Snipped! – Part 2: My Little Years

January 26, 2012
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by Incongruous Circumspection

I was born in Minneapolis as a boy.  Mama took one look at me and exclaimed, “I thought he was going to be Rebecca!”  Needless to say, I was scarred for life.  In those days, getting an ultrasound to determine the sex of a baby wasn’t a bygone decision and people essentially relied on the doctors and midwives to make educated guesses based on measurements, heart rates, and old wives tales.

Yes, I was born in a hospital.  My mother birthed all seven of us children before she entered the world of Bill Gothard (Billy Boy G.), i.e. no home births.   Thus, there were no complications when she had to have an emergency C-section with my younger sister (though she constantly attributed that sister’s rebellion to not being squeezed through the birth canal).

I was the middle child of seven.  I had an older sister, two older twin brothers, two younger sisters, and my baby bro.  We were all within 7.5 years in age, allowing us to be very close as we tried to navigate the hell that was to be our childhood and young adult years.

My father tells the story that he knew something was wrong with Mama when my older sister (I’ll call her Marie) was beaten at the ripe old age of six months – for crying.  This practice helped Mama fit in to her new-found faith once she found Billy Boy G in 1987, 10 years later.  Marie was beaten until she escaped at 25 years old, a fact you might remember from my previous installments.

The only memory I have of being beaten during my “little years” was when we were being babysat by an aunt.  The aunt was a good woman and allowed kids to be kids.  I climbed up on the dresser in the boys’ bedroom and knocked a bunch of clothes off of it.  As a young whippersnapper, I never cleaned up my messes – unless I was beaten.  Children tend to learn things like that quickly.  Mama came home and found the mess and lit into me.  I have no recollection of the beating –just the narrative.  And she never let me forget. Years later, she still used that incident as proof that I was a disobedient, evil, louse.

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The Destiny of a Virtuous Daughter ~ Part 5: Not My Will

January 24, 2012
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by Starfury

Anthony and I maintained a long-distance courtship until shortly before I turned 18, whereupon he moved to where I was safely ensconced at a conservative Catholic university. Our arguments grew in number when we spent more time together, but I pretended nothing was wrong. After all, I should feel guilty. He was trying to encourage me to grow spiritually when I wasn’t willing to take chances and trust in God. Still, I loved him, and even though I hated how he told me what to do at times, I knew it was in my best interest.

That spring, he drove me home from school, where my parents were waiting. Unexpectedly, they called us in to discuss the state of our relationship. Having only received encouragement from them throughout the year, we were a little startled at this, but went willingly. They confronted us with concerns brought to them by a family we attended church with; we were not emotionally or spiritually mature enough, and our relationship was moving too quickly, especially physically.

My first reaction was anger and hurt that they would suggest I had broken my vows of purity (which I had not). The next concern was what was meant by too fast? We were courting, and as far as I was led to understand, that meant we were involved in a serious relationship with marriage as the goal. I was certain I wanted to marry him. Physically, we kissed on the cheek and hugged and held hands. Spiritually, I pointed out to my parents that he was challenging and encouraging me in my walk.

Undaunted by our arguments and defenses, my parents decreed that they did not feel we were ready for this relationship. To illustrate this point, and help us grow as respective individuals, they were instituting a one year moratorium on our relationship. We were not breaking up, but merely putting a pause on the way things were. During this time, we were to have absolutely no contact with each other, whatsoever. Flabbergasted, we had no choice but to accept.

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Bring Me The Flaming Head Of Barbie! – Adventures In Recovery

January 8, 2012
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by Calulu

A few weeks ago I was witnessing internet wide that one thing is certain. Just about everyone has a strong reaction to the news that Michelle Duggar is enceinte again. Of course I snicked like the sarcastic wise-cracking gal I am and some of us tossed around those hoary old chestnuts we always say when discussing Duggar child bearing. “It’s a vagina not a clown car” and “Looks like Jim Bob tossed the hotdog down the well again”

In most of the online discussion of how dangerous her playing maternal Russian roulette actually is no one seemed to hit upon my first thought, how quickly would Jim Bob replace her with a newer, younger, prettier model.

I mean, really, it’s like shooting dice, eventually snake eyes is going to come up. Bad things happen if you keep repeating the same risky behavior. Look at the last of her pregnancies. Something did go wrong. It’s just simple statistics that sometimes things go haywire and we can’t do much about them. But why put yourself in those types of risky situations in the first place?

Back when I was with my old church I got to see this numerous times. Lady either gets pregnant that probably shouldn’t be or would contract a very serious illness. They’d start praying, asking for prayer but refusing medical monitoring or intervention by the medical world at all. They say the same things Michelle Duggar does about this is God’s will and God would either deliver her safely or He would heal her.

One of the saddest cases of this was a lady named Christina who contracted breast cancer and refused all medical treatments, saying only God alone would heal her. She wasn’t going to have any surgery, no chemo, no radiation, she would simply rely on God.

Everyone at church supported her decision. Except for me. I’d had a bout with breast cancer many years ago, had the joyous fun (it wasn’t fun, I’m just joking) of surgery, chemo, radiation till I beat the cancer. Oh heck, I had chemo four summers ago for my auto immune problems. Big deal, so your hair falls out, you get the excuse to wear lots of fun hats. It is what it is, a temporary season. If it turned out that solving my ongoing immune problems meant eating a bowl of cockroaches or something even more disgusting I’d say ‘Gimme a spoon and a bottle of Tabasco sauce right now!’

Not getting health care while you have children in the home to finish raising is just irresponsible.

But the men of the church always had medical intervention, and it never seemed to strike anyone there that was some sort of warped double standard. I never understood why that was so I’m guessing the lack of serious health care was because in the world of Fundy-Gelicals women were without intrinsic value and considered interchangeable.

Christina died after an agonizing torturous 18 months. What did did Mr. Christina do? He did what I’ve witnessed a number of Patriarchal men have done. He collected that big insurance check, bought a sports car and within six months married a much younger, better looking, newer model. And the cycle continued. Even our Pastor did it, boom, wife dies of cancer, 9 months later Pastor has another wife and life goes on as before.

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Daughter of the Patriarchy: Admissions

December 15, 2011
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by Sierra

“When I was your age, my parents wouldn’t send me to college,” my mother was telling me. “I had to work my way through on my own. I don’t want you to have to stop. I will do everything I can to help you keep going to school. Your education is the most important thing to me.”

We stood in the kitchen, a printed letter lying on the counter between us. It was not good news.

I glanced up at my mother with a strained smile. I knew that if wishes could be cashed at the bank, I’d be writing my admissions essay to an ivy-coated castle. Instead, I was trying to find a way to pay the bill from my last semester of community college in time to register for fall classes. It was already August.

My work at Wal-Mart paid eight-fifty an hour: better than all the other work options for teenagers in the area. My schedule was already as close to full-time as it could be without requiring the company to offer me benefits. My hands were tied: I could take another part-time job, but when would I go to school? It was all I could do to keep our car paid for and insured while my mother handled the rent and utilities. College tuition had slipped between more pressing matters like food and transportation, and dragging it back to current status again would not be easy.

Still, I was grateful to have a mother who dared to disagree with the life track laid out before me. A Catholic turned evangelical, my mother was a radical believer in forging new paths. She had, after all, followed her heart out of her family’s religion when I was still a toddler. Going to college was my chance to discover what God had in store for me as an individual, she thought. I knew already that beliefs like these made my mother an outsider, a liberal and a radical in my church of stay-at-home daughters and unremitting parental supervision. What I did not yet know was how short and how tight the bonds were that held my friends.

“Why don’t you fill out your FAFSA?” my mother suggested. “Maybe you can get grants or student loans. They might offer you more if you apply to a four-year school. Let’s drive around and look for a college where you can transfer your credits.

I loved Rowling College on sight. The sprawling green lawn, ancient shady oaks and dark grey stone of its oldest building washed over me in a wave of color and charm. “It looks like a little Harvard,” I told my mother breathlessly. A more culturally adept young woman might have said it looked like Hogwarts.

The admissions counselor radiated warmth and hope. She beamed at my community college transcripts. No, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have SATs, she said. My grades proved that I could handle introductory classes. I felt a bubble of excitement rising in my throat, and firmly swallowed it. I would assume that this all was beyond my grasp, I decided. If it proved true, I would be pleasantly surprised. If it didn’t, I would not allow myself to feel the disappointment. I can go back to college later, I reasoned. There is a manager position opening at my store.

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Snipped! – Part 1: Mama

December 6, 2011
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by Incongruous Circumspection

I will begin this series with a look into the childhood of my Mama.  In fact, let’s go even further back to how her parents met.  This look into my mother’s growing up years will give the reader some sense of why she did what she did.

Grandpa fought in the Atlantic Theater in World War II.  Grandma was the secretary to the Secretary of State. She had a small side-job for the government – meeting the young men who came back from war, as a dancer.  Yes, the government would provide women to dance with the young lads on leave. It was at one of these functions that Grandpa met Grandma and they fell in love.  They were married shortly thereafter.  Both were devout Catholics, and made that clear, by having a total of nine children.  My mother popped out as the second oldest.

Grandpa was many things.  He bought the family a horse ranch in Big Lake, Minnesota.  That ranch was the source of many, maybe all, of my mother’s fond childhood memories.  When the family lost the ranch,  my mother was crushed.  She loved her horses and the “getting away” that the ranch provided. Grandpa was also a devout Republican and yet, he had many friends in high places in both major political parties.  He was good friends with George McGovern,  had an excellent friendship with Hubert H. Humphrey, knew Nixon, and loved Ronald Reagan.  He was friends with the family of Amy Klobuchar and watched her grow up.

His connections led him to start a newspaper that would rival the other large Minneapolis rags, which, at the time, were both on strike.  The paper went well for a while and then the other two papers merged, which caused the strike to end.  Grandpa’s partners pulled their money, and he was left broke and weeping.  Until his death, Grandpa ran a few daily circulars or weekly newsletters to support the family.  When money ran short, he would spin off to Las Vegas to increase his monetary footprint or even send one of his children to “make some money”. Once, he handed my mother $40 and sent her to the City of Sin.  She went with no clue how to gamble and ended up winning $400.  She did the math and realized that that was a pretty decent haul and went right back home, much to the consternation of Grandpa.  He was of the mindset that, if things were going well, they would keep going well.  Thus, if you won $400 from $40, you would easily haul away $4000 from $400.

Grandpa also had a dark side.  He had numerous extra-marital affairs.  It was rumored that he fathered a child by one of his secretaries. Half the family fled to California in disgust and anger.  My mother was one of them.  His sexual abuse was also both documented and rumored.  You will see, later in my story, how this translated to how my mother raised her own children.  Through all of this tumultuous life, Grandpa stuck with Grandma and they loved each other very much.  He died in her arms.

At 19 years old, my mother was in charge of her father’s newsroom and directed the editing of the paper.  She was, and is, very intelligent and knows what she is doing at every juncture in her life.  She lived precariously, but never drank an ounce of liquor, did any drugs, nor did she ever smoke.  Once she went out with a police officer who took her on a ride-along while sipping from a flask of whiskey on a necklace.  He flipped the squad car and Mama broke her neck, collarbone, and arm.  She bears the scars of surgery to this day and can predict the weather with the subsequent aches and pains. After she left the paper, she  became a cab driver.  The cab company went on strike and Mama became a scab.  She caught the eye of my dad, the company dispatcher. They were married not long after he proposed to her, over the dispatch radio.

And that was her life before us.

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Snipped! ~ The Intro.

December 5, 2011
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My name is Incongruous Circumspection.

You can call me Circ, for short, as long as it doesn’t make you think of circumcision.  Then again, if you are at all familiar with Christianity, circumcision and the analogies of circumcision are all too familiar and you will feel more than comfortable calling me Circ.  In fact, being Circ, you may view me as a sort of King David, being that he circ-ed hundreds of dudes for some chicks big time dad to let him marry his daughter.  After all, I love women as much and more than David ever did.  I just don’t peep from rooftops.

Ok, enough of that rabbit trail.  Let me further introduce myself.

I will be writing my story from beginning to end (though it hardly has an end, at this point) and will occasionally write commentary on current events that I find troubling, guffaw-ready, or even celebratory – advancing the power of women and men together.

I am a husband of one woman.  She is so smokin’ hot I have trouble concentrating at work, play, and even while sleeping.  We have been married for over ten years and have been growing closer as the days go by.  We have six children.  They are aged 9, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1.

While I love children and hate them at the same time, we are done for good.  I got snipped as a Christmas present to my wife last December and our sex life has never been better.

I grew up in a matriarchal home (single mom) with patriarchal ideals.  We churched in a commune sort of church and socialized with only those people that agreed with us and swallowed Billy G. (Gothard) whole.

We learned about sex being evil, women being inferior, men being the spiritual leader of the home and always expected to be perfect, the Bible being inerrant and infallible, the Republican Party being configured to usher in the second coming of Christ, the idea that all liberals were the spawn of Satan, children were supposed to be beaten into submission, shirts were to be buttoned to the neck, shorts were evil, women were to wear dresses, skirts, and jumpers at all times (even while swimming), the idea that bunches of children that you couldn’t support made you more holy in the sight of God, the evils of public school, and much more.

I rejected most of this on the surface of my life when I “ran away” at the age of 19.  But, I still lived with the guilt and the foundational principles of red-blooded ultraconservative Christianity.  I took it into my marriage and made the first six years a living hell at times, with many a bright spot in between.

Eighteen months ago, we finally cast off the last piece of the baloney sausage and moved into a life of freedom and happiness.  I became an agnostic and my wife became a questioning Christian.

My story will hit on many of the juicy details of my growing up years.  The abuse of my mother.  The physical, emotional, and borderline sexual abuse.  The spanking of my sisters until they were 25 years of age.  Being accused of having two affairs because I left a church.  Learning to swear intelligently and then overusing the talent.  It will all be mixed in with my sorry attempt at humor.

I hope to keep your attention and learn you a thing or two about patriarchal and quiverful life from the perspective of a man who would rather be submissive to a woman (or many women) so I don’t have to go through the tiring pretense of trying to be perfect.

I look forward to it.

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How Modesty Made Me Fat

November 22, 2011
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by Sierra

This isn’t a story about how modest clothes allowed me to “let myself go” and conceal a growing figure. It’s not even a story about how wearing modest clothes kept my self-esteem at rock bottom and thrust me into a too-close relationship with Ben & Jerry. It’s a story about how modesty doctrines impacted my mind, in ways that had real, negative effects on my body. Modesty was one of the reasons my defining relationship with my body became whether or not I was “fat.” Modesty was one of the engines that pushed me into a full-blown eating disorder. It’s not just a dress code: it’s a philosophy, and it’s one that destroys young women, mentally and physically.

Modesty taught me that my first priority needed to be making sure I wasn’t a “stumbling block” to men. Not being sexually attractive was the most important thing I had to consider when buying clothes, putting them on, maintaining my weight (can’t have things getting tight!), and moving around (can’t wiggle those hips, or let a little knee show). Modesty taught me that what I looked like was what mattered most of all. Not what I thought. Not how I felt. Not what I was capable of doing. Worrying about modesty, and being vigilant not to be sexy, made me even more obsessed with my looks than the women in short shorts and spray tans I was taught to hate.

Modesty taught me that I was always on display. There was no occasion in which it was acceptable to be immodest. Not the beach, not at the pool with friends, not in my own backyard (sunbathing was out because a neighbor might glance over and see me). This took my normal self-consciousness as a teenage girl and amped it up to an impossible degree. I once had a bee fly down my (acceptably loose) shirt and, in flailing around to get it out, had a family member comment that I’d just “flashed” my own grandfather. I was horrified for the rest of the week. That’s not normal. The normal order of priorities is getting dangerous animals out of your clothing first, and then worrying about making your own relatives perv on you second. Not so with the modesty doctrine. I should have let it sting me, apparently. Getting stung was the lesser risk.

Modesty was not just about dress. It was also about moving like a lady. Knees together, butt down, breasts in, arms down. It is impossible to get physically fit while adhering to ladylike movements only. You might be able to run, but only if you wear two sports bras to keep anything from jiggling inappropriately. You certainly can’t do anything with weights. In college, I had the chance to join a horseback riding team for a couple of semesters. I soon realized that staying on the horse required starting some kind of fitness regimen. In the gym, I found a couple of hip abductor/adductor machines that were handy for building the thigh strength necessary to grip the horse. The problem? I was so embarrassed that somebody might walk in front of me while I was on the machine with my legs spread that I started going to the gym the moment it opened in the morning and avoiding exercise when men were present. In this instance, modesty was literally keeping me weak. Eventually, I grew comfortable enough with my own body to exercise without worrying about other people happening to look at me. Now, I do an exercise routine that would have scandalized my old self: squats, deadlifts, and barbell rows. I have so much more energy and my mood is so much improved – plus, I can move my own furniture! But I couldn’t have got to this point without dumping the modesty doctrine. Because I couldn’t concentrate on hauling iron while worried that some perv behind me might happen to glance my way and pop his gym shorts. That’s not my job anymore. I’m not responsible for men’s souls, because I no longer think of myself as an object to be looked at and evaluated.

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But They Look So Happy!

November 10, 2011
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Excerpted from Dulce De Leche:

All of the recent news about the Duggar’s newest baby spawned a number of online arguments.  One of the most frequent comments was about how cheerful their family is, especially the children.  How Michelle is a great mom who doesn’t yell.  It must be working for them, because the kids are well behaved and look happy.  Sounds reasonable, right?

I might believe it, if I didn’t know what I know of Gothard/ATI and the Pearls.  The Duggars are deeply enmeshed in ATI, and ATI takes allegiance very seriously.  It isn’t a vague Statement of Beliefs that you sign so your kids can take the courses.  It is several pages of in depth info that covers what kind of music you can listen to (no Christian rock), the kind of TV you watch (mainly Christian DVDs), the way you dress (those jumpers are about modesty), the kind of punishments the parents use (spankings), and more.  It isn’t just a curriculum–it is a lifestyle that delves into family finances, child planning and every other detail.

There has long been a lot of speculation about whether the Duggars use the controversial punishment methods taught by Michael and Debi Pearl in To Train Up a Child.  Things like the blanket training, certain phrases that are used, and the general popularity within that subculture have fueled that, as well as many people who claim that it was recommended previously on the website.  I can’t prove that they follow TTUAC, but as of yesterday, the Duggar’s website included it in their Amazon links along with a glowing recommendation.  Considering that some of the other recommendations list personal details about how the materials were used by the family, I cannot believe that it was randomly included on their site without their approval.

One of the creepiest things about Gothard and the Pearls is that they teach that happy is the only acceptable emotion.  If you do not have a joyful countenance, you are publicly shaming your authorities.  In other words, if the kid looks unhappy, it is a personal offense against the parents.  Pearl also has nauseating quotes and anecdotes about how any time his kids expressed unhappiness or anger they were hit even harder and longer until they were cheerful.  How twisted is that?  These children are taught from babyhood to always be cheerful, or else they deserve a spanking.  As they grow older, it is not just the fear of a spanking that causes them to keep smiling.  It is the sincere belief that they are sinning with ingratitude, rebellion and more if they don’t present a happy face.

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