Except this time, instead of trying to smash the joy and hope out of little hearts, he is after our beloved Democratic presidential candidate. Which is basically the same thing. Jesse Taylor at Pandagon breaks it down pretty well.
How much you wanna bet Joshua Harris is somewhere behind the scenes on this? Okay, unlikely. But it would be pretty funny.
Showing posts with label fundamentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fundamentalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Thank you Dad for never taking me to a purity ball
So a few weeks ago, I started and never published a post about my anxiety over telling my father that B and I were moving in together. My father is very religiously conservative, and on top of it, conservatively Asian. One thing that's dawned on me in the last month or so as I've dealt with this whole moving in thing is that I'm not really sure any more which one - religious beliefs or native culture - has more effect on the conservative and somewhat authoritarian way he raised us. I used to take for granted that it was religion.
But now that I'm a little bit older, I'm kind of appalled at myself for not realizing how much our differences are actually cultural. And not only cultural, but cultural intermingled with generational. My Dad is Filipino, and even in Filipino culture in the Philippines, I've heard that there's a huge generational divide between people of my dad's generation, and people of my generation. My Dad and I unfortunately have it in double or triple doses, because since my Mom is American and white, culturally my sisters and I have always been more American than Filipino. And add on to that the religion factor, and friends, you've got a whole lot of differences between my dad and this adult daughter.
So you can imagine I was quaking in my patent leather sandals over telling him I was moving in with my lapsed-Catholic/agnostic lawyer boyfriend. But you know what? The whole thing turned out surprisingly well. I went up to the cabin with my parents the week before B's law school graduation, when all his family would be in town and chatting away about the happy news. I planned to tell him on our morning run. Let's just say I told him about 15 minutes in, and the 30 minute run ended up being a 45 minute run. With a 15 minute cool down walk. And yes he did moralize a little bit, but he listened as I rationally explained my reasons and points where I disagreed with him. And he never lost his temper, or raised his voice, which is saying a lot.
In the end, I was pretty pleased with how it went. Imagine my surprise when, at lunch last week, he tells me he'd like to take back some of the things he said. Instead, he wanted to say that he respects and supports (yes, supports!) both of us. He realizes that we are both smart and mature adults, and we would not have come to such an important decision without giving it some very serious thought. And he is behind us. I'm tearing up just thinking about it.
In light of all that, this article in the New York Times over the weekend made me appreciate my dad even more. Considering my background, my biggest feminist pet peeve is abstinence only education. A close second are purity balls, and all that they represent. I was excited to see this issue covered in the New York Times, but I have mixed feelings about the tone. There was mention of the fact that the majority of teens break their purity pledges, and that they're less likely to use condoms when they do. But throughout the article, I just felt like screaming at my laptop: this is weird, wrong, and creepy on so many levels! How anyone can calmly and impartially recount a narrative of the evening is beyond me. I realize the benefits of presenting the story that way, but part of me wanted to author to say something, anything to acknowledge how completely messed up this purity ball was, from the very concepts and values behind it, to the smallest little details of the evening. And some of the girls were so young. Do they even fully grasp what they are promising? Somehow I'm afraid that's kind of the point. A commenter on Feministing linked to this great post on the NYT article on a blog I'd never seen before, Womenstake.org. It's the National Women's Law Center's blog, and they do amazing work, so I'm sure I'll be reading it a lot more.
I really believe that the worst of my fundamentalist upbringing did not come from our home. It came from the private schools and the churches. The camps and the retreats. And some of my parents' worst mistakes were made when they were younger, newer parents. In a way, I see them as victims too. They were, and still always are, trying to do the right thing. The fathers who take their daughters to purity balls claim that they are showing their daughters they love them by purporting to take ownership over their virginity, and guarding it till they can pass her off to another man. While I'm not questioning that they love their daughters, what they're really doing is telling them is that their only value is in their virginity, or lack thereof, and in association with the man who currently has domain over it. My dad, in contrast, is showing his daughter he loves her by borrowing his buddy's pick up truck and helping her move in with her boyfriend. I'll take that type of love any day.
But now that I'm a little bit older, I'm kind of appalled at myself for not realizing how much our differences are actually cultural. And not only cultural, but cultural intermingled with generational. My Dad is Filipino, and even in Filipino culture in the Philippines, I've heard that there's a huge generational divide between people of my dad's generation, and people of my generation. My Dad and I unfortunately have it in double or triple doses, because since my Mom is American and white, culturally my sisters and I have always been more American than Filipino. And add on to that the religion factor, and friends, you've got a whole lot of differences between my dad and this adult daughter.
So you can imagine I was quaking in my patent leather sandals over telling him I was moving in with my lapsed-Catholic/agnostic lawyer boyfriend. But you know what? The whole thing turned out surprisingly well. I went up to the cabin with my parents the week before B's law school graduation, when all his family would be in town and chatting away about the happy news. I planned to tell him on our morning run. Let's just say I told him about 15 minutes in, and the 30 minute run ended up being a 45 minute run. With a 15 minute cool down walk. And yes he did moralize a little bit, but he listened as I rationally explained my reasons and points where I disagreed with him. And he never lost his temper, or raised his voice, which is saying a lot.
In the end, I was pretty pleased with how it went. Imagine my surprise when, at lunch last week, he tells me he'd like to take back some of the things he said. Instead, he wanted to say that he respects and supports (yes, supports!) both of us. He realizes that we are both smart and mature adults, and we would not have come to such an important decision without giving it some very serious thought. And he is behind us. I'm tearing up just thinking about it.
In light of all that, this article in the New York Times over the weekend made me appreciate my dad even more. Considering my background, my biggest feminist pet peeve is abstinence only education. A close second are purity balls, and all that they represent. I was excited to see this issue covered in the New York Times, but I have mixed feelings about the tone. There was mention of the fact that the majority of teens break their purity pledges, and that they're less likely to use condoms when they do. But throughout the article, I just felt like screaming at my laptop: this is weird, wrong, and creepy on so many levels! How anyone can calmly and impartially recount a narrative of the evening is beyond me. I realize the benefits of presenting the story that way, but part of me wanted to author to say something, anything to acknowledge how completely messed up this purity ball was, from the very concepts and values behind it, to the smallest little details of the evening. And some of the girls were so young. Do they even fully grasp what they are promising? Somehow I'm afraid that's kind of the point. A commenter on Feministing linked to this great post on the NYT article on a blog I'd never seen before, Womenstake.org. It's the National Women's Law Center's blog, and they do amazing work, so I'm sure I'll be reading it a lot more.
I really believe that the worst of my fundamentalist upbringing did not come from our home. It came from the private schools and the churches. The camps and the retreats. And some of my parents' worst mistakes were made when they were younger, newer parents. In a way, I see them as victims too. They were, and still always are, trying to do the right thing. The fathers who take their daughters to purity balls claim that they are showing their daughters they love them by purporting to take ownership over their virginity, and guarding it till they can pass her off to another man. While I'm not questioning that they love their daughters, what they're really doing is telling them is that their only value is in their virginity, or lack thereof, and in association with the man who currently has domain over it. My dad, in contrast, is showing his daughter he loves her by borrowing his buddy's pick up truck and helping her move in with her boyfriend. I'll take that type of love any day.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Fundie flashbacks: We want to tell you what to wear edition
Joshua Harris, can't you leave a girl alone?
As a child, a hobby of mine was reading and picking apart Christian lifestyle books of all types, particularly the ones that purported to tell me, specifically, how to live my life. Or ones that told other people how to tell me how to live my life. In my tween years, I started out with some classic James Dobson. I think my parents had the good sense to keep this gem somewhere other than my dad's office bookshelf, but you'd better believe I got my hands on some other ones. I would read, and then methodically report back to my parents with my criticisms of books such as Dare to Discipline, and a couple years later, when I was compelled to read it in school, Preparing for Adolescence.
In case you haven't had the pleasure of reading some of Dr. Dobson's finer work, The Strong-Willed Child could be renamed "How to Crush Dissent and Original Thought in Persons Under the Age of 18." Dare to Discipline is how to hit your kids without getting reported to Child Protective Services. And Preparing for Adolescence teaches girls to slut-shame themselves in case there isn't someone else there to do it for them, along with other misinformation about teens' emerging sexuality, which would be entertaining if it wasn't so dangerous.
You have to find little things like this to amuse yourself and keep yourself sane when you're growing up in fundie-land. But a book came out when I was the tender age of 16 that was anything but funny. And it became a raging sensation with fundamentalist fathers everywhere. The book was I Kissed Dating Goodbye by a man named Joshua Harris. The basic premise of this book is that dating as an institution is flawed, and good Christians should forgo romantic love of all types until they're ready to wed, and which time they should begin pursuing "courtships," which will eventually lead to marriage.
Now, being out of that scene for so long, and beginning to be more involved feminist issues, I see even more fundamental problems with the book than I did at the time, such as the fact that he presupposes that everyone ought to aspire to the fundamental institution of the patriarchy - heterosexual marriage. But even at the time, I could see how a catchy introduction fell into a string of logical fallacies, in everything from his core arguments to his use of supporting evidence. Unfortunately, this time, my critical examination of this latest fundie-festo was less a precocious pastime, and was more rooted in the deep fear that he was right, and I was somehow inherently bad for dating.
If Joshua himself, or one of his minions, was reading this blog right now, he would probably say, "See, Shells, that fear you feel is your heart telling you that dating is in fact wrong." And adult Shells would tell him, "No, Josh, that fear is the result of sixteen consecutive years of brainwashing to believe the sexual fearmongering that spews forth from the pens of creeps like you." Of course, when I was sixteen, I didn't know that. Ever since I can remember, I've been cursed with being the perfectionistic, type-A person that I am. When you have that type of temperament, and you're raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, and books like this come up, you're put in a difficult position. You know everyone will think better of you and admire you if you follow its prescriptions. But you also know it's bullshit.
So I compromised. I kept my boyfriend, but had a very publicly non-sexual relationship with him. I literally had parents coming up to me and telling me they wished their kids would behave more like my boyfriend and I, and that we were a wonderful example. At the time, I felt like I was having my cake, and eating it too. But now, I see how this strand of Christian philosphy, and many like it over the years, have continued to warp the way I approach relationships and sex, even though I've long since abandoned them.
Which is why it all came flooding painfully back when I saw this. It turns out Harris's little brothers have picked up the torch, and created a survey that helps Christian men dictate what women should wear so that they don't "stumble," titled The Modesty Survey. (Sound familiar? Maybe because stuff like that is written into the laws in places like, oh, Saudi Arabia.) I don't have the energy to pick it apart right now, but there's some great feminist analysis by Jill at Feministe, and by The Happy Feminist, who I love because she's a feminist and a lawyer. There's also a hilarious parody at Pandagon that definitely raised the depressed spirits of a recovering surf of fundamentalism.
Now off to bed so I can dream about tying Joshua Harris to a front row seat of any given catwalk at Fashion Week...
As a child, a hobby of mine was reading and picking apart Christian lifestyle books of all types, particularly the ones that purported to tell me, specifically, how to live my life. Or ones that told other people how to tell me how to live my life. In my tween years, I started out with some classic James Dobson. I think my parents had the good sense to keep this gem somewhere other than my dad's office bookshelf, but you'd better believe I got my hands on some other ones. I would read, and then methodically report back to my parents with my criticisms of books such as Dare to Discipline, and a couple years later, when I was compelled to read it in school, Preparing for Adolescence.
In case you haven't had the pleasure of reading some of Dr. Dobson's finer work, The Strong-Willed Child could be renamed "How to Crush Dissent and Original Thought in Persons Under the Age of 18." Dare to Discipline is how to hit your kids without getting reported to Child Protective Services. And Preparing for Adolescence teaches girls to slut-shame themselves in case there isn't someone else there to do it for them, along with other misinformation about teens' emerging sexuality, which would be entertaining if it wasn't so dangerous.
You have to find little things like this to amuse yourself and keep yourself sane when you're growing up in fundie-land. But a book came out when I was the tender age of 16 that was anything but funny. And it became a raging sensation with fundamentalist fathers everywhere. The book was I Kissed Dating Goodbye by a man named Joshua Harris. The basic premise of this book is that dating as an institution is flawed, and good Christians should forgo romantic love of all types until they're ready to wed, and which time they should begin pursuing "courtships," which will eventually lead to marriage.
Now, being out of that scene for so long, and beginning to be more involved feminist issues, I see even more fundamental problems with the book than I did at the time, such as the fact that he presupposes that everyone ought to aspire to the fundamental institution of the patriarchy - heterosexual marriage. But even at the time, I could see how a catchy introduction fell into a string of logical fallacies, in everything from his core arguments to his use of supporting evidence. Unfortunately, this time, my critical examination of this latest fundie-festo was less a precocious pastime, and was more rooted in the deep fear that he was right, and I was somehow inherently bad for dating.
If Joshua himself, or one of his minions, was reading this blog right now, he would probably say, "See, Shells, that fear you feel is your heart telling you that dating is in fact wrong." And adult Shells would tell him, "No, Josh, that fear is the result of sixteen consecutive years of brainwashing to believe the sexual fearmongering that spews forth from the pens of creeps like you." Of course, when I was sixteen, I didn't know that. Ever since I can remember, I've been cursed with being the perfectionistic, type-A person that I am. When you have that type of temperament, and you're raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment, and books like this come up, you're put in a difficult position. You know everyone will think better of you and admire you if you follow its prescriptions. But you also know it's bullshit.
So I compromised. I kept my boyfriend, but had a very publicly non-sexual relationship with him. I literally had parents coming up to me and telling me they wished their kids would behave more like my boyfriend and I, and that we were a wonderful example. At the time, I felt like I was having my cake, and eating it too. But now, I see how this strand of Christian philosphy, and many like it over the years, have continued to warp the way I approach relationships and sex, even though I've long since abandoned them.
Which is why it all came flooding painfully back when I saw this. It turns out Harris's little brothers have picked up the torch, and created a survey that helps Christian men dictate what women should wear so that they don't "stumble," titled The Modesty Survey. (Sound familiar? Maybe because stuff like that is written into the laws in places like, oh, Saudi Arabia.) I don't have the energy to pick it apart right now, but there's some great feminist analysis by Jill at Feministe, and by The Happy Feminist, who I love because she's a feminist and a lawyer. There's also a hilarious parody at Pandagon that definitely raised the depressed spirits of a recovering surf of fundamentalism.
Now off to bed so I can dream about tying Joshua Harris to a front row seat of any given catwalk at Fashion Week...
Thursday, March 20, 2008
How Much a Few Days Can Change...
So we spent the last few days in Mexico. And it was amazing. I don't really think I realized just quite how amazing at the time. But I have my pictures, and six handcrafted blown glass wine goblets, to remind me.
We were with two of B's best friends from high school, their girlfriends, and one of B's friend's (let's call him B2) from the gay bar he works at in BsHomeTown, R. I don't know if I'll ever be brave enough to tell him, but knowing him has changed my life in a small way.
Ever since I broke loose from the Fundamentalist Christian chains the defined my childhood (more on that another time) I've moved towards and eventually fully embraced the concept of LGBT rights, even before I could define them in those words. Regardless of whether you see gay people's sexual orientation as a product of nature, nurture, or both, is irrelevant to the principle that they should have full inclusion in society. They should be able to marry, have biological children or adopt, not be the target of hate speech or crime, etc. You know, all the things we straight people see as our inalienable rights, so much so that we hardly give them a second thought... and step off the soapbox.
But as much as I was intellectually on board with this, lingering negative experiences and residual attitudes kept it from being much more than that. I kind of embraced gay rights as being a necessary part of my larger progressive beliefs. But growing up I'd never heard anything but negativity towards homosexuality, from high-level religious discourse to bigoted anecdotes. And my Sophomore year at LargePrivateCaliforniaSchool, I had the only gay person even peripherally in my life go off on me in a drunk rage about, of all things, leaving my dishes in the sink of my shared apartment. It sounds silly, but his drunk rant fed into every stereotype of gay men and why we should fear them I'd heard growing up. And so why my intellectual support for gay rights stayed strong, my emotional support stayed, at best, neutral.
Until I spent this weekend with R. When confronted with gross homophobia, you often hear people say things along the lines of, "I wonder how he/she would feel if they had a gay/lesbian son or daughter." Now I know why. Having a person in your life, who you care about, even to a small degree, changes everything. From the beginning, R was smart, cool, funny, politically liberal (unlike B's two high school friends... and their girlfriends for that matter), and had recently graduated from a small, liberal arts college just a few minutes from mine. I immediately knew he was a person I would love to have as a friend. Which is why I felt a surprising stab of pain when, the first day in Mexico, as we walked along the pool side, R a good ten feet ahead of me, I heard two guys mutter something about, "that fag."
I felt like I'd gotten the wind knocked out of me. For the first time, what I felt wasn't righteous indignation, but actual hurt that someone would harbor that type of hatred towards a person who I'd come to consider my friend. And they'd never even met him.
Coming back to the real world, and seeing Sally Kern's hateful words flash across the screen elicited a different response than it might have before. Instead of rolling my eyes at the latest in fundie crazies and moving on, I actually felt profoundly sad. Sad for the hate and ignorance she lives in, sad for all the people influenced by her words who will carry on that hate, and sad for those victimized by their hate. Sad for R, that he lives in a world where people like that hold elected office. I can't even imagine how I'd feel if some elected official was on a campaign to show the country how straight Asian women were the primary cause of our nation's decrepitude. And people believed them.
P.S. On a lighter note, one thing that R and I agree on wholeheartedly is that B2's girlfriend is the most annoying individual on the planet Earth. Seriously. I'll leave it at that!
We were with two of B's best friends from high school, their girlfriends, and one of B's friend's (let's call him B2) from the gay bar he works at in BsHomeTown, R. I don't know if I'll ever be brave enough to tell him, but knowing him has changed my life in a small way.
Ever since I broke loose from the Fundamentalist Christian chains the defined my childhood (more on that another time) I've moved towards and eventually fully embraced the concept of LGBT rights, even before I could define them in those words. Regardless of whether you see gay people's sexual orientation as a product of nature, nurture, or both, is irrelevant to the principle that they should have full inclusion in society. They should be able to marry, have biological children or adopt, not be the target of hate speech or crime, etc. You know, all the things we straight people see as our inalienable rights, so much so that we hardly give them a second thought... and step off the soapbox.
But as much as I was intellectually on board with this, lingering negative experiences and residual attitudes kept it from being much more than that. I kind of embraced gay rights as being a necessary part of my larger progressive beliefs. But growing up I'd never heard anything but negativity towards homosexuality, from high-level religious discourse to bigoted anecdotes. And my Sophomore year at LargePrivateCaliforniaSchool, I had the only gay person even peripherally in my life go off on me in a drunk rage about, of all things, leaving my dishes in the sink of my shared apartment. It sounds silly, but his drunk rant fed into every stereotype of gay men and why we should fear them I'd heard growing up. And so why my intellectual support for gay rights stayed strong, my emotional support stayed, at best, neutral.
Until I spent this weekend with R. When confronted with gross homophobia, you often hear people say things along the lines of, "I wonder how he/she would feel if they had a gay/lesbian son or daughter." Now I know why. Having a person in your life, who you care about, even to a small degree, changes everything. From the beginning, R was smart, cool, funny, politically liberal (unlike B's two high school friends... and their girlfriends for that matter), and had recently graduated from a small, liberal arts college just a few minutes from mine. I immediately knew he was a person I would love to have as a friend. Which is why I felt a surprising stab of pain when, the first day in Mexico, as we walked along the pool side, R a good ten feet ahead of me, I heard two guys mutter something about, "that fag."
I felt like I'd gotten the wind knocked out of me. For the first time, what I felt wasn't righteous indignation, but actual hurt that someone would harbor that type of hatred towards a person who I'd come to consider my friend. And they'd never even met him.
Coming back to the real world, and seeing Sally Kern's hateful words flash across the screen elicited a different response than it might have before. Instead of rolling my eyes at the latest in fundie crazies and moving on, I actually felt profoundly sad. Sad for the hate and ignorance she lives in, sad for all the people influenced by her words who will carry on that hate, and sad for those victimized by their hate. Sad for R, that he lives in a world where people like that hold elected office. I can't even imagine how I'd feel if some elected official was on a campaign to show the country how straight Asian women were the primary cause of our nation's decrepitude. And people believed them.
P.S. On a lighter note, one thing that R and I agree on wholeheartedly is that B2's girlfriend is the most annoying individual on the planet Earth. Seriously. I'll leave it at that!
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