It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better! Because sharing is caring! So feel free to share away. The more, the merrier! ❤
The Language of What Happened To Us (from the Rumpus): “If I look more closely at the homeschooling community in which I grew up during my high school years, I see more of this: a high school friend who had never really touched herself until after she gave birth and was given a vibrator by her husband for an anniversary gift, who used it and then texted me: “I get it now.” A sister who was sexually assaulted by an older female neighbor, who didn’t know it was wrong because it was a girl who did it to her. A friend who was raped, who reported to her parents and to the police, but who was gaslit into signing an affidavit at the police station that she was making it up and seeking attention. A friend who was forced to drink Everclear by the pastor’s son and his friends, and who woke up the next day disheveled and in a house alone, and never questioned what happened until years later because she had blacked out, end of story. A friend whose brother assaulted her for years and used cruel torture techniques on her from books he read, who didn’t know what it was that had been happening to her until she learned more about sex when she started going to a public school rather than being homeschooled. Another friend who didn’t know she had been raped because she didn’t know what rape was, but knew enough to go to a doctor for an STI check, distraught that she had lost her virginity, and then was told she had been raped.
These stories are just a few. These stories are not surprising, because these stories are common. If I tried to make a list of all the stories like these that I have heard from former fundamentalist Christians, former homeschoolers, former true believers in the pro-life movement or in purity culture, it would run longer than the “begat” passages in the Pentateuch.”
How An Evangelical Dating Guide And Purity Culture Gave Me An Anxiety Disorder (from the Huffington Post): “I didn’t just grow up surrounded by the ideologies of purity culture ― I believed the narrative with every fiber of my teenage being. When I left the oppressive church of my childhood, I naively assumed that I could easily shed the principles of purity culture. The anxiety disorder that sprung up when I attempted to enter the dating world proved that, instead, they had been violently hammered into my psyche.”
Inside Monica Roberts’ Mission to Identify Transgender Murder Victims (from the Daily Beast): “Roberts had to fight for acceptance not just within the world at large, but within her own family as well. Her late father, she recalled, had high expectations for his firstborn child and “was not happy about my transition.” Through his radio connections, Roberts’s father was able to introduce Roberts to Houston politicians—and Roberts felt as though she was expected to become one herself.”
The Intellectual Dark Web is Just a Bunch of Whiny Rich People (from the Outline): “Members of the Intellectual Dark Web don’t connect their wild popularity and financial success to being mainstream, because without their beloved narrative of persecution and their self-imposed “outsider” status, they lose their access point to the most easily manipulated emotion: outrage. Everyone loves to be part of something larger than themselves — to be engaged (even if it’s through the other side of a screen) in what appears like some grand, cosmic war threatening to shake the foundation of our democracy. It’s the sort of thing that lifts the listener out of the humdrum dregs of daily life by convincing them that they’re the only one who truly gets it. The so-called Intellectual Dark Web is selling escapism, plain and simple, and so long as people continue buying it (and New York Times Opinion writers keep showering the practice with praise), they probably won’t stop anytime soon.”
Carrot juice to cure stage four cancer: the dangerous world of YouTube home remedies (from NewStatesmenAmerica): “In contrast, “natural healing” vlogs trade on the reassuring appeal of the familiar. Wonder cures are often ingredients found in kitchen cupboards: lemons, baking soda, honey. The vloggers who personally hawk such treatments tend to be fit, with pearly white teeth and glowing complexions. “You look like a really healthy guy,” reads a top comment on one such video. “[M]akes it easier to believe your videos and what your [sic] saying.””
I’m an OB/GYN and infanticide is not part of abortion care. Here’s why. (from Dr. Jen Gunter): “Whether a birth is recorded as “live” in situations of extreme prematurity or fetal anomalies — the kind of situations we are talking about — is not cut and dried. For example, when my son Aidan was born at 22 1/2 weeks I was asked if I wanted his birth to be considered a live birth? It was my choice.
I had no idea? I mean he lived 3 minutes or so, but he could never live a life. What a live birth got me was a birth certificate. I said yes, but in retrospect I wished I hadn’t. A live birth meant he was now a hospital patient and so I was charged $600 for the care he received — a blanket and a nurse holding him. Why was I charged? As he lived 3 minutes I obviously didn’t apply for health insurance. With no insurer to bill, I was charged for his post delivery care as if he were a term infant in the hospital for less than 24 hours. Nice, huh?
It was super special fighting that bill with collections when my other two boys were in the neonatal intensive care unit struggling to not die. So awesome the forced birth advocates are involved in helping women like me when we are literally penalized for having a live birth. (Heavy sarcasm).”
I’m Sick of Debating My Humanity as a Trans Person (from Medium): “However, there are some issues where there is no middle ground whatsoever. There’s no middle ground between young-earth creationism and evolution, no middle ground between flat-earth theory and reality, and no middle ground between oppression and human rights. Yet in our current discourse, the big name pundits and public armchair intellectuals all believe that the only way to create a more civil America is to debate the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings. It’s no longer a debate about the most effective ways to fight bigotry, but rather if we can allow certain forms of bigotry to prevail in order to make everyone happy.”
And that’s all for this post. Drop by again for more articles and information that you didn’t know you needed in your life. So until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 