So I saw Maleficent over the weekend. And for me and many other sexual assault survivors, that gut-wrenching scene where Stefan cuts off Maleficent’s wings instantly read as rape. I just sat there staring in shock, like…. “No. He took HER WINGS. This is way worse than if he just stabbed her.”
Maleficent’s wings are her source of power. Stefan takes that power away from her, but in the end SHE GETS IT BACK. I was so, so happy about that. (I love that the idea of rape is so clearly tied to power, rather than sex, throughout the whole film, too. It’s not like “her wings are her virginity, and she lost that, so now she’s broken.” It’s like “Her wings are her power, and he stole them, but she can get them back.” YES, YES, YES.)
But in that scene where she’s slowly limping down the hill afterwards, stunned, leaning on her staff and trying to process what just happened, my heart bled. I know pretty much exactly what she felt like at that moment.
This story is for later, but the guy who assaulted me was much older and he was constantly pushing my boundaries and trying to get me to do things I felt uncomfortable with. (It says something that I thought marrying this dude would be better than living with my parents.) The actual assault was one of those pesky gray areas: it started out as a sort-of-consensual encounter, and then he told me to do something I was uncomfortable with and I said “No,” and then he grabbed me and made me do it anyway. We broke up soon after.
I was really angry at him for a long time, but the older I get and the farther away from it I get, I’ve started to feel like my anger was sort of misdirected. That dude only took up about four months of my life, tops. The homeschool culture spent 20+ years systematically stripping me of my privacy, dignity and autonomy as a human being.
I came to realize I was raised in a culture that stole my wings before I really knew I had them. My No didn’t matter. My Yes didn’t matter. Basically, nothing I said really mattered – so I quit trying to say anything. When Mr. Grîma Wormtongue first met me, he knew I would be a REALLY easy person to abuse, so he took advantage of that.
I don’t have a good way to end this, exactly, but I think it’s sobering that so much of the homeschool subculture is a massive power play. The people in control are determined to stay in control, even if that means systematically destroying the individual souls of individual kids. They’re basically like, “We don’t care about you as a person, about what you think or feel or say. We’re just going to do our thing and be in charge, and we don’t care if you get broken. In fact, it’s easier for us if we can break you.”
Honestly, if rape is about power, homeschooling sometimes looks very, very similar.
I was homeschooled, but I am getting my wings back. Feather by beautiful feather.
HA note: The title of this piece is the title chosen by the author. The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Cora” is a pseudonym.
Trigger warning: abusive parenting, rape.
My first memories are from when I was 3 or 4. We were living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I remember every detail about that house. We had a cocker spaniel named Lacey. She was the only person/animal that I was ever emotionally attached to for many, many years.
My memories from that time are very vague. I remember the place, and then flashes of ghosts uttering words and phrases. Feelings. Small snippets of events. I had a clown for my birthday party. I was locked in my room screaming for hours. I rode my tricycle outside. My mother yelled at my father for not hitting me enough. I became a master at hiding. Under the bed. In the top shelf of a closet. Behind a bush. I would stay in my spot for what seemed like hours. My feelings were a constant mix of fear, anger, frustration, and a strong desire to leave. From the very beginning, I wanted to be nowhere near her.
It was my fault, I was told. I was a “difficult child”. Or maybe just a child. Still, it must have been my fault just for being there, right? The grown up has “authority” so it couldn’t possibly be them, right?
We moved to New Zealand. My next memory is being chased around the living room of our house with a switch because I wasn’t cleaning up fast enough. I was 4 or 5. I screamed and picked things up and it seemed like it never stopped. I would sit in my room for hours alone, and lose myself in my own made up world. This world was misery every day. I would make up a different world.
Something fabulous happened in New Zealand though. I was allowed to go to school. I remember how happy I was to leave home every morning. I had friends who would cry and miss their parents when they were gone. I could never understand why. The good memories of my childhood were all away from home.
I don’t remember much of my father from that time. He was a ghost in the background. Not saying much. I remember calling him “Daddy-doo” and trying to spend time with him when she wasn’t around.
I was a “rebellious” child.
I was spanked constantly. My memories of early childhood are essentially a long sequence of being hit, with intermittent memories of other people. All of whom knew something was wrong. All of whom would talk about my crazy mother behind her back. None of whom did anything. I learned early that my father wouldn’t stand up for me.
I remember having to re-write school assignments for hours until they were approved. I remember all of my “infractions” being counted throughout the day to determine the number of hits I would get every night. I remember some of the sessions feeling as though it must have lasted at least an hour. I remember hearing everyday how bad I was. I believed her. And so I never tried to be “good”. I knew it would be useless anyway. The rules always changed. She was always mad. She was always yelling. Always. I never imagined that I had any power to change anything based on my behavior. So I didn’t try. I just found my hiding spots and made up my own stories.
We returned to the US for a while, before going back. I asked about Lacey. I had been thinking about her and missing her the entire time we were gone. The only time I experienced the sensation of missing someone until much later in life. My dad told me that they family who had been watching her decided they didn’t want to give her back, so he said they could keep her. I felt again, that he wouldn’t stand up for me.
In our second house in New Zealand I would climb down the hill behind the house and be gone for hours. No one ever noticed. Not until I took my brother with me one day. I was a nuisance, so the only way to avoid punishment was to disappear.
When we came back to the US things got worse. In the US you had to be vaccinated to go to school. You also had to be surrounded by ungodliness. So I was homeschooled. I was at home. All day. With her. They also suddenly became even more religiously conservative. I was no longer allowed to go anywhere with friends. For a while our neighbors could come over to play, until one of the boys kissed me. After that it was just me and my siblings. At home. With her.
We all got assigned the household work. I had the kitchen, the dusting, the mopping, my room and bathroom, my laundry, and occasionally her room and laundry. My brother had the vacuuming, feeding the pets, and his room and laundry. My little sister had her room and laundry. But we were all so lazy. She would nap, drive us to homeschool events, go to the store, and “organize”. We were the lazy ones. We were bad. We were lazy. We were rebellious. It was all our fault.
I started getting grounded from the few things I was allowed to do. Watch G rated movies, talk on the phone, go to church events. Didn’t lift your blinds this morning? Grounded for a month. Didn’t wash the dishes in time? Another month. And another. I just assumed it was a permanent situation, so again, I never tried. I did try speaking up though. My dad would always tell me, “your mother does so much for you, why don’t you appreciate her?” I remember writing my dad a letter describing the situation. I could tell it shook him. He said he would talk to her. She yelled at him. That was the end of it. I continued to learn that he wouldn’t stand up for me.
I told a relative when I was around ten years old that I wished she would leave and never come back.
No mother at all is better than a whirling mass of violence and anger impenetrable to reason.
In a strange turn of events she started comparing my siblings to me as they got older. Your sister got these grades and your sister wasn’t as bad as you, etc. I can only imagine how the must have felt being told that they were worse that their bad, rebellious, lazy sister.
The fear of the outside world grew. Daring to have a friend that didn’t attend our 100 person church was out of the question. Dating was out of the question. Even our relatives of the same religion weren’t conservative enough and were therefore suspect. We were warned about them. We were warned about everyone. Everything and anything happening outside of the bubble was to be feared. So we stayed at home.
By some miracle I made a friend at the age of 16 or 17. She went to church with me. Then another girl moved into town and starting going to our church. I was finally allowed to go somewhere with someone outside of the home. I started secretly dating the second girl’s cousin. Having been told all of my life that my worth was in eventually being someone’s wife, serving him, and having children and that my virginity essential to attracting a husband, I naturally informed my suitor that I wanted to wait until marriage. He agreed. Then he started pushing. And pushing. Until he held me down in the bathroom one day, and forced himself on me. I don’t remember how, but I pushed him off of me and ran to the other room. Bleeding. I told my friend. She told me it was because I was teasing him. I believed her. We both lived in a world that demanded that women be responsible for a man’s desire. The mere fact of existing and causing a man to want you means you should expect to be violated. She has grown up now, and we are both different. She is still my friend. I can’t blame her, because I hadn’t learned yet either. I would have said the same.
I never told anyone else for a long, long time. I knew my parents would also tell me that it was my fault. Dating. Being alone with a boy. Kissing a boy. Growing boobs. And I would be locked up, at home, for good. To me, the threat of being forced to be home was worse than rape. And the threat of losing what little freedom I had gained was worse to me than letting a rapist go free.
What they didn’t know and what I didn’t realize then was that rape isn’t caused by dating, or being alone with a boy, or wearing tight jeans, or any of those things.
Rape flourishes when a girl is told marriage is how she obtains worth, and virginity is how she gets married. When her virginity is stolen, she will never tell. Rape flourishes when women are told that they are at fault, and face dire consequences if they reveal their rapist. Rape flourishes when women aren’t taught about their bodies, told that they aren’t able to make their own choices, and how to identify predatory behavior or even that it is wrong. Rape flourishes when it’s always a woman’s fault when a man has desire. Rape flourishes when you teach your boys that they own and control women.
I moved out of state when I turned 18. I hit a breaking point when I realized that it wasn’t just my parents and the people at my church who were this way. I went to a small Christian college, and realized that these attitudes were the norm. This time I bucked against it all that I could.
To this day I cannot enter a church building without intense feelings of anger and mistrust. I will never allow myself to be held down again. I started talking about it little by little. With each memory another surfaced. Sometimes they hit me in waves. It’s too much, and I get physically ill. Some memories I still can’t bear to relive. So I push them back every time they come up. Someday, maybe. But not yet. I have found a man who loves me, and cares deeply for my well-being. They told me I was “brainwashed”. She told me I was “addicted to him”. I suppose, if you define unconditional love and acceptance as addiction. If you define peace, comfort, and trust as being brainwashed.
They have never accepted any personal responsibility. I have tried to bring up many of these instances. I’m told it was my fault. I was a difficult child. That an adult, who intrinsically has the power and knowledge, would physically and emotionally abuse a four year old and then blame the four year old is sick.
They have told me my departure is “heartbreaking”. I wouldn’t know.
Trigger warning: If you experience triggers from descriptions of physical and sexual violence, please know that the details in many of the cases are disturbing and graphic.
Joshua Komisarjevsky (right) was homeschooled under Bill Gothard’s ATI curriculum.
Joshua was adopted at two-weeks-old by fundamentalist Christians. His father Benedict has been described as “critical, cold, and controlling”; the mother Jude, “quite submissive.”
Jude homeschooled Joshua using material from the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), the homeschooling curriculum developed by Inge Cannon (the former Director of HSLDA’s National Center for Home Education) for Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles. Jude said that she and her husband Benedict “had tried to instill Christian values in the boy by pulling him out of public school and educating him at home,” but he had nonetheless “wallowed in depression” due to the death of his grandfather a year earlier and had “come under ‘satanic’ influences through other youths” in his hometown of Cheshire, Connecticut. Jude said her son “was easily manipulated and controlled by others,” and she recalled going into his room at one point and “he had written over and over again on the walls: ‘death’ and ‘die’ and ‘suicide.’”
Right before turning 15, Joshua set fire to a gas station. Since police recognized he had serious mental health issues, he was briefly hospitalized in a mental health hospital and given medication. However, his father did not want him on any medication, and instead sent him to a “faith-based” treatment program.
On July 23, 2007, Joshua and his friend Steven Hayes broke into the home of the Petit family — William, Jennifer, and their daughters, 17-year-old Haley and 11-year-old Michaela. Joshua and Steven held the family hostage for hours. They forced Jennifer to drive to the family’s nearby bank and withdraw $15,000 — on the threat of killing the entire family otherwise. They raped and strangled Jennifer and then sexually assaulted Michaela. William was severely beaten and tied to a post in the basement. Joshua and Steven then doused the house with gasoline and set fire to the house. Haley and Michaela died from smoke inhalation. William managed to escape.
Joshua had specifically targeted the Petit family. A day prior to the killings, he noticed Jennifer and Michaela at a grocery store. He followed them from the store home and made plans to come back the next day with Hayes.
Joshua was found guilty of murder. Evidence of “his strict Christian upbringing, his disturbed behavior as a youth and his parents’ decision not to get traditional psychological treatment for him because of their Christian beliefs” was a significant matter of discussion during his trial. In January 2012, Joshua was sentenced to death. His accomplice, Steven Hayes, was also sentenced to death.
Trigger warning: If you experience triggers from descriptions of physical and sexual violence, please know that the details in many of the cases are disturbing and graphic.
*****
Israel Keyes
Israel Keyes has been referred to as “the most notorious serial killer in a generation” and “the most meticulous serial killer of modern times.” He also was homeschooled.
Israel Keyes has been referred to as “the most notorious serial killer in a generation.”
Israel was born in 1978 in Richmond, Utah. His parents were fundamentalist Mormons and homeschooled him and his siblings. When his family moved to Stevens County, Washington, they attended a Christian Identity church called “The Ark,” known for its racism and anti-Semitism. While attending the Ark and living in Washington, the Keyes family became neighbors and friends with the aforementionedKehoe family. Israel, Chevie, and Cheyne were childhood friends who remained friends through their teenage years.
Israel’s criminal activities allegedly began around 1996 when, at age18, he raped a young girl in Oregon. He intended to kill her, but eventually decided against it. He then began a series of burglaries and robberies. In 2007, Israel created Keyes Construction in Alaska and became a construction contractor. Through his business, he traveled around the U.S. and planned and committed an alarming number of murders. His killing tactics were indeed meticulous: “he would choose a random victim in a remote location, murder the person, and leave,” and “he only killed strangers.” He financed these trips by robbing banks. He had “murder kits” — with items like shovels, plastic bags, money, weapons, ammunition and bottles of Drano — “to help dispose of the bodies.” After his murders, he would bury his kits. His kits have been discovered in Alaska and New York, but he claims he also buried some in Washington, Wyoming, Texas, and Arizona.
In February 2012, Israel kidnapped an 18-year-old barista named Samantha Koenig in Anchorage. The abduction was caught on video by the coffee shop’s surveillance system and a massive search began for her. Unfortunately, Samantha was killed not long after the abduction. Israel raped her and strangled her to death, then left her body in a shed and went on a 2-week-long cruise. When he returned after the cruise, he then dismembered her body and dumped it in a lake. Israel was finally caught because on March 16, 2012, he used Samantha’s debit card while in Lufkin, Texas.
While being interrogated, Israel confessed to eight murders. He also said he studied the tactics of other serial killers but “was careful to point out” that “he used his own ideas, those of other famous killers.” He added that, after murdering, he “liked to return to Alaska and then follow the news of his murders on the Internet.”
On December 2, 2012, Israel committed suicide in his Anchorage jail cell by cutting his wrists and strangling himself with a bed sheet. He did not leave a straightforward suicide note, but rather a four-page “Ode to Murder.”
Federal authorities released new information on Keyes, revealing that they suspect him to have a final death toll of eleven victims, all killed from 2001 to 2012, and that there are presumably other victims in Canada (where he sought out prostitutes) and other countries.
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.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Myra” is a pseudonym.
Trigger warnings:the following story contains descriptions of physical and sexual abuse of a child.
*****
Perhaps this is just for me, for me to finally put into words the terrible pain in my heart, which seems to slowly eat away at life like acid on skin. Sexual education.
I received none as a child, absolutely none.
The following story might be confusing in places because I have recently been told I suffer from PTSD and DID, or dissociative identity disorder. Large portions of my childhood are missing, confused, or simply changed. Only recently has the truth been resurfacing in my mind.
I was homeschooled my entire life growing up, and my family was the homeschooling family to be in our area.
My mother kept a computer in the house that was password protected and we were never allowed to use it unless we were typing. I found her password book one day tucked under her mattress when I was cleaning the house. When I was a teenager I snuck out of my room in the middle of the night and I searched sex, rape, and pornography on the World Wide Web. They were all terms I had heard before, mostly associated with evil and the world going to the devil at church.
Needless to say I got a first-hand pseudo sex education from the porn industry. And I was hooked. I spent every night on that computer watching pornography in a trance. I realized, eventually, that I had been masturbating since before I could remember as a self-soothing mechanism when I was spanked. I also realized that my father touched me after beating me (it was called spanking but I was always left with bruises from the middle of my back to my knees) to make me stop crying.
I had my first orgasm as a small child with my father.
Frankly, the experience was beyond confusing. The actual experience with him was pleasurable not painful at all, but it forever associated being beaten with sex for me. And obviously, I was being molested even thought I did not know it. I honestly thought it was how people were supposed to comfort their children. The intense shame and regret I felt as a teenager immediately caused me to dissociate the memory and place it in my mind in a place that was carefully guarded.
I do not know how long this abuse continued or when it started. There are other elements of the abuse that I have recently remembered but are too fresh, raw, and frankly too explicit to detail.
My mother spanked me between the legs whenever she caught me masturbating. When I was almost a teenager I was raped by a family friend.
Today I am left with a confusing mixture of sexual issues. I have a hard time not associating sex with punishment. I have a hard time not seeing sex as something used to make someone feel better, basically, used as a commodity, I have a hard time associating intimacy with sexual action.
Having any sort of sexual education might have helped me see that I was being taken advantage of by the people who were supposed to care for me. Perhaps it would not have, I honestly do not know. I do know that it could have saved me from a life long struggle with pornography addiction.
I hear others talking about how wonderful, intimate and generally fireworkery, sex is.
I wish that had not been taken from me.
I wish I had not been so isolated. I wish I had been told more about sex.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Morgan Dawn” is a pseudonym.
Trigger warnings: rape, extreme physical abuse.
At the age of 3, I was adopted by a Navy couple.
Life was great for about 6 weeks, when they adopted a baby boy. That was when the horror began.
I was pushed aside, because I was “just a girl.” By the time I was 10, the couple had 3 biological kids, on top of myself and the other adopted boy. My adopted mother had lots of health issues, so she was either pregnant or sick.
My adopted father decided that since his wife wasn’t able to perform her “wifely duties,” that job would fall to me. The rapes were a weekly occurrence from then on. When I went to a DOD school official, my family decided that the “safest” thing for me was to be homeschooled. After all, I was a pathological liar.
Right there, my life changed.
They started reading everything they could about “To Train Up a Child” and proper disciplines for “obstinate children.” Drop a glass on the floor? I had to stand on that glass until my feet were bleeding badly. Slam a door? My hands were slammed in doors until I couldn’t help but pass out from pain.
I would sneak out of the house to see my boyfriend at night. One thing led to another, and by 13 I was pregnant. The father was killed in a drive-by shooting when I was 6 months along. I managed to hide the pregnancy (my adoptive father was on deployment to the Middle East, so no one was close enough to tell) until he got home. He wanted sex, and I said no.
O, the pain that “no” would cost me.
He took a baseball bat to my body for hours. By the time the paramedics were called, I was hanging by a thread, and in preterm labor. They said I’d never walk or talk again. My daughter was given (without my permission) to a family “friend” who let her drown in a pool on her 6th birthday.
Homeschooling hid everything.
No one really saw me anyways, so not seeing me at all because I was in body casts didn’t alert anyone. When my face had to be reconstructed for the 2nd time, everyone was told that my biological family had passed on defects that needed fixed. Schooling was “Here’s a book, read it and be prepared to debate on it”, but if the debate wasn’t “right” I’d get beat. It was hell.
By 18, I was ready to leave. By then, there were 10 kids total, and I was expected to sacrifice college to take care of them all. I couldn’t. So, one night, I left and never looked back. I’m now forbidden to talk to anyone in the family.
They were all told that all I was was a whore who left because I was pregnant.
I moved out of state with the help of a few friends that had known me before I was pulled from school. Apparently I was the only reason for homeschooling, as the other kids are all back in school. I was the evil sinner who needed punished. And now, I love that title.
At least this “evil sinner” is now living life the way she wants. I’m currently in school for Social Work, living with my biological mother, engaged to a wonderful man, and happy. The happy is so strange, but I like it.
Revelations that Doug Phillips of Vision Forum had a long-term affair, likely with a much younger woman who worked for his family without pay, have revived crucial interest in Christian patriarchy’s attitude toward relationships and consent. Phillips isn’t a mainstream figure; he’s a proponent of the Quiverfull movement who doesn’t think women should vote. He’s also a figurehead of the so-called Stay at Home Daughter Movement, which encourages young women to forsake higher education and careers in order to remain at home, under their fathers’ “protection.”
Obviously, that protection didn’t extend to Phillips’ young victim–and I use “victim” quite deliberately here. I agree with Julie Anne Smith of Spiritual Sounding Board that the Christian patriarchy movement grooms young women for abuse, consciously or not, by brainwashing them into compliance and encouraging them to forgo developing skills necessary for independent lives. There is a very clear power imbalance present, even in relationships between adults of the same age, because of an overwhelming emphasis on male dominion. I believe that Phillips knew exactly what he was doing. I think he sought this woman out at a young age specifically because of her vulnerability.
I think this a.) because that’s how predators work and b.) because the movement idolizes regressive gender roles.
Take the infamous Elsie Dinsmore series. Though they stopped selling the series this year, Vision Forum pushed the books as a wholesome alternative to worldly fiction for girls and formerly ran an essay contest based on the series. Unfortunately, Vision Forum has removed that page from its site and I can only find a cached pdf copy that doesn’t link to the full essays. You’ll have to trust my memory instead. I read the essays while still in college and had to restrain myself from picking up my lumbering school-issued PC and throwing it across the room as I read essay after essay by girls crediting the Dinsmore books for encouraging them to forgo a college education.
The series, which is available on Project Gutenburg if you feel like torturing yourself, stars Elsie Dinsmore and lauds her submission to her physically abusive father and her eventual marriage to one of her father’s friends, Mr. Travilla. Dinsmore is eight in the first book, which also features this stupendous quote from Travilla: “He (Elsie’s father) is not to take you away. I have made a bargain with him to let me keep you . . . call me papa in the future.” And so she did.
This is Vision Forum’s approach to romance. This is what they promote to their stay at home daughters. That’s why I, like Julie Anne, don’t really believe Phillips’ victim consented to the relationship. The environment in which it occurred is intrinsically coercive.
I was not a stay at home daughter. My parents had the sense to encourage me to attend college and pursue a career of my choice. But even their version of soft patriarchy granted my father a position of unreasonable power in our household and condemned me to a lifetime of submission to men.
As a college student, I became the victim of an attempted rape, the culmination of an abusive, controlling relationship.
It’s something I’ve written about before on my blog, and while I don’t enjoy writing about it, I will when I think my experience is relevant. Unfortunately, it’s relevant again. You see, Christian patriarchy–even soft patriarchy– doesn’t talk about consent. It doesn’t talk about relationship abuse. It encourages men to control women, and it expects women to submit to that control. And even though I was a non-theist and a feminist by the time I survived the attack, I blamed myself for what happened. I provoked it. I’d worn pajamas around a man, and just the year before, our student chaplain had warned women that wearing pajamas around men made them think about sex. And instead of going to the police when it happened, I continued to submit.
It’s incredible, really, how even the most absurd beliefs can embed themselves inside your psyche and stay there.
I am not that girl any longer. I’m older, wiser, and a bit tougher. I suppose that’s the up side of surviving something like that. You don’t make it unless you become stronger than you were, and I do not believe I’d submit to that abuse now. I think that’s partially because I know my real enemy: Christian patriarchy, the system that had shaped me and my attacker, too.
If the Christian church is concerned about abuse, it will have to divorce itself from patriarchy in all its incarnations.
It’s too late for me, and for Phillips’ victim, and for many, many others, but it’s not too late to protect the women and girls whose faith compels them to participate in Christian community.
This week, the Duggars announced that their daughter, Jessa, had begun a “courtship” with Ben Seewald. News articles have been floating around in my facebook feed about this, and as I read a few of them . . . my heart sank. Many people are mocking the family, Jessa, Ben, her parents, for how they’ve chosen to handle this.
I can’t get behind the mocking.
All I can feel right now is compassion for Jessa and Ben.
It’s an emotion they might dismiss as completely unwarranted– from all appearances, they’re blissfully happy, and this courtship is what they’ve always envisioned for themselves. I don’t know about Ben, but everything I’ve seen from Jessa is familiar territory– she’s carefully “guarded her heart” so one day she could date with “intent and purpose.” The way she’s been taught to respond to romantic relationships probably feels very mature and sensible. It’s designed to be safe. Everything about it is carefully vetted, monitored, and controlled. There won’t be any unexpected surprises for them. This process will help ensure a happy, Spirit-filled marriage.
But, if I could sit down with Jessa over a cup of tea and talk with her, there’s a few stories I would share.
*****
The eldest daughter of my “pastor,” Leah*, was in her early twenties when an evangelist that came to our church every year suggested a young man, Steve*, to her father. Over the next month or so, her father carefully vetted this young man. The first time Steve came to visit, he didn’t even meet Leah. Her father took him out to dinner, then they sat in his truck for hours while he grilled him from pages of notes and questions. Barely any stone was left unturned– but I remember my father commenting offhand that it’s not likely that Steve was really honest about most of those questions.
The next time Steve came, he and Leah were never given a moment’s privacy. They were never allowed to be more than a few feet away from another member of the family. When he left, they were not allowed to talk on the phone, and could only communicate through letters that were read, out loud, in front of the entire family.
They did, eventually, get married. The next thing I heard about her was that she and Steve had not yet consummated their marriage, not even after being married for months. They were complete strangers when they got married. They didn’t know anything about the other– the only person they had gotten to know had been the person her parents expected to see. Without any private moments, without the ability to talk without being constantly monitored, they didn’t really know anything real.
They’d “courted” a performance, not a person.
*****
When I was in college, one of my best friends got married.
Their courtship story was perfect– charming, adorable, romantic in a Victorian sense. Her parents called him her “suitor” and his visits were “calls.” They had no physical contact– her father put the engagement ring on her finger when he proposed on the beach, in the moonlight– in front of their families. When they went through the wedding rehearsal, they held a handkerchief instead of holding hands. Their first kiss was at the altar, and Charity* looked like she was about to burst with happiness for the rest of the day.
It’s been a few years now, since they got married, and they’ve experienced some significant marital “bumps” in that time. There were a few moments when no one was sure if their marriage would make it. My mother was trying to give hers some comfort and advice during one of those hard times, and I remember hearing her start crying:
“I don’t understand, I just don’t understand. We did everything right. None of this was supposed to happen.”
*****
My own courtship experience was . . . ugly.
We “talked,” getting to know each other strictly in group settings, just like we were supposed to. I asked my parents to come meet him, and we all went out to dinner. I made sure that my father had plenty of time to talk with him, to get to know him. John* asked their permission to “court” me, and we did under the supervision of both our parents. By the end of the summer, he laid out his plan for them, what he planned to do and how he planned to accomplish it, and asked their permission to marry me. When he proposed at a fancy restaurant, my parents were sitting at a table directly across the aisle. For the first six months, everything seemed perfect. It was all going exactly how I’d been taught it should.
But, after I had that ring on my finger and I was in the middle of planning a wedding, and after all our families were on board and we’d announced it to everyone we knew… that was when the abuse began in earnest. It was abuse he kept carefully concealed from anyone– abuse I was promised I was protected from, because, after all, we were courting. We’d done everything exactly how we were supposed to.
And I was trapped.
Because I’d been told to guard my heart, that once I give my heart away, I won’t have my whole heart to give to my husband.
Because I’d been taught that it was my duty, my responsibility, to make sure our relationship was perfectly chaste. He knew that– he sexually assaulted me, he raped me, and he used what I’d been taught against me. I was a cup full of spit. I was a half-eaten candybar. I was that rose with all the petals torn off.
No one would want me, I wasn’t good enough for any other man.
*****
That’s what I’d tell you, Jessa, if I could talk to you.
I’d tell you that courtship doesn’t guarantee that you’ll actually get to know that person. I’d tell you that yes, you have to know how a person interacts with people who aren’t you, but you also have to know how he’ll interact with you when no one is watching.
I’d tell you that courtship doesn’t guarantee a happy marriage. There’s no magical promise that is impossible for either one of you to break. Following all the courtship procedures and rules means nothing when you realize that life has changed around you, and you might not believe everything you always did– and he hasn’t changed with you. Courtship doesn’t automatically grant you the ability to communicate without fighting or to have patience with each other. Most of the things you need for a healthy marriage you don’t get through having your parents monitor all your texts and never touching each other longer than a 30-second side hug.
I’d tell you that courtship doesn’t guarantee you won’t get hurt.
People are very capable of hiding. People can be very good at cloaking everything about themselves– especially when they are given an insanely precise checklist to follow. The roadmap, the rules, the procedure– they’re not going to shield you from a man using those rules to get close to you so that he can hurt you.
You might be getting to know this person on an honest, deep level– I don’t know. It’s possible that he’s a genuinely wonderful man and both of you are being completely, bluntly honest. It’s probable that you were raised with the understanding that you never hide anything from your parents– and up to this point, why should you? But, it’s also just as possible that you’re both innocently unaware that you’re not really getting to know each other.
Courtship, you’ve been told, promises a safe adolescent experience, free from the trauma and heartache of a thousand “crushes.” Courtship holds the sweet sanctuary of your parents’ blessing and God’s promises. Courtship is about commitment, and honor, and responsibility, and those are the things that will keep your marriage strong.
And maybe– maybe it will.
But, in the end, if you make it, it won’t be because you courted. It won’t be because of all the questions your father asked him or all the times you wanted to be alone but suppressed the desire. It won’t be because you kissed for the first time after the pastor said “you may.”
It’ll be because of who you are, Jessa, and who he is.
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:
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.
Note from R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator: The following post does not mention “homeschooling” in any way. It is more about the Christian culture in which many of our homeschooling experiences occurred. But since many of our particular homeschooling experiences occurred within this culture, this post is very relevant. After reading Kathryn’s thoughts, I, too, tried to remember when any of the modesty or purity teachings I received about relationships — in both my church and homeschooling environments — included any discussion about consent. Like Kathryn, I was at a loss. In retrospect, I find this omission rather disturbing.
A friend made a comment on one of my Facebook posts today that got me thinking.
The comment was about how a lot of people in the Church don’t have any kind of sexual ethic, just a bunch rules that they follow. I think that’s a good description of how it is that people buy into slippery slope arguments—the old, “if we allow people to gay marry, then what’s to stop them from toaster marrying?” logic.
If you’ve got a sexual ethic based on consent, then the answer is obvious: because toasters are incapable of consent.
If you are just operating by rules, then it makes sense that you’d think that if one of your rules gets tossed then what’s to stop all your rules from going out the window.
The comment on my Facebook post made me realize that in all of the years of growing up in the Church, of getting lectures about abstinence in Sunday school and youth group and True Love Waits, I cannot remember a single mention of consent. I remember Dawson McAllister coming to town to a True Love Waits event and telling us that anal sex was still sex and not a way to remain a virgin (which is not a bad piece of information, incidentally, though really rather stupid if the only reason you’re telling them is to make sure they remain more than just technical virgins), but for all of the talk about what you couldn’t do, the only talk about saying “no” was about not sinning.
I’ve racked my brain trying to remember even a single time that I’ve ever heard consent mentioned in a church-related setting growing up and I can’t remember a single one.
By not teaching about consent, you produce girls who don’t know that they can refuse consent for any other reason than “it’s a sin,” and you produce boys who have never been taught that no means no. That’s a recipe for disaster. Is conservative abstinence education turning boys into accidental rapists and girls into easy victims because neither one has been educated about consent being an inviolable element in a sexual encounter?
I put this question out there on Facebook and Twitter and I’ll ask it here as well. For those of you who grew up in the church and were lectured about abstinence in youth group/Sunday school/True Love Waits/etc.:
Do any of you remember being taught about consent?
Homeschoolers Anonymous 