I Am Now in a Permanent State of Creeped Out

(Trigger Warning)

Okay, fair warning. This is going to make your skin crawl so much, you may suddenly notice it's several hundred miles away and your skeletal ass is shivering in your chair while you do your best Frank from "Hellraiser" impression. Apparently, the incredible creepiness of the "Daddy's your boyfriend" purity balls isn't quite fucked-up enough; I had no idea what I was in for when I read this post over at NMMNB: Tying Daddy's Shoelaces to Save Civilization

Via Talk to Action, I've just been reading "Victory Through Daughters," a chilling excerpt from Kathryn Joyce's new book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

Is "patriarchy" too strong a word? If anything, it's not strong enough -- this is a movement that believes women and girls have absolutely one purpose in life, and that is to do the most basic of household chores. Do they need to function in the larger world? Hell, they don't even need to know how to read -- and I mean that literally.

Every quote, every link leads to either a new bucket 'o squick, or something to outrage anyone that doesn't think a woman should be permanently pregnant with a vacuum cleaner grafted to her hand.

Vision Forum gears its entire Beautiful Girlhood catalogue collection -- replete with tea sets, white gloves, "modesty slips," and Victorian manners books -- to the proper raising of daughters in the faith. Both Vision Forum and Reconstructionism's Chalcedon Foundation sponsor girls' essay contests on subjects such as fulfilling one's vocation as a daughter and the enduring appeal of Elsie Dinsmore -- a heroine in Martha Finley's Victorian-era children's book series, an obedient and priggishly pious daughter of the Antebellum South who aspired to be a submissive daughter and wife. (Dinsmore, as one contest winner wrote, shows daughters how "to rise up by stepping down.")

Steve provides links to the catalogues in his post. The stuff for girls is incredibly (and perhaps, predictably... Victorian Manners Books?) outrageous, and the stuff for boys is just fucking weird. I mean, I would expect them to think the only way to have a boy grow up into a proper, two-fisted hetero patriarch is to let him play with nothing but guns and war toys, but it's really creepy how they're all pre-Vietnam era. I suppose wars were better back then, before those damn hippies got involved and made us start losing. Seriously, they've got replica grenades (Grenades! Jebus!), replica field phones, WWII net helmets... I wouldn't know if I should be playing war or re-enacting scenes from Blackadder Goes Forth.

Then, because I am dumb and love punishing myself, I decided to head over and read the excerpt. I thought I knew what horror was, until I got to this (bolds are mine):

Anna Sofia has served thus herself, as her father explains in an appendix interview included in So Much More so it might contain some proper male authority to address fathers. One day, while father Botkin was entertaining a “very important political leader,” he called to his daughter. Anna Sofia, then five or six, came into the room to untie and remove her father’s shoes, and she then asked the guest if she could untie his shoes as well. Years later, Geoffrey Botkin says, the politician brought the evening up, telling Botkin, “‘You know when I decided we should have more children? It was that night your sweet little daughter helped me with my shoes.’ One simple act of hospitality had eternal consequences.”

The extent to which Botkin views his daughters as his ambassadors, or extensions of himself, is perplexingly hinted at when both he and Doug Phillips slip during the conference and refer to So Much More as Geoffrey Botkin’s book. This could seem either an indication of his daughters’ total identification with their father, or else, perhaps, indication of the heavy paternal hand guiding the virtuous daughters’ movement—as present in the writing of the book as it feels in every frame of the film and every still photograph taken of the two sisters.

Such lessons are repeated wide-scale at the father-daughter retreats, where daughters are given object lessons alongside the sermons through a series of ideological games, including a blindfolded obstacle course, where chains of blinded daughters were guided solely by relying on their fathers’ verbal commands; contests for fathers “wooing and winning the hearts of their daughters”; and intimacy-building “unity games” that teach daughters to serve their fathers by shaving their faces, grooming their hair, and knotting their shoes and ties. As three of Phillips’s young daughters, Jubilee, Liberty, and Faith, explained on a video posted on Vision Forum’s Web site, “Each of the games was designed to teach us a principle about our relationship with our fathers.”

I don't think I'll ever stop throwing up. I don't know what's worse: my outrage at these girls being fucking brainwashed into being slaves for men in the name of God, or my extreme gross-out at the girls being made to do this for their fathers. The purity balls had some sort of mention of future marriage; this is simply treating daddy like hubby. Shaving is an act that's a bit intimate to share with your daughter. Eew.

If anything, I suppose we now have another example of the Patriarchy in its most basic form.

Seriously, shaving their faces?? Christ. Not only are they dominating patriarchs creating Stepford Daughters; they're fucking lazy. Untie your own fucking shoes, pops.