Trigger warning for sexual mutilation and rape.
Linksurfing around, I came across this remarkable and moving little memoir about growing up in a household where the parents followed the teachings of a particularly popular fundamentalist guru with a real fixation on “purity”. I found it immensely sad, and at the same time revelatory.
As an atheist, I don’t know a whole lot about the internal experience of Christianity, particularly not the weird mutant strain this poor guy’s family had, but I know a bit. We in the atheist and feminist communities talk a good deal about how certain forms of fundamentalism demonize and damage female sexuality, and that’s certainly true. Girls who grow up literally thinking that showing an inch too much skin will result in instant rape, girls ceremonially “married” to their fathers until he hands them off like a football… the creepy runs deep.
What doesn’t get talked about as much is how these forms of repression also demonize and damage male sexuality. Sometimes that’s just in a simple Ozy’s Law kind of way, where the repulsive ideas about men are the logical corollary to the repulsive ideas about women, and other times, like in the linked author’s experience, it’s a lot more specific and awful. I think we need to start looking at how boys and men are getting warped and hurt by these ideas, and start calling that out in public.
Noah, I was planning to comment on this, and wanted to thank you for linking to it. I grew up in an area with a high proportion of fundamentalist Christian churches of various stripes, and a lot of very good, sweet, but damaged kids who were dealing with this type (if not necessarily as severe) of religious baggage. The policing of youthful sexuality is absolutely ghoulish. And you’re RIGHT to say that some of it is very specifically, anti-male. Training kind young boys to grow up into the sort of warped men who would do this to their own sons,… Read more »
“There are inviolate laws of nature that can be discovered
God, or some other force is not messing with your evidence, particularly evidence of past events such as fossils.”
Occam’s Razor says we don’t need to posit #2, because #2 is unnecessary to the proposition. Only if you could prove that God exists, and does stuff to your evidence, could you include it, for the positive stuff it would do (as opposed to ‘not doing anything’, which is the default state).
Forgot to mention– there’s a bit in Ayn Rand which goes approximately that if what’s needed for living is described as evil, people are apt to embrace actual evils.
There’s a Catholic variant (no mutilation) in Gil Hedley’s Reconceiving My Body— he’d grown up wanting to be a perfect (self-denying/sexless) martyr, and partly as a result of debilitating back pain, does the work to get in touch with his body and emotions. He eventually becomes a happy, non-self-destructive person, realizes that his instincts for living are good enough, and stops being a Catholic.
@ Clarence:
“So what happened made me angry and sad -because I think his father truly cared for him but was unwittingly doing great harm by attempting to save his Son’s soul though that stupid interpretation of the Christian religion.”
I don’t think Christianity could get any more explicit about it’s low opinion of male sexuality. This man took it to an extreme, but it requires being pointed in a particular direction to go to an extreme in the first place.
As for “faith” and science:
To play the science game you have to assume two things:
There are inviolate laws of nature that can be discovered
God, or some other force is not messing with your evidence, particularly evidence of past events such as fossils.
You have to have faith that those two things are true, or science doesn’t work. Don’t worry, I have such faith, but I know I can’t prove either of those postulates.
typhon, noah: The scary thing is, it could have easily been worse. When I first started reading about his father forcing him to “confess” these things to him, I was expecting to read about the physical abuse starting, or maybe even his father disowning him for such thoughts. Of course what did happen was bad enough – had it been any worse we might not have ever read that post because our poster might have had a mental breakdown or even committed suicide. So what happened made me angry and sad -because I think his father truly cared for him… Read more »
@ Noahbrand
It was an easy mistake to make at least in terms of rape. The explicitly mentioned sexual mutilation not so much.
I advised the trigger warning because his description of what happened to him at the hands of his male-sexuality hating fundamentalist father was evoking such a strong sensation of rape and violation. Specifically that moment when you can’t fight anymore so you just start to disassociate or simply identify with your abuser.
Perhaps ‘sexual abuse’ would have been a better term?
Returning (briefly) to the issue of belief: Clarence makes an excellent point: empiricists have FAITH in the ability to connect cause-and-effect based on observation. Let’s take a detour into fantasy land for a moment. Assume that sometime tomorrow, the laws of physics stop working as they used to and things start happening that defy cause-and-effect. There are two possibilities: 1). We will be forced to learn the rules of our new reality and re-learn cause-and-effect (to the extent that it is possible to do so) 2). Accept the fact that cause-and-effect no longer applies and try and reach Nirvana (e.g.… Read more »
“Agh, fuck, I forgot the trigger warning! Shit! Good catch, typhon, and I apologize for not putting that on there in the first place.” See how even someone like you, even you, is conditioned not to see this for all the various kinds of violation that it is – some you caught, but not the deepest levels? That’s how pervasive this harm to men is – it is not restricted to “Christian” cults (frankly I doubt the validity of their baptism and their Christianity) or hyper-macho settings. It pervades even the guys like you, male feminists, who are trying to… Read more »
No lie, fucked-up social programming is like a bug infestation. You think you’ve gotten ’em all, but… no, there’s another one. No, wait, two more… where are they even coming fro– is there another NEST back here?
All you can do is keep at it, though. Otherwise the bugs own your house and you’re Rick Perry, and nobody wants that.
I’ve spent the last hours reading on that website. There’s a lot of horrible stories about growing up in this Christian cult, and a lot of great healed-survivor stories. But as an atheist, I don’t get it. How can they insist on being christians still? I, as they, grew up in a christian family. Not nearly as extreme, but it was always there, quite unquestioned by everyone around me. Both of my siblings are unbelievers now, so is the brothers and sisters of my parents. They’re the only ones left. Uuh, I’m rambling. An hour past midnight here in Norway.… Read more »
This ‘man box’… The violence it does to the men outside of it is obvious; but the violence it does to the men within it is worse. The men inside the box not only have had the same violence done to them, but they’ve internalized it as *beneficial to them.*
They’ve been beaten so much and damaged so deeply that they no longer have a choice to look at what the manbox ‘gives’ them as something positive.
@ Noah Please put a trigger warning for sexual mutilation and rape. ” I no longer felt valuable enough to feel his controlling presence was a violation of privacy and personhood. I didn’t have a right to privacy and personhood. I was the property of my God-given authority and getting used to that was much more pleasant. It was many more years before I felt all the pain of that season. The cumulative events of the years felt as though my masculinity was raped repeatedly.” I think the ideas in this passage need to be discussed more fully. In his… Read more »
Agh, fuck, I forgot the trigger warning! Shit! Good catch, typhon, and I apologize for not putting that on there in the first place.
I don’t want to get into a discussion on the word “belief” either. But I will just point about that belief does not equal certitude. And that someone can criticize someone’s beliefs without criticizing the person holding those beliefs.
For more on “belief” I suggest Colin McGinn and “The Atheism Tapes”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU2Og1NxAOY
or read this from his blog.
http://mcginn.philospot.com/index.php?story=story100111-211826
especially paragraph four.
“This is my way of saying that I would like it if we could engage with the issue of damaging sexual notions and how they’re enculturated, without getting into the existence or nonexistence of a god or gods.” You don’t discuss religion or politics in polite society and there is a good reason for that. The problem is that if you wnat to discuss people’s enculturation and even their moral systems, you get into these discussions of religion. But there is a middle ground that will allow the discussion to go forward – decribe and discuss the religion in judgment… Read more »
“There’s a saying that the purpose of spiritual practice is to repalce belief with experience.”
And stereotypes with actual people’s characteristics, a much more nuanced view of groups you know.
For example, I greatly changed the perception my boyfriend had of trans women.
A friend of mine, also an atheist, once asked me (rather high-handedly, I thought), “How come we have this cultural idea that you have to respect people’s religious beliefs? Why is that one area somehow exempt from rational inquiry?” He thought he was being rhetorical, but I explained that there’s a very good reason: because that is the only way we can have a civilization. We have millennia of data showing us that when people start calling each other’s religion into question, it always ends in bloodshed, but when people agree to mutually respect each others’ faiths and just not… Read more »
“I think you define faith right out of existence when you suggest that one needs faith to believe in objective reality. ‘ The issue is dogmatic belief in the absolute, ultimate existence of something – that applies just as much to the physical world as to fairies. As for the faith vs. religion thing – Gaius is only a quarter right. religion is the sociala spect of this impulse, and that is where it gets dangerous of course – and yeah, that is going to involve myths and all that communicative stuff. “So, for example, i do not need faith… Read more »
Clarence. Science isn’t about “proofs” or “truth” or “certainty”. And other than that, I do not know what ‘philosophies’ you are talking about.
I think you define faith right out of existence when you suggest that one needs faith to believe in objective reality. I also think you are delving into solipsism if you don’t think there can be evidence…that yeah, maybe you are a brain in a jar, everything is an illusion.
I don’t want to derail too much…I’m satisfied to simply disagree. But if you say I have faith or everyone has faith, I’ll object.
debaser: You have faith in that there is “evidence” in the first place. Any philosophical position that relies on there being any truths at all relies on faith of various sorts. And yes, you need faith – that is belief without evidence- to assume that just because the sun has risen some 14,000 times in your life that it will rise tomorrow as usual. All science, hell, all empericism depends on having faith that your observations match reality, because at the end of the day, you can’t “prove” anything with absolute certainty. I bet you believe that there is some… Read more »
I do not have faith in anything…faith means belief without or in spite of the evidence. So, for example, i do not need faith to believe the sun will rise tomorrow because I have forty years of personal evidence to backup my belief.
If you mean hope, trust, fidelity, etc, just use those words. Especially if you are speaking for ALL.
“We don’t know why we’re going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decay, so there better be someone somewhere who does know.
God aside, this really sums up the 1970′s in the US. Those too young to remember it, rejoice.”
Where in the US were you, Uncalledfor? I was in California, and all the economic stagnation didn’t stop it from being a really fun time.
@Zyzle:
We know about one over-controlling parent from that group — who knows, maybe other are wiser and their children accept their teachings? If they told you they’re happy, would you doubt that? On what basis?
“THIS is than anatomy of faith, and faith is a major obstacle against social justice and social egalitarianism: it is a group of people, potentially very large, who not only do not know how to think (because they’ve never been taught), but are actually frightened to do so and content not to. Because god is watching out for them. So they cling to whatever codified system (i.e. religion) they’ve been taught to cling to and resist anything that requires them to think… including a world without binaries, without clear delineations of gender roles.” And 1000 years of Dark Ages happened… Read more »
yzek: I would define a normal, healthy approach to sex as one you’ve chosen for yourself and are happy with.
I fail to see how teaching children that something as fundamental to the human experience as sexuality is inherently wrong can ever be considered in any way laudable.