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Status and age of women in marriage - TTW, Biblical Gender Roles and PP


Katzchen24

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Trigger warning for abuse of women and girls.

This has been a horrible week. I've seen a number of fundie blogs and videos that address when women should be married, and what her status is in that marriage. I think some of these may have already been discussed, but I wanted to draw them together. I've seen some commentary videos about them on YouTube (Mr Atheist, and Suris the Sceptic who addressed these) as well.

The first one was the Transformed Wife's video (posted on her blog 10 June 2019) on whether rape in marriage is a thing. She laughs, and says of course it isn't. She goes on a long and wobbly defence of something that is clearly rape, and the whole message is that women are literally just vessels for men to use as they like.

The second was a video by Steven Anderson on consent and rape in marriage.  I can't remember when it was posted (I think it was fairly recently but refuse to hunt amongst the sewage for it again). As far as he is concerned, saying 'I do' is consent for the rest of your life as far as a married woman is concerned. I've never felt sorry for Zoo until I saw this. Regardless of the terrible things she does and believes, she has almost certainly been a victim of assault in her marriage. I also feel so terribly sorry for the Anderson daughters, and what they are being brought up to expect from their eventual husbands. He thinks women are essentially vessels for men to use as they like.

The final straw was a recent blog post from Biblical Gender Roles (on the BGR blog site posted 4 June 2019). This one really concerns me. This blogger posted a terrible piece about the benefits of marrying off girls as soon as they begin to menstruate. I get the feeling that TTW and PP would want what BGR wants as it feeds naturally into their world view of women in marriage. To me it appears to be a promotion of grooming and sexually assaulting minors. BGR wants to make it so that girls are essentially vessels for men to use as they like, and to be gotten hold of young enough to accept it. Surely this kind of writing is illegal? 

I know I tend to think of these fundies in isolation, and forget that they actually form part of a bigger pattern of abuse and misogyny. Reading these three together reinforces the idea that they don't exist in isolation, and someone who reads one blogger might well listen to another as well. It's horrifying.

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I read the Biblical Gender Roles blog post and EWWWW. That dude is a fucking creep. Men like him make me want to fight my ass off to raise the legal age of marriage in all states to 18.

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BGR shut down his FB page at some point this week.  It was one of the pages I checked daily to troll...er, provide a differing opinion.

Yesterday I went to this blog post and wanted to barf all over again.

https://biblicalgenderroles.com/2019/06/23/men-should-be-attracted-to-loud-and-opinionated-women/

Spoiler

Why Highly Intelligent and Educated Women are Not Attractive to Men

Most men want a wife that is teachable and moldable. A woman that will look up to them for both spiritual and worldly knowledge.  They want a woman to reverence them as the Scriptures call on women to do and they want their woman to respect them.  And a woman who thinks she knows more than her husband will have a much harder time respecting him, this is a simple fact of life.

And this desire in men is both God given. It is not a matter of sinful pride or of a man feeling intimidated by a woman.  It is a matter of him knowing what he wants in a woman and what his mission is in life.

The second reason highly intelligent and highly educated women are unattractive to most men is because intelligent and educated women, especially in our modern feminist culture, tend to be contentious with their husbands and they often shame their husbands.

I mean, of course each man is allowed to have his own personal preferences.  When we were married my ex husband always bragged about me and my job.  Also, my brother has outright said that he is attracted to intelligent women.  The most irksome part about this article is how BGR states that NO men are attracted to intelligent and/or highly accomplished women.  Grr.

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2 hours ago, Katzchen24 said:

BGR wants to make it so that girls are essentially vessels for men to use as they like, and to be gotten hold of young enough to accept it.

This sounds like Vaughan Olhman , a troglodytic wack nut who also advocated that people, especially women, marry young. As you'll see at that link, he came to FJ's attention several years ago when he was trying to organize a "retreat" in order to marry off young people.

After he got too much heat for his fuckwad notions, he took himself offline for the most part.

 

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2 hours ago, hollyfeller said:

BGR shut down his FB page at some point this week.  It was one of the pages I checked daily to troll...er, provide a differing opinion.

Yesterday I went to this blog post and wanted to barf all over again.

 

I've never gone to his FB page - the blog was enough for me and I didn't look at much! It would be nice to think FB had shut him down, but somehow I doubt it. 

9 minutes ago, hoipolloi said:

This sounds like Vaughan Olhman , a troglodytic wack nut who also advocated that people, especially women, marry young. As you'll see at that link, he came to FJ's attention several years ago when he was trying to organize a "retreat" in order to marry off young people.

After he got too much heat for his fuckwad notions, he took himself offline for the most part.

 

When did he go offline? Just interested because BGR is anonymous and it looks like he started blogging around April 2014.

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That post from BGR on marrying pubescent girls to adult men is one of the most repugnant things I’ve ever read. 

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4 hours ago, Katzchen24 said:

When did he go offline? Just interested because BGR is anonymous and it looks like he started blogging around April 2014.

Not long after that FJ discussion started.

When Olhman's bullshit started making the real news, he scuttled back into his cult world. The negative publicity caused the Salvation Army to cancel his cult's reservation of their facility in KS.

There's a lot in the FJ thread but this Homeschoolers Anonymous post has a good summary of what happened.

Edited by hoipolloi
Clarity
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I don't think BGR  (alias Larry Solomon because he doesn't have the guts to use his own name) is Vaughn Ohlman poking his head back up out of his underground sewer.  The writing style is too different.

The fucked up beliefs are definitely in the Ohlman and Lindvall camp though.

I'm glad he understands that he is not the Savior. 

https://biblicalgenderroles.com/about/

Yuck!

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10 hours ago, princessmahina said:

That post from BGR on marrying pubescent girls to adult men is one of the most repugnant things I’ve ever read. 

Didn't read BGR, but you don't have to dig deep into any of these male-dominant cults, i.e., anywhere in patriarchy/IFB/"touch not mind annointed/FLDS/Catholic church to find an obsessive interest, and incredibly frequent acting out/institutionalized sex abuse (very young marriage) re: pubescent girls and sex.  

Understand, of course, that sex abuse/molestation occurs everywhere, but, IMHO, patriarchal beliefs are a predisposing factor, which also is extremely invested in covering up those abuses and then excusing the exposed abusers.  

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17 hours ago, hollyfeller said:

I mean, of course each man is allowed to have his own personal preferences.  When we were married my ex husband always bragged about me and my job.  Also, my brother has outright said that he is attracted to intelligent women.  The most irksome part about this article is how BGR states that NO men are attracted to intelligent and/or highly accomplished women.  Grr.

Mr. No doesn't brag about my job but he definitely has said he prefers smart women like me.  My boyfriends before him didn't mind that I was smart and an honor student.   This business about guys not liking intelligent and accomplished women is so much BS.  If a guy makes a big deal about smart women, well, you know exactly what he is looking for.

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I am loud, opinionated and intelligent. Mr. Xtian thinks those qualities are rather sexy (and useful dealing w/his health issues).

 

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23 hours ago, hollyfeller said:

BGR shut down his FB page at some point this week.  It was one of the pages I checked daily to troll...er, provide a differing opinion.

Yesterday I went to this blog post and wanted to barf all over again.

https://biblicalgenderroles.com/2019/06/23/men-should-be-attracted-to-loud-and-opinionated-women/

  Hide contents

Why Highly Intelligent and Educated Women are Not Attractive to Men

Most men want a wife that is teachable and moldable. A woman that will look up to them for both spiritual and worldly knowledge.  They want a woman to reverence them as the Scriptures call on women to do and they want their woman to respect them.  And a woman who thinks she knows more than her husband will have a much harder time respecting him, this is a simple fact of life.

And this desire in men is both God given. It is not a matter of sinful pride or of a man feeling intimidated by a woman.  It is a matter of him knowing what he wants in a woman and what his mission is in life.

The second reason highly intelligent and highly educated women are unattractive to most men is because intelligent and educated women, especially in our modern feminist culture, tend to be contentious with their husbands and they often shame their husbands.

I mean, of course each man is allowed to have his own personal preferences.  When we were married my ex husband always bragged about me and my job.  Also, my brother has outright said that he is attracted to intelligent women.  The most irksome part about this article is how BGR states that NO men are attracted to intelligent and/or highly accomplished women.  Grr.

Mr. Briefly and I may have our problems and probably always will, but one of the first real compliments he gave me was that while he was attracted to my physically, he was not interested in unintelligent women, would never be, and that my intelligence is the most attractive thing to him.

I feel really bad for the women that get caught in that situation.  They may well be very smart.  But then have never been given the opportunity to use the brains they have, or to think for themselves.  They have no chance.

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16 minutes ago, Briefly said:

Mr. Briefly and I may have our problems and probably always will, but one of the first real compliments he gave me was that while he was attracted to my physically, he was not interested in unintelligent women, would never be, and that my intelligence is the most attractive thing to him.

I feel really bad for the women that get caught in that situation.  They may well be very smart.  But then have never been given the opportunity to use the brains they have, or to think for themselves.  They have no chance.

I’ve always assumed the more intelligent fundie wives have to be very careful in how they express their intelligence around their husbands. I bet a lot of them bite their lips when their husbands are completely wrong and they know it. They probably also don’t voice their differing opinions on things like politics or world events. I imagine they just nod and smile and keep it to themselves. I’ve always imagined Cassidy Bontrager to be like this with her husband, Josh. 

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I’m not a historian, but my friend is, and she says the average age for marriage during the European Middle Ages was around 25 years old, for both women and men. 

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4 hours ago, akinom said:

I’m not a historian, but my friend is, and she says the average age for marriage during the European Middle Ages was around 25 years old, for both women and men. 

Even if you look at stats in the US, the average age of marriage for men and women over the past 100 years was never under 18. It was mostly people in their 20s.

This link talks about marriage in the 1800s and the average age for women was never under 18. 

https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.html

Edited by JermajestyDuggar
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I will add though that European monarchs did seem to marry young for the first time. But they did not live lives like regular folks. Their marriages were usually some sort of political pact between countries and they wanted to get those kids producing heirs ASAP. They already had a home, money, and a future mapped out for them. So they could marry young. But the ordinary people didn’t have that luxury. So they had to wait longer to get married. 

Edited by JermajestyDuggar
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6 hours ago, akinom said:

I’m not a historian, but my friend is, and she says the average age for marriage during the European Middle Ages was around 25 years old, for both women and men. 

People in the Middle Ages reaches puberty much later than modern kids. The composer Hayden, for example, was an accomplished choirboy in his youth and was able to sing soprano until he was seventeen. He was even advised to castrate himself so he could continue his singing career, but didn’t go through with it, and embarked on a career as a freelance composer after his voice changed. In comparison, there was a long article in the NYT magazine a few years ago about how the early physical maturation of modern kids is a problem for choirs in Europe, as they are only able to get two or three years out of their boy sopranos before their voices change. Aristocratic kids would have had better diets than the rest of the population, and they probably went through puberty and were married earlier because of that. 

While it is true that the word teenager is relatively recent, it’s silly to think that people in the earlier periods wouldn’t have known that a thirteen year old is in a very different place than a thirty year old (the terms youth/maiden would have been the preferred words). Fundies who tout super early marriage really want to saddle young people with babies and adult responsibilities ASAP, so they’re too busy and tired to question things. 

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35 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

Fundies who tout super early marriage really want to saddle young people with babies and adult responsibilities ASAP, so they’re too busy and tired to question things. 

There was a book about how to run a Christian school that they made new teachers read when I worked at one. It had a section that the board and admins did not agree with that advocated teen marriage. But the reason was so that kids would not be "impure". Marry them at 16 and 14 or so and you were more likely to get it done before they held hands, kissed or (horrors!) had sex outside of marriage. The author advocated for Christian schools to allow married students and to have flexible credit arrangements for young women who then had babies as teens to graduate. 

The school I taught at did not allow married students. One year, a couple decided they wanted to get married the summer he graduated; she was going to be a senior in the fall. Both sets of parents were fine with it and one of the mothers told the administration that they felt it was better than them inevitably having premarital sex. The admins told them that she would have to leave the school. She chose to wait and graduate with her class. Then she and the boy broke up by Christmas and eventually married other people as young adults. Pretty sure the school saved them from a big mistake. 

That school did provide arrangements for two senior girls who got pregnant one spring to finish their coursework and graduate, but they did not allow them to come back to school or be at graduation. They also reexamined their choice to have zero sex education until the senior year. They added the standard puberty stuff in 5th and 6th grade and discussions of sex and abstinence by 7th grade. Not perfect, but better than not bringing up any of it until they are seniors. Of course, way too many parents held their kids out of it all. 

 Interestingly enough, their response to a pregnant student was better than the Catholic school I taught at later. A few years before I went there, they had kicked out a pregnant girl and she had to finish at public. 

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1 hour ago, Cleopatra7 said:

While it is true that the word teenager is relatively recent, it’s silly to think that people in the earlier periods wouldn’t have known that a thirteen year old is in a very different place than a thirty year old (the terms youth/maiden would have been the preferred words). 

Yeah, their arguments always reveal just how ignorant they are of history.

Working-class men needed someone who could really do the physically demanding labor on a farm (and women's cooking and laundry back then was incredibly physically demanding), as well someone who had the maturity to help run the household and its finances and obviously deal with the physical demands of pregnancy (an underdeveloped, emotionally unstable 13 year old wife bed-ridden for five months of her pregnancy ain't gonna help anyone on a farm struggling to get ready for winter). I wish these ass clowns would note that the current age of marriage for the Amish is 21-23 years old, not 15. There's a practical reason for that. 

I've always thought it was interesting that the average first age of marriage for American women dropped in the 1950s (age 20, versus age 22 in the 1890s), probably in part because of a change to industrial jobs and increased technology that made running a household less demanding.

If they ever bothered to crack a book, they'd see we have plenty of primary documents in the form of 18th and 19th century journals, newspapers, and novels that show women really weren't considered "marriageable" until at least 16. 

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I once read something by the late D. James Kennedy in which he bragged that the Christian school affiliated with his church should have X pregnant students based on enrollment, but they had none, because they taught abstinence!  I thought, “Yeah, and should you ever have one, you’d expel her so fast, her head would spin.”

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3 hours ago, louisa05 said:

Not perfect, but better than not bringing up any of it until they are seniors pregnant.  

Fixed it for ya! 

Also, abortion was legal and widely practiced in the US in most of the 1800s 

The surprising history of abortion in the United States

Quote

There was a time when abortion was simply part of life in the United States. People didn't scream about it in protest, and services were marketed openly.

 

Edited by Howl
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12 minutes ago, Howl said:

Fixed it for ya! 

Well, both. The teacher who was doing the senior class where sex was finally addressed (a "Bible" class, of course) had been saying for the two years I had been there that a lot of the kids told her they had had sex by the time the school got around to talking about it. And a lot of them also told her that their parents had told them absolutely nothing. 

Of course, they just taught abstinence. So no information about contraception was ever given to them at school. But prior to the two pregnancies in one senior class, a lot of those kids were getting all the way to senior year without any information from adults about even the basic biological facts about sex. 

When I taught at Catholic school, believe it or not,  they got basic information about contraception at school. And the school's insurance covered contraception (with a co-pay--pre ACA). Catholics in the U.S. don't pay a lot of attention to that whole anti-contraception thing. 

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21 minutes ago, louisa05 said:

The teacher who was doing the senior class where sex was finally addressed (a "Bible" class, of course) had been saying for the two years I had been there that a lot of the kids told her they had had sex by the time the school got around to talking about it.

Thank you for this clarification.  

People dealing with teenagers don't get that kids can make informed decisions with the right information and  vocabulary and self confidence to discuss sexual consent and boundaries with potential partners or have the vocabulary to discuss, again with sufficient self confidence, that they want to wait.  

20 minutes ago, louisa05 said:

Catholics in the U.S. don't pay a lot of attention to that whole anti-contraception thing. 

I find this intriguing! 

 

 

Edited by Howl
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I saw this a few days back and it was disturbing. This guy thinks that once a girl starts her menstrual cycles, she needs to be married off because he wants women to be in full control of men. He mentions having three daughters, three preteen and teenage daughters in the BGR article, yet he doesn't see anything wrong with marrying them off right now. I've been aware of girls as young as 8 and 9 starting their cycles, how young are these creeps willing to go? If they dare think yes, they are not only creeps, but pedophile creeps not allowed within a 1000 feet of a child ever. People like this need knocked down off their invisible pedestal of controlling creepdom because we aren't going to be decreasing the age you can legally marry. If anything, I expect they will keep increasing it until no one can marry until they reach legal adulthood. I hope his 3 daughters leave once they become adults and run far away from their disturbed asshole father. 

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