I am Superior Because I Believe Differently Than You?

Recently I've become obsessed with researching polygamy in the United States in the religion of Latter Day Saints. With the new season of Sister Wives starting this month, I have had a renewed interest in the show. I started watching some of the previous seasons on Netflix but quickly found that I couldn't watch too many seasons before both becoming bored (I actually find the show extremely boring) as wall as depressed about the conditions that the "wives" were living in. Despite the best efforts of TLC and the Brown family, I felt that the sadness, loneliness, and jealousy still showed through. I also started reading things about the Brown family online and saw many people mention that the book they have written shows a lot more of the sadness of their lives. I went online to Amazon and read the sample of the book. Unfortunately, the excerpt I read with Kody writing was too much selfishness for me so I did not purchase the book. However, there were other books suggested that also talked about polygamy. Over the last week, I have poured myself into reading multiple stories about women living in Mormon polygamy.

You can do your own research into the history of polygamy in the Mormon church. Polygamy is not accepted now in the mainstream Mormon church. Only the fundamentalist Mormons still practice polygamy. While reading the books, I started realizing there were so many similarities between Mormon and Christian fundamentalists. They all claim that you have to live a superior life to make it to heaven while the rest of the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They believe in suppressing women. They believe that children don't really matter except for advancing the gospel or out-populating the unbelievers. They believe the American government is the devil himself and that Christ will someday pour out all kinds of judgement for all the evil things the government has done.

Growing up, I was taught that the unbelievers (all people who did not live their lives exactly as we did) were empty and soulless. I was taught that their lives felt pointless and that they were never truly happy. I was taught that they had a huge gaping hole in their heart that could only be filled by the god. Although many things that I was taught growing up never came with real life examples and thus evidence for me, this was one thing I thought my dad was an authority in because he had been an unbeliever up until his late teens.

I have been questioning many things about the god recently. I have found that I can't really believe that he is there, at least the way the Christian world paints him. Sometimes I have become jealous of people who have grown up in normal homes because they can go to Church without questioning all the horrible lies the church teaches them. One of the things I've been questioning is the whole theory of the emptiness of unbelievers. One night as I climbed into bed with my partner, I looked at him and realized he was one of those people who my dad taught me had a deep emptiness and could never truly be happy. That's when I realized that my dad was just plain wrong. My partner does not have a hole in his soul. He's not always turning from one bad thing to another to fill that "hole". He's not unhappy. In fact, I think he's happier than my dad. I think his life is way more fulfilling than my dad. I think he feels his life has more purpose than my dad thinks about his own life.

The next day as I was driving to work, I started looking at the people in the cars next to me. I realized that all of my life I had been taught I was superior to them because I knew the "gospel". I had been taught that I was privileged because I had been taught religion from my youngest age. I was taught that I was superior to them because I actually did believe in what our religion said while all the other people didn't. These people aren't any better or worse or different than me. We all feel the same things. We all are trying to achieve what we think is the most important in our lives. We are all doing what we feel morally obligated to do. I'm not any better than them. I am not more enlightened than them. I am not holier than them. I hate that I was taught these awful lies while growing up. I hate that I was taught that our way was better and the only way. I hate that I was taught that other people had something fundamentally wrong with them just because they didn't believe the same as I did. I hate that I was taught the only way to happiness was through believing everything my parents told me.

Day Six: Day Five and Meeting Guys Continued

This is a continued story of my sexual experience as a young adult in a patriarchal home. This second part is hard for me to write about because I feel great shame about my actions. Sometimes I want someone to tell me that what I did doesn't make me a bad person, but deep down I still feel like my sexual history makes me an awful person. What is hardest for me is that at the time it never crossed my mind that what I was doing wasn't honorable. I didn't value my body or my life. I treated myself like trash because I really thought I was trash. I was never treated as someone valuable, outside of my ability to produce godly children. Because I had started to reject all christianity, I rejected everything that I had been taught was valuable about me.

If you thought my first post was bad, just wait until the second part of my story. That's when my life started really unraveling. That's when it starts to show that I had no idea what morals even were. At the time, most of what I did didn't bother me or even strike me as wrong or even abnormal. I thought I was finally having a normal experience. My perception of the real world was so skewed. I thought I was just fitting in. Writing this second part is really baring my soul for the first time. There is not a single person that I have told my sexual story to, not even my partner. This is the first time my complete story has ever been told and it's scary for me.

I ended my last post with me loosing my virginity to Guy1, who was dating Girlfriend1. I still had a twisted idea of sex and love and relationships all being linked. Guy1 was "safe" for me because he wasn't in a relationship with me, but I also deep down wanted a relationship with him. I longed for a real boyfriend. I remember about a week after I lost my virginity to Guy1, Girlfriend1 (who was still my friend) called me and told me that Guy1 said he wanted to marry her. I was crushed and confused. How could he want to marry her while he was sneaking off to meet with me almost every night? This strange new world just didn't make sense to me. To add to my confusion, we continued messing around but Guy1 also tried to hook me up with other guys.

Within a month of loosing my virginity, I started messing around with Guy2, who Guy1 had hooked me up with. Within a couple weeks of meeting each other and the first time we were alone together, we had sex. I barely knew the guy. The next week or so I showered him with my loving and texts and thought I had forever with him. Honestly now looking back I am still embarrassed with myself for how fast I moved. Then one day he announced that he couldn't be in a relationship with me. I don't really remember all the reasons he cited to me but one that I remembered very well was that he knew my parent's wouldn't let that happen.

Guy2 had broken off any chance of a relationship with me but I was still desperate for attention. I was broken and took it really badly. However, Guy2 also had a drinking problem. The next weekend he got drunk and he decided he wanted to hang out with me. I felt obligated to give him sex because he was willing to hang out with me. I remember several occasions I did not want to have sex with him but had sex anyway because I thought he'd never hang out with me again if I didn't have sex with him. Over the next several months things continued the same. We weren't in a relationship but we'd hang out together and I'd give him sex. During these months, I began messing around with Guy1 again. I loved Guy1 more, but I knew Guy2 was more available.

I remember one day I really wanted to meet up with Guy1 but he was busy so I went with Guy2 instead. I strictly only wanted to hang out with Guy2 and not have sex. However, by this time Guy2 was used to our routine of hanging out and then having sex. I was laying in his bed with him when he started making sexual advances. I fought off his advances but they were of no avail. I don't know if he took me fighting off his advances as a game or if he really didn't care about me. My fighting off his advances didn't stop him. He was stronger than me. That day was the first time I truly felt myself dissociating. He did his thing while my mind left my body so not to feel the searing pain in my chest. That night I cried and cried and cried. Despite the experience, I didn't stop seeing Guy2 or even stop having sex with him. I think at that point the consensual part of the sex was out of the window with Guy2, though. He and I both didn't care if I wanted to have sex or not.

A couple months after loosing my virginity and loosing Guy2, Guy3 became single. I wrote about Guy3 before in some of my journal entries. Guy3 was one of the first guys I had a crush on and he was really close to me. When Guy3 became single, we started talking for real and especially talking about starting messing around. However, my parents had scheduled me to leave town for a couple weeks to help out some family members. These weeks fell right after Guy3 and I started talking about starting messing around. I left to the family member's house and before I came back Guy3 was dating another girl. I was crushed beyond measure. I didn't even know I was competing with another girl. I had thought he was truly interested in me. I took this rejection as sealing that something was wrong with me. When I came back, there was still a sexual charge between us and I ended up having sex with him despite his girlfriend.

Now enters the man who flirted with me during my tryouts for the activity. He started pursuing me again and somehow got my number. I still loved him flirting with me and it gave me a high. I thought we were going to be a relationship. We talked and texted and talked about meeting up. Then one day he posted pictures on Facebook of the girlfriend he had told me he had broken up with. I was devastated once again. I felt so tricked and disillusioned. During this time I was still keeping up with Guy1, Guy2, and Guy3.

My TV show is on now so I'm going to finish this another day. To be continued...

Day Five: My Teen Years and Meeting Guys

One of the things that has caused me the most shame in my life is my sexual history. I am starting to believe that there is a reason for my actions. That there was some kind of deep psychological issue the compelled me to do the things I did. I'm not sure if there is or if I'm actually just a slut. I might be. But I believe patriarchy made me into a slut. That is probably a very controversial statement but wait while I tell you my story...

My story begins when I was sixteen. By the time I was sixteen, my family had gone through some really really rough times. We were financially devastated, emotionally exhausted, and our family relationships had long gone down the drain, through the sewer, and out into the ocean. My parents had left many churches over the last couple years and moved us around the country repeatedly. I was left questioning everything I knew. My parents seemed to believe one thing at one church and then when they would leave they would tell us that they expected us to "discern" what was the truth (or what my dad thought was the truth). I hadn't had friends in years. Every time I had gotten close to any friends, we would have to move again. The only person I was really close to was my next older brother and he was having serious issues with "rebelling." He had actually left home for a bit and gone to a different state. By the time I was sixteen he had moved back in, if nothing else because he was broke. When I was sixteen, my dad finally got a semi-permanent job and we started to settle down and not move quite as much.

Although I loved the stability of actually having a home, I was bored out of my mind. My parents were on their no-churching streak so they viewed going to church as wrong. So we didn't go to church. The homeschool group in that area was too secular, so we didn't get involved in it. We didn't get involved in anything. The highlight of my day was being allowed to walk to the end of the driveway to get the mail and paper and then doing the Sudoku. The only time I left the house was to go grocery shopping with my mother or going to the library once a month. However, I was fed up with the library because I had read through all the books that my mother had approved and I was tired of having my mother tell me that the book I chose was no appropriate for me.

My brother found an extracurricular activity outside of the home that we will call "team building" to help protect my identity. He loved this activity and would be gone several days a week participating in it. I missed him terribly. I would literally cry and wait up for him at night because I was so lonely. One day, my brother decided that it would be great for me to try out for the activity as well. It took my parents forever to deliberate on whether it was appropriate for a girl to do an activity outside of the home. I remember writing multiple journal entries wondering if it was god's will that I do the activity. My parents decided that that activity was appropriate for me and I went one evening to try out for it. That evening would change me forever.

That evening I had something stirred in me that had never been stirred before. A guy flirted with me. I had no idea what to do and it made me blush and giggle. All the people at the activity were amused by my reaction.
That night, I wrote a really long journal entry about what I would do if this man asked me to be his girlfriend. A little bit of an overreaction? Now add to that that his man was probably 8 or 9 years older than me, which would have made any relations illegal. I didn't know how to control my emotions and I was feeling something I had never felt before. I was on a high and I was getting a sexual satisfaction over thinking about that one time the guy had flirted with me. I remember from that journal entry that I concluded that yes I could morally be his girlfriend. Now I realize how I think all my parents teaching never sunk in to me. Already at 16 I was willing to date instead of court and even date someone who was not a Christian! I don't think I ever bought my parents ideas, honestly. I think never buying into my parents' ideas was part of why I lacked morals overall. My parents never let us question anything and I knew that they weren't looking out for the best for us, they were only looking out for the best for their reputation. All moral teaching I was taught, I just combined with the other bullshit teachings and threw them all out the window.

I did make the tryouts for the activity and a few months later I was fully participating in it. I quickly made friends with those who were around my brother's and my age. I loved that time. I was learning for the first time how to be a friend. I was finally accepted for who I was. But I was also learning how socially awkward as well as innocent I was. I was hearing people talk about sex for the first time in my life. I still only knew the very basics of sex that my mother had told me: "the penis enters the vagina." I remember hearing one girl talking about how a piercing on a guy had torn her up inside by the movement and I was so curious as to how there was movement during sex. In fact, I didn't realize how there was movement in sex until the night I lost my virginity. I strictly thought the penis entered the vagina and bam sex was done. After only a couple months participating in the activity, I wanted boys' attention and I wanted to be less innocent.

Here's a few of my journal entries from around that time:

"August 18 2008

 "I am an average height 17-year-old with medium long black hair and brown eyes.

"At this point in my life I am about the happiest I have ever been, at least most of the time. Sometimes i think this is also the saddest time of my life. I certainly cry alot. 

"But never before have I had friends I am so close to and who I can talk so freely with. Never before have I had friends who would stand by me in all times and who also need me at times. Often I can't even believe it. And yet sometimes it seems like they also bring heartache. I have come to believe every true friend will make you cry at some point, at least if you are a girl.

"I still often feel awkward and out of place with alot of people, but things are getting better. I still want to cry when I see boyfriends with their girlfriends, but I am starting to get over it. I have to be content the way I am before things can change. I still feel unattractive and uninteresting. I still long for a boyfriend but i am starting to wonder if I will ever have one. I have just had to be honest with myself with that one. The way I grew up totally f*cked my younger years up. Because of that I am often stupidly ignorant. Who wants to date an ignorant girl? Mother and Dad say they would let me love someone, but in practice they really wouldn't. Who wants to have to deal with my parents? No one so far. Between that and learning how innocent I am, no one wants to love me or anything like that.

"I wonder what most people would think if they learned that I have never been kissed? I mean, I think most people can tell. I'll never forget the night Guy3 told me to call him. Mother and Dad were out of town so when I got home I called him. We talked about our day and and then he asked me if I had ever been kissed. When i told him no he was very surprised. He couldn't believe it. That night he was telling me how he wished he could have a backrub. He jokingly told me I should walk to his house. I now know what he wanted. I really can't believe I. I can't believe he actually liked me that much. I think the fact that I had never been kissed before kinda scared him off. I really can't believe either that he would have cheated on Girlfriend2. He loves that girl so much. Oh god I want to cry even now when I think of the chance I passed by. Why didn't we go through with it? Why was I stupid and shy? Why do I still have to be so f*cking innocent? Oh god will I ever have a chance again? I haven't since then and there is no chance in the near future except maybe with J*** and I certainly don't want that! Today as I realize more and more what J*** wanted and what a one in a million opportunity I had, I just want to go crazy. I am about to cry because now he has Girlfriend2. Now neither him nor I would ever do that to her. No girl with any self respect could let her friend's boyfriend cheat with her."

I saw any guy paying any attention to me as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I sincerely thought that I might NEVER have a chance again with ANY guy.

Within about a month of the time of that entry I had had my first kiss. Once again, I don't think I was really attracted to the guy or even really liked him. I saw it as a great honor for any guy to pay any attention to me. I was so nervous about the kiss that I threw up afterward. That night, I don't think I daydreamed about the guy. Only that I finally had had a kiss. I still saw myself as so undesirable that I thought after that night the guy would never talk to me again.

"August 28, 2008

"So Guy1 is telling me that I need to find someone that can give me what I need. He says it doesn't have to be anything serious. He says it will help me. I totally agree at least in theory, but my question is who would be willing to give me what I need? Who on earth would be willing to put up with my stress and drama? And my clingy-ness? Oh god I wish I knew what to do!"

"Who would be willing to give me what I need?" I had so little respect for myself that I though I would be lucky if I could even get one guy to break my innocence. I wasn't even looking for a guy to be my boyfriend or to love me. I thought I was unlovable. I thought no one would ever love me. I doubt I even knew what love was at that point. My parents "loved" me and I wanted as far away from that as possible.

"[No date] 

"No one cares. No one really wants to be my friend. Why did I ever think that they would? Why did I think I was good enough for them? No I'm just a f*cking homeschooled brat who needs to go back to her shell and not feel anything. Not care if she is treated like nothing. Not care if she's ignored. Why did I think they were my friends? They don't care for me. They don't care if I never come back. They don't care if they never see me again. Why did I ever come out of my f*cking shell? Why? Why? They don't care for me. They abandoned me the first chance they got. But the facts are the facts and I need to accept them and move on. If they don't really care, then I need to tell them f*ck you and find some others. I need people! I need someone!

I honestly don't know what happened that prompted that journal entry. Obviously, it was a very emotional outburst caused by something that had really hurt me. I still can remember the searing pain of those years. I mentioned there how I had finally opened my shell a little. Being turned down for me was the end of the world. I didn't know how to control my feelings. I didn't know how to express my feelings to others. I didn't know how to tell them that my feelings were hurt without lashing out on them and trying to burn all bridges. I was so emotionally dysfunctional and it was so extremely painful for me.

The journal entries stop for the most part there for the next couple months. Over the next couple months, I started texting Guy1 long into the night. Finally one thing led to another, and we had sex one night. I lost my virginity the first night I saw a real human adult penis. I lost my virginity without ever having kissed the guy. I lost my virginity to Girlfriend1's boyfriend. She was also my friend. I wrote about the night that I lost my virginity but I don't think it's very appropriate for anywhere except a porn site. I'll put one thing I wrote: "It made me feel like I was worth something a special to have him looking at me." I thought I was using him. I thought I was using him because I was willing to finally break my innoncence. My innocence was something my parents protected so strongly but was something I saw as a curse. I thought that was what made me so different from everyone else. I thought I wasn't worth anyone's time, much less love. I knew he loved someone else and I knew it was wrong. I think there was something in me that thought he was "safe" because he wouldn't love me. I wouldn't have to go through the pain of rejection because it was only physical.

To be continued.

A Week of Memories Day Four: Coming Out about Sexual Abuse

I’ve come to the realization that I cannot write about a new memory/issue every day. It’s just too triggering and traumatic for me. I now have three or four different memories that I’ve started writing about but just couldn’t finish. Most of the time, by the time I got as far as I did, I was experiencing a very bad headache and was in a very bad mood (both signs of a lot of triggering going on for me). 

My mother realized that from an early age I was easily controlled by fear. This was a huge break for my mother who is extremely manipulative and she will probably use that technique over me for the rest of my life. I've grown a tougher skin to my mother's manipulation and have realized how really outlandish her ideas are. I strongly disagree with the means my mother used to manipulate me with fear. One fear she played on me was my fear of sexual assault. Lately I have been trying to come to terms with the question on whether or not I've been sexually abused. My sexual abuse is not something clear-cut and easy to define. My brain has done a wonderful job of blocking many painful memories. And on top of all that, we were repeatedly taught we were raised in a sexual safe haven.

However, I have come to believe that I was sexually abused as a daughter in a fundamentalist homeschooling movement.

One of my first memories of my life (and of my sexual abuse) is on a sweltering hot day. That day one of my brothers needed to go to the doctor because he was sick. That was back when my parents still took us to the doctor when we got sick. Mom left us in the car with all the other siblings because she didn't want to make a scene in the doctors office because we were always too noisy. I remember being covered in sweat and wanting to step out of the car just for a few minutes of fresh air. I also remember I was wearing my favorite grass-green skirt. I was playing with one of my brother's match-box cars in my lap when my mother came back. When my mother came back, she accused me of "playing with myself" (playing with my private parts). I don't know if I was innocently masturbating or really just playing with the car in my lap. I remember being confused because whatever I was doing I didn't think anything was wrong with it. She told me that if she caught me again doing that, she would take me right into the doctor's office and have me checked out for what was wrong with me.

From that interaction, I learned that someone seeing my privates was an extreme humiliation and also could be used as a means of punishment. I learned that I didn't have control over my own body. I learned that if I was doing something that my mother did not like, she could have another person take advantage of my body and violate me. I learned the doctors could be used as a form of punishment. I also learned to be terrified of touching myself, even in ways that I thought were totally appropriate.

Around that time, my brother and I started doing our own exploration. This brother is barely older than me and we went through many stages of our mental development together. We hit a phase of curiosity at the same time, so we turned to each other for answers. We had a game where we would play "penis and bottom." This went on for probably awhile. We would play it whenever we could find some time where no one would interrupt us. I don't remember all that went into the game, but I remember we would draw bottoms and penises and vagina's. I'm pretty sure that's where I learned the name "penis." We would also take turns urinating into the baby's diapers we had stolen from the baby's dresser. Pretty much, we were doing what typical children do when exploring sexuality and sexual differences. But then we got caught. We had gone into my bedroom and locked the door. We thought the family was busy with other things but our dad decided to come get us for some chores. He found the door locked and when we let him in he pretty quickly figured out what was going on. I got a huge spanking from that, got all sweets taken away for a month, and we could never play behind closed doors again. My natural curiosity was met with so much anger and shaming that once again completely confused me.

I think a practice that is common among many fundamentalist families is what my family called bare-bottom spankings. Depending on how bad the infraction was, we had levels of nakedness for our spankings. We would either be spanked just bending over the bed, or we had to pull our dresses up and be spanked with just our underwear on, or we had to pull down our underwear as well to be spanked without any protection while bending over a bed. I don't know if there were any of the popular child raising experts promoting this practice. At some point I'm sure I'll look it up but at this point I know that looking it up will probably trigger me to the point where I won't finish this post, so I'll put looking it up off for now. This whole practice screams inappropriateness to me now. I strongly believe the only time that a child should be seen naked is when he wants to be and is being helped by his parent. For example, help with bathing. By they time the child minds his parents seeing him naked, he is usually bathing by himself. I strongly believe that even if spanking is used, the child should never have to remove clothes to have the spanking performed.

Making a child remove clothes to receive corporal punishment is sexual abuse.

To add to wrongfulness of making children undress to receive punishment, there is the double standard, there is the extreme secretiveness of the children's bodies. We could never talk about our bodies. I remember getting spanked (bare-bottomed) for talking about with my friends what color my underwear was. It was extremely shaming for me to be taught that even talking about the color of my underwear was so extremely inappropriate and yet my dad could deem at what time it was appropriate for him, a man, to see my underwear. Girls are taught such extreme modesty in that culture, and yet at 12 or 14 years old their dads can decide they need to take off their underwear and bend over a bed in front of them?!

I believe that my dad never had an sexual meaning to this practice, but added on top of the extreme modesty culture and my mother's sexual threats, these actions were sexually abusive to me. I believe my mother, however, had full knowledge of the sexuality in these actions and loved to add to the shame by announcing to my friends mother's, in front of my friends, all of my wrong-doings and exactly how they were punished. Once again, she was sexually shaming me and showing me that she had no respect for my body and that my sexuality could be used as a punishment against me.

In the midst of my mother's sexual shaming, I was immersed in a culture of sexual suppression. I was taught that if I did not go to my marriage bed a virgin, it would be the ultimate shame and I could never have a happy marriage. I was taught that no man would ever want me if I was in any way "impure." I was taught that the most important thing I could do before I was married was to remain pure. I was also taught very little on what exactly was remaining pure, since even knowing about sex was not appropriate. I had to keep my body covered at all costs.

When I hit my early teens, I had an issue with bed wetting. I'm not sure if the bed wetting was a result of the sexual abuse or of something else. However, my mother decided that I needed to go to the doctor about it. At this point, we basically never went to the doctor. In fact, I think that was the only time I went to the doctor in about a ten year stretch. Remember back to when my mother used exposing me to the doctor as a punishment? I cried and dreaded the appointment for weeks but nothing I could do could convince my mother to not take me. I went and was forced to have a pelvic exam. I thought I was forever violated. I thought I now had no hope of ever getting a husband. I had been violated, I had lost my purity, all against my will. I had disappointed my mother and she had chosen to have me exposed to the world. I was shamed and permanently scarred.

All throughout these same years, my mother would force me to change my clothes in front of her. I was a good little fundamentalist daughter who was very protective of anyone ever seeing my body. I had learned my lesson and never talked about the color of my underwear. And yet, here my mom was often coming into our room when I was changing. Making my try on different bras in front of her and in front of my older sisters. She once again taught me that I had no control over my body. That my body was something she could use for her every whim.

I think this is probably one of the most disjointed posts I've written, but I think it's because all of these memories are so painful for me. I am proud that I have gotten through this blog post but I don't think I'll be able to read over it for grammar checking so you'll have to excuse the sub-standard writing. I am fully convinced now that between my mother and the cultural body-shaming I experienced, I was sexually abused as in my home. To this day, I experience the symptoms of sexual abuse. To this day any mention of sexual abuse is extremely triggering to me. Maybe one day I'll even have the nerve to ask one of my older sisters if they think they were sexually abused in our home as well. One day I'll even write about how my childhood sexual abuse led to sexual abuse in my adult life. But for now, I've talked about it as much as I can take without having another breakdown.