One about killed a woman by not identifying her pregnancy is ectopic. Many anti abortion folks are convinced that even ectopic pregnancies can be viable.
These places promise things like free pregnancy tests and medical advice to get people in the door.
They really just exist to pressure women into not getting abortions. They will lie through their teeth - all the classics, like suggesting that an abortion makes it impossible to get pregnant again, or that abortion causes cancer - they’ll say anything to prevent an abortion.
They are pretty much completely unregulated, and present themselves as secular non profits.
Doesn’t everyone need permission to have sex? From the person they’re having sex with, no doubt…
Who else could they be claiming someone would need permission from?
I was sent to a Christian (Baptist leaning) high school and in 9th grade instead of sex ed we had an abstinence unit in health class where they brought in 2 people (one man and one woman) from some outside organization to speak to us about abstinence. So boys and girls were split up and they tried to “encourage us to ask honest questions.” Some of the things that the girls were told is:
The boys were apparently told similar things except that there was a big emphasis on how masturbation and porn count as no longer being abstinent bc they’ll be sex and porn addicts. Then the male speaker spoke to the boys and girls together about stds and how if you have sex with one person then you’ve basically had sex with anyone they’ve had sex with, so you’ve basically fucked 1,000 people. We were literally told that
Ironically, the female speaker was pregnant (married) and the male speaker told us how his wife didn’t wait till marriage and she had to pray super hard and luckily God answered her prayers and let her enjoy married life like she had been abstinent (whatever the fuck that means??)
So basically, as women we were straight up told to consider the feelings of a theoretical future husband and let that determine our actions :/
I got the same crap. I’m sorry you were subjected to that bullshit, too. :(
That is fucked up :(
I was taught this in public school.
I grew up in a christian environment too (non-denominational, but beneath the surface it was baptist-leaning, though I didn’t realize that till much later; I was just told it was “true christianity” because it wasn’t adulterated with any “denominational doctrines.” Spoiler: it was).
Anyway, I was homeschooled in elementary and part of middle school. I was given puberty books from a christian publisher that told me things like “masturbation is a sin because sex is supposed to be between husband and wife, not you and yourself” and “your parents might sound crazy sometimes, but that’s actually because you’re loopy from hormones and your parents are actually always right about everything.”
Then I joined a church youth group, and we were told similar things to what you were saying. The old “duct tape and lint” analogy, the “you have to be faithful to your future spouse” gimmick. Of course talking about pregnancy and stds, the failure rate of condoms, how viruses are smaller than sperm so they can apparently fit through the condom easier…
I don’t think they separated us by gender for those talks, maybe because none of the youth group leaders were women (the women prepared the meals, though, obviously…). So as far as I’m aware the girls weren’t told anything different from what the boys were.
There was a dress code, especially when it came to swimming, which mostly applied to the girls, but boys wouldn’t have been allowed to wear crop tops or bikinis either even if we wanted to. I don’t know exactly what messaging the girls received about it because it wasn’t directed at me so I didn’t internalize it. But there was a lot of general undertones of bodily shame to go around.
So yeah, it sucks that we were programmed with that messaging at an age when our minds and self-identities were still developing. But it doesn’t have to be a “guys vs. girls” thing. It happened to both of us, and we can heal from that without blaming the other gender. Otherwise, the programming wins by keeping us separate, as a perpetual “wedge” placed between us by that messaging we received growing up…
Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say it was a girls v boys thing but rather to point out the gender stereotypes those in charge were pushing as part of the message. They always assumed that girls don’t have to be told to not masturbate bc women aren’t sexual, men are. And yet, they had to constantly tell the girls to not dress slutty and tempt the boys. We were all taught fucked up things, they just changed it up slightly between the boys and girls to fit gender stereotypes
Oh, valid. Yeah, I remember being told “Guys think about sex every 11 seconds, that means we have to work really hard all the time to keep our minds pure, while women’s minds are just pure by default.”
I basically internalized this messaging that as guys, we’re inherently perverted, disgusting, aberrant, and impure beings who need to constantly remain vigilant and fight with ourselves to keep our animalistic nature in check. You know, to protect women’s chastity of course, because without us they would be perfectly pure beings with no sexuality whatsoever. Apparently…
That’s so fucked up. I always felt bad for the guys in my class because a lot of them were really sweet but some clearly internalized that messaging in the same way you did. No one should be made to feel like they’re a monster and inherently dangerous
Yeah, it took me deep into my twenties to unlearn all those subconscious patterns. It took a lot of digging, which at times felt like wandering blindly through a labyrinth. It wasn’t a comfortable process, and there were many dead ends. At times I even wound up basically torturing myself in a misguided attempt to rewire my brain. No doubt informed by the underlying assumption that I’m somehow inherently evil and deserved the self-torture, as if the most virtuous thing I could do for the rest of my life was punish myself for being born.
I’m a lot healthier now, and I’m not sure how much of that was necessary, but ultimately it wasn’t an easy process to deprogram myself, especially when I found very little social support when what I really needed was healthy mentorship, social acceptance and integration, and basically any good influences to drown out all the echos in my mind of voices from my past…
Like, this whole assumption we see so commonly, where guys have everything so easy and aren’t harmed by the patriarchy too, it really needs to change, because it is harmful. Real feminists like bell hooks and carol gilligan acknowledge that.
I’m not claiming women don’t have it bad, but whenever I even mention that men also face societal problems, I get flamed by pseudo-feminists who seem to believe “smash the patriarchy” means “bully any man who shows vulnerability or weakness.” It’s really sad.