Dominion Oriented Femininity, by the Botkinettes

[refugee]

1 hour ago, fiery redhead said:

if you are dealing with someone as decieving as my dad one must separate themselves. 

If I could upvote your whole comment (not just the quoted part) 1000 times, I would.

[fiery redhead]

3 hours ago, Baabaablacksheep said:

Good for you - this is a really difficult and brave place to arrive at after being indoctrinated that you are responsible for the way someone else behaves. I'm new to FJ, what is CollegeMinus?

   Thank you. CollegeMinus is CollegePlus, a program that proves curriculum for CLEP exams and a degree plan tailored to your major and university of choice. It's basically an alternative to junior college. Many fundies use it because brick and mortar schools are supposedly evil, I chose it because I can put myself through school. I've had friends that have done it and it's been a good experience. FJ calls it CollegeMinus because you aren't taking nearly as many classes as traditional school.

3 hours ago, refugee said:

If I could upvote your whole comment (not just the quoted part) 1000 times, I would.

Thank you. And I noticed a major grammatical error. I wrote this in the heat of the moment

[nickelodeon]

I saw this goofy, poorly made meme earlier today and thought, was this specifically made about the Botkinettes, or are there myriads of women in Tennessee and Alabama extolling the virtues of the stocky and prickly prairie wife, completely obscured by jpeg artifacts?

Spoiler

 

[Dreadcrumbs]

These girls wouldn't last a day in my mother's shoes. Not even on an easy day. 

[ophelia]

These girls probably wouldn't last anywhere beside their daddies lap. Although they are always presented as the educated, beautiful, confident, christian superprincesses, I think that in the real world they have no skills at all. And if you look forward a few years and they stay unmarried they won't even be fundieprincesses anymore, but just plain old spinsters in their circles.

[CyborgKin]

A few weeks back I heard a fair bit of one of their talks "It's Not About Staying at Home".  Or something like that.  I think it was from a year or so ago. They did a lot of explaining how they didn't really mean what people say they meant, and how they're not dogmatically saying you musn't ever think of attending college - it's just most likely not beneficial and a bad idea in most cases - and how 'at home' actually has a very broad scope and doesn't mean just stay in your house or just work for your father, and how you shouldn't be focused only on the goal of getting married, and why you should think more about your position than being 'against feminism' because feminisms have been against bad ideas of womanhood too, and how they think the acronym for Stay At Home Daughters is 'kinda sad' (insert nervous giggle at poor attempt at a joke) and probably half a dozen other kinds of backpedalling I've already forgotten.  And there was a line in there about men not being perfect or having problems or however they phrased it, which was a definite jab at DPiaT.

[Marian the Librarian]

4 hours ago, CyborgKin said:

A few weeks back I heard a fair bit of one of their talks "It's Not About Staying at Home".  Or something like that.  I think it was from a year or so ago. They did a lot of explaining how they didn't really mean what people say they meant, and how they're not dogmatically saying you musn't ever think of attending college - it's just most likely not beneficial and a bad idea in most cases - and how 'at home' actually has a very broad scope and doesn't mean just stay in your house or just work for your father, and how you shouldn't be focused only on the goal of getting married, and why you should think more about your position than being 'against feminism' because feminisms have been against bad ideas of womanhood too, and how they think the acronym for Stay At Home Daughters is 'kinda sad' (insert nervous giggle at poor attempt at a joke) and probably half a dozen other kinds of backpedalling I've already forgotten.  And there was a line in there about men not being perfect or having problems or however they phrased it, which was a definite jab at DPiaT.

Ah, the trademark cry of the Botkins: "We've been misunderstood!!" They've been whining that tune for as long as I've been aware of their existence - which is going on 10 years, ever since the WTF moment when a copy of "The Return of the Daughters" landed in one of my libraries. 

[hoipolloi]

44 minutes ago, Marian the Librarian said:

"We've been misunderstood!!"

Which is a corollary to "You're doing it wrong,"  -- what they and other cult members say to those whose lives don't turn out according to the Botkinettes' script.

[ophelia]

The saddest thing IMO is that these girls aren't stupid at all. If they had the chance to get a real education I could really see them flourish, but their godlike father would never let that happen. It makes me sick how much potential is getting wasted in the fundieworld, just because parents are too afraid or full of themselves to let their kids get any kind of worldly education.

[CyborgKin]

And no one has any chance of ever separaring them from their father while he lives.

[ophelia]

Thats basically a hostage situation.

[CyborgKin]

I'm listening to Geoff's interview on Kevin Swanson's show ( http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=11507103516 ) in which he talks about his 200 year plan.  He says it has titles of books for his children to write at specific ages.  Wow that's controlling!  And it's also got numbers of children they'll have at specific ages and how many of those will be married by then.  And that's not all...

He's also got dates of death for everyone on there!  Only 'according to the insurance company', but still...  Anyhow, Geoff has his own death down for 2038.  By which point his daughters will be into their fifties.

 

Also he says that before he was saved from being a full blown Marxist, he'd "never been in a church, per se".  I guess that "per se" is there to weasel out of any church-going that doesn't meet his current standards, so it doesn't really count

[CyborgKin]

"And at the end of my 200 year plan, each one of my children has roughly 156 thousand male descendents."

Because female descendents don't count?

Oh, but then he says this is just a rough guess of what could happen, they're not presuming on the Lord, they can revise it every year, and his children should make their own 200 year plan when they marry... because that definitely makes it all okay and not creepy and controlling like it sounded a minute ago

[refugee]

5 hours ago, CyborgKin said:

I'm listening to Geoff's interview on Kevin Swanson's show ( http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=11507103516 ) in which he talks about his 200 year plan.  He says it has titles of books for his children to write at specific ages.  Wow that's controlling!  And it's also got numbers of children they'll have at specific ages and how many of those will be married by then.  And that's not all...

He's also got dates of death for everyone on there!  Only 'according to the insurance company', but still...  Anyhow, Geoff has his own death down for 2038.  By which point his daughters will be into their fifties.

 

Also he says that before he was saved from being a full blown Marxist, he'd "never been in a church, per se".  I guess that "per se" is there to weasel out of any church-going that doesn't meet his current standards, so it doesn't really count

I know I've read about this somewhere, someone who went through his history and debunked most of his testimony. I am very fuzzy-minded today, but I seem to recall that he was never a Marxist, but was heavily involved in the abusive, controlling Shepherding movement.

[hoipolloi]

1 hour ago, refugee said:

I know I've read about this somewhere, someone who went through his history and debunked most of his testimony. I am very fuzzy-minded today, but I seem to recall that he was never a Marxist, but was heavily involved in the abusive, controlling Shepherding movement.

The blog Under Much Grace has a lot on Botkin's antecedents.

Note: the blogger at Under Much Grace used to participate on FJ until she was widely & justifiably slammed for various homophobic stupidities. 

[CyborgKin]

Yeah I've been reading those too, and I'm going down the GCx rabbithole to see what all that was about.

[fundiefan]

On ‎5‎/‎9‎/‎2016 at 11:20 AM, Dreadcrumbs said:

These girls wouldn't last a day in my mother's shoes. Not even on an easy day. 

They wouldn't last a day in the shoes of the women who lived before the Women's Suffrage Movement. Those Pilgrim women they proclaim as perfect feminity? They were anything but 'feminine' as they crossed oceans, built homes, killed for food, dug pits and graves and trenches, fought, helped build a new country, etc. The raising of their offspring was pretty much give birth, nurse, wean, and they're on their own. Babies weren't coddled, kids were part of the labor force, and married off in financial and other 'deals'...all things people with common sense know and understand.

Which, of course, is why the Botkinettes do not understand. Their heads would explode if they allowed themselves even the tiniest bit of reality into their lives.

[CloakNDagger]

On 5/11/2016 at 4:56 PM, fundiefan said:

They wouldn't last a day in the shoes of the women who lived before the Women's Suffrage Movement. Those Pilgrim women they proclaim as perfect feminity? They were anything but 'feminine' as they crossed oceans, built homes, killed for food, dug pits and graves and trenches, fought, helped build a new country, etc. The raising of their offspring was pretty much give birth, nurse, wean, and they're on their own. Babies weren't coddled, kids were part of the labor force, and married off in financial and other 'deals'...all things people with common sense know and understand.

Which, of course, is why the Botkinettes do not understand. Their heads would explode if they allowed themselves even the tiniest bit of reality into their lives.

That's actually quite an unfair and untrue assertion. I happen to think that those girls would do JUST FINE despite whatever you think about their belief system.

[CyborgKin]

2 hours ago, CloakNDagger said:

That's actually quite an unfair and untrue assertion. I happen to think that those girls would do JUST FINE despite whatever you think about their belief system.

I think it's their being raised in a life of comparative ease (compared to the pioneers), not their beliefs, that we're saying would cause them to flounder in that environment.  If they'd been raised in that environment, that would be a different matter, and their beliefs would be different due to different experiences and circumstances.

[Grimalkin]

9 hours ago, CloakNDagger said:

That's actually quite an unfair and untrue assertion. I happen to think that those girls would do JUST FINE despite whatever you think about their belief system.

        I don't know why it's unfair to say that. They seem to have some romantic idealization of what pioneer life was like. To me they do seem coddled and spoiled with little understanding of real life. I am not botherd by that fact, but it's laughable to hear them wax poetic about pioneer life especially at thier age.

        Honestly, why would the get married? They seem to have a nice life,  doing what they want, traveling, speaking engagements, little responsibility.

[nokidsmom]

On 5/11/2016 at 2:43 AM, CyborgKin said:

And no one has any chance of ever separaring them from their father while he lives.

I 100% agree with this.

[CloakNDagger]

2 hours ago, Grimalkin said:

        I don't know why it's unfair to say that. They seem to have some romantic idealization of what pioneer life was like. To me they do seem coddled and spoiled with little understanding of real life. I am not botherd by that fact, but it's laughable to hear them wax poetic about pioneer life especially at thier age.

        Honestly, why would the get married? They seem to have a nice life,  doing what they want, traveling, speaking engagements, little responsibility.

I totally disagree. They may couch their beliefs about pioneer life in deliberately romantic terms, but they are not stupid, nor ignorant about real hardships. I think they would very much like to get married, too, but maybe the right guys aren't asking and their beliefs, much as mine did, keep them from broadening their horizons. I personally feel rather bad for them.

[refugee]

3 hours ago, Grimalkin said:

        I don't know why it's unfair to say that. They seem to have some romantic idealization of what pioneer life was like. To me they do seem coddled and spoiled with little understanding of real life. I am not botherd by that fact, but it's laughable to hear them wax poetic about pioneer life especially at thier age.

        Honestly, why would the get married? They seem to have a nice life,  doing what they want, traveling, speaking engagements, little responsibility.

You just reminded me of that show where they put several families out in the boonies and had them live 1800s settlers' lives. I don't remember the name of the show. I think it was on public broadcasting. It really opened my eyes to some realities about homesteading and truly living off the grid.

I think living off the grid is probably a lot easier if you have a lot of money to start with, so that you can get things set up right, and then pursue sustainability from there. I've never done it, so I'm talking from complete ignorance, of course... I've never roughed it for more than three weeks at a time, and even then, we carried a lot of luxuries with us (if it fit in a backpack, that is) that someone truly trying to be "off the grid" might not have.

I don't know whether or not they'd like to get married, but I can see them ending like the old maid sisters you see sometimes in literature, rattling around the family home after patriarchal "Father" dies, living in the reflection of his faded glory.

I've seen them in Agatha Christie, and the Hamish MacBeth mystery series (can't think of the author), and one of the Miss Read series (I think Miss Read had spinster sister characters in her village, could be mixing up books though. ETA YES! Yes, I remember, except in the Miss Read books it was three sisters!) -- "Miss Read" is the author's penname, about life in village England starting in the 1950s or so, and maybe the Mitford books and a few others I can't bring to mind right now. Oh! The sisters in The Waltons! How could I forget those two with "Papa's Recipe"?

Apparently it's not such a novel situation, to have become a fixture in various works of literature.

Perhaps that will bring them some comfort. Perhaps not.

[Grimalkin]

@refugee I think I saw one or two of those! 

       @CloakNDagger if they choose to leave home, I think they could adjust to life apart from thier family. I don't see them living of the grid and thriving. As far as marriage goes, I am sure they want to....one day. My point was they don't seem motivated maybe? It's not a criticism of them.  They seem content and comfortable so why change it? They don't look after a million kids, and seem to have a bit of freedom in a way where they can do what they like as far as persuing interests and hobbies. They live in a wealthy family that can support them too.   They could afford to be picky more than most fundie women.    

[Grimalkin]

I wanted to add that they are attractive women who are smart and charming. Certainly they have had many suitors. More than most even. What would be the right man? Do you see them living in an RV with a dozen kids if the man was "the right one"? This is an honest question.

       I realize we probably won't agree on them. I am happy with exchanging points of view, and hope I don't seem like I am trying to start an argument.