{"id":11824,"date":"2010-12-03T23:46:42","date_gmt":"2010-12-04T06:46:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11824"},"modified":"2010-12-03T23:46:42","modified_gmt":"2010-12-04T06:46:42","slug":"papa-do-preach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=11824","title":{"rendered":"Papa Do Preach"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"As you know, I’ve written many times about purity balls<\/a>, and how decidedly creepy they are. There’s just something horribly wrong about asking your daughter to pledge her virginity to you until she marries someone. It’s creepy, and incestuous, and completely destructive to the idea that women are actual people with actual feelings about the world.<\/p>\n

Purity balls are creepy, but most liberal defenders of them usually ask<\/a>, “But what’s the real problem? I mean, you’re just asking your daughter to not have sex. What’s wrong with that?”<\/p>\n

Well, what’s wrong with that is what not having sex leads to. No, not not having babies — although that’s a perfectly good reason for a woman to choose not to have sex, if that’s what she wants. No, the purity ball, pledge-yourself-to-daddy movement has as its ultimate goal that women should pledge themselves to daddy<\/a>. Period.<\/p>\n

That’s the report from Bitch<\/em>‘s Gina McGalliard, who digs into the “stay-at-home daughters movement,” a movement that sees purity balls’ creep factor and then goes all-in, saying that it’s not enough for a daughter merely to forgo sex; she also must give up all trappings of an independent life. From birth to marriage, she is her father’s; from marriage to death she is her husband’s. Anything else is an affront to God.<\/p>\n

No, really:<\/p>\n

\u201cDaughters aren\u2019t to be independent. They\u2019re not to act outside the scope \u2028of their father. As long as they\u2019re under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to nullify or not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can\u2019t just go out \u2028independently and say, \u2018I\u2019m going to marry whoever I want.\u2019 No. The father has \u2028the ability to say, \u2018No, I\u2019m sorry, that has to be approved by me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of talk in American mainstream media lately \u2028about the diminishing role of men — fathers, in particular. Have feminism and reproductive technology made them obsolete? \u2028Are breadwinning wives and career-oriented mothers emasculating them?<\/p>\n

No such uncertainty exists in the mind of Doug Phillips, the man quoted above. The San Antonio minister is the founder of Vision Forum, a beachhead for what\u2019s known as the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a branch of evangelical Christianity that takes beliefs about men as leaders and women as homemakers to anachronistic extremes. Vision Forum Ministries is, according to its Statements of Doctrine, \u201ccommitted to affirming the historic faith of Biblical Christianity,\u201d with special attention to the historical faith found in the book of Genesis, when God created Eve as a \u201chelper\u201d to Adam. According to Christian Patriarchy, marriage bonds man (the symbol of Christ) to woman (the symbol of the Church). It\u2019s a model that situates husbands and fathers in a position of absolute power: If a woman disobeys her \u201cmaster,\u201d whether father or husband, she\u2019s defying God. Thus, women in the Christian Patriarchy Movement aren\u2019t just stay-at-home mothers — they\u2019re stay-at-home daughters as well. And many of them wouldn\u2019t have \u2028it any other way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, if they would have it any other way, they’d have to shut up about it. After all, in the stay-at-home daughters movement, there is no other way. There is daddy’s way, or there is Satan’s way.<\/p>\n

Integral to Vision Forum\u2019s belief about female submission is making sure women are not independent at any point in their lives, regardless of age; hence the organization\u2019s enthusiasm for stay-at-home daughterhood. The most visible proponents of this belief are Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, sisters and authors of the book So Much More: The Remarkable Influence of Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God <\/em>(published by Vision Forum), and creators of the documentary film Return of the Daughters<\/em>, which follows several young women staying home until marriage, and details how they spend their time serving their fathers. One woman, Melissa Keen, 25, helps put on Vision Forum\u2019s annual Father-Daughter Retreat, an event that\u2019s described on Vision Forum\u2019s website in terms that are, in a word, discomfiting. (\u201cHe leads her, woos her, and wins her with a tenderness and affection unique to the bonds of father and daughter.\u201d) Another, 23-year-old Katie Valenti, enthuses that her father \u201cis the greatest man in my life. I believe that helping my father in his business is a better use of my youth and is helping prepare me to be a better helpmeet for my future husband, rather than indulging in selfishness and pursuing my own success and selfish ambitions.\u201d (A video of Valenti\u2019s 2009 wedding to Phillip Bradrick shows her father announcing into a microphone that he is \u201ctransferring my authority to you, Phillip.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You see, women have to be protected from the outside world. If they’re allowed to go off to college, they might, you know, learn that there’s a possibility for women to have their own goals, their own desires, and their own lives.<\/p>\n

The number of these blogs and their followers may be surprising to mainstream women, who would likely find the tenets the bloggers live by disturbingly retrograde, if not just plain disturbing. For instance, stay-at-home daughterhood means, among other things, subsuming one\u2019s own identity into the family unit. The Botkin sisters write in So Much More that loving your parents means agreeing with all their opinions. \u201cWhen your parents have your heart you will truly \u2018delight in their ways,\u2019\u201d write the sisters in one blog post. \u201cYou will love what they love, hate what they hate, and desire their approval and company and even \u2018think thoughts after them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Botkin sisters aim to validate living a life of confinement with staunch, if unfounded, opinions and beliefs regarding college. \u201cCollege campuses have become dangerous places of anxiety, wasted years, mental defilement and moral derangement,\u201d they write. Although neither of the sisters has attended college, they also claim universities are hotbeds of Marxism that forbid a free exchange of ideas and seek to indoctrinate students in leftist thinking. Elsewhere, they quote a document from the pro-patriarchy website Fathers for Life that states that the \u201cprime purposes of feminism are to establish a lesbian-socialist republic and to dismantle the family unit,\u201d echoing Pat Robertson\u2019s notorious statement that feminism is a \u201csocialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The read the whole thing quotient on this article is high, and indeed, it’s important that you do so. The sad fact is that the stay-at-home daughters movement is, in its own bizarre way, truly about recreating a vision of femininity that dominated the west for most of its history, and dominates far too many places on Earth yet today. It is, quite simply, a vision of women as chattel, as objects, as things that belong to their fathers, until they’re dealt to someone who can breed them for boys, and for more chattel to be sold. What these women want is as irrelevant as what a toaster wants; their role is to serve the men who they belong to, full stop. And their own desires matter not a whit.<\/p>\n

This is why the purity balls have always discomfited me. Because when you say your sexuality belongs to your father, until it belongs to your husband — well, then it never belongs to you<\/em>. If a stay-at-home daughter marries a man who wants sex constantly from her, she must submit to him. If she dislikes it, she is defying God Himself. There is no such thing as marital rape in a purity ball world; just women submitting meekly to their husbands, and to nobody else, lest they destroy their resale value.<\/p>\n

That is the vision of the world that the truly retrograde embrace, and the vision of the world that those who pine for the “good old days” are pining for. That it is horrific to all by the fringe right — for now — is one of the great gifts of feminism. Thank goodness my daughter will grow up to think her own thoughts, make her own decisions, go off to college and come back telling me how I’m wrong about everything. Indeed, she already tells me I’m wrong not to be a vegetarian, as she is; I disagree with her, but I support her in her ability to disagree with me. And I love that she’s willing to do so at eight years old.<\/p>\n

Her ability to live a life that is her own is a far greater gift to me than her loving what I love and hating what I hate. She isn’t a pale echo of me. She’s her own person. And thank God for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you know, I’ve written many times about purity balls, and how decidedly creepy they are. There’s just something horribly wrong about asking your daughter to pledge her virginity to you until she marries someone. It’s creepy, and incestuous, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-families-structures-divorce-etc","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}