, squashed into the mold. I’ve seen other friends who weren’t brought up this way torture themselves, briefly, to go from independent woman to some Christian boy’s submissive ideal, and fortunately escape before any lasting harm was done.

Any man who marries a woman because she fits the “ideal homeschool girl” mold is only perpetuating oppression. And maybe that’s why they all think feminists are “mean”:

Because we’ll never stop calling you out on this.

Mr. Markos, you can go home and rub one out to Lizzy Bennett as many times as you want, but please stop reducing real human beings to nonconsensual players in your little fetish game.

The Survivor

October 2, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial TeamLeave a comment

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on September 21, 2013.

It’s no secret that my life has been a little weird.

I’ve been trying to deal with my bizarre past in the last few months. The process still feels like probing a wound, and I’m trying to figure out right now if I can afford the therapy I know I need.

Some weeks are fine. This past week was most definitely not. Homeschoolers Anonymous was running a series on child discipline, which was good and necessary and appropriately headed by trigger warnings. I read the stories, I couldn’t stop reading them, and they brought back some of the most traumatic memories of my childhood. Memories I had repressed. An onslaught of things I hadn’t really thought about in years.

I would be physically shaking by the end of each story, and yet I had to read more, to try and process the fact that yes, I had been abused as a child.

Just when you think you have a handle on your life, and then it spins completely out of control and you’re dumped into a jungle of memories and problems without a clue where to begin looking for a way out. That’s one of the reasons I’m looking for a therapist, because hopefully she’ll at least have a compass.

I tried to go out last night with my friends. I said I was out of money so I couldn’t drink at the bars, which was true, but I turned down a free shot too, because the truth is, as badly as I wanted to block out this past week, I didn’t trust myself to. I was already being super weird and swinging like a pendulum between talking about myself too much and being weirdly quiet.

If I got drunk, I’m pretty sure I would have started babbling about what was actually bothering me, and “Hey guess what I just realized I was physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused as a child by loving, well-meaning parents” isn’t exactly acceptable party talk.

So I went home early, leaving without saying good-bye, walking alone several blocks to my truck and driving home stone-cold sober. I got home, tried to start writing about the memories I’d been rehashing this week, and was so upset I just curled up in a blanket and stared at the wall until I fell asleep.

That scared me, when I woke up this morning. Is my grip on a normal life really that fragile? I got up and started my day, but when I was flat on my back during my yoga routine, I remembered the thought that has gotten me through other difficult situations:

You are you.

I’m still me. I am the same person I have always been. Yes I’ve grown and learned and developed as a person through things I’ve done and things I’ve experienced and things that have been done to me. But I’m still me. That used to be a horrifying thought, back when I hated myself and believed that my natural self uninfluenced by God was purely evil. But I’ve learned to love myself and so now that thought’s a comfort.

I am strong and I am a survivor.

If I could handle everything that has happened to me, I sure as hell can handle dealing with what those memories mean to me now.

My will, my personality, my spirit was never fully broken. I’m the same person who faced down near-daily spankings and dealt with it partly by creating imaginary adventures about escaping dungeons and forced servitude and unreasonable authority figures. I’m the same person who was unbearably weird and unbelievably unsocialized and managed to purposefully, intentionally, painfully catch up on most of that missed socialization (though I’ll be the first to admit I’m still pretty weird). By now I have done and lived through enough that I look back at points in my life and can say, “Yeah, I did that. Yeah, I survived that.”

Whatever happens, I will always be me.

Hopefully I’ll continue to strive upward and continue to turn into improved versions of me. One of the ways I can do that is by dealing with shit from the past, with help of course. But there’s that core, that consciousness, that continuous self, and somehow that knowledge gives me the courage to move forward.

What Rape Culture and Modesty Culture Have In Common

August 22, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team13 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on August 22, 2013.

*****

Note from Faith: I originally wrote this article and posted it on my old blog in November 2012. I’d been meaning to revamp it for Roses & Revolutionaries, but was finally catalyzed to do so when I found that Katelyn Beaty at The Atlantic linked to my original post in the article “Toward a New Understanding of Modesty.” This is the updated version of my original blogpost.

*****

Sometimes it can be hard for men to understand why women are so upset about rape.

What’s the big deal? Rape’s not that much of a thing, right? Mostly it’s just cues being misread or hysterical prudes who just need some dick or unsatisfied women after a night of bad sex crying “rape” because they didn’t like the guy, right? And if even one person suggests rape shouldn’t happen, or that rape had happened to them, or that someone shouldn’t tell rape jokes, or so forth, they should get raped to teach them a lesson, right?

And this is what is known as “rape culture,” defined by Wikipedia as:

A culture in which rape and sexual violence are common and in which prevalent attitudes, norms, practices, and media normalize, excuse, tolerate, or even condone rape…[Examples] include victim blaming, sexual objectification, and trivializing rape.

Some men are very upset by the claim that rape culture exists. But I promise you it does. I know it does every time I can’t walk alone at night. I know it every time I’m walking to my car at night with my key stuck between my fingers in case I need an impromptu weapon. I know it when every rape survivor has to answer a litany of questions about where she was, who she was with, whether she was drinking, what she was wearing. I know it every time a guy thinks “no” means “just convince me a little more,” which is disturbingly often. I know it every time I hear of another leader (religious, political, atheist) who faces rape allegations being unquestioningly supported by his fans, followers, fellow leaders, and mentors.

The idea, in our society, is that if you’re a woman, your body exists to be exploited by men. The burden is on me to defend myself, not on men to be respectful of my privacy, my bodily autonomy, my right to say no, my right to live a life free of sexual violence and my right to present myself however I choose without being judged, shamed, or taken advantage of for it.

Christian purity culture is in many ways a reaction against sexual permissiveness masquerading as a reaction against sexual predation.

This shirt counts as modest by most evangelical standards – note the formlessness and high neckline.

The levels of sexual predation within the church give the lie to that claim. A special niche of purity culture is deeply concerned with modesty. The idea is, a really self-respecting woman will dress herself in such a way that her body will not be the focus at all. Sermons, conferences, books, even T-shirts all advocate this notion that modesty is a prime component of sexual purity and therefore (paradoxically) desirability (to the proper sort of Christian gentleman of course). There are endless debates on what constitutes modesty. The general consensus is, however, a woman’s clothing must not be too revealing of either flesh or figure (too scanty or too tight). Quibbling about inches and guidelines takes up an amazing amount of time and energy amongst modesty advocates, but the idea is the same: Good girls are modest.

And modesty is for everyone’s protection. Men are less tempted sexually when the women around them cover up. Modest women are less likely to be taken advantage of, whether just by ogling on the street, by men pressuring them to have sex, or by rape (so goes the story, anyway). Do you feel a little judged, a little meddled with, when a stranger tells you how to dress? Don’t. They really have your best interests at heart. They want you to “respect yourself” by doing your best to control other people’s reaction to your body. And they can’t be held responsible for what happens when you don’t dress modestly enough.

You should see some of the correspondence already.

Here’s the first ugly truth: as soon as a woman falls outside the standards of what is perceived as modest, those advocating modesty culture immediately join rape culture.

They shrug and say, “Whatever happens is on her. She’s asking for it.” They’re not actually concerned about all women, only women who are willing to conform to their standards of modesty. It gets worse: When a woman is a victim of sexual violence, it matters much less to “modesty culture” than to current American “rape culture” how she dresses or acts – “modesty culture” will assume much more quicklythat it is somehow her fault, probably because their standards for how “good girls” dress and behave are so much higher.

Second, both “cultures” have a very problematic stance on men; it’s not as bad as their view of women but it’s another of the shocking similarities between the two.

Why does “modesty culture” try to get all women to cover up? Because men, according to “modesty culture,” cannot help themselves. Since actually sincere Christians want their men to be sexually pure as well as their women (or at least they say they do, but of course the onus for keeping men pure is put on the women), all temptation must be removed. For even seeing a flash of skin he ought not to have seen will make a man think all sorts of lusty and rape-y thoughts.

That’s the gist of it – I’ve read modesty books that go into great detail on how men’s chemistry works, essentially saying that if he catches just a glimpse of a woman’s body he will be sexually turned on in an instant and after that he is incapable of controlling his mental/physical reaction. (and it is only a woman’s body that will create this reaction…modesty culture is heteronormative to the point of denying that real homosexual attraction even exists). So both rape culture and modesty culture envision men as drooling hound dogs with everlasting erections. (As a side note, modesty culture is also made up of people who think men ought to be the ones running the world, and that the male gender holds all spiritual authority. No wonder women should stay in the kitchen, we can’t have the lords of creation suddenly turned into slavering animals while they’re trying to do important political and religious leadership type things.)

But how can a “culture” that ostensibly seeks to protect women from sexual exploitation be fundamentally the same in assumptions as a “culture” that accepts sexual exploitation and violence as the norm? It’s simple —

Fundamentally, they are both based on the exact same principle: Objectification.

Just showing off a sand castle…and more skin than any modesty advocate would ever condone.

Here’s how it works. Imagine that I am on a beach on a very hot day, wearing a bikini. I look at some cool algae that’s washed up on the beach and I say to the two men standing next to me, “I didn’t know algae could be purple, I wonder what causes that?” Man number one is “rape culture man” and man number two is “modesty culture man.” Neither man really registers a word I’ve said. “Rape culture man” reaches for his camera (there’s a lot of people on the beach so he’s not actually going to rape me, just take a picture to post online later; he’d also totally love it if I were to lose my top whilst swimming in the ocean). “Modesty culture man” panics, looks around and while averting his eyes grabs a nearby towel and hands it to me, saying, “Cover up!” Neither man has reacted at all to the thought I had just expressed, to the fact that I, as a human being, was trying to interact with them, as human beings. They didn’t even see another human being, they just saw body parts. Rape culture man wanted to take sexual ownership of those body parts, while modesty culture man wanted me to hide those body parts from his view so that he wasn’t tempted to take sexual ownership of them. But despite the different end result, their initial reaction was the same.

Whether the obsession is with seeing & exploiting a woman’s body or with the danger of being tempted by accidentally seeing it, it’s just two sides of the same coin. I become an object. I am considered not as me, not as a person with thoughts and feelings and ideas and a back-story, but as a simple trigger for lust.

Whether you are hoping to see a little cleavage or desperately avoiding the possibility of seeing a little cleavage, you’re still just focused on my cleavage, and you’re probably not hearing a word I’m saying.

I am still just an object, reduced to a body part, and by focusing so much on your own lust (feeding it or starving it), you’re reducing yourself to a body part too.

Though they’re based on the same view of humanity (men as lustful, women as objects), rape culture is still the worse of the two. But I dislike both. Objectification is just not okay and it’s happened for far too long. When will we see all people as people instead of just extras in the movie of our own personal life?

For the record, I’m just a little annoyed when it comes to me personally being objectified. Mostly, I’m like, whatever. How you react to me is your choice and it’s not my fault you’re making a dumb choice. (Not including sexual violence here; that’s completely different) But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to change cultural attitudes.

I’d love to see a world where victim blaming does not happen, where a woman is interacted with as a fellow human being no matter what she’s wearing, where no one assumes that anyone is “asking for” sexual violence.

I’d love to live in a world where assumptions about your ethics aren’t made based on your clothing choices or your personality. But I’m not going to let categories of “good girl” or “bad girl” change the way I act. I am not going to treat myself as an object; I am not going to listen to people’s judgments of me; my body is a part of all that makes up “me” and I’m not going to let any obsession with it take over my entire life.

And I’m also going to arm myself, because I do not yet live in a world where any woman can consider herself completely safe.

To My Past — I Wouldn’t Be Who I Am Today Without You

August 13, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Faith Beauchemin’s blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It was originally published on June 30, 2013.

I was raised in a home and a church with certain expectations.

Most of the people I grew up with have lived up to those expectations. They’re all good Christians, remaining doctrinally pure and behaviorally righteous. Most of them are married and gearing up to raise the next generation of good Christians, in homes where the father is the leader and the mother is submissive.

My peers who have followed this path are the pride of their parents and the future of their church.

I have flouted all of these expectations. I quit attending fundamentalist churches years ago, and quit altogether around the time I graduated college. Although my parents think it’s okay for a single woman to work, they also think a woman’s highest calling is wifehood and motherhood. I’m nowhere near being a wife and I intend never to have children at all. My politics are so far removed from those of my parents that we can barely discourse on the topic due to fundamentally different worldviews. My behavior, as well, is far from the stringent moral standards held up by my former community, although somehow I think I’m still a pretty good person (mysteriously, drinking, going out to bars, and similar behaviors have not turned me into some kind of monster).

But it is clear to me that, however far removed I am from the outcome intended by the key players in my past (my parents and their church), my politics and anti-authoritarian worldview are a direct result of that past.

My parents made the mistake of teaching me to think for myself, to go against the mainstream, to be willing to believe what I know to be right. They homeschooled me partially in order to keep me from conforming to ordinary culture. Then they expected me to accept the exact same conclusions and ideas they themselves had accepted.

My church was, for a fundamentalist congregation, quite intellectual. They taught us to look at textual and cultural context and to know (their version of) church history. They taught us to argue for our faith. Then they expected that we would use each of these skills only to defend their particularly narrow viewpoint. I attended a Christian college, where I took classes which taught me how to reason, how to gather evidence, how to think for myself and effectively communicate with others.

But that same Christian college naively assumed that its graduates would toe the party line.

There were immense cultural pressures from my parents, their church, and my college to conform to a particular point of view, but all of them also gave me the tools to make my own way in the world, to reject conformity and with it the point of view they so desperately demanded I embrace.

At the same time as my parents, their church, and my college gave me the tools I needed to think for myself, they also taught me important lessons about fascism and forced conformity and loyalty to a particular ideology. I saw and I experienced in my own life the terrible consequences of valuing ideology and power structures over people.

I learned that unquestioning acceptance of authority often leads to very negative outcomes.

I learned that although those in authority demand implicit trust, I cannot implicitly trust them because they almost never truly have my best interests at heart. As I have said before, fundamentalism is simply religious fascism. It didn’t take long for my opposition to religious fascism to translate into the political arena as well. Also, my past taught me the harm of a “we few vs. the rest of the world” mentality. By its nature, conservative Christianity is elitist, claiming an inside track on knowledge and a superiority to unbelievers.

I am now utterly opposed to absolute power and I am wary of elitism in whatever form it takes.

So however critical I am of those in my past who attempted to control my life, I must also always be grateful to them.

They gave me early experiences which formed my current worldview. They gave me tools with which I was able to break out of the prisons they constructed around me and then build my own life, a life which looks nothing like they want it to but a life which I inhabit very happily.

Authoritarian Parenting Is Poison: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

July 18, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Authoritarian Parenting Is Poison: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

The following piece was originally published by Faith Beauchemin on her blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It is reprinted with her permission. Also by Faith Beauchemin on HA: “The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story” and “Starship Captains and Dinosaurs.”

My parents wanted to be the best parents they could be. It’s a pity that I barely even speak to them. It’s not really their fault, and I would forgive them immediately if they ever admitted their parenting had been wrong. But they defend themselves and make excuses and believe that they were doing it all to the glory of God. And if something is to God’s glory, of course it’s going to be good for every person involved.

But that’s not true at all. I suffer significant psychological and emotional distress to the point of being developmentally stunted in several ways because of my parents’ “god-centered” parenting techniques.

All the books and sermons available to my parents convinced them that their parenting techniques were correct. Multiple authors and preachers basically bullied my parents and many others like them to completely dominate and break their childrens’ wills, because total obedience was God’s plan for children and if children could not obey their parents, how would they ever know how to obey God? My parents were convinced that my eternal salvation rested on their success as parents. If they did everything right, I would follow the Lord and be happy all my days. Too bad I only started being truly happy after I left home and left the church.

In the interests of doing everything right, my parents chose to homeschool me and my siblings. This, along with the very tiny church which was our only social interaction, meant my dad’s ideas and will completely dominated every aspect of my life growing up. He passed it all off as God’s ideas and God’s will, but there was of course only one correct way to think of everything and that was my dad’s interpretation of Christianity.

As a young child, I was happy, imaginative, precocious, friendly, outgoing, intelligent, excited to explore new ideas, devouring books about dinosaurs, about history, and every story I could lay my hands on. By the time I went to college, I was quiet, depressed, frightened of everything, unable to speak in public, socially awkward to a painful degree, and self-censoring as to what ideas I was willing to even entertain or think about. I channeled my intelligence into proving the few points that I believed were true, and disproving everything else. My mind wasn’t just closed, it was completely locked down. It took four long years at college to return me partially to the outgoing, intellectually curious, adventurous personality I had lost.

My parents broke my will. They wanted to make me follow a prescribed course of life. They had a particular bundle of beliefs that they wanted me to adopt and take with me forever. Any flicker of self-interest, self-will, was seen as rebellion and immediately crushed. Any personal desire contrary to their wishes was deemed sinful, and spanked out of me. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, I never got away from my parents. I was always in their home, always dominated by their influence, their thoughts and desires. I had one channel of freedom, the books I checked out of the library. But when every other part of my life was controlled so totally, I tended to closely self-censor on what books I would read or how I would interpret them.

The adversarial form of parenting, the one which sees the child’s self as automatically opposed to the parent’s authority, is unbelievably harmful to the parent/child relationship. It took me a very long time to relate to my mom as a person rather than just an authority figure. I still can’t relate to my dad as a person, his whole being is consumed with his religion, and with trying to prioritize God in his life. He has obsessed for a long time over the fact that he’s the authority figure in the family and everyone needs to honor him, which come to think of it makes me a little worried about his mental health. He hasn’t realized that it’s wrong to put your ideology before your children. He doesn’t understand why we barely ever speak to him.

Even hearing about homeschooling families or reading materials written by people in the homeschooling or fundamentalist Christian movement can trigger flashbacks. I am still working, every day, on reclaiming my self. I wonder, sometimes, what life might have been like if I had been allowed to develop my own path instead of being forced to follow so closely my parents plan for my ideas and my life. What might I have accomplished if I hadn’t wasted the first 19 years of my life focusing all my time and energy on matching up to this ideal Christian model held up by my parents. Perfection was the goal and therefore it took all of my time and energy to try to reach that goal.

I have only just now, at age 23, begun with any kind of seriousness to figure out my place in the world. Once I realized I had spent the vast majority of my life in a tiny insular principality, ruled by my father, which had very little to do with the rest of the world, I felt completely lost. And who am I supposed to turn to to figure it out? My parents? They’re the ones who screwed up my life this badly.

I have to rely on myself, the self that was squashed and harangued and abused almost out of existence. I’ve survived, and I’ll go on to do something important and real and lasting in this world, but I will never know what could have happened in those years that are lost.

Starship Captains and Dinosaurs: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

June 4, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team8 Comments

Starship Captains and Dinosaurs: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

A fundamentalist Christian family is a hard place for a woman to grow up.

I was taught by my parents (and, more urgently, by all the books available to me) that a woman’s place is in the home. A woman’s highest calling is marriage and child-rearing. All of my talents and abilities and dreams could be met and fulfilled in building a happy home for my family. If (god forbid) I were to end up single, I could be a nurse, like Florence Nightingale, or a missionary, or maybe a teacher. I didn’t know anyone with a career, as far as I knew. There actually were some women at church who had jobs, but they were either single or else I didn’t know that they had jobs. It was just assumed by everyone that the normal pattern was for a woman to marry and give up her job as soon as she had kids, to dedicate herself full-time to taking care of them and, most likely, homeschooling them. After all, Paul wanted women “to be keepers at home.” And what someone wanted for women two thousand years ago is obviously the best thing possible for all women throughout time.

But two women slipped through the cracks and crept into my early image of successful womanhood. Of course later, as my view of the world widened, there would be others, but these two I knew from early on in my childhood, and each holds a place in my heart.

When you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I (not feeling that motherhood right away would be my path) would respond either teacher or nurse, and singer. Singer? What a random career option. This is because we had some old records by Amy Grant, which my mom had recorded onto tapes, which I listened to constantly. She inspired me to enjoy singing, and I wanted so badly to be like her, singing such beautiful songs for a living. I imagined being on a stage, people clapping for me. The dream was squashed by two things. First, when Amy Grant got a divorce, I felt terribly betrayed. I was too young to understand the reasons why it was actually a good thing for her to get out of that marriage, and I had been taught that divorce is a horrible sin. I wouldn’t listen to her music for months afterward. The second dream-squasher was being taught that everything needs to be done for god, not for oneself. This led me to believe that performance was in some way wrong, perhaps not for other people but for a selfish, prideful person like me, it certainly would be.

My other early female inspiration was Captain Kathryn Janeway, from Star Trek: Voyager. The series ran from the time I was five years old until I was eleven, and oh, how I wanted to be Captain Janeway. I recall in particular one birthday party, I couldn’t have been older than six, where we went to a park and played on one of those big playground structures. I ignored all the other kids at the party and ran around the playground structure pretending to be Captain Janeway commanding the starship Voyager. I sucked in my stomach because I thought that made it look like I was a grown-up woman with boobs, lending me more credibility in the character of female spaceship captain.

I have literally no clue how I continued to want to be Captain Janeway alongside being taught harmful patriarchal bullshit about having to be a totally submissive wife and mother with no career or dreams or goals of her own except serving her family. I don’t know how Janeway survived my upbringing, how she remained enshrined in my heart as a totally badass role model, but she did.

Maybe it’s like the way I believed in both evolution and creation at the same time. My Grandpa gave us books about dinosaurs and fossils and I devoured them (as I devoured all books), and somehow held separate in my mind two alternate timelines for the universe. The first timeline was illustrated by the pictures in my bible story books, god creating everything from nothing, the luscious garden scenes, the temptation and fall of mankind, the flood, and then it appeared that everybody lived in the desert for a long time, with camels and stuff. The second timeline was illustrated by the dinosaur books and a couple other books that managed to slip through the cracks. There were volcanoes and organisms crawling out of the water, sea monsters and dinosaurs and cave men. There were magical words like “Jurassic” and “Cretaceous” and “trilobite.” The evolutionary timeline seemed more like a fantasy than the biblical timeline, just because it wasn’t continuously reinforced during every waking moment. But the evolutionary timeline was so taboo I got an almost sexual thrill from thinking about it, reading about it, looking at those strange landscapes and animals, and I thought that it, too, along with the bible taken in a strictly literal sense, was true. There’s no way to reconcile how I was taught the bible with the evolutionary theory, but yet those beliefs coexisted in my mind. In the same way, there’s no way to reconcile the patriarchy I was brought up in with an admiration of Captain Janeway, but I held on to both anyway.

Maybe it’s because, deep down, I liked a world where dinosaurs roamed exotic forests and then millions of years later a woman could captain a starship better than a world that had been around for brief few thousand years of history in which women were always morally obligated to be subjected to men and never aspire further than the home. And maybe it’s because, deep down, I knew as soon as I encountered it what I actually believed, no matter how strenuously I tried to make myself believe what I was being taught.

The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

May 16, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

The Importance Of Telling Your Own Story: Faith Beauchemin’s Thoughts

The following piece was originally published by Faith Beauchemin on her blog Roses and Revolutionaries. It is reprinted with her permission.

"Story-telling is empowerment." — “Story-telling is empowerment.”

Story-telling is one of the most powerful forms of sharing truth known to humankind. A story can contain so many different kinds of truth. A story sticks in the mind longer than a syllogism or a propositional truth claim. And the thing about stories is, we all have one.

Sometimes it takes courage to tell your own story. But it is necessary. If you don’t tell your story, chances are someone else will. And whoever tells the story gains power over it. Do you want someone else’s words expressing your personal experiences, or do you want to choose the words of your story yourself?

A couple of months ago, I came across a blog called Homeschoolers Anonymous. It’s a forum for homeschoolers to tell their own stories. I began reading story after story, constantly finding mirrored there many of my own experiences. The stories told tales of spiritual, psychological and physical abuse. They spoke about the harm of authoritarian parenting, the fact that lack of socialization really is a huge problem for homeschooled children, the pain and regret and family rifts that result from many doctrines pushed by the radical right-wing arm of the homeschooling movement. Reading these stories I felt angry. I cried for all of us, for the suffering and for the fact that so many of us were moving on and finding healing and somehow building lives for ourselves. And most of all, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I am not alone. We are not alone. We speak of our personal experiences and find common ground in the very wounds and burned-over fields we had thought no one would be able to relate to.

It was so comforting to find others telling stories similar to my own because I find that I have trouble taking control of my story, even in my own head. You see, when you grow up in a hierarchical, authoritarian Christian fundamentalist environment, you have a single narrative which your interpretation of your experiences must fit into. That narrative is reinforced over and over again, especially since many fundamentalists are very quick to talk about other people’s lives or tell you about your own life using these terms. “Sin,” “rebellion,” “pride,” “selfishness,” “ungodliness,” “worldliness,” “backsliding”…these are the categories I had to fit everything into if it was not in line with my parent’s ideals for the perfect Christian life.

In an authoritarian home, you’re not allowed power over your own story. You are handed the words of an authority on all matters and you must accept them as true. Thinking for yourself is sinful. This is why it has taken me a long time to start framing my story in my own words. I can see the transition in my diaries, from stilted descriptions of spiritual things which sound like they are just someone else’s words parroted back to convince myself, or endless agonizing about why I was so sinful, to finally taking my own thoughts seriously and using words that came from my own head to describe my life.

A diary is one thing. The residual voice in my head narrating my life in Christian fundamentalist terms can be ignored, or argued with, or told to shut up. But sharing your story out loud is an entirely different matter. Because when you finally do gather the courage to share your story out loud, most people want to tell you that you’re wrong, and that their interpretation of your life is truer than your own.

These homeschool alumni who bravely shared their stories are being criticized. Homeschool advocates are trying to negate the stories collected at Homeschoolers Anonymous by claiming “My homeschool is never like that!” or “Your parents didn’t homeschool the right way.” or “Your current viewpoints are proof that your parents never taught you the things I’m teaching my kids.” Even well-documented claims that the Home School Legal Defense Association is fighting for a parent’s-rights agenda that will be extremely conducive to child abuse are written off by a simple assertion that it’s just not true.

It’s incredibly frustrating seeing this happen. I am willing to hear parents tell stories of how great homeschooling is for their kids (though I’d be much happier to hear young adults who grew up homeschooled tell stories of how great it was, since the players in the conversation are mostly not parents and we’ve already heard from our parents countless times how good they believe homeschooling is). But I am not willing to hear anyone try to negate these stories of how bad homeschooling has been for so many people. I’m especially not willing to hear stories of outright abuse be dismissed with basically a pat on the head and an assertion that the survivor’s experience is totally unique. If we want to dialogue constructively on a topic, we need to first allow one another the basic respect of listening to each other’s stories and believing them.

One more thought on story-telling. I don’t like hearing an authority figure telling a story about or on behalf of those they have authority over. I don’t care what the authorities think, I want to hear the people’s stories from their own mouths. Because story-telling is empowerment. You want to empower yourself, of course, but you need to empower others as well. If we all bravely commit to telling our own stories and listening to other people’s stories, we might together be able to find the next steps in human progress. Whatever our past, there’s something in each of our life stories that can make the world a better place if we speak it and collaboratively explore what it is we have to tell.