Not mine to keep, but mine to share

[omorka]

After spending a long time (why, even weeks!) not thinking about evangelical Christian fundamentalism in particularly concrete terms, I made a mistake. I went looking for sex on the Internet.

No, this doesn't end up at fundie porn, although it might as well. Let's just say that when you search for certain tems that involve the string "submi*", you get not only the sites I was looking for and a whole lot of heteronormative quasimisogynist crap, you also get Quiverfull and other sites on how to be a good fundie Christian daughter, wife, and mother. Not what I needed at the moment.

However, through a couple of links, I ended up at No Longer Quivering, a site for QF walkaways. Some of these stories are horrific, and make me glad that my mother's fundamentalism is mild and mainstream by comparison. Some are - well, not uplifting, exactly, but they make one sigh in relief that there are people out there, Christian and otherwise, who are willing to give the women (and usually theri children!) who do walk away a helping hand and emotional support. In both cases, a recurring theme is how difficult it is to walk away.

So this quote from a blogger named Sierra struck me rather hard -

Stories about valor and courage never tell you that the hero feels like the villain most of the time. There is no doublespeak in heroic tales. Heroes don’t feel like if they’d sit down, shut up, cover up, hide, give birth, nod, smile, listen, clean, serve, serve, serve, obey, worship, then none of this would have happened. Valorous persons never feel like they’re the ingrateful, hard-hearted, demon-possessed, selfish, bitter, angry, defensive ones, right?

Don’t they? What dishonest stories.

Someone else who knows what it means to be evil.

Comments

[judo-creature.livejournal.com]

A while back I was following several stories on No Longer Quivering, and I can't even explain the state of distress it put me into after reading them. My heart aches for the women who are victims of these groups. I've never been to an intensely fundie church, but I understand the guilt of Divine Judgment and the pressure put on women to be chaste and demure. Lately I've been incredibly self conscious of how I'm viewed by Christians, due to how physically open and casual about nudity I am. I'm not even mentally capable of having sex, yet my own mother thinks I am behaving like a whore when I get hot and take my shirt off around even a gay man.

I find more and more lately getting really viscerally angry with the church's treatment of women and sex. At the end of July I'm going to my former church's annual camp-out with my family, and the beach straight-up does not allow women to wear bathing suits that do not cover their entire midsection. I never liked the rule, but now when I think about it, I get incredibly upset. What's so damn offensive about my stomach, anyway? Why aren't men's stomachs equally offensive?

[omorka.livejournal.com]

It's not really about sex. The guilt and shame are about a woman owning her own body and deciding when and where she will show it, conceal it, or enjoy it for herself. The fundies and control addicts (of any stripe) can't stand the idea. They can't really stand the idea for men, either, especially men who don't fit into their narrow ideas of masculinity - see how they react when a femme gay man shows up in high drag, or a macho gay man shows up in leather chaps - but women are used as a reward to help keep other men in line, so keeping them under wraps and propertized as bodies is more important. (For men, it's really more their labor that's propertized.)

So men's stomachs aren't as offensive because they're not using the promise of someday seeing a man's stomach that no other woman has ever seen as an enticement to follow the rules. That, and they don't really believe in female desire, so they don't think het women will be tempted into sin by the sight of a good six-pack or a gently rounded boy-belly (and assume there won't be any gay men or bi's of any stripe).

[cifarelli]

[Previous comment deleted as this post isn't locked. You hopefully got it in your email, though.]

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I'd totally agree if I were convinced that the QF movement met the "consensual" part of "safe, sane, and consensual."

Although now that I've typed that I'm not so sure about the "sane" part, either.

[awbryan.livejournal.com]

Even though I knew it was fairly cognate to Huck's "All right then, I'll go to hell"... I don't think I understood what you meant by "evil" until now.

And of course you choose to be "evil". How could you not?

....though there ARE heroic stories like that. But they're a minority, and were not written until the twentieth century. Margaret Atwood comes to mind.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that just about sums it up. And yes, I know there are a few stories that tell the truth about that part - but damned few.