feminine-genius

The shiny sewer for girls

There is an excellent piece by Dawn Hawkins on the harms of Cosmo, which is [surprise] geared to very young girls, not women (the 18-24 claim is shown to be false by the celebrities chosen, as this article proves). You're familiar with the vulgar cover and the decadent articles trumpeted at every checkout stand, but there's a concerted effort to at least minimise some of the effects on passers-by here.

If you step back and consider what we want all the young girls in our community to know about their future, to believe about themselves, to imagine in their heart-of-hearts, this isn't it. And without attentive fathers in the home to protect them, without a media with standards to filter these messages, without healthy family models around them to show them authentic love, is it any wonder that they're making ghastly choices from a very young age?

Let's step up and try to help.

Revisiting an old scandal

For some reason, Mary Kay Letourneau (the teacher who seduced a 13-yr-old student) is back in the news, perhaps because she believes the moral climate has changed enough to allow her back into the classroom. I need to outline a few details, not for the sake of salacious gossip, but because the reaction to this gambit will give a good indication of how much we've changed in the last 15 years.

When Mary Kay Letourneau Fualaau was forced to go public in 1997 with an affair she was having with her former sixth grade student, Vili Fualaau, after she became pregnant with his child, it was the teacher-student sex scandal heard around the world.

At the time, Mary was a 34-year-old, married teacher in Seattle, who already had four children of her own. Vili was just 13 years old. Mary was arrested and served seven and a half years in prison.

Today, Mary is 53 and Vili is 31. The couple is still together and are about to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. The two daughters they have together are now teenagers -- older than Vili was when the affair started.

How did her victim process his injury? What sort of help did he receive at the time? Appallingly little, of substance.

“It was a huge change in my life, for sure,” he said. “I don’t feel like I had the right support, the right help behind me ... from my family, from anyone, in general. I mean, my friends couldn't help me because they had no idea what it was like to be a parent, I mean, because we were all 14, 15.”

Vili said he had counseling sessions, but even then he struggled because he said counselors wanted him to take antidepressant medication to "even him out."

“I don’t even think the counselors knew how to deal with it. It was just weird,” he said. “I was like, ‘Why do I need to be on an antidepressant pill?’ And they said it was to level you out so they can have a conversation with you. ... It just kind of just really annoyed me through the years.” Vili was forbidden from visiting Mary in prison, but he said it would have helped him if he had been able to talk to her during that time.

Her husband divorced her, she was released in 2004, and she and Vili were married within a year. They seem to have put together some sort of stable life, and even gather all the children for holidays and special events, although interestingly, it's Vili who finds it the most awkward.

More importantly, though, Mary has asked a question that needs an answer:

"The incident was a late night that it didn't stop with a kiss," Mary said. "And I thought that it would and it didn't." When asked if she felt guilty or disgusted with herself for having the affair, Mary said, "I loved him very much, and I kind of thought, 'why can't it ever just be a kiss?'"

Let's consider why it can't:

• She was old enough to be his mother;
• She was married and the mother of four children;
• She was in a position of authority over the boy;
• He was from a dysfunctional, fatherless home;
• He was hormonal and immature;
• He had no support system.

So those are some reasons why there should have been no kiss, much less no ensuing intimacy. She broke her marriage vows, she betrayed her children, she took advantage of a student, and she violated the terms of her parole to endanger him further. I am happy that she has taken responsibility for the two daughters from this relationship by creating a stable home, but of course it's founded in the ruins of another home, another family, another vow that meant nothing.

These are my grave concerns at present:

• There is no self-awareness of how she was wrong to pursue a relationship with Vili;
• There is no remorse for the damage to her husband and children;
• There is no cognizance of ongoing scandal by throwing these six children together;
• There is no sense of proper boundaries between students and teachers;
• There is no sense of shame about bad choices or neglect of duty;
• There is no recognition of the harms to Vili, who seems like a likeable fellow;
• Reading between the lines, one senses that Mary is tremendously manipulative.

The clincher is the closing comments about dating--comments which prove supremely ironic. But for Vili, his words speak volumes about what he recognises as the legitimate harms he has steadfastly endured over the years:

Their parents are very protective, and Vili said he has warned his daughters against having boyfriends. “The reason for me telling them that was just from, out of experience,” he said. “A relationship could lead to something that you think you wanted back then. You don't really want it, maybe, years later.”

If either of their girls did what they did, if they came home one day and said they were sleeping with their teacher, both Mary and Vili said they would be shocked and upset.

“I don't support younger kids being married or having a relationship with someone older,” Vili said. “I don't support it.”

Amen. But an "I'm sorry, I was wrong" would have been a better response from Mary. That aside, if there is a rehabilitation of her school career at this point, we will know that we have turned a dangerous corner. Please, God, no -- our children cannot be exposed to any more, the culture is quite bad enough!

Who will protect the children?

There are two riveting accounts at the Witherspoon Institute of how gender disphoria harms children. The first shows the irresponsibility of the medical community for suggesting that sex-reassignment surgery can heal emotional wounds:

It wasn’t my mother but my grandmother who clothed me in a purple chiffon dress she made for me. That dress set in motion a life filled with gender dysphoria, sexual abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, and finally, an unnecessary gender reassignment surgery. My life was ripped apart by a trusted adult who enjoyed dressing me as a girl.

My mom and dad didn’t have any idea that when they dropped their son off for a weekend at Grandma’s that she was dressing their boy in girls’ clothes. Grandma told me it was our little secret. My grandmother withheld affirmations of me as a boy, but she lavished delighted praise upon me when I was dressed as a girl. Feelings of euphoria swept over me with her praise, followed later by depression and insecurity about being a boy. Her actions planted the idea in me that I was born in the wrong body. She nourished and encouraged the idea, and over time it took on a life of its own.

This story shows how difficult it is for children to process dysfunction in their parents:

When I was nine years old, my father told me he wanted to become a woman...In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman. As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires. His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father.

For all our talk of safe environments, when we don't protect the dignity and purity of children, we are party to abuse. There are many more excellent resources at Witherspoon. Kindly educate yourself and pass the word.

Exposure to exposure

This poor girl survived abuse that she couldn't categorise until later:

In a candid interview, the daughter of a famed pornographer about the abuse she underwent as a child through early exposure to pornography. Liberty Bradford Mitchell was the daughter of Artie Mitchell, whose life ended when he was shot by his brother and business partner, Jim, in 1991.

The brothers ran a strip club and a pornography studio in San Francisco throughout the girl’s life. She was present at the location many times, with her earliest memories of the place dating back to when she was four-years-old.

“I saw [the customers] all sink into this disgusting depravity where every woman in the room becomes a target. It became this entitlement that the men had and it made me sick,” she said in an interview with Salon.com.

“I experienced firsthand how confusing it can be to be exposed to sexual imagery as a child.”

She explains that even as a child, she found the activity "distubing" and "weird," which attests to the natural law written on every human heart. I would imagine that she was named "Liberty" from her father's misunderstanding of the concept, perhaps thinking that freedom is the license to do whatever he wanted. Praise God she found the true meaning in stepping beyond the childhood hell (where was her mother?!) into a place where she could describe perversity for what it is. 

According to the National Coalition to Prevent Child Abuse and Exploitation, exposure to pornography on young people can have many negative side-effects, including objectification, fostering positive attitudes towards violence against women and other types of sexual aggression, cynicism, sexual uncertainty, and other sexual and relational dysfunctions.

we must remember that it doesn't take a porno palace now to bring such exposure to children -- they can find most of the same material on the internet, in many movies, and described in a plethora of song lyrics. Even many sex education programs expose youngsters to such imagery at a very young age. Shame on our culture and on those who don't treasure and guard the innocence of children (or the persons abused in the making of such vulgar things.)

Kudos to Salon for publishing her interview, which ought to be a wake-up call for at least some of the readers there.

A granny's plea

This story is difficult to read, and reminds us of the difficult decisions that every family has to make -- decisions that we can only weep over years later:

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother warned against sending the Prince of Wales to boarding school in Scotland because she thought he would be miserable, according to a collection of her previously unpublished letters. 

Despite the Queen Mother’s pleas, the Duke of Edinburgh ruled that his eldest son would attend his alma mater, located in rugged countryside near Elgin. But her concerns proved accurate after the prince described the inter-denominational school as “Colditz in kilts.”

His father's reason was that if Charleys went to Eton (so close to London) he would be hounded by the press -- and we do know what the press is capable of in making one's life unpleasant. But the isolation of the school chosen for Charles was only part of his future suffering:

He thought Charles would thrive at Gordonstoun because his eldest son loved Scotland, the author said.

But, unlike his father, the young prince did not enjoy the Spartan regime, which included cold showers, physical punishment and morning runs all year round.

In a letter home in 1963, he wrote: “The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness, they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul.”

One contemporary at the school recalled that Charles was bullied “maliciously, cruelly and without respite.”

Indigestion in the lunchroom

This is unfortunate, given the age of the children. They are essentially trapped:

A parent of two young girls was caught off guard recently when her daughters came home from school with questions about a man dressed like a woman on duty in the school cafeteria. The parent was further chagrined when officials in the Sierra Sands Unified School District confirmed the story but insisted their hands were tied.

What continues to floor the parent, Phyllis Fernandez, whose daughters attend kindergarten and third grade at Faller Elementary School, is that the employee’s attire would not be permissible for students. The employee, a substitute lunch duty worker, was wearing makeup and a spaghetti strap shirt, with his bra straps visible to students. District dress code policies for students ban both spaghetti straps and visible undergarments.

“I shouldn’t have to be explaining to my five and eight year old girls why a man at their school is wearing a bra,” said Mrs. Fernandez. “The school believes they have to give special treatment to this individual because of his chosen gender expression, but the learning environment is suffering.”

With the current legal trajectory in place in this country, there is only more of this on the horizon. Technically, there is nothing to be done, given our refusal to stand by Judeo-Christian morality. In a secular state with no effort to define morality, the children will be fed to the lions.

Applauding divorce

Marriage can end in two ways: there are divorces and there are decrees of nullity (saying there was no legitimate union in the first place). Since other religions don't have the wisdom of the Church to remind them of fundamental elements of human dignity, they must use divorce to separate what should never have been united. Like geriatric men and little girls.

"ten days later..." ?!

From Jihad Watch:

(ANSAmed) - ANKARA - A 12-year-old girl from Corum, a village in central Anatolia not far from Ankara, has been sold twice by her father: the first time in exchange for four cows, and the second time for 10,000 Turkish lire (around 4,800 euros). Just yesterday the police discovered the crime and arrested the girl's father and the second buyer, while the first is still being sought.

The story was reported by daily paper Vatan, which writes that Sukru A. (this is the name of the father) sold his daughter K.A last summer when she was just 12 years old to 29-year-old bricklayer Kamber Bostan in exchange for four cows, who married the girl in a religious ceremony in front of the imam. After several months however, the girl - who became pregnant in the meantime - went back home because she didn't get on with her husband.

Last December, in her sixth month of pregnancy, she lost the child. Ten days later the father sold her again, this time to a 20-year-old unemployed man, Gokhan Turk, who paid 3,000 out of the 10,000 lire agreed upfront, and took the girl home. Yesterday, when Turk refused to pay the balance - claiming that the girl he bought was not a virgin - Sukru A. turned to the police and reported him for insolvency but without mentioning the reason.

After a short investigation the truth came out and both the father and Turk were arrested, while Bostan is still being sought.(ANSAmed).

A religious ceremony with an Imam speaks volumes, ladies. This must stop -- and if they wanted to, they could do it. People in a village know what goes on (note: "short investigation"). As to the baby, it could have been a stillbirth or an abortion --I suppose we'll never know. This is child abuse of the highest order.

UPDATE: and those who speak out can expect this. (In France, no less.) Bottom line -- "If you say anything bad about Muslim men, we will kill you." Bless her for her courage.