Josh, Anna and the Ms 15: now with Mason

[Dandruff]

For whatever reason, Anna does seem to want as many children as the Lord will provide.  She married into a family with at least 15 children (as of the time she married) on a TV show emphasizing their large, growing number of children.  I believe their marriage vows included not preventing.  She has said she has "baby fever".  To me, this seems completely consistent with QF.

OTOH, I never had the sense that Josh wanted a huge family.  I don't think he was totally happy being the eldest brother in a growing family that was struggling to make ends meet while also choosing to follow Gothard.  I think he was encouraged to marry - to get him away from his sisters, to be able to have approved relations, and because the Duggars and TLC would both benefit greatly due to higher show ratings.  I believe Josh did care about Anna, and still does, but he had a very limited set of young ladies to choose from at that time.

[JDuggs]

5 hours ago, justoneoftwo said:

All evidence we have seen actually points to Anna being the more QF.  She is the one who is hinting at more kids all the time.

I haven’t seen Anna hint at more kids since the Ashley Madison scandal. She did when she thought she had the perfect fundy family. I realize that Mason has been born since then, and Anna is probably very happy to have him, but I’m not sure if she thinks the best thing is for them to have a double digit number of kids now. I think that getting pregnant with Mason was a symbol that there marriage has been healed, but possibly not an indication that they want an unlimited number of kids. I hope that she and Josh have been able to have some totally honest discussions about what makes them happy and how they can achieve that together. I don’t think that Josh wants a boatload of kids and Anna needs to realize that if she wants this marriage to work, she’ll have to accept that limiting their family size might be part of it.

[CorruptionInc.]

I'm not entirely sure that Josh does care about Anna. I'm assuming he cares a small amount but he is more sorry about getting caught in my opinion.

[Nikedagain?]

5 minutes ago, JDuggs said:

haven’t seen Anna hint at more kids since the Ashley Madison scandal.

But we really haven't seen that much of Anna since that time. At least not in a context that it would be discussed. 

[JDuggs]

28 minutes ago, Nikedagain? said:

But we really haven't seen that much of Anna since that time. At least not in a context that it would be discussed. 

That’s why I don’t think we can assume that Anna still wants a bunch of babies. It might be more important now to her to keep Josh happy.

[singsingsing]

51 minutes ago, CorruptionInc. said:

I'm not entirely sure that Josh does care about Anna. I'm assuming he cares a small amount but he is more sorry about getting caught in my opinion.

I'm not entirely sure, either. But I'm equally unsure that he doesn't care very deeply and love her very much. *Shrug* That's the problem with trying to really evaluate Josh and Anna and their relationship - at this point, they're basically an enigma. That doesn't mean it's wrong to speculate, but we do end up kind of spinning our wheels because there's just not much to go on.

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

41 minutes ago, singsingsing said:

...at this point, they're basically an enigma. That doesn't mean it's wrong to speculate, but we do end up kind of spinning our wheels because there's just not much to go on.

I find that true of some of the other Duggars we discuss as well. For example, why is Jana still living with her parents? (Because they want her to...) I guess I mean, why hasn't Jana married?

When we don't have much data to go on, it can become more about our hopes and dreams than about what any Duggar might want. Like a Rorschach test or looking for pictures in the clouds, there really isn't anything there, but we look for it anyway.

[Lurky]

8 hours ago, WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo? said:

When we don't have much data to go on, it can become more about our hopes and dreams than about what any Duggar might want. Like a Rorschach test or looking for pictures in the clouds, there really isn't anything there, but we look for it anyway.

That's pretty much what @Coy Koi said abut Jill Rodrigues the other day:

Quote

You just made me realize that Jill is kind of a Rorschach test. Her antics are so over-the-top and yet somehow strangely relatable (sometimes) that we all probably kind of project our own issues onto her. A team of highly-skilled psychologists could probably design some sort of assessment where we view a bunch of Jill media and then give our feedback on it, and it would probably tell those experts a whole lot about us as individuals. They might still not know what exactly to make of that lunatic, Jill, but they'd have us all figured out.

 

[Cleopatra7]

13 hours ago, CorruptionInc. said:

I'm not entirely sure that Josh does care about Anna. I'm assuming he cares a small amount but he is more sorry about getting caught in my opinion.

I think Josh cares about her as the mother of his children, but still wants to have sex with women who aren’t her. This is why it was common in the past for men of a certain income level to have mistresses and visit prostitutes, because they claimed that they respected their wives too much to do all the freaky things they did with these “disreputable women” and they needed a “respectable woman” to raise legitimate children and keep house for them. 

[AprilQuilt]

3 hours ago, Lurky said:

That's pretty much what @Coy Koi said abut Jill Rodrigues the other day:

 

and i haven't been able to forget it! I'm sure it's true of most reality TV that gives you so-much information but with enough gaps for you to fill in yourself, but it did make me think. 

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

5 hours ago, Lurky said:

That's pretty much what @Coy Koi said abut Jill Rodrigues the other day:

In the past, I've thought about the Duggars as blank paper where we FJers draw our own ideas, but someone mentioned ink blot tests somewhere (a Duggar thread maybe) so that came to mind. I guess ideas flow all around FJ!  

And I wonder what my Jill Rod test would say about me... 

[KelseyAnn]

On 10/25/2017 at 3:25 AM, Lurky said:

Of course they are, but where's the evidence Josh is doing this?  Or more than everyone else in the QF families we discuss?  If it's being QF that's abusive, then it's weird to single Anna out as a "victimizer".

 

1

Ummm...pretty sure that exposing your children to a religion that believes women are inferior and hell is just around the corner for those who sin is emotional abuse....

[singsingsing]

33 minutes ago, KelseyAnn said:

Ummm...pretty sure that exposing your children to a religion that believes women are inferior and hell is just around the corner for those who sin is emotional abuse....

But the same could be said for every single one of these people, husbands and wives. Josh isn't unique in that regard at all. 

[chaotic life]

Josh is a proven sex addict who has been well established to be the pedoohile variety. Even serious, evidence based recovery programs have insanely low recovery rates and the pedophile variety even less so.

That said, no education, no job skills and a house full of young children makes leaving terrifying. Sometimes you are too paralyzed to go....and other times you don’t see the threat as critical enough to not stay long enough to build a plan and make a safe exit. And exit plans generally require concealment while they are being put into place. Mine took seven years but most of my friends were not nearly as fooled by the facade as he was.

[singsingsing]

28 minutes ago, chaotic life said:

Josh is a proven sex addict who has been well established to be the pedoohile variety. Even serious, evidence based recovery programs have insanely low recovery rates and the pedophile variety even less so.

Actually, I don't think it's accurate to say Josh is a proven sex addict, or that he's been 'well established to be the pedophile variety'. By his own admission, he was 'addicted to pornography', which may or may not be true. And what he did at the age of 14 does not constitute pedophilia. When he was trolling the internet for hookups, he was obviously searching for adult women, and his stated sexual interests were very mainstream and vanilla. 

That doesn't make him any less of an asshole, creep, and abuser, though.

 

[snarkykitty]

On 9/18/2017 at 10:17 AM, sawasdee said:

We had one priest who could hold a non sermon Mass in less than 20 minutes. For some reason, those he celebrated were very popular .

No homily?

[chaotic life]

Josh was seeking prostitutes and no strings attached hook ups. By definition that is sex addiction. And regardless of how the Duggars want to normalize molesting his sisters not even in those insular and messed up environments is molesting little girls normal behavior. It’s pediphiliac behavior.

It’s way more then more porn. It’s classic behaviors.

[singsingsing]

1 hour ago, chaotic life said:

Josh was seeking prostitutes and no strings attached hook ups. By definition that is sex addiction. And regardless of how the Duggars want to normalize molesting his sisters not even in those insular and messed up environments is molesting little girls normal behavior. It’s pediphiliac behavior.

It’s way more then more porn. It’s classic behaviors.

Seeking prostitutes and no strings attached hookups is not by definition a sex addiction. And since when do we have any evidence whatsoever that Josh was seeking prostitutes? Did I miss something?

Josh's actions do not qualify as pedophilia. Full stop. We don't know if there was sexual attraction involved in his crimes, and regardless, he was too young at the time to meet the criteria for pedophilia.

Look, Josh Duggar is probably one of my least favourite humans on earth, and for all I know he's even more terrible than he seems - but based on what we know, he can't be classified as a sex addict or a pedophile. It's just simply inaccurate to label him as either of those things.

[JDuggs]

There is no evidence that Josh had sex with any woman outside of his marriage. Danica Dillon’s claims that she had sex with Josh were discredited. No other woman has come forward with a claim. Josh admitted that he was unfaithful, but was not specific as to how he was unfaithful. Was it just seeking out extramarital sex, masturbating to porn, or actually having sex? Maybe he kissed and groped women or paid for lap dances. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I don’t think he’s a pedophile and I don’t believe that his daughters or any other girls are in danger of being molested by Josh. I think that Josh molested his sisters because he had sexual urges and they were accessible, not because he’s necessarily attracted to young girls. If he had a girlfriend at the time, I would think that he would have been trying to fulfill his sexual urges with her, not his sisters. I do believe that a person with basically no sexual self-control has huge issues, but doesn’t make him a pedophile.

[singsingsing]

59 minutes ago, JDuggs said:

There is no evidence that Josh had sex with any woman outside of his marriage. Danica Dillon’s claims that she had sex with Josh were discredited. No other woman has come forward with a claim. Josh admitted that he was unfaithful, but was not specific as to how he was unfaithful.

Yeah, basically this. I'm not sure how Josh having accounts on Ashley Madison and OKCupid and admitting that he was 'addicted to pornography' and 'became unfaithful' to his wife has morphed into him being a sex addict regularly hooking up with prostitutes. 

[Carm_88]

What Josh did do is bad enough. We don't need to add anything to that. 

[Glasgowghirl]

6 minutes ago, Carm_88 said:

What Josh did do is bad enough. We don't need to add anything to that. 

Amen, not condoning what he did to his sisters and baby sitter but he was still classed as a minor when he commented those offences so can't be labelled as a paedophile. Same with being on dating sites while married, it's not nice but we don't actually know if he physically cheated on Anna or just spoke to women. Unless he decides to come clean about the extent of his cheating we will never know if he was an actual sex addict and given how Josh was raised he probably thinks looking at porn every now and then is enough to be classed as an adiction. 

[JDuggs]

I have a feeling that Josh’s porn habits were a big issue. I think that Josh probably preferred masturbating to porn rather than having sex with his wife. I bet it happened daily and he was very often “too tired” to have sex with Anna. The bonus for Josh was that it limited his number of blessings. When a husband prefers porn to his wife, it’s an issue.

[snickers34]

On 10/26/2017 at 8:42 AM, WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo? said:

In the past, I've thought about the Duggars as blank paper where we FJers draw our own ideas

But surely Jana is still single because she wants to go to college and become an architect/engineer/etc and doesn't want to pop out 15 kids and also agreed to a pact with John to leave the cult together and become a feminist! 

[Smoochie]

On 10/29/2017 at 7:07 PM, snarkykitty said:

No homily?

When I used to go to church, our priest said if he couldn't get his point across in 10 minutes or less, then he clearly didn't understand the point he was trying to make!  He had a great sense of humour too, so that certainly helped out.  He's since retired, but, yup, his masses were always full!