GOD, I love the internet. Because no matter what weird thing you're obsessed with - oddly shaped post-it notes, Swedish fist-fighting, rugby - there is a group of people out there who not only share your obsession, but have started a forum about it.
A few weeks ago, I went down the internet rabbit-hole reading about the phenomenon of Stay-At-Home Daughters.
The SAHD Coles Notes: these young ladies are fundamentalist Christians who choose to remain at home after completing their home school education rather than going off to college.
They spend their days learning the gentle arts of thrifty domesticity from their mothers, reading the bible and taking care of their (multitude of) younger siblings while cultivating "a servant's heart" in preparation for fulfilling their biblical roles as women - becoming heart surgeons. HAHAHAHAAA! Just kidding. They are training to become helpmeets to godly men.
These girls stay at home - as looooong as it takes - under the authority of their fathers - until they marry and their father transfers his authority to their new husband! For real - it's part of the wedding ceremony.
But here's the most awesome thing - a bunch of these stay-at-home daughters have blogs! I know! And despite their thrifty fundie ways, they all seem to have really excellent cameras with which to document the day-to-day minutiae of their at-home daughter existences. Typical stay-at-home daughter blogs have names like Aspiring Homemaker, the Unliberated Woman, The Father Knows Best, Courageous Womanhood and - my personal favourite SAHD blog - Striving to Serve at Home.
Striving to Serve at Home is about Meredith, the eldest of six, whose family runs an organic, sustainable dairy and poultry farm in Virginia. Meredith got her real estate license at the age of 19 (studying from home) and enjoys flipping properties - but promises to give up real estate flipping if it "threatens her husband's financial leadership".
I don't need to shit on Meredith and her life choices - while they're not my life choices, I think she's a smart person with a strong work ethic who's a titch more live and let live than some of her fire and brimstone fundie brethren. To be honest, after reading her blog - all of it, since 2007 - I actually kind of love Meredith, even though she'd probably shit twice, die, block my IP address and take a Christian shower if I ever left a comment on her blog.
God love her, Meredith waited a long time for her Prince Charming - in a culture where most stay-at-home daughters are stay-at-home mothers before they're old enough to drink, Meredith was 23 before her guy Stephen showed up. And the only reason they met is that he stumbled upon her blog the same way I did: by Googling "stay at home daughter". Creepy! Yay love! They got married a month ago and he's spirited her off to Oxford, where he's studying classics. She's super excited.
I'm not sure why but I found Meredith's constant talk of "God's faithfulness in scripting her love story" strangely compelling. I guess it kind of reminded me of the "yearning for a simpler time" I would sometimes experience when I read old-fashioned books like Anne of Green Gables, where you rambled in the woods, married a nice local boy, pressed your own apple cider, popped out a lot of kids and didn't have to worry about anything, like voting or having rights.
I yapped to a lot of people about Meredith and her God-scripted, internet-enabled love story but I don't get out too much and soon everyone I interact with on a regular basis had heard about this new obsession of mine and I had no one left to talk to about it. Also, Meredith didn't update her blog during her honeymoon (presumably because she and Stephen were getting to know each other in the biblical sense - or "skronking for Jesus", as my friend Padu would say) and I was starting to get antsy.
So I googled "Meredith and Stephen" and that's when I found my new online home - a fundie-obsessed forum called Free Jinger (Jinger is one of the 19 children in the fundie Duggar family, in case you weren't familiar with the Duggars) with a discussion area called Quiverfull of Snark.
Everyone is there - liberals, homos, recovering fundies, current fundie-lites, people who actually know the Duggars in real life - basically people who are as crazy or crazier than me about these fundamentalists and their homespun ways. Some of my favourite recent topics include:
- Picture of the Morton Ball coming out
- Sister Wives sighting!!!!!!!
- Can we discuss this Ladies Against Feminism article?
- I found wives for the Maxwell boys
- We Can All Breathe Now - Kirk Cameron Assures Us That the World is Not Ending
- Gospel Aerobics
I have spent more time than I care to admit lurking on Free Jinger. I cannot get enough. And it seems like every time I'm on there, I learn about a new fundie blog or website that threatens to eat my whole weekend.
I honestly don't know why I'm so fascinated by fundies and their radical beliefs and their extreme reproduction and their terrible clothes and their constant talk of God's faithfulness and their eyes shut, fingers in ears, "LALALALALALA"-ing to keep the rest of the world out. But I CAN'T LOOK AWAY.
As most of you know, I've always been enthralled by people of faith - witness my ten year Catholic iconography obsession - but there's something extra tangy about these wholesome girls baking bread for their 12 siblings and innocently fellating pickles and waiting for their dads to okay some dude to court them. Do I want to save them? Do I want to be them? Do I want to corrupt them by telling them what that pickle photo reminds me of?
Or do I just want to keep tabs on them because they're having so many fucking children that they will soon be our overlords?
History will decide. And the Lord.
