Not mine to keep, but mine to share
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.
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.