Oh hey, what exciting news, the Duggars are going to have child # 20 – that is, Michelle Duggar is pregnant with child # 20. Quiverfull strikes another blow for theocracy.
The Quiverfull movement places emphasis on the importance of women submitting to their husbands and fathers, and is often recognized as a backlash to the gains made in women’s rights by the feminist movement. It is an anti-feminist backlash that holds that gender equality is contrary to God’s law and that women’s highest calling is as wives and “prolific” mothers. In line with other fundamentalist Christians, they believe a woman’s place is in the home, breeding children and serving her husband.
The movement embraces misogyny as God’s law. Women are reduced to breeders. Children reduced to metaphorical cannon fodder in to be brainwashed and sent out as cultural warriors, fighting for Christian dominion over America.
Yes yes yes, but let’s don’t be a party-pooper – they’re going to have another baaaaaaaybeeeeeeeeeee for Americans to watch on tv. Isn’t that cute?
Jesus. I had no idea that the Duggars were part of the Quiverfull movement–I just thought they were lunatics.
Are they just going to keep popping out babies until Michelle Duggar is dead?
Well, they say they’re going to have “as many children as God allows them to have”* which I guess means it’s a three-way race between menopause, death, and serious complications resulting in infertility.
*I notice that this philosophy never seems to apply to other areas of life. Fundamentalist Christians never talk about “having as many drinks as God allows them to have” or “working as many hours as God allows them to work”. In these areas they recognize that at some point they need to set limits for themselves and practice moderation, but all that magically goes out the window when it comes to procreation.
Yes the keep the QF quiet for the tv audience, but they are all right. My QF friends are all over them!
I’m going to be noble and not make any “clown car” comments.
Steve
Yes.
Deadpan aside, I wonder if these people know, or even care, about how biologically *costly* it is for a woman to have a child, not to mention the costs to the child when the mother herself is not in a state of optimal health. I mean, QF is clearly misogynistic, so I guess the first bit is a stupid question, but you’d think they’d at least “think of the children”, which is trotted out at every opportunity against such immoral behavior as gay marriage. (Because clearly, gay marriage is much more harmful to children than a mother used as a baby oven and 19 other siblings.)
Too late. Already loling. XD
If I wasn’t going to hell before…XD
Idiocracy: the future is arriving.
Plus, she thinks it’s going to be fine this time because she’s going to take better care of herself. Oh, *that’s* why women’s pregnancies go poorly sometimes – they just don’t eat properly or get enough rest!
*headdesk*
This kind of thing is precisely why I’m irritated by the default general setting of “respect” for all personal choices, no matter how ultra-conservative or otherwise damaging. Atheists rightly complain about unearned respect for ethically horrific religious practices. But I see this “respect” as a wider phenomenon, an unintended consequence of liberal and feminist rhetoric. Women (or individuals generally) have the right to make their own choices, and second-guessing their choices is often smug and presumptuous…so, a good feminist or a good liberal respects all their choices. Except, wait: the first does NOT follow from the second.
I do not respect Michelle Duggar’s choices, or her rationale for them.
Don’t need to respect the choice, or the rationale behind it.
Do need to respect the right for people to make stupid choices, to the extent that they don’t harm others.
The question is, how are the Duggars’ stupid choices affecting others.
How do they afford to raise a family like that?
Don’t sweat it, Michelle says overpopulation is a myth this week( no, I don’t watch it, they make my head hurt, but someone in my family does;I can’t roll my eyes any harder wthout them actually falling out.)
As a preemie, I’m just… gah! RAGE! With all the problems they had with Nineteen, and Michelle Duggar’s age, and what we know about how pre-term birth can fuck a kid up — it’s not worth the risk!
20 kids … good chance one will be gay ….
Yes:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2120218&page=1
30 000 in the QM and increasing, especially in the US and Australia. It was a bit surreal to read the stories of abusive relationships in the No longer Quivering blog and realise that so many of the women had huge numbers of children with their abusive asshole husbands. I have very limited understanding and compassion for these women and the criminally lunatic choices they make for themselves and their children.
A woman in somalia or afghanistan who is treated as a broodmare is caught up in a nightmare situation not of her making and really cannot escape but all these women in the US and elsewhere so enthusiastically embracing the patriachy really deserve all the shit they get. My cold, callous opinion but here it is.
Actually I really hope that none of the duggar kids are gay- can you imagine how tortured that child will be growing up in such an environment?
In somewhat related news, SBS report on the Obedient Wifes CLub
*prays that it doesn’t get embedded*
mirax
Please read up a bit on the psychology of abuse. The thing is that the victims of abuse come to think that it’s not abuse but the right thing to do.
They deserve what they’re getting, it’s not the abusers fault at all. A standard sentence of abused women is “It’s really not his fault, he’s a good man, I shouldn’t have…”
And those women have been in this since childhood. You think that it’s bad to indoctrinate children and scare them with hell?
Remember, they grow up one day with nobody there to tell them that’s bullshit.They had their will broken, they have been scared to hell, literally, they have never experienced the unconditional love children should get from their parents.
Do you really find it hard to have some compassion with them?.
@Gilliel — You just said what I wanted to say.
@Mirax — You really think these monsters aren’t also abusing the women? D’you know what it’s like when someone has complete control over your life? No? Then STFU.
Proof that God admires termites and wants us to be like them!
Being the product of a Christian home and a Christian boarding schol, and knowing how perverse the whole process of bringing up children “in the fear and nurture of the Lord” can really be, the Quiverfull movement seems positively diabolical. They’ve really stood Philip Larkin on his head:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do,
becomes
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They certainly mean to, and they do.
Religion keeps showing its less than salubrious face, and it is becoming more and more (shall we say?) strident about it.
Didn’t Michelle have preeclampsia in her last pregnancy?
Despite my thoughts of “these people are insane” I truly hope that she doesn’t die from this. All those kids without a mother, it’d be terrible…
And no matter the outcome some at risk women (or their families) are going to look at Mrs. Duggers example and be inspired to go through with risky pregnancies.
Where is Discovery/TLC/Animal Planet going to stop?
With the Duggars and Sister Wives we have both Quiverfull and fundie Mormon polygamy being portrayed entirely uncritically as feelgood family-values stuff. What next? A fun little show called Spare the Rod, in which Michael and Debi Pearl happily beat the shit out of small children for the cameras?
But I suppose it’s a bit of a change from the more usual Discovery fare of credulous pseudo-docos about ghosts, demons and chupacabras.
Here in Canada, Discovery pretty well sticks to sciency stuff, plus such shows as Canada’s Worst Driver (which has definitely improved my driving skills), with only occasional deviations into such fare as Mike Rowe’s Dirtiest Jobs. It’s TLC which has such dreck as the Duggars and Long Island Medium. Are the two channels connected?
It’s part of the mormon faith. In fact one of the rules was that you can only have sex when the woman is ovulating.
There is an even worse aspect of the mormon church called the FLDS (Fundementalist church of Latter Day Saints) which still practices polygamy and is known for culturally acceptable incest and paedophilia. Not to mention sticking to the really racist bits of the book of Mormon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
It’s really quite a shocking thing to discover…
Although it would be hell for the kids, it would wonderfully ironic if all the Duggar children were gay.
‘Quiverful: the More, the Gayer’
Unfortunately those kids are in for hell anyway, especially the girls.
@DaveL
“having as many drinks as God allows them to have”
Never heard of the Liverfull movement?
@mirax: I have very limited understanding and compassion for these women and the criminally lunatic choices they make for themselves and their children.
What the others said at 19, 20, & 22 (comment numbers, not baby numbers).
Also: Imagine you are a Quiverful wife/mother. Your father transferred his *ownership* of you to your husband, probably when you were still a teenager. You have little formal education, and likely no employable skills other than housekeeping and childcare. Probably all of your friends (and even acquaintances) and most of your family are part of the QM (those that are not are likely disowned, or at least estranged). Your choices:
1) Stay
2) Strike out on your own, leaving everything and everyone you know. This means leaving your children without their mother, and with their (probably abusive father). It also means that you are disobeying the Ultimate Head of the patriarchy, and thereby risking your immortal soul.
3) Take the children and leave. If you can even find a place to go, and a way to get there, there remain the huge challenges of figuring out how to keep your bunch of kids, how to support yourself, etc. So you are now risking not just perdition at the end of your life, but abject poverty along the way.
So, mirax: In view of this, perhaps you could try to expand your understanding and extend some compassion to these women who, as a result of choices that certainly seemed like a good idea at the time, now find themselves in a horrible situation, for themselves and their children.
Read some of the stories on No longer Quivering – some of the women went to college; some did not grow up in the movement (how old is the movement anyway, did it exist 3 decades ago?); some stood aside and watched their kids being abused; some actually repudiated loving and supportive ‘normal’ families including in one case a ‘sinful’ lesbian mother to join this fucked up nonsense. So all these women are unquestionally victims? None of them perpetrated abuse of others more vulnerable than themselves? I shouldnt feel any anger against women who in many cases arrogantly, stupidly and callously CHOOSE this kind of life for themselves and enthusiastically evangelise it? This Duggar woman who has access to so much is a victim too? Fuck that.
Here in Singapore I have encountered this kind of christian women – NAR, Dominionists but not QM- and they are no victims.They have played active roles in trying to destroy women’s and gay rights movements. They are willing adherents of a loathsome and harmful way of life.
@98:
Heh! I’m joining. Or, I will once I feel like drinking again.
I presume the father must have a very good job to pay for all those children? He must also pay a lot of tax to help fund all the services his children will need?
Rorschach,
Yeah the OBC – another extremist group where women are enthusiastic and self-selecting members. What kind of women? Shockingly, educated and financially independent women who like tellng other women how to suck up to the patriachy.
The OBC is a reincarnation of the 1980’s Al-arqam sect (peculiar to Malaysia and Singapore) where the biggest thing going was satisfying the insatiable sex drives of its male adherents. We had one of the worst case of child sex abuse with one of these about 15 years back. A self-styled preacher who collected 10 wives (who included university graduates who worked to support the man and huge family of over 30 kids) and ended up raping and impregnating some of the kids. Only the kids were victims, the women were as culpable as the man but never prosecuted.
The father has a prosperous car dealership or something like that. Lots of QF people aren’t prosperous though, of course, so they get dire poverty along with the rest of the mess.
It’s a good point about The “Learning” Channel. Why the hell is it portraying theocratic patriarchy and deranged procreation as a good thing?
“The Learning Channel” officially changed their name to just “TLC” a few years back. Around my house we took to calling it “The Lurid Channel”
This is a tough question. Mirax’s critics make a good point, but his responses are not wrong, too.
It all comes down to culpability for our own choices. Some have far fewer choices than others.
So the bottom line: Do not “celebrate” this culture…it is toxic and must be criticized/opposed/slammed/made fun of. Loudly and constantly. And there must continue to be support for those women who do choose to escape.
The kids all have J-names. My sister and I got together and suggested Just Fucking Stop Already. (Or Just Stop Fucking Already; that works too.)
Sorry but I wrote about the Singapore abuse case from memory and on looking it up, found that I had some things wrong.
Yeah the muslim preacher had 10 wives all right but had 64 children ranging from age 19 mths to the oldest being a mere 16. He raped 6 of his biological daughters repeatedly and impregnated two of them. Three of his wives were prosecuted and found guilty of abetting him because they coerced their daughters into the incestual rape. The case was actually fairly recent – it concluded in 2006 with the man getting 32 years in the slammer and one of the wives getting 9 years. Obedient wives indeed.
@ lordshipmayhem, #26 — Discovery Communications owns Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Planet Green and several other channels in the US. They’ve gone heavily into the reality-style programming, mainly because it garners them bigger numbers in viewership.
Discovery Channel Canada is owned by CTV, so they’re totally unconnected to Discovery US as a company. There is some crossover branding, but the audience for Discovery Canada is more interested in the science and practical “how it’s done” kind of programming.
Mythbusters remains the only thing in the entire Discovery Communications conglomerate that’s worth watching.
Bite your tongue! These kids will be raised as good, gawd-fearing Xians who would never make such a choice and even if one does, he’ll have 19 siblings working hard to pray the gay away.
/snark.
I’m proud to say that I’ve never watched an episode of this or any of the other clown car (ha!) shows, but if I ever saw Jim Bob Duggar in person, I’d probably kick him in the balls on general principles. Stop the problem at the souce.
I say we set up an, or support any established, underground railroad to smuggle birth control into, and women and children out of, Quiverfull communities.
As with many polygamous Mormon families the economics only works because the state provides welfare and benefits to the ostensibly independent women with children who make up the bulk of these overextended families. I once had an interesting discussion with a man who was vehemently against the state subsidizing “Mexicans, and welfare queens” but saw no contradiction in the state subsidizing his second and third wife as they took care of his tenth, eleventh, and twelfth kids.
.
mirax
You’re citing anectodata as opposed to scientific studies, and you’re extending those cases to all women in those relationships. Yes, you say that some women have a college education, some women joined freely.
Sadly, having a good education and not been indoctrinated is only a factor that lessens your risk, not factors that make you imune. You can find plenty of testimonies from victims on this blog and others where they describe how they, strong independent women fell victim to abusive partners and the difficulties they had in getting out.
Here are some studies and abstracts:
50 obstacles to leaving or why women stay
20 years of research on abuse
How women experience battering
But to come to the point:
Do you notice how you choose to talk about the guilt and blame and responsibility of the women, how they fail to leave, fail to protect, how it’s their fault they’re ending up in abusive relationships, while you don’t talk about how the men fail to not abuse, not to rape, not to batter, not to abuse their wives as broodmares?
All those kids without a mother, it’d be terrible
He’ll just get another brood mare. Uteri are fungible.
Most likely one of the older daughters would take on the mother’s role. They’ve all been childcare slaves since they were old enough to change a baby’s nappy anyway. How else do you think a woman can care for 20 children?
Now I have a good answer for when people ask shy I’m not having kids – the Duggars already had my quota.
Do you notice how you choose to talk about the guilt and blame and responsibility of the women, how they fail to leave, fail to protect, how it’s their fault they’re ending up in abusive relationships, while you don’t talk about how the men fail to not abuse, not to rape, not to batter, not to abuse their wives as broodmares?
I, too, would like an answer to that — I wonder why people blame the victim?
Not shy – “why.”
Victim-blaming aside, I do wonder why women who are *not* born into movements like QF, who are educated and come from more liberal backgrounds, would join such patriarchal movements in the first place. My immediate assumption would be that such women are in the minority, but even then, why?
Are they for whatever reason less able or willing to cope with the competitiveness of modern life and want something simpler, or is there something else at work? Do these conversions tend to happen right after traumatic life events? Or does it have to do with their significant others?
I’d be really interested in reading up about that, if anyone had any material.
@Gilliel,Theobromine
Thank you for the links and I understand a lot of what you are saying. I do not go in for woman or victim bashing and that is not what I was trying to do here and that is not my history here or anywhere else on the net or in real life.
I am not talking about the men who run these movements as I assumed that what I think of them – them being monstrous abusive fucktards -was a given. This is B&W afterall and I am a long time fan of Ophelia. I do want to retract my harsh words in the last bit of my first post. Yes, the women who grow up in such movements and have been isolated from the rest of society do deserve a lot of sympathy*. I am just not convinced about the women who choose to join and promote these movements.
I have great difficulty understanding that none of these women share any blame or responsbility, especially when abuse of children takes place as it inevitably does in such patriachal movements. My specific point here is that these movements and the abuse therein cannot exist without the active involvement of these women. Sometimes, as in the polygamy cases, many more women than men. These women are enforcers of the patriachy. Like Mrs Duggar, who wont allow her daughters to go to college though her sons may do so.
*But I wonder. If you explain away the women’s acts of abuse or complicity in abuse because they grew up in such movements and were brainwashed from a young age, does that understanding extend to men who grow up in these movements too, say Warren Jeff?
mirax
That’s not what anybody said, is it?
I think that people here hold women like Debbie Pearl in deep contempt.
You say you read the stories on “No longer quivering”, so you see that those women finally took the responsibility and made a move.
But you will also know from their stories what they were thinking at the time when the abuse happened.
The psychology of abuse is complex, and I’m only a layperson in it. Most of what I’m telling now comes from having read the testimonies of
Most abusive relationships don’t start out as such. They don’t start with a good trashing. They start out with somebody you like and love. The abuse usually grows gradually until you cannot fight back anymore. Those women are mostly broken before any abuse of their children even starts.
Abusers give their victims fake power. And the religiously enabled abuse is especially good at that. If you read their propaganda, the woman has the power to make it right. Doesn’t that sound wonderful and enabling? You can have a fulfilling, perfect relationship and life, it is within your power, all you have to do is X.
Of course, we know it’s wrong, they don’t have any power, they only have blame, but at the beginning, it will look promising, especially when your background might not be a happy suburb house with a dog on the lawn.
Then there’s something called “the lost investment fallacy”. You know, like people who pay another 500$ for car repairs of an old broken car because they have already paid so much and the money would be lost if they didn’t invest even more.
Just one more time and it will be right. If I don’t do it this time, the last time would have been wasted.
Last, but not least, you can be a victim and an abuser at the same time. We know that coming from an abusive family greatly hightens the risk of becoming an abusive parent.
Well, lots of those things have been covered above. Women can be horrible misogynists just like men. Women can be rape-apologists. Women can and do actively support patriarchy. Like Duggar, like Pearl, Bachman and Palin.
People have a horrible tendency to kick those below instead of charging those above. The reasons are the same why the American working and middle class largely rejects public healthcare and higher taxes on the rich. They actively help the conservatives. Would you say that somebody who dies because of lack of healthcare isn’t victim of the system because he voted Republican?
Cultural relativism run amok beyond it’s clinical purpose combined with white religious privilege, and a side show barkers ethics.
The privileged world we live in does create the metaphorical equivalent of the deal with the devil. You can improve your station and live better than the rest of those mooks…all you have to do is turn on them.