As long as we’re dropping in on the pregnancy-fetishists, let’s drop in on one of the top fetishists of them all, Michelle Duggar. What’s Michelle Duggar been up to lately you wonder? Well trying to get pregnant with kid #20 is one thing (even though she nearly died carrying kid #19 and had a miscarriage last year), and another is telling her daughters not to be slutty, aka teaching them about “modest dress.”
My daughters are the second generation of modest dressing in this family. They’ve grown up being dressed modestly, and in clothes that are definitely more feminine apparel. I’ve told my daughters this has been a joyful journey for me to learn what my Lord has called me to. This is the direction that God has led me as your mother, and you’re in the family.
Rilly? That happened? God personally told her to tell her daughters not to wear jeans because that’s not feminine apparel? (Did he tell her to use words like “apparel” instead of “clothes” to sound more elevated and magisterial? In a feminine way, of course.)
When the girls are little, they’re jumping and playing and not even thinking about modesty. It’s good because that’s the way children should be. As a parent I would have to remind them, let’s not stand upside down on your head in that chair because you want to practice being ladylike. And they look at me with this puzzled looked like, what does that mean? I’ll explain, well, it means that you sit up, put your knees together and pull your skirt down over your knees.
In other words if you stand upside down in feminine apparel then PEOPLE CAN SEE YOUR UNDERPANTS.
Underpants underpants underpants. Oooooh. Satan. Flesh. Hot. Burning. Pants pants pants. What’s under the pants. Under.pants. Underpants. Under pants.
THE HOLE. THE HOLE IS UNDER THERE. YOU MUST NEVER STAND ON YOUR HEAD.
God forbid the kids should just wear jeans or shorts and bounce around any way they feel like. Hell no. They have to be all squicked out about it right from the beginning.
Even though they have on pantaloons or leggings, I’m teaching them that it’s not very polite to sit on your head with your legs scattered all over the place. It’s not like, shame on you, it’s more like, we’re going to learn to be proper and be a little lady instead of a tomboy that climbs in the tree all day long. There’s a time and a place for all of that. I definitely give them the freedom to go catch tadpoles and climb trees because I love doing that, too, but I want them to be ladylike and modest when we’re doing it.
Well, at the dinner table, if they do headstands they might accidentally kick the food onto the floor. But other than that? Pffffff. The hell with being ladylike.
But then I don’t get my instructions from god, so I’m probably all wrong here.
In other words, squelch the kids’ natural exuberance, subdue them and make them self-conscious.
Then babble about how women are naturally modest, obedient and submissive.
When my daughter was first getting the hang of going to the toilet she would often drop her pants wherever she was and rush off to the bathroom at great speed. One day, when she did this at my in-laws’ house, my mother-in-law said ‘You need to teach that girl to be a lady’. Then a little voice called out from the toilet ‘Not a lady! A superhero!’
This same child refused to wear dresses when she was a baby because she couldn’t crawl properly in them.
There is a scene in the book Little Women where Marmee opines that girls should be free of corsets, and should be able to run and gambol just like boys, because that’s what the young are meant to do. Vigorous play builds strong bodies. You notice the Duggar boys’ bodies are not policed. This is just one more way women suffer in Dominionist, patriarchal cults.
P.S. “I’m a superhero” is just awesome. Good on her!
Hers is a strange god indeed. Capable of bringing a vast cosmos into being with a single word and of fashioning living things from nothingness. Yet he cares so very deeply about the genitals of these brainy simians on a tiny speck of a planet. One would be excused for presuming he had grander things to think about.
Has anybody read her advice on raising (read breaking the spirit of) strong-willed children?
A sample:
Ugh!
Then there’s this, about her husband Jim-Bob (emph. mine):
That gave me a shiver!
If she had a miscarriage, shouldn’t she be charged with manslaughter, at least?
what ignorant people the Duggars are.
No you wouldn’t.
That’s the way children should be, but then you teach them that they shouldn’t be that way.
Make sense, she doesn’t.
Yeesh, this woman creeps me out. Her kids sometimes wear pantaloons? I hadn’t realized that they were trying to literally go back the 19th century.
Oh, and Angharad – cool story and daughter.
Am I reading this right? She says she lets her girls climb trees, but wants them to be modest *while doing it*. As in, “climb the tree, but make sure no one can see up your skirt while you’re climbing!” Which of course, translates into it being the girl’s “own choice” not to climb, because it’s not possible to do modestly.