If she can walk she can marry
There’s a reason adult men are attracted to teenage girls, in addition to the whole tight young flesh thing.
When Roy Moore, then 34 years old, asked 17-year-old Debbie Wesson Gibson if she would date him, Gibson asked her mother what she would think.
According to The Washington Post’s investigation into Moore’s pursuit of teenage girls, which was published Thursday, Gibson’s mother replied, “I’d say you were the luckiest girl in the world.”
That attitude of encouraging teenage girls to date older men, rather than shielding girls from men’s advances, sounded familiar to some people who read the Post story that has shaken Moore’s bid for the U.S. Senate.
“It’s not so uncommon that people would necessarily look at it askance,” said Nicholas Syrett, a University of Kansas professor who recently published a book on child marriage in America. “The South has a much longer history of allowing minors to marry, and obviously there’s some courtship or dating — whatever you want to call it — leading up to that.”
The younger you imprison them, the more malleable they are.
That courtship of underage girls is especially common in conservative religious communities.
“We should probably talk about how there is a segment of evangelicalism and home-school culture where the only thing Roy Moore did wrong was initiating sexual contact outside of marriage. [Fourteen-year-old] girls courting adult men isn’t entirely uncommon,” Kathryn Brightbill, who works for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, tweeted on Friday, prompting a flurry of responses from other people who also had watched teenagers date much older Christian men.
Does the word “patriarchy” ring a bell? Husbands are supposed to take over from fathers, and both are supposed to keep the flighty brainless hotblooded little thing in line.
Ashley Easter, who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist church where courting was the norm for teenagers, said, “That was the first thing I thought of with Roy Moore.” In her church community in Lynchburg, Va., Easter said, fathers had complete control over whom their daughters were allowed to date, and she could see how a father might set his teen daughter up with a much older man.
“A woman’s role is to be a wife, a homemaker and someone who births children. The man’s role is generally to be established and someone who provides the full income,” said Easter, who runs the Courage Conference for survivors of church sexual abuse. “It may take longer for a man to reach stability. While a woman of 15 or 16, if she’s been trained for a long time looking after her younger siblings, in their eyes she might be ready for marriage.”
And that way she’s locked in early, so it will be harder for her to get out if she ever develops a mind of her own.
Easter said she experienced this courtship culture herself. As a woman in a fundamentalist Christian church who was expected to remain under her father’s roof until he handed her over to her husband, Easter became a “stay-at-home daughter” after high school. She said she understood the pressure a teenager might feel to marry an older man as a way to gain some measure of independence.
Easter left her fundamentalist community four years ago, at age 21, after breaking off a relationship with a man her father had selected for her. Now, she helps run the Courage Conference, a gathering of people who have left abusive religious communities, and listens to the struggles of the women who attend. “Their lives are very difficult now that they’ve gotten free. When you have never learned to make your own choices — you haven’t learned how to be in charge of your life. Working through that can be very scary,” she said.
But maybe not as scary as being married to Roy Moore.
Those of you who know me might laugh but my sister is a seriously fundie Baptist. I’m not picking on Baptists in particular, more the fundie part, but it worries me that she chose a strain of Christianity which seems to lend itself quite well to abusive behaviour. I mean, it ain’t no Catholicism or anything but the particular thread of Baptism with which she’s been involved for decades is is disturbing in its insular and doctrinaire nature. There is a very definite theme of marrying within the religion and she has three young kids. I don’t think for a moment that she’d allow them to be abused, but I’ve seen the differences between the ways she treats her daughters and the ways she treats her son and it sickens me. I’ve noticed the casual way she talks about her daughters getting married at some point to someone she and her husband know through their extensive church work and I am seriously freaked out.
I don’t think I’ve ever been a good influence on anyone but those kids do seem to like their Chaotic Evil uncle latsot. I can’t help it if I infect them with vile ideas about doing whatever the fuck you want as long as it helps rather than hurts people. All I know is that those kids run riot and defy their parents whenever I’m around, at which point I open forth my maw and cackle. Which is not very often, for some reason I’m not usually invited to their family events.
Anyway, my point is this: I am privy to some possibly abusive (in terms of indoctrination and possible future creepiness) relationships and there’s not a great deal I can do about it other than to be my usual disruptive self. It’s all down to religion, or at least the love of religion: my access to those kids is limited because I’m such a bad – or at least, chaotic – influence on their idiotic religious beliefs.
It’s almost as though we need to build on atheism as a movement, to incorporate concern about the victims of religion and propose and endorse something better. Atheism~, possibly.
14 year old girls ‘courting’ older men…really? The merchandise doesn’t pursue the customer.
Yeah, that caught me, too. It sounds like a way to get Moore off the hook. He wasn’t molesting her, she was ‘courting’ him. Bullshit is what I say about that.
The reasoning behind your outrage at the lack of outrage on the part of some people seems somehow backwards…
The way I see it — grossly oversimplified, yes, but intentionally so, to get at the roots of this difference in opinion — is that one can only be outraged by an adult man courting an adolescent girl if one believes the feminist premise that women are people.
Marriage, in every culture I’m aware of (I’ll admit to lack of expertise, but this is a polemic, not a dissertation on the origin of the concept) is fundamentally an institution to legislate the conditions under which men are allowed to own and make use of female humans as livestock/chattel slaves. Some religions go as far as to set out an extensive framework of mutual rights and obligations, but as men are always granted the ultimate authority in the marriage (and other men are always the arbiters/enforcers), it is men’s rights and their wives obligations that are preferentially enforced by their society. This is really what “Patriarchy” means, regardless of the multitude of figleaves any given culture uses to disguise this fundamental structure of the marriage relationship.
Many Westerners (at least the ones sufficiently aware of history not to reject the idea outright) like to argue that the institution has evolved, and, to some extent it has, but even today, even in developed countries, the institution of marriage is only as evolved as that country’s attitude to women’s status as full and equal human beings. Slavery is a sufficiently unpalatable concept today, that, certainly, in the U.S., even the most fundamentalist of fundamentalists would strenuously protest that a “wife” is just a nice word for livestock/property. However, the inferior status of women is so “baked in” into what our society considers normal or “normal enough” to make allowances for, that it takes a great deal of effort to even spot specific instances.
This is why, to many, many people (yes, including women — since women are people equally capable of absorbing their cultural milieu), a relationship between an adolescent girl and an adult man doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Even many people who consider 14 to be too young to date or marry a man in his 30s only see it as a matter of legality and/or infantilizing the 14-year-old as being too young to be exposed to sexuality (this being incompatible with the concept of childhood purity). These same people are more ok with a 16-year-old dating/marrying that same man (especially in states with a lower age of consent). Almost no one blinks at a 30-something man pursuing 18-19 year old girls in general.
And why should they? Every cultural artifact subtly trains us to accept some degree of men’s ownership or domination of women — it is literally inescapable. Even as Americans have come to see their pets as family members and to increasingly legislate for their humane treatment (and to pass harsh social judgement on people who treat their pets worse than the socially-accepted standard but not sufficiently badly to violate the law), we have come to expect the same sort of “nicety” in ownership of wives and children, but the inherent right to ownership is still softly implied, and the only points of disagreement, really, are local community standards. So yeah, in plenty of communities parents are perfectly fine with, and, indeed, welcoming of, their adolescent daughters being courted by older, established, high-status men. After all, if these daughters are meant to be owned, isn’t it better to hand them over to a stable, mature, kind and wealthy owner who can provide them with a good home, pamper them, and have more alternatives when it comes to extracting domestic labor from them? And just as it is easier to find a home for a puppy or a kitten, who, in addition to being extra adorable, also promise to be more trainable, and, due to their youth, free from the potential baggage of prior trauma (and therefore neurotic triggers needing to be accommodated) inflicted by abusive owners or bad habits fostered by neglectful ones, isn’t it easier to find a good future owner for your daughter while she is younger, firmer/tighter/bouncier, and more naive and unformed, making it easier for her to adjust to her future circumstances at the same time as it gives her new owner more power to mould her to his preferences?
The only reason you’d be outraged by an adult man repeatedly pursuing relationships with adolescent girls (and at least deeply suspicious if this happened on only one occasion) is if you believed that women’s inner lives were exactly as deep, interesting, and valuable as men’s, and that adolescent girls should, therefore, be given the opportunity to mature at their own pace, to both pursue their own educational and professional goals (as ends in themselves, not as a future financial asset to the families they will one day have) AND to explore their own developing sexualities and experiment without pressure (such as from a more socially competent adult seeking to mould them to satisfy his own, already formed desires). If that was the source of your objections, you’d see the age of consent laws as a very imperfect tool to try and protect minors from predation by adults (usually, specifically adult males), rather than a silly PC rule constraining right-thinking red-blooded men from playing ball when grass has very obviously been on the field for years. In fact, if that was the source of your objections, you’d be more willing to make exceptions and take context into consideration, reasoning that an adolescent may well be interested in and pursue an adult, and, again, while any right-thinking adult would rebuff such advances as a matter of course, in some rare sets of circumstances, it would, at least, not be unambiguously wrong for the adult in question to accept them (while everyone still agreeing that it IS unambiguously wrong for an adult to pursue an adolescent).
Much as some people love to insist that compromise is always possible, there’s really no middle ground between these two positions. Sure, you might have a perfectly reasonable conversation with someone where you agree that no one under 18 is old enough to get married, and that when women are educated they are healthier, happier, more satisfied with their lives, form more stable families, etc, and that male violence against women is unacceptable, and so on and so forth, but just because you agree on all of these “right on” socially acceptable virtue signalling “best practices” doesn’t mean you are actually seeing eye-to-eye. It is easy to overlook fundamental disagreements on first principles when everything is going well. It is only when norms are violated (but not always even then) that anyone even begins to question why those are the norms, how they became the norms, and whether everyone arrived at their agreement on what the norms are from the same starting point, and once you start debating those starting points, it really isn’t pretty: there’s no middle ground, you can’t agree to disagree, and there isn’t an agreed-upon arbiter to appeal to to settle the question once and for all.
So, sure, maybe everyone who frequents this blog will be outraged by Roy Moore kissing a 14-year-old when he was in his 30s (I’m not aware of her name or if it’s even been released) and inviting her to fondle him, and maybe everyone here will be equally outraged both by his asking (at 34) a 17-year-old Debbie Gibson to date him AND by her mother’s reaction. But I am far too familiar with just how quickly most Americans, even if they superficially agree that women are people and the equals of men, reveal an alarming lack of follow-through when it comes to their expectations of what being full and equal humans actually entails when it comes to women. Honestly, I often question if ignorance isn’t bliss, and if it isn’t really better (if one is lucky enough, of course) to find a nice owner at 17 (or 18, or even 14) and sail through life without ever being made fully and repeatedly aware that almost everyone you meet will see you as no more than a cow, or, if they are really nice and liberal, perhaps a cat.
This has been my experience. In my playwriting collective, there are a number of women, and the members of the group mostly identify as liberal. They would be horrified that anyone would suggest otherwise, or should anyone suggest they see women in a patriarchal role.
Yet there is much in the plays they write, and in how they are produced, that simply accepts the “way women are” as presented so commonly throughout history. It is so difficult for them to see the situation that few noticed when my intelligent, strong, educated woman (and asexual, being a worker bee) was turned into an airheaded ditz during production. Not only that, she was portrayed as a sexually frustrated spinster who swooned over the first boorish male she encountered. While some people were uncomfortable with the sexual overtones that were added to the role by director and actor, even they did not realize the violence done to feminism in the portrayal, and the comfort such a portrayal no doubt leant to the patriarchal structure of our society. And most of them, when the discussion began, simply said, well, it was a success, people like it, so what are you complaining about? Damn.
And no one, absolutely no one else noticed what they did to another strong, educated, intelligent female character who actually managed to perpetuate a nice slap down of the male character when he was acting like a jerk to try to impress her. She came on into an office setting carrying the things to go on her desk – a wastebasket full of bric-a-brac, pictures, hand lotion (which was actually applied during the play), perfume, and other feminine niceties. The male character then stepped in to his desk carrying a telephone and a piece of paper – a lean, mean, working machine contrasted to the feminine, sort of trivial female who was demonstrating that she put family and nurturing first by the pictures on the desk. I know the author of the piece, and I doubt it bothered him. He would say, like they all would say, well, this is just how it is. Women are caring and nurturing, men are stripped down and hungry. Surely you don’t have a problem with that? After all, isn’t it nice that women are like that, so they can make the world a better place to live? Damn it, no. I’m sick of it. It is a subtle way of reminding us that women are more of an ornament and an assistant in the working place, while men are the efficient go-getters.
And as for marrying? I was constantly reminded, from the age of six, that my role was to marry. My mother started my hope chest when I was 8 by buying me a punch bowl for Christmas (have you ever known an 8 year old who would rather have a punch bowl than a Mr. Potato Head?). My older sister began dating at 14, and married the man 2 years later. I was a big disappointment, because I never did what a fundamentalist Christian woman is supposed to do. I guess I wasn’t very good at that stuff. God was more like Santa Claus to me, something you believe in when you’re young and discard when you get older. But I was still expected to toe the line and marry a good Christian man and have good Christian babies, die a good Christian death and get buried next to my husband/owner in a good Christian grave, visited regularly by my 97 good Christian children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. My family considers me hopeless; I have one child, and even though I am now 57 years old, I do not have (nor desire to have) any grandchildren. I am a scientist, a playwright, and a feminist/atheist/environmentalist – in short, the true black sheep of the family. I am the only one who ever finished what I started, and I know that I would have achieved little of that if I had married at 16 like my older sister. But I would have made my parents very happy.
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Outstanding one-two punch there.
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