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How The Church Set Us Up For Relationship Dysfunction
42 Plays3 years ago
Savannah and Reaux reckon with some of the most damaging lessons, dysfunctions, and observed hypocrisies about relationships they learned from church. Not Lilith though, she's a godless heathen.
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Transcript
Episode Introduction: Toxic Religious Upbringing
00:00:06
Speaker
What's up, queens?
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to the Female Dating Strategy Podcast, the meanest female-only podcast on the internet.
00:00:10
Speaker
I'm Ro.
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm Savannah.
00:00:12
Speaker
And I'm Willis.
00:00:14
Speaker
And today, we are going to church.
00:00:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:00:18
Speaker
We're going to talk about Jeebus.
00:00:20
Speaker
Jeebus.
Lilith's Experience: Demon Child in Church
00:00:22
Speaker
we're talking about some jesus um no uh yeah so this episode is about some of the toxic messages that we learned from our religious upbringing a long overdue episode because i know that we've hinted at it a lot about certain messages that were instilled in us when by us i mean savannah yeah lilith is a godless heathen i'm a godless heathen but
00:00:47
Speaker
Do you remember you saying that you do have religious family members?
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, I do have religious family members, but honestly, I am a legend in the church as the demon child, right?
00:00:56
Speaker
So I don't show my face there.
00:00:58
Speaker
You swerved that.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:01
Speaker
I literally, as a child, would scream in church because I didn't want to be there, and then they stopped inviting me, and that's how I got out of going to church.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh my gosh, we just got our asses beat if we did that.
00:01:11
Speaker
Just started screaming in church!
00:01:13
Speaker
I did also get my ass beat, but I just kept screaming.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:18
Speaker
And it was perfectly acceptable for the other like church mothers to pop you with a wooden spoon too.
00:01:23
Speaker
Or like a spatula.
00:01:26
Speaker
See, my mom had this attitude of like, only I am allowed to beat my daughter kind of thing.
00:01:30
Speaker
So my mom wouldn't have let that fly.
00:01:32
Speaker
But so I guess it's kind of like, she had her own weird way of protecting me.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I guess that kind of helped.
00:01:38
Speaker
But yeah, I just was raised mostly without the influence of God or just sort of like a peripheral sort of outside thing.
00:01:46
Speaker
If that makes sense.
Cultural and Religious Entanglement
00:01:47
Speaker
It's hard to actually do this episode because there's so much to unpack that it's almost hard to know where to start because most of it has to do with patriarchal religion.
00:01:56
Speaker
And it's a pretty sticky topic because for a lot of people, religion isn't necessarily just a belief system.
00:02:03
Speaker
It's like a cultural...
00:02:04
Speaker
It's part of their culture, right?
00:02:06
Speaker
So it's hard to extricate themselves from the social aspect of believing in a religion, even if they don't necessarily believe all the tenants anymore, even if they've secularized themselves.
00:02:17
Speaker
There's a lot of people like where their, you know, their family is so entrenched and it's difficult to do.
00:02:20
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:02:21
Speaker
Where do you want to start?
00:02:22
Speaker
I just wanted to say as well that I think the time has come, as they say, to...
00:02:29
Speaker
To really have a reckoning on the role of religion and just how much, I guess, upset, discrimination and just basically bullshit that it's responsible for, regardless if you're a religion or not.
00:02:41
Speaker
A lot of people aren't taught the history of religion and just how many things it had an influence over.
00:02:47
Speaker
So when people talk about the separation of the church and state,
00:02:51
Speaker
Even though in a lot of especially Western worlds that is happening, but the genesis or the impact of religion, it still can't be removed from certain industries because it's so deeply rooted.
00:03:02
Speaker
For example, the concept of the mental health institutions and mental asylums actually started with the Quakers when believed that mental illness was basically like
Religion's Influence on Mental Health
00:03:12
Speaker
a physical illness.
00:03:13
Speaker
And in that, you know, we can exercise that we can basically just like cut out of your system.
00:03:18
Speaker
And the same, you know, sort of, you know, when it comes to the asylums, the same, I guess, like format of asylum that was begun by the Quakers is still very much relevant today.
00:03:30
Speaker
And it really has an impact on the way people with poor mental health and the people who end up in these sorts of places are treated as well.
00:03:37
Speaker
So there really needs to be a wider discussion, I think, about just how far reaching religion actually is.
00:03:43
Speaker
And in particular as well, when it comes to women, like historically, I'm speaking from the point of view of Christianity, because that's what I
Christianity's Impact on Women
00:03:50
Speaker
grew up around.
00:03:50
Speaker
But historically, Christianity has not been a friend to women at all.
00:03:55
Speaker
If you look at the historical teachings, the way Jesus was essentially lauded in the Bible, seen as a radical human being, just because he treated women differently.
00:04:05
Speaker
as if they were human beings.
00:04:07
Speaker
Like bearing in mind, people like to say that Jesus was so liberal, but he wasn't.
00:04:10
Speaker
He was still quite conservative.
00:04:12
Speaker
If you look at what he actually said, but it's quite telling that at the time he was deemed to be a radical person because he so much as spoke to women.
00:04:21
Speaker
And the mischaracterisation of women in the Bible is a huge thing as well.
00:04:24
Speaker
Like Mary Magdalene, you know, when people say Jesus was friends with prostitutes, they're referring to Mary Magdalene when there is that little to no evidence to suggest that she was actually a prostitute.
00:04:34
Speaker
But that's just become a huge part of Bible lexicon.
00:04:37
Speaker
And a lot of the, I suppose, like the myth busting around the Bible and the stories, I actually learned from essentially an atheist as well, which is also interesting.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:46
Speaker
So, yeah, I think we need to have a bit of an honest discussion about the history of religion to begin with and where women fit into that because the history is not pretty at all.
00:04:58
Speaker
It's always been politicized and it's not to just pick on, I don't want to pick on just Christianity, but most religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, I don't know as much about like Buddhism or
00:05:10
Speaker
or Hinduism.
Politics of Biblical Canon
00:05:11
Speaker
We're leaning towards Christianity because we understand it more culturally.
00:05:14
Speaker
It's one that we grew up in.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I grew up in.
00:05:18
Speaker
It's so politicized.
00:05:19
Speaker
And I think it's hard to have this conversation without blackpilling people, because even when you look at the types of things that made it in the Bible, or the types of translations that were considered accurate from like the original Hebrew texts,
00:05:31
Speaker
more Arabic texts to English.
00:05:33
Speaker
It's all very political.
00:05:34
Speaker
In fact, like the current canon in the Bible was decided by the Catholic church.
00:05:39
Speaker
And a lot of it has to do with like which things they thought should be in there.
00:05:43
Speaker
And a lot of the books that were a little bit more female friendly or told more descriptive things,
00:05:49
Speaker
tales about like women's role when it came to the messianic scriptures were deliberately omitted.
00:05:55
Speaker
So you have to understand that like everything that we're even reading or considering to be canon has some kind of historical basis and specifically a political ideology that was decided through what types of biblical texts
Toxic Teachings on Female Submission
00:06:07
Speaker
would be included.
00:06:07
Speaker
So it's very difficult to talk about because, you know, for anybody who's still practicing religion in this day and age, like you almost have to live with a certain level of cognitive dissonance between what's in the Bible, what the intention was when it was written, and then whatever church that you go to interprets it.
00:06:24
Speaker
And more often than not, and part of the reason why I walked away from the church is that you'll find that it's overwhelmingly toxic to women.
00:06:32
Speaker
Most denominations are horribly toxic to women, especially in the United States.
00:06:37
Speaker
Like when you're talking about Baptists, Lutherans, Kojic type churches, evangelicals.
00:06:43
Speaker
Having grown up in the evangelical culture, most of it is very like patriarchal, almost exclusively extremely patriarchal.
00:06:51
Speaker
And not even just patriarchal, but like specifically teaches a lot of female subservience and female denigration disguised as, once again, disguised as empowerment, where they try to tell you is empowering, but isn't.
Religion as Male Control Tool
00:07:05
Speaker
I honestly think that religion was designed as a supreme affirmative action for men.
00:07:11
Speaker
I know I've said that about marriage, but religion supersedes marriage in this case.
00:07:15
Speaker
It's honestly just a affirmative action for shitty men.
00:07:19
Speaker
If you look at some of the teachings about how women are supposed to be submissive to men, it doesn't really give as much attention.
00:07:27
Speaker
chair time to what sort of man is should be worth submitting to if you see what I mean so this is why I just think it's just affirmative action for shitty men and just another way to control women and keep them in their place and like Rose said it's just you know a way to convince women that being subjugated by men is in their best interest when it's not
00:07:49
Speaker
Yes.
00:07:49
Speaker
And everything is about context as well.
00:07:52
Speaker
There are some arguments that for its time, certain principles were progressive for women.
00:07:58
Speaker
But the problem with biblical fundamentalists and fundamentalists in general is that like they don't do any type of historical criticism.
00:08:05
Speaker
They look at it like everything there is the exact right way to do things.
00:08:09
Speaker
And there should be no creative interpretation for today's world.
00:08:13
Speaker
There's like a need to say that everything in the book is infallible.
00:08:18
Speaker
And therefore, that's the exact way you should perform everything.
00:08:20
Speaker
But the irony is like, even while they're saying that they still cherry pick things, which we'll get into.
00:08:25
Speaker
Oh, 100%.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:47
Speaker
where most of the evangelical teachings that I grew up with were all about how like men are the head of the household, that God ordained men with certain roles, men are supposed to be leaders, and women are supposed to be submissive and followers, right?
00:09:00
Speaker
That like we're supposed to submit to the headship of men and that women are made to be men's helpmeets.
00:09:06
Speaker
So from the beginning, they're already framing the
00:09:10
Speaker
that women's existence is there to be subservient to men and to what men want and men's needs.
00:09:16
Speaker
And that men are supposed to do like what they call like generally like graceful leadership or love leadership and stuff like that.
Church Teachings and Family Abuse
00:09:24
Speaker
I mean, it's so often bullshit, right?
00:09:26
Speaker
Like the expectations for men are, even though they're supposed to be a certain way, like they're not often enforced in the church and then often like used to constantly disenfranchise and disempower women and
00:09:37
Speaker
and cause women to not speak up when things are bad.
00:09:41
Speaker
And I talked about this in the bonus content is that it caused a lot of abuse in my family because the church basically put up with it because they felt like, well, the men are supposed to be the leaders in the house and like he's abusive because some of the women in my family, so they felt anyways, like weren't respecting their authority because they wanted to be focused on their careers or they wanted to get an education.
00:10:03
Speaker
And so like they discouraged women because
00:10:05
Speaker
from getting education, from getting careers, from getting like anything that might give them any type of independence because they felt like a woman's place is to submit to the authority of her husband.
Critique of Church Marriage Advice
00:10:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:17
Speaker
And then the marriage advice, advice in quotation marks, again, it just wasn't, I mean, from what I saw, it was always more about praying the problem away, being a better wife, basically putting up and yeah, basically put up and shut up sort of culture.
00:10:31
Speaker
There wasn't really any, even though, and, you know, I found this the wildest is that even Jesus said divorce is, you know, cheating is grounds for divorce.
00:10:40
Speaker
But if a woman was subjected to infidelity in her marriage, all the churches I went to, they would never advise her to divorce.
00:10:46
Speaker
If anything, you know, they would make out like she was a problem for wanting to be divorced and they would gaslight her and make her believe that
00:10:53
Speaker
you know, just pray it away.
00:10:55
Speaker
You know, you can be a better wife.
00:10:56
Speaker
This was just a blip.
00:10:58
Speaker
It's just a part of marriage.
00:10:59
Speaker
To the point where people in the church I went to actively expected that their husband would cheat on them.
00:11:04
Speaker
Like, it was just like a casual thing, so to speak, almost like, you know, I expect my husband to watch the Super Bowl sort of thing.
Power and Predation in Church
00:11:11
Speaker
And that's just how normalised it became.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting the double standard there.
00:11:15
Speaker
I don't know.
00:11:16
Speaker
I don't remember because I left the church early on.
00:11:20
Speaker
You escaped early on.
00:11:21
Speaker
Like, I don't remember necessarily like getting plugged into all of the drama as far as like people's marriages.
00:11:27
Speaker
I could only see as far as like cheating anyways.
00:11:29
Speaker
But like there was always like rumors about that, that there were men in the church that were...
00:11:34
Speaker
quite frankly, like just cads, right?
00:11:36
Speaker
Like they would just use the church as like their own predatory, like sexual ground, right?
00:11:41
Speaker
Maybe not predatory, but like, it was just more like it's a place where a man can have his ego stroked.
00:11:45
Speaker
And then there's a lot of desperate women and the proportion of men to women in the church is always skews female.
00:11:51
Speaker
So like if a man who is a leadership position in the church and he's single wants to have like women, then it's like the perfect place for them to do that because there's a lot of women who basically hero worship them.
00:12:04
Speaker
And in a place where marriage is touted as like the end goal for every woman, then yeah.
00:12:09
Speaker
And to be honest, I saw that predatory nature firsthand where the youth pastor at my church started a relationship with the vicar's daughter before she was 18.
00:12:19
Speaker
And I got all this tea because I was quite close to one of the, you know, like the people who run the church at the church council.
00:12:25
Speaker
There was a woman who sort of took me under her wing and I go to her house a lot of the time.
00:12:29
Speaker
And she was on it.
00:12:31
Speaker
And she said, like, he basically came to them and said, we're starting this relationship, bearing in mind he was a youth pastor.
00:12:38
Speaker
And they were like, what the fuck?
00:12:40
Speaker
So the compromise in quotation marks was they couldn't go public until she turned 18, but they'd started a relationship before she was 18.
00:12:47
Speaker
And the worst part is everybody knew it was like an open secret.
00:12:50
Speaker
Like they weren't even subtle about it.
00:12:52
Speaker
But looking back, this was like when I was still part of the church.
00:12:55
Speaker
So I just thought it was like, okay, yeah, whatever.
00:12:57
Speaker
But looking back, that was deeply inappropriate.
00:12:59
Speaker
It's just like a teacher having a relationship with a 17 year old student.
00:13:03
Speaker
That teacher would be struck off.
00:13:05
Speaker
Even if the teacher was, say, 22 and the age gap wasn't that big, but it's not so much about that.
00:13:10
Speaker
It's more the abuse of power, being in a power position, you know?
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:15
Speaker
A lot of men get into those positions specifically because they like having that power.
00:13:19
Speaker
And you have a lot of people that can, once again...
Reducing Female Influence in Church
00:13:23
Speaker
going to say this delicately.
00:13:24
Speaker
If you practice a faith-based religion, it means that often that you have to take things on quote faith, like less than, and not necessarily on evidence or reason per se.
00:13:35
Speaker
So often you have charlatan type people that take advantage of that, right?
00:13:40
Speaker
So there's a lot of men who see that kind of environment and they think to themselves like, okay, this is a place where I can thrive because you have a lot of people who will take what I say based on faith or face value.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, who basically give them the benefit of the doubt, even when it's not deserved or shouldn't be given at all.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, if you're part of a faith-based religion, it often means suspending certain levels of reason.
00:14:04
Speaker
And also there's a reinforcement that you should be innocent as a lamb.
00:14:08
Speaker
And then the way that forgiveness is inappropriately weaponized as well adds to it as well.
00:14:14
Speaker
So forgive and forget.
00:14:17
Speaker
Again, I'm going to speak about the church because this is all the experience that I have.
00:14:21
Speaker
But the way forgiveness is seen in the church is often very, very one-sided.
00:14:26
Speaker
It's unlimited chances.
00:14:28
Speaker
Even when the Bible doesn't actually say that at all.
00:14:31
Speaker
If you look in the book of, for example, Psalms and even...
00:14:34
Speaker
and proverbs as well, the Bible is really, really clear on, you know, not getting involved with shitty people and cutting them off as well.
00:14:41
Speaker
But the way that's translated, well, that basically hasn't translated at all into the context of the church, which is why so many Christians believe that you should just keep forgiving people, even when they keep on being shitty, even though the Bible never actually said that.
00:14:56
Speaker
And if anything, it says the opposite.
00:14:58
Speaker
It says that you're stupid.
00:14:59
Speaker
What's the line?
00:15:00
Speaker
I think it's like somewhere in Proverbs, it says, as a dog goes back to its, you know, vomit, a fool repeats their stupidity.
00:15:06
Speaker
So it's quite clear in that if you keep getting into the same bad situations, you know, then you're basically on the same level as a dog who eats its own vomit.
00:15:15
Speaker
Like, I don't know.
00:15:16
Speaker
I don't know.
00:15:17
Speaker
I don't know how much more base you can get about that, but that particular message, especially around forgiveness, is just not translated at all in the church today as well.
00:15:27
Speaker
There's often double standards around it and hypocritical.
00:15:29
Speaker
Like I said, they cherry pick which types of things deserve forgiveness and which things deserve permanent condemnation, right?
00:15:36
Speaker
And often, once again, it's things that give men power and disenfranchise women.
00:15:40
Speaker
So, you
00:15:41
Speaker
Yes.
00:15:41
Speaker
Like Savannah said, there is a lot of pressure for women to extend grace to men for almost everything, including things like infidelity, abuse, but you rarely see the opposite.
00:15:53
Speaker
And part of it, I think, is because men in those situations are more likely to bounce and just give up on religion.
00:15:57
Speaker
In my experience, they only practice religion if it gives them some type of power.
00:16:02
Speaker
And in fact, there's been a really big push.
00:16:04
Speaker
And this is something before I left the church, like one of the really big pushes in the church was about defeminizing the church.
00:16:11
Speaker
I don't know if that's something that you've...
00:16:13
Speaker
experienced at all, Savannah?
00:16:14
Speaker
I never came across that.
00:16:16
Speaker
So church attendance is down all around.
00:16:18
Speaker
And then like specifically the gender ratio in the church has gotten extremely lopsided in favor of women.
00:16:26
Speaker
So quick estimates, something like 60 to 65, 70% of, depending on the actual denomination of churchgoers are women.
00:16:35
Speaker
Also a lot of the way that evangelicals would praise and worship is kind of...
Women in Church Leadership Struggles
00:16:41
Speaker
It's interesting.
00:16:41
Speaker
Like it would be, I know like South Park lambasted it, but they would talk about God and talk about Jesus in a way that was like very much a love song.
00:16:49
Speaker
Like Jesus, I love you.
00:16:50
Speaker
And Jesus is like this and this and that.
00:16:52
Speaker
So it would turn a lot, it would turn a lot of men off who kind of didn't like the almost like romantic sounding devotion of a lot of the praise and worship towards God and towards Jesus.
00:17:03
Speaker
So there was this
00:17:05
Speaker
initiative and this pushback against what they were calling the feminization of the church because of the fact that so often like men were just leaving right like if any men men who would not want to take responsibility for anything men who couldn't use feel like they were going to be powerful in the church would be able to use it to exert power and the church would just leave they didn't necessarily like singing love songs to jesus
00:17:31
Speaker
They felt like women weren't submitting to them and stuff like that, right?
00:17:34
Speaker
So a lot of it had to do with them feeling like women were taking over the church and women were getting too powerful in the church, especially as like women started to demand that they be given more senior leadership roles.
00:17:45
Speaker
And this was a really, really big controversy.
00:17:47
Speaker
There was the controversy around
00:17:49
Speaker
giving senior leadership roles to obviously gay and lesbians, but also the controversy about giving women, even straight women, leadership roles was still really controversial.
00:17:58
Speaker
So there was a lot of like scrote raging about women, quote unquote, taking over the church and it no longer being a purview where men could like assert their authority and their headship, et cetera.
00:18:08
Speaker
It's interesting because they want most of the churchgoers are women.
00:18:12
Speaker
Most of the support staff are women.
00:18:14
Speaker
A lot of what keeps churches running are women, but they don't want women to have leadership roles.
00:18:19
Speaker
They attack women when women start to in any way, like, quote, scare the men off because they're not being submissive enough.
00:18:28
Speaker
Debatable about like, what if that's why there's sort of like a dependence on women while having a contempt for women at the same time.
00:18:35
Speaker
And I feel like part of the reason why women in particular are more susceptible to church is because women are so often in positions where they're dependent.
00:18:43
Speaker
And so like for myself and for my family, I know at different times in our life where honestly, we probably would have been destitute without it.
00:18:50
Speaker
The church has really stepped in, right?
00:18:52
Speaker
Where like it's become a place where even in the absence of men and if there's men there, there's a lot of like a way to find female camaraderie in order to support each other through difficult times.
00:19:02
Speaker
But that has led to like what they're calling feminization because it's more like it can be ironically like women supporting women while also upholding patriarchy.
Manosphere and Male Exodus from Church
00:19:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:12
Speaker
But don't you think as well as interesting how if I'm judging the timeline correctly that this, you know, mass exodus of, you know, men who ate shit from the church is,
00:19:22
Speaker
also coincided with the rise of things like the manosphere and the red pill that basically want the traditional, you know, woman that's been set out in Christianity, but obviously with like none of the responsibility or obligation to be a good person.
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that's exactly what it is.
00:19:38
Speaker
But I feel like religion was probably always the appeal for religion for a lot of men in the first place, right?
00:19:44
Speaker
The idea that they could have some kind of little mini-
00:19:47
Speaker
Affirmative action, basically.
00:19:48
Speaker
Like, they can get their woman, their submissive woman, who'll be a doormat, who won't challenge them, who'll make them food, give them babies, give them sex on tap, without them having to do anything.
00:19:57
Speaker
Affirmative action for men, ladies.
00:19:59
Speaker
Inaction.
00:20:01
Speaker
In the church.
00:20:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:20:02
Speaker
And that brings us to our next point about purity
Purity Culture: Male Ownership of Sexuality
00:20:06
Speaker
culture.
00:20:06
Speaker
So purity and sex culture.
00:20:08
Speaker
I don't know if people grew up in the age of purity balls and purity rings, but purity balls and purity rings were pledges that kids would make to... Generally, it was a girl would make to her father to remain a virgin until marriage.
00:20:21
Speaker
There was some gender swap version of that, but it was not nearly as popular and as prevalent as the daddy-daughter dynamic.
00:20:28
Speaker
I wonder why.
00:20:29
Speaker
The man was like in charge of his daughter's protecting his daughter's virtue and protecting his daughter's like virginity until she got married and gave herself to her husband.
00:20:38
Speaker
And so there was a weird, it's like this mentality that your sexuality is owned by your father until it's owned by your husband and that women don't have ownership of their own sexuality.
00:20:48
Speaker
Can I just say you?
00:20:50
Speaker
Right.
00:20:50
Speaker
Fucking you.
00:20:51
Speaker
The daddy daughter balls where they like dance and like the idea of a father like owning his daughter's sexuality is so disgusting and incestuous to me.
00:21:00
Speaker
Just like even symbolically.
00:21:02
Speaker
How is that a normal part of the culture?
00:21:04
Speaker
Well, so they don't like, it's not as explicit, especially if you're dealing with young kids, because the girls don't know what they're talking about, right?
00:21:11
Speaker
They're just like, oh, I love my daddy.
00:21:13
Speaker
I'm pledging myself to my daddy, right?
00:21:14
Speaker
Because they would do these purity balls for teenagers, but also like toddlers and stuff, right?
00:21:18
Speaker
So it would be kind of like a daddy-daughter dance and it would be promoted more or less like strong fathers protecting their daughter's virtue.
00:21:27
Speaker
So it's like, oh, I'm here to protect you and make sure nobody harms you or takes advantage of you.
00:21:32
Speaker
So like they would more...
00:21:33
Speaker
frame it that way and less about like explicitly about sex that it was less like incestuous and disgusting.
00:21:40
Speaker
What kind of purity are we talking about here?
00:21:42
Speaker
Like it is sexual purity, but like they would say everything.
00:21:45
Speaker
They would basically dress it up as like everything purity, like guarding her mind and guarding her heart and guarding her body as well.
00:21:51
Speaker
Yeah, but we all know what they're talking.
00:21:53
Speaker
That's the thing.
00:21:54
Speaker
That's what's so sick about these
00:21:55
Speaker
these types of events to me is that the kids have no idea what's going on but all the adults do and so there's almost like a sort of I'm watching it as an outsider it's like a has a sort of dramatic irony almost where you know in like plays or in theater there's like dramatic irony where like the audience knows something that the players you know or the characters don't kind of thing so I'm watching these little girls like not you know
00:22:16
Speaker
you know, I love my dad kind of thing for them.
00:22:18
Speaker
It's all innocent.
00:22:19
Speaker
They don't know what it's about, but the adults in the room do that like asymmetry and the knowledge of what they're talking about is what makes it so fucking creepy to me.
00:22:28
Speaker
And like, I'm sorry, I just, I always wanted to just take a step back and just be like, you're talking about
Purity Balls and Sexuality Manipulation
00:22:33
Speaker
all these things.
00:22:33
Speaker
That's like a completely foreign concept to me.
00:22:35
Speaker
And it's actually like, it makes me angry to realize that like how normalized it is actually for the girls that grow up with it.
00:22:42
Speaker
A lot of it that's really, I mean, harmful to women, which I think is, you know, why I think there was such a rise in like liberal feminism because it was basically like, fuck all that, right?
00:22:50
Speaker
Like I own my sexuality.
00:22:52
Speaker
I'm an experiment with my sexuality.
00:22:53
Speaker
They just kind of took it to an extreme, right?
00:22:56
Speaker
Because they were just trying to be anti-conservative.
00:22:58
Speaker
And because conservative purity culture is toxic and it's toxic in its own way because of the fact that like, once again,
00:23:05
Speaker
Everything is about making women sexually exploitable to men.
00:23:08
Speaker
And we've more talked about it from the angle of like secularism because we've talked about obviously like prostitution and like the sex industry, et cetera.
00:23:17
Speaker
But like that kind of grooming mentality, it really did start in a conservative culture.
00:23:21
Speaker
I feel like when women left started to kind of leave that angle, they just took that same idea away.
00:23:27
Speaker
but like applied it to secular culture and that like your sexuality and that like letting men dictate what's sexy and what your sexuality should be.
00:23:35
Speaker
Right.
00:23:36
Speaker
And then saying it's empowering because one of those I started to notice when I started to like, when I left the church and then started to kind of navigate the world as a sexual being outside of
00:23:45
Speaker
the church and then figuring out what that means.
00:23:46
Speaker
It's like, oh, a lot of the language is actually unironically the exact same coming from purity culture, but just dressed up for secular culture.
00:23:54
Speaker
And we talk about that all the time when a concept of submission as it means from BDSM versus like how submission is framed within Christian culture.
00:24:02
Speaker
Like it's literally framed the exact same way that female submission is the power position within a Christian marriage.
00:24:09
Speaker
And that like, actually the man has more responsibility to
00:24:12
Speaker
And that kind of situation because he's more accountable to God and that like, and that even though it looks like abuse on the outside, it's actually submissive and then i.e.
00:24:20
Speaker
the woman in that situation that has the more power.
00:24:22
Speaker
And so you see that exact same rhetoric being said by BDSM communities.
00:24:26
Speaker
And that's why I'm like, so this is just basically like bizarro world Christianity in a lot of ways.
00:24:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:32
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:24:34
Speaker
That was one of the things that I first noticed when I started dabbling in BDSM, just the parallels between like Christianity was just
BDSM and Religious Submission
00:24:42
Speaker
insane.
00:24:42
Speaker
Like, I don't think if you had a DS relationship and you had, say, a man walking his wife...
00:24:49
Speaker
on a leash like a dog in most churches.
00:24:52
Speaker
I don't even think they would care, to be honest.
00:24:54
Speaker
Like, they're so similar in terms of the structure, the protocols, the whole.
00:24:58
Speaker
And what's that really used to, like, really get on my wick in the BDSM community like, Ro?
00:25:02
Speaker
You know, in church, like, lexicon, like, when you're referring to God, right, you capitalise it.
00:25:07
Speaker
So even if it's his pronouns, like, he, him,
00:25:10
Speaker
it's always capitalized.
00:25:12
Speaker
And you see that in the BDSM community a lot.
00:25:15
Speaker
Like when women are referring to their doms, they capitalize and it just fucks me up every single time.
00:25:20
Speaker
Because I just think of it as a, I've only seen that in religion before.
00:25:23
Speaker
Like I've only seen, I mean, I was just like, what the fuck?
00:25:26
Speaker
I hate that so much when they refer to their dom with the capital he, like they're referring to a man as a God.
00:25:32
Speaker
With a capital he?
00:25:34
Speaker
Ugh.
00:25:34
Speaker
and they do it even when they're not like talking to the dom like when they're just having comments it's just i'm just like what the fuck but anyway that was one of the first things i noticed about bdsm and it just really squicked me out and even not just to the extreme of bdsm but general sexual culture like if you talk to christian women and christian girls they'll say the exact same thing that they're freely making the choice to give their purity to their father to their husband they're saving themselves from marriage out of their free choice
00:26:01
Speaker
Even though it's clear that men are manipulating that situation in the same way that like choice feminism says the same thing that like, oh, women, I'm really choosing to like have sex with all these guys on the first night because I'm empowered.
Comparing Purity Culture and Sexual Empowerment
00:26:12
Speaker
Where like it's very clearly when you take a little bit of a step back that men are manipulating that situation for most women by telling them that's empowering because it benefits them, right?
00:26:20
Speaker
So there's like an element of like just going from one type of sexual control and sexual exploitation that's been framed to women as empowerment.
00:26:28
Speaker
And purity culture is not framed to women like it's oppressive.
00:26:31
Speaker
And within the Christian circles, it is also framed as empowering and that it's actually giving you a lot of power in your relationship to say no.
00:26:37
Speaker
And that's why so many women, you're seeing like the rise of the trad wives and the rise of like the feminine coaches because it teaches them sexual boundaries.
00:26:44
Speaker
Now it comes at the expense of your sexual ownership being by men.
00:26:48
Speaker
are being had by men, but it does give them sexual boundaries versus liberal feminism that like normalizes the lack of sexual boundaries.
00:26:55
Speaker
I'd like they're kind of trying to pick play catch up now with consent, but even with consent, it's such a bare minimum criteria and it's not nearly sufficient enough for all the men are trying to sexually exploit you.
00:27:04
Speaker
It comes with the caveat of like sexual expectation because like you guess you have the freedom to make the choice in the same way that conservative women are making the choice to stay pure, but it's often your choices are dictated to you by men.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:17
Speaker
But what's so interesting about purity culture is that I'm not sure if you might have insight into this, not that you've partaken it, but if you just know any stories, but you never hear like, okay, so what's, I mean, so you never hear like the after the cherry popping story.
00:27:31
Speaker
From the little that I know, that many women or the women I know who waited until marriage, they ended up having very, very like disordered views about sex, even after marriage.
00:27:41
Speaker
And, you know, they've advised me even that if I could do it again, I wouldn't have waited so long.
00:27:46
Speaker
Not to say that they were buying into sex posi culture, sleep with everybody culture, but they would have, you know, but I think that when they got married, because even I think, you know, like another parallel between sex posi culture and purity culture is that they make sex a much bigger deal than it actually is.
00:28:01
Speaker
And I think that when these women, you know, eventually had sex, like, you know, like, for example, firstly, because in the church, there's absolutely no sex education.
00:28:10
Speaker
The only sex education is just to abstain.
00:28:12
Speaker
So things like the practical elements of sex, they knew nothing about.
00:28:15
Speaker
Secondly, even things like how to enjoy sex, again, they knew nothing about that either.
00:28:21
Speaker
You know, decades of being told that sex is dirty, sex is this, sex will change who you are as a person, sex will, you know, it's a binding experience that all the people that you slept with are going to be like hovering in your spirit for life.
00:28:34
Speaker
All those sorts of beliefs doesn't go away after marriage.
00:28:38
Speaker
And a lot of them ended up having quite basically... Sexual dysfunction as an adult?
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much.
00:28:45
Speaker
And it's really sad because they're not sexually dysfunctional.
00:28:48
Speaker
It's all completely psychological.
00:28:51
Speaker
There's also, there was a big scandal with millennials, especially those who went to a lot of these like Bible colleges about how often they would get married really young because of the emphasis on purity culture.
00:29:00
Speaker
So they get married at like 1920.
00:29:02
Speaker
I experienced that as well in my church.
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:05
Speaker
And they get divorced by 22.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:07
Speaker
First of all, I think a lot of the women felt pressured into it to feel like, okay, I'm going to take fulfilling my God-given duty to be someone's wife.
00:29:14
Speaker
But truthfully, the relationships had problems, but they also weren't actually sexually attracted to some of the men because they picked the good man, right?
00:29:21
Speaker
The Christian biblical man.
00:29:22
Speaker
And they had issues with sex, but also that like they didn't learn their own sexuality enough for them to sustain a relationship because then you get in a relationship, you don't know enough about your own sexual needs.
00:29:33
Speaker
And then it just becomes like a disappointment after disappointment.
00:29:36
Speaker
And in the place of that, that's when they started having all these like Christian books that came out.
Christian Relationship Teachings
00:29:41
Speaker
One of which was the five love languages, which is like a huge, which is huge, right?
00:29:45
Speaker
But it did start out as like a Christian book, but there's a lot of these like Christian relationship books and marriage books that would emphasize and like, they were so focused on like Christian sex.
00:29:53
Speaker
And part of it was because of like a lot of women discovering themselves in these marriages where they were just completely sexually unsatisfied that
00:30:02
Speaker
And then their husbands being demanding pricks because they're like, well, I thought I was going to get sex on demand because I got me a wife.
00:30:06
Speaker
Right.
00:30:07
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:30:08
Speaker
And all of it was like teaching women to like acquiesce in the name of God, which is like just so disgusting on so many levels.
00:30:14
Speaker
Like God's got to tell you to fuck your husband.
00:30:16
Speaker
Like, I think your sex drive is just what it is.
00:30:18
Speaker
I don't even think it was God.
00:30:19
Speaker
I think it was that Scrope Paul who had like, it was him who said, oh, you can only agree to not, like basically not having sex should be a mutual decision as opposed to like, so your husband should agree that you don't sleep with him.
00:30:32
Speaker
Like where's the bodily autonomy?
00:30:33
Speaker
And like Paul wasn't even married himself.
00:30:35
Speaker
So yeah, it didn't even come from God, that commandment.
00:30:37
Speaker
It actually came from one of his, I guess, like wayward apostles.
00:30:41
Speaker
He wasn't a disciple.
00:30:41
Speaker
He was just a random dude.
00:30:44
Speaker
Random guy.
00:30:45
Speaker
Just a guy.
00:30:46
Speaker
just a guy he was a convert he used to be like anti-christian and then he became converted and then he started writing all these gospels she just stayed blind to be honest for what he did for christianity oh was that the guy who used to be saul and then he became paul that guy yeah the road to damascus moment yeah he basically went hardcore once he did
00:31:06
Speaker
He went from a hard right to hard left or vice versa.
00:31:10
Speaker
Exactly.
00:31:11
Speaker
Like he was just like one of the first like absolute zealots.
00:31:13
Speaker
And so he had all these like ideas about how things should be run.
00:31:16
Speaker
So he was constantly writing people letters and shit about like how things need to be done.
00:31:21
Speaker
And he had so much to say about marriage despite never being married.
00:31:25
Speaker
The scripture she's referencing is 1 Corinthians 7, 5, where it says, Paul saying that abstaining from sex is permissible for a period of time if you both agree to it, if it's for the purposes of prayer and fasting, but only for such times.
00:31:37
Speaker
Then come back together again.
00:31:38
Speaker
Satan has an ingenious way of tempting us when we
Apostle Paul's Influence on Sexual Norms
00:31:41
Speaker
least expect it.
00:31:41
Speaker
So basically, they took this one verse and then they built all this doctrine around it about how you have to fuck your husband so that Satan doesn't tempt him.
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:50
Speaker
And women have really internalised that as well.
00:31:52
Speaker
Not just in religion as well, but it's basically that whole idea of like maintenance sex, isn't it?
00:31:57
Speaker
Like the idea that the only good reason for a woman to abstain is for prayer and fasting.
00:32:03
Speaker
When realistically, even in like modern day religion, you know, praise and fasting isn't really a thing in a lot of... So basically she hasn't gone out there.
00:32:13
Speaker
She hasn't gone out there anyway.
00:32:14
Speaker
I'm just imagining...
00:32:16
Speaker
ancient times women getting out of sex like you know now that it's like oh i have a headache or like oh i'm tired from work or something like imagine women back then like no we can't have sex tonight i'm fasting or like no imagine women like praying to avoid sex with their husband like the man wants to have sex she's like no no i'm busy praying like
00:32:33
Speaker
Let's figure out how to gain the system.
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, he was like, he was celibate, but he'd always say like, oh, the wife doesn't have authority over her own body, but yields it to her husband.
00:32:43
Speaker
In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but yields it to his wife.
00:32:47
Speaker
So it's like them trying to create a scripture by which, you know, in like the New English translation is marriage is not a place to stand up for your rights.
00:32:54
Speaker
Marriage is a decision to serve each other, whether in bed or out.
00:32:57
Speaker
So like there's a lot of like emphasis on this type of scripture and they built in a lot of the like relationship counselors would be them trying to like negotiate these sexual politics with even within the marriage because like a lot of women, they just had no sexual knowledge and no
Maintenance Sex in Religion and Secular Contexts
00:33:11
Speaker
sexual clue.
00:33:11
Speaker
Right.
00:33:12
Speaker
And then depending on what kind of religion you are, some of them are very anti birth control on top of that.
00:33:16
Speaker
So you're talking about the risk of pregnancy every time you have sex on top of that.
00:33:20
Speaker
And it's just like there's no acknowledgement of women's sexuality other than like this sort of submissive thing that she's got a duty for her husband.
00:33:27
Speaker
And the irony, and once again, when you look at secular culture, maintenance sex is also a thing in secular culture.
00:33:32
Speaker
When I look at like how the sexual liberation movement has really failed women, it's like it really feels like they just adopted all of the language from the church and then like made it fashion.
00:33:42
Speaker
made it secularized because this is yet another concept that started there that still exists in quote unquote empowerment circles or like women's like sexual function circles that like, oh, well, if you're not turned on all the time, if you're not a sexual being, you should have sex.
00:33:57
Speaker
If you're not having an orgasm, you should have sex.
00:33:59
Speaker
Like, even if it's like maintenance sex, these are all things that are like still preached, even though it's like, why, like, why is this something that we're
00:34:07
Speaker
at work creating as part of our sexual culture for women?
00:34:11
Speaker
And how is this different from the teachings of what came from conservative culture from the Bible?
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:16
Speaker
I know.
00:34:16
Speaker
That's how I started to see through the scheme of sex positivity.
00:34:19
Speaker
Because like, this is basically just the same shit I already learned, but like, almost like flipped around in its head a little bit.
00:34:25
Speaker
Instead of being a private property of a man, you're publicly property.
00:34:28
Speaker
And the words of Andrea Dworkin.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:31
Speaker
It's just, and the end result is the same increasing sexual access to women for men.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah, things like blue ball, like so many of the like myths about sexual culture and women's sexuality is not all that different, which is the irony of it, which is why still all this time, even after all this like sexual liberation, so many women, even now, even within Gen Z are reporting just like mass levels of sexual dissatisfaction because so much of it is like in service of men.
00:34:58
Speaker
Yeah, and that's sad.
Evaluating Religious Teachings for Women
00:35:00
Speaker
Okay, so, but I would like to make a final point, and this is towards the women who are religious or who are in the church, because I did know some people who didn't classify themselves as being religious, but they liked going to church.
00:35:14
Speaker
I'm not like hand-tee the concept of there being a deity or a God in general, but what I think that women who are in the church need to be aware of and to always consider is if the advice that they're being given is actually serving them.
00:35:30
Speaker
In my church career, I did find that there were some churches that were a lot better than others at being, I guess, somewhat decent towards women.
00:35:39
Speaker
And sometimes it's just the case of just potentially shopping around and finding a good supportive community as well.
00:35:46
Speaker
I don't know.
00:35:47
Speaker
I'm just trying to think of how FDS fits in with religion because I do know that there are some people who subscribe to FDS who are also religious.
00:35:54
Speaker
Realistically, I think it's actually hard to advocate for yourself within the bounds of patriarch religion.
00:36:01
Speaker
That being said, I think FDS would try to meet everybody where they are right now.
00:36:05
Speaker
Not everybody's in a position where they can just fully extricate themselves from their communities.
00:36:09
Speaker
Like I've said before,
00:36:10
Speaker
you know, religion isn't just, it's not just a belief system.
00:36:13
Speaker
It's like a cultural thing, right?
00:36:14
Speaker
Like there's a lot of people that celebrate Christmas and Easter and they're not Christian, right?
00:36:17
Speaker
In our culture.
00:36:17
Speaker
And even people who are, you know, if they're Muslim, in fact, I've had friends like, like their families are actually atheist and they moved to the United States from a Middle Eastern country, but like they still have to practice.
00:36:27
Speaker
They still practice certain cultural aspects of their, their religion, even if they don't believe in it.
00:36:32
Speaker
So it's not always like
00:36:33
Speaker
easy to just completely extricate yourself.
00:36:35
Speaker
But I think if you're still in a religion, and you're more looking for a traditional marriage within that religion, then I think the concept of vetting becomes extremely, extremely important.
00:36:45
Speaker
Don't be like the red pill chicks.
00:36:47
Speaker
It was just like kind of...
00:36:49
Speaker
Because the red pill is basically just the exact same thing.
00:36:52
Speaker
Instead of calling for biblical headship of the man, it's like their captain and all this kind of stuff.
00:36:57
Speaker
But all of those women are often in these completely one-sided to satisfying relationships because they don't vet and they're not encouraged to advocate for themselves.
00:37:06
Speaker
So the danger is, is if you're in these types of religion, understand that the odds are stacked against you, that the structure as is, is going to support male leadership before it supports your ability to advocate for yourself.
00:37:17
Speaker
And that includes everything, but especially things like sex, as well as like how to raise a family.
00:37:22
Speaker
So
00:37:22
Speaker
I know there's a lot of women who realistically, and once again, I think people who rely on the community, like people who are poor or working class or rely on the community of the church, they're more likely to stay within his teaching because it offers some kind of protection
Vetting Partners for Sexual Satisfaction
00:37:37
Speaker
for them, right?
00:37:37
Speaker
To have that community to like be able to uplift and support them through hard times.
00:37:41
Speaker
I don't want to like completely denigrate the church because I understand like why some women continue to do it because it is a place of resources for people who may not otherwise have it.
00:37:50
Speaker
But I think if you're looking to get into a marriage, even if you're trying to follow your religion, like it becomes of the utmost importance to draw boundaries around yourself and the types of things that you'll put up with.
00:38:01
Speaker
And I think even more so than other women, because you're going to put yourself in a position to be where the odds are stacked against you because the men generally can wield the power of the church a lot easier than women.
00:38:11
Speaker
So vetting men for obviously financial stability, but also like their ability to take direction from you is of the utmost importance.
00:38:19
Speaker
And then also personally, I don't think you should wait till you get married to have sex because I think like we said, it could lead to a lot of dissatisfaction that I know.
00:38:26
Speaker
But for those of you who are like born again virgins and like who've had sex and like, so you have at least some idea, like you have to lean on that experience even when you're trying to choose a sexual partner that you're going to have for the rest of your life.
00:38:36
Speaker
Like, I
00:38:36
Speaker
I almost recommend having sex, trying to start to draw boundaries around what you like, sexually what you don't.
00:38:42
Speaker
And then like becoming a born again person is to me, it's a little bit better than just going into it like completely blind.
00:38:49
Speaker
I think like if you want to wait until you're married, that's absolutely fine as well.
00:38:55
Speaker
But I think that you can decide to wait till marriage, but you just have to, you have to firstly make sure that A, it's also what you really, really want.
00:39:04
Speaker
And B, do your research into the after the cherry popping stories, because if you're expecting, because if you think that waiting until marriage is going to make your sex life better, or if it's going to be like, you know, fireworks from the get go, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
00:39:18
Speaker
And like Rose said, I would always...
00:39:19
Speaker
So then just invest in getting to know your body, what turned you on, invest in sex toys, stuff like that in the meantime
Critique of Purity and Sex Positivity Cultures
00:39:26
Speaker
as well.
00:39:26
Speaker
And also coming to terms with the fact that even though religion says that sex is this huge event and that if you do it in the wrong way, then you're forever dirty and unclean.
00:39:36
Speaker
that that isn't true.
00:39:37
Speaker
Like sex is a totally normal and healthy thing on the plane of sounding patronising, but it's just unfortunate that the mainstream advice out there is either purity culture or the other extreme, which is the sex positive culture.
00:39:49
Speaker
I believe that the true answer lies somewhere in the middle and it's highly personal as well.
00:39:54
Speaker
I think my biggest gripe with the sex posi and the purity culture is that the biggest proponents of it are often not happy with the choice that they've made.
00:40:02
Speaker
And I think with FDS, you know, one of the key things is, I know it sounds like choice feminism, but we do it with a twist in the sense that we want, you know, women to be empowered and to feel, you know, confident, secure and happy in the choices that they've made.
00:40:16
Speaker
So that's our show.
00:40:20
Speaker
We didn't go as hard on this as like, I know that there's a lot of people that wish that we did because of the fact that it's a delicate subject.
00:40:28
Speaker
And I know we're going to probably get roasted by a lot of people who hate religion, but just, you know, keep in mind that people are starting from different places in their FDS journey, we should say.
00:40:37
Speaker
So check us out on the website, thefemaledatingstrategy.com, as well as our Twitter, FMDatStrat, and support our Patreon.
00:40:45
Speaker
There's bonus content on there.
00:40:46
Speaker
You can also talk to us on the Discord, give us some feedback about this episode, submit a Rosas Grote, a Nasus, or a Queen Chit, and we can read it on the air if you have a dating question.
00:40:56
Speaker
Also, follow us on Instagram at underscore thefemaledatingstrategy.
00:41:00
Speaker
And that's all, folks.
00:41:01
Speaker
So thanks for listening, queens, and for all these Grotes out there.
00:41:03
Speaker
I see the devil in you.
00:41:05
Speaker
Die, Ben.
Episode Conclusion and Sign-off
00:41:07
Speaker
See you next week, ladies.