This chapter has a lot of child abuse. So I’m going to put this right up front:

Content Note for severe physical abuse of a child.

In the Jessop household, showing any degree of spine to Barbara results in punishment. She thrives on it. So when all her sister wives do their best to keep things calm and peaceful after Merril’s heart attack, it’s only a few weeks before she escalates to get a rise out of them. She incites the children of the household to act up in hopes of provoking the wives to attack them, just so she’ll have a reason to discipline them. Carolyn’s turn comes when she calls some of the girls out for gossiping about a girl at their school who is being bullied. She snaps at them, calling them hypocrites for pretending to be shocked, considering the way they treat the wives.

She expects Barbara to come at her for it. But instead, Barbara attacks her son, Patrick.

Merril decides late one night to have impromptu family prayers. Patrick is sent to wake Carolyn, who is physically wrecked after the recent birth of her daughter Merilee. She tells him she’s too tired, and goes back to sleep. When Patrick reports back without his mother, Barbara takes him into another room, closes the door, interrogates him, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of him. She starts with slapping, then escalates to throwing him across the room and into the metal bars of a footboard. She keeps slamming him into those bars. Then she kicks him in the stomach.

He is a tiny little four year-old. She is a 200-pound adult.

And she knows she’s gone too far. She does that child abuser thing of telling him not to tell anyone what she’s done, or she’ll beat him worse. She shakes him until he agrees. Then she hands him tissues and sits with him until he’s too terrified to continue crying.

Yep. His father knows. And he doesn’t care.

Patrick goes and cries himself to sleep in a recliner in his mom’s room. Carolyn is appalled when she sees the bruises covering him the next day, and knows he’s lying when he tells her they came from roughhousing with his siblings, but she doesn’t force the truth from him. Instead, she comes up with ways to protect her kids.

Mind you, she can’t go to the local police: they’re all FLDS. They won’t do shit. She can’t go to Merril, because he’ll deny anything happened and do absolutely nothing. She would also be opening Patrick up to retaliation. She can’t go to CPS: “they had poor track records of protecting women and children in Colorado City. Victims routinely got sent back to perpetrators.”

All she can do is keep her kids with her at all times when they aren’t in school. She takes them to work with her. She feeds them in her room. Luckily, when she enlists her mother, she doesn’t get a lecture on obeying her husband this time. Instead, her mom gets her food she can keep in her room.

Patrick carries the secret of what Barbara did to him for nine years. He doesn’t feel safe telling her even after they’ve fled. He finally is able to tell her what happened over three years after their escape.

This is the kind of shit the police and CPS just allow to happen in the FLDS communities. There’s a horrible deference we as a society show to pious groups. We let religious people get away with far too much. We pretend we have no right to interfere with them. But believing in a god or gods shouldn’t give you the ability to physically abuse children and get away with it. Piety shouldn’t be a shield for child beaters.

It’s far past time to deny religion the power to let people hit children with impunity. This is one hope I have for the rise of the Nones: that we finally start doing the right thing.

The post (Repost) “He Couldn’t Breathe” – Escape Chapter 24: Patrick’s Abuse appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

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Content note for antisemitism, Trump, eliminationist rhetoric.

Once Hitler realized he’d need to dial back the antisemitic rhetoric in order win power, he began glorifying the Volk and calling Germans to unify instead. But of course Jews were not part of that Volk. He’d perfected the art of the dog whistle. Even a Jewish woman who went to one of his rallies heard “nothing even against the Jews.”

But, like Trump, Hitler managed to speak for hours without saying much of anything at all. She could have been describing a Trump rally: “[He] put up sham accusations, only to refute them, used slogans by the hour, and said nothing else than praise of himself…” Yet his admirers ate it all up. It’s so similar to Trump and his fans it’s terrifying.

Many people tried to wave away Hitler’s antisemitism, just like many people today try to pretend Trump and the Republicans aren’t bigoted scumlords. But a quick glance at either party’s platform quickly reveals the truth. The proof is in the planks. When your planks consist of racist, bigoted bullshit, your protestations that you’re not a bigoted racist can only be believed by those who need to pretend they’re not with you because of your most vile beliefs.

One particular Nazi Party Program Plank is horribly similar to things Trump is doing to our own Muslim immigrants: “‘non-Germans’ who had immigrated after 1914 would be expelled from Germany.”

And, like Hitler, Trump is leaving open racism to his surrogates while he proclaims himself to be the least racist person on the planet. Folks: When someone supports racist party planks and appoints virulent racists to high positions, that person is a fucking racist. The mask will come off the second he’s deceived enough of you so that he no longer needs it. Believe his actions, not his words.

The smaller commonalities between Trump and Hitler are also jarring. Both used the third person to refer to themselves, for instance. Both unsuccessfully ran for election before winning power. Both have a taste for grandiosity.

And both tenuously rose to power on a wave of hate. We’ll be analyzing that next.

Intro • Prologue • 1.1 • 1.2 • 1.3 • 2.1 • 2.2 • 2.3

The post Part 4: The Nazi Conscience Chapter 2: The Politics of Virtue appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Hitler managed to persuade a German court to hand him a mild 5-year sentence for treason, rather than deporting him or imprisoning him for life. But he’d had to tone down his bigotry for the courts, and his followers were upset.

They needn’t have worried.

Hitler, once his future was secure, was more than happy to return to spouting his poisonous antisemitism. He assured them that his earlier ideas about the Jews were, if anything, “too mild.” He cast the conflict between Jews and Germans as “a question of life and death.” He turned his attention toward spewing venom to Rudolph Hess, who compiled his ravings into the book that would become Mein Kampf. He amped up his exterminationist rhetoric, describing Jews as parasites, freeloaders, “a dangerous bacillus,” maggots, and poisoners. He called for their extermination.

So, remember: if a Nazi or other bigot dials back their rhetoric in the face of legal trouble or social sanctions, don’t trust their change of heart until it’s backed up by subsequent, sustained actions. Watch for them to return to and possibly intensify their previous hateful speech and actions. Once the coast is relatively clear, they will revert to their true selves.

Hitler spent a mere ten months in prison, and once he was released, he set about unifying his followers before reaching out for new ones. He’d learned how to dog whistle. Because more educated people wouldn’t respond as favorably to overt bigotry, and because fomenting hate and violence could get him silenced or deported, he resorted to a more veiled antisemitism. He would speak about “one single enemy.” He used racist humor and metaphors.

He would link “Jewish” to despised values like urbanism, materialism, and greed. For comic relief, he joked about “upstart Jewish composers, scribblers, painters who drown our Volk in their pathetic trash [Dreck].” In a typical three-hour speech, Hitler would mention Jews in passing, as in a slur against the “Jewish press” for promoting decadent “Jimmy [probably a reference to Jim Crow] culture.” He would blame moral degeneration on sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews, which he called “racial treason” (Rassenschande) or “bastardization.”

These are all techniques and phrases that have been used by our modern Nazis, virtually word-for-word.

At that time, in the mid-1920s, the Nazis had secured less than 6% of the vote. Hitler knew he had to modify his rhetoric to appeal to a broader swathe of the German electorate. He stopped proclaiming his racial hate at every possible opportunity, expressing it only where and when it would further his ambitions. And he wasn’t afraid to accuse critics of being just as antisemitic as he was.

The projection is familiar, but with a plurality of the electoral college behind him, our off-brand American Hitler doesn’t have to soften his own rhetoric. You do, however, see our modern Nazis putting a civilized mask over their abhorrent ideology in order to win over a wider swathe of the population. They know they can’t win the numbers they need if they’re too open with their hideous beliefs. So they follow the lead of their hero Hitler, and dial it back in public. The fact they’re becoming bold enough to be a bit more careless with showing their true faces should terrify us. They wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think they had enough support to get away with it.

We must drive these views back underground by exposing them for what they are and making it utterly clear they have no place in a civilized democracy. We need to make Nazis afraid again. We’ve seen exactly what happens when they seize power and become bold.

Intro • Prologue • 1.1 • 1.2 • 1.3 • 2.1 • 2.2

The post Part 3: The Nazi Conscience Chapter 2: The Politics of Virtue appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

In our last installment, we learned that Warren Jeffs was busy making everyone believe their every ailment could be cured by faith alone, leading many people to almost kill themselves and at least one to maim herself in the effort to follow Warren’s God’s supposed will. Now we find out Warren in into survivalist shit as well. This allows some of the more concerning members of the community to indulge their sadistic sides.

Content Note for graphic animal abuse, brutal animal killing, spiritual abuse, ritual murder discussion, elder abuse, medical neglect.

Carolyn learns from Merril’s daughter Merrilyn that Warren has been running a series of survival classes at the FLDS’s private school in Salt Lake City. They mostly consist of Dee Jessop killing various animals in a variety of horrifying ways in front of the children. This includes ripping the heart out of a living pig as it screams in agony.

And no one says anything against it.

The more Warren gets away with without opposition, the stronger his hold on the community becomes. I wonder if these brutal “survivalist” classes were to see just how far people would go to comply with his orders. Was he using them to desensitize people? If you can get people to start doing more and more outrageous things, you can walk them into ideas that would’ve had them running away screaming if you’d thrown them straight in.

His father, the prophet Rulon Jeffs, begins having strokes in 1996, and Warren uses them to usurp his power. The community is told that Rulon’s mind is intact, but no one’s allowed to see him. This allows Warren to pretend his father is still mentally competent enough to perform his duties. He acts as Rulon’s mouthpiece. He gives the orders. And, with the community firmly in his grasp, he begins to squeeze. He tells the community that immoral men must be banished. And then he goes further:

Men were given pamphlets that spelled out the new moral code. All sex in marriage was forbidden except that which was for procreation. Immoral acts for which there could be no forgiveness were also named. Any person who committed these sins, such as fornication and adultery, would have to pay for them with “blood atonement.”

I had never heard of blood atonement before. Blood atonement is a murder. Warren claimed the ordinance of blood atonement dated back to the beginning of the Mormon Church. But he said that blood atonement could only be practiced in a temple that he said we would build in the near future.

I’m surprised Carolyn had never heard of blood atonement. It, along with polygamy, was one of Joseph Smith’s worst ideas. Brigham Young expanded on it, and too many Mormons in the early years of the faith treated it as a license to kill. It informed the death penalty options in Utah, which until early this century included the firing squad, and originally beheading as well. Like so many other hinky doctrines, the mainstream LDS Church loves to disavow any knowledge of it, but judging from the fuss kicked up when legislators first tried to do away with the firing squad, plenty of rank and file members believed in it. And since the FLDS was so keen to hold on to traditions like polygamy, I’m rather shocked that blood atonement doesn’t seem to have been a thing until Warren.

So things are getting rather bizarre and bloody already. Then Dee Jessop decides to bring his survivalist classes to Colorado City, complete with a demonstration at Centennial Park.

Carolyn suspects he’s going to get up to shenanigans and doesn’t want her kids anywhere near him, so she doesn’t go. Others who do aren’t suspecting anything particularly graphic – after all, children have been invited. And Dee’s going to demonstrate how the women folk can take care of themselves when FLDS prophecy comes true and all the men are gone. So the crowd gets treated to Dee’s wife tying up a cow. So far, not so outrageous.

But once the cow was restrained, she took out a handsaw and began sawing off the cow’s head.

The cow’s screams sounded like a woman’s. Children shrieked in terror. Those closest to the cow were sprayed by blood. Stunned parents grabbed their kids and started to run away. Some stayed, frozen in shock and unable to move.

People are outraged. Of course, they don’t turn their wrath on Warren, who was in charge of this stuff and knew exactly what Dee had been doing in his school up in Salt Lake City. Nor are they mad at Fred, the bishop of Colorado City. They scapegoat Dee, who is a twisted fucker but sure as shit wasn’t solely responsible for this fiasco.

Of course, the leadership doesn’t act against him. Nothing happens to him – until Ruth, in the throes of a breakdown that Merril has once again been ignoring, goes running down the road with her accordion one day, and Dee tries to grab her to bring her back home. She bashes him in the face with her instrument, and then starts raining kicks on him. Plenty of passers-by watch the show, happy to let Ruth deliver the justice they’ve been denied.

Poor Ruth still isn’t given any treatment. The most Uncle Rulon does is sends her daughter (and his wife) Merrilyn home to take care of her, which Merrilyn resents.

We get an appalling look at the family dynamic:

One morning Tammy came down for breakfast and heard Ruth screaming like a child. She walked into Merril’s office and saw Merrilyn beating her mother. Ruth finally sank into the corner of the office, sobbing and hugging herself.

Tammy was shocked. “Why are you slapping your mother like that?”

Merrilyn shrugged. “That’s the way Father handled her ever since I was a little girl. When she gets out of control, he beats the hell out of her until she comes to her senses.”

Needless to say, this is not how you treat mentally ill people. Beating them does not fix the problem.

Ruth eventually gets hospitalized, but I guarantee you, with a family and community like that, her life doesn’t improve. And Warren only makes it worse.

The post (Repost) “Blood Atonement” – Escape Chapter 23: Ruth’s Nose appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

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In light of Fifty Shades Darker infesting theatres, I figured it was time to repost this 2014 article in which I explain, at some length, just how fucked up and abusive this franchise is.

CN for sexual, physical, emotional and verbal abuse; stalking; fake BDSM; Fifty Shades shit; gaslighting; casual ableism in quotes and links.

Let me tell you how I got acquainted with some of the worst books on the market:

It was an odd time. I’d just spent over a month intensively critiquing creationist earth science texts, and that triggers depression after so many chapters. One begins to lose all hope for humanity. The end of summer loomed. B and I had a rather serious falling out. So there I was, mopey and miserable and wishing the world could just stop for a while.

I don’t remember what I was reading, but there was a link to Jenny Trout’s blog in the comments. And she had done to the Fifty Shades trilogy what I’m doing to Christianist textbooks. I’d been hearing for years how bloody awful the Fifty Shades of Grey books were, how they glorified abuse, how fake the BDSM was, and how terrible the writing was. I’d heard it from enough people whose opinion I trust that I hadn’t wasted my time attempting to read the bloody things. But now there’s gonna be a movie, and about nine trillion people think this shit’s the cat’s pajamas and ever-so-good for their looove lives, so maybe it would be a good idea to find out a bit more about it. And here was a brilliant, funny, and feminist writer who’d read and reported on them so I didn’t have to. It was like Cliffs Notes, with brutal honesty and snark.

Now, I should’ve been working, but I really couldn’t. And a day off wouldn’t hurt. And I read this:

Ana flushes way too much. I’m going to throw this out there right now. At the end of one paragraph, her face flames. There is a line of dialogue, and then the beginning of the next paragraph, she goes crimson. I get the distinct impression that she’s a Humboldt Squid in a dress, flashing red like a broken neon sign.

And I decided, “Fuck it. In bed, all day, with Jenny Trout’s MST3King of FSOG. That’s me.”

That day became a week. And it didn’t end with Jenny.

I couldn’t stop. I mean, this shit was far worse than I’d expected. Dude, I’ve read The Gift of Fear. I’ve delved into forensic psychology. And every section Jenny quoted screamed, “This asshole will murder you!” Have you ever read one of those signs-of-an-abusive-relationship dealios? Like Jenny pointed out in her Chapter 14 recap, this supposedly epic romance between Ana Steele and Christian Grey waves all the red flags:

When I first finished reading it, I thought it was funny, because how could anyone not understand that this isn’t a good relationship? But stuff stops being hilarious when a social worker sends you all her red flag charts and you realize that the book you just read is being held up as a romantic ideal by women all over the nation.

Yet this is the fucked-up “romance” that had the local adult stores filling their walls with BDSM-lite crap themed around FSOG, and people were raving about how seexxxy it was, and none of the fans seemed to realize this isn’t kink, it’s bloody domestic abuse. Shit’s not romantic, people, it’s rape culture, complete with rape.

And we don’t need to be telling women that this is what true love with a side of BDSM is. Jesus. It makes me wonder how many women are trapped in physically, sexually, verbally, and emotionally abusive relationships right now, pretending they’re wonderful because E.L. James says this is perfect love. It makes me wonder how many women are dead because they mistook red flags for roses, because of these books.

Someone asked recently why I “hate” on the readers who liked this series. I don’t “hate” them. I’m just pissed off at them for making excuses for this blatant anti-female, anti-sex propaganda that tells women that kink is only for fucked up people, and if their guy is physically and emotionally abusive, they’re just not loving him hard enough. And you know, I don’t feel like I need to be particularly nice to women who want to further that message in our culture, just like I wouldn’t be nice to Paul Ryan if he emailed me asking why I just can’t be more civil about his policies regarding abortion. Because I can’t, because if you’re civil and nice about this shit, people take it as tacit agreement with whatever fucked up thing they’re trying to say.

– Jenny Trout

I ran Christian Grey through Gavin de Becker & Associates’ Risk Evaluation Test. Based on his actions in the first book, he got a) 8 out of 10 for risk and b) a 154 out of 200 for quality of the assessment. (It could have been higher, but he did not own a handgun or share children with Ana. Both of these things will become factors in the next two books, so Ana’s situation will only become worse.)

Now, I don’t know how bad 154 is (though a risk of 8 out of 10 sounds pretty bad)…but de Becker & Associates kept imploring me to call the police on this (unnamed) controlling, manipulative, lying, abusive stalker-rapist and get his nameless victim to safety and shelter IMMEDIATELY. They pegged him as unstable, violent, rigid, and completely unable to deal with anything that challenged his viewpoint or the way that he saw himself. Interestingly, they said that people like him rarely kept jobs for long; any crisis at work or challenge from a co-worker or rival would reduce him to a state of rage. He simply wouldn’t be able to cope with any opposition. They also said that he had many traits shared by serial rapists and serial killers. And they found his frequent drinking to be a sign that he was becoming less and less stable.

Does that give you a general idea?

– Gehayi from The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company

When your romantic hero is the kind of person Gavin de Becker’s MOSAIC program tells you to call the police over, then you should know you’ve mistaken love for murderous psychopathy somewhere, and you maybe oughtta backtrack.

“… if a situation has several of these signals, there is reason for concern.”

Several of these signals. As in “three or four.” Three or four of thirty reliable pre-incident indicators associated with spousal violence and murder indicates that there is reason to be worried. The victim is in serious danger.

Twenty-four Twenty-five popped up in the relationship of Christian Grey and Ana Steele.

TWENTY-FIVE.

This is not a relationship. It is a murder waiting to happen.

– Gehayi from The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company

Woman after woman in the reviews I read said the romantic hero extraordinaire reminded them of their abusive asshole exes:

Really, though this whole thing pisses me off for more than just the slave vs. submissive thing and you just kind of pointed out why. Because James, undoubtedly, would defend that mistake with the fact that she is an ignorant cockmonkey and just didn’t know. After all, I’ve seen people defend their love of the book with, “Well, I didn’t know that BDSM wasn’t like that, so it’s okay that it’s not accurately portrayed because I don’t know the difference.” No, it’s the fact that Gaston is getting her to crave sex and orgasms and actually manipulating her into believing that only he can give them to her and that the only way he’ll keep giving them to her is if she’ll agree to all of his demands. Wanna know why that is so off-pissing for me and why it makes me want to book a flight to England so that I might personally kick this bitch’s ass?

Because that is exactly what my ex-boyfriend did to me.

I was sexually naïve and innocent, very young, and he was the one who gave me my first orgasm. He got me hooked on them, and then proceeded to convince me that only he could do it, and that I couldn’t bring myself to orgasm. He conditioned me. And after he was done with that, he convinced me that I owed all kinds of sex back to him because, after all, he was doing that great favor to me and I couldn’t do it myself! Gaston is doing exactly what my ex-boyfriend did to me. The ex-boyfriend who abused me on every conceivable level: sexually, emotionally, physically, and mentally. The ex-boyfriend who had such a bad effect on me I wound up in a mental hospital because of him because I wanted to kill myself when it was all over and I realized that I’d just been abused for seven years and thought that I’d ruined my life, because of the time he found me.

*sneering* So, James, so far you remind Ket, Gehayi, and I very strongly of our exes, to the point that it both enrages and upsets us. Christian Grey is pretty much a nice little combination of all of our exes, taking all of their worst aspects and bundling them together into one absolutely foul and loathsome abomination of a character, and then you dump a lot of money on him and make him hot because, well, that makes it all better.

I’m not gonna bother trying to find a picture, GIF, or video that would best encompass just how much I despise you, getting rich off of this. Because there isn’t one. It just makes me feel used and dirty, like you’re publishing the worst chapter of my life and calling it True Love and making millions from it.

Fuck you, and fuck your fanbase. Yes, fuck the fanbase too. Because they agree with you. Because all of them, by saying it is romantic and True Love and wonderful, are by default saying that what happened to me, Gehayi, and Ket wasn’t rape and abuse.

Fuck. You. All.

– Mervin from The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company

When your epic romance is triggering abuse survivors to this extent, you’re doing romance wrong. But we’ve been doing it wrong for a long time, haven’t we?

Those of you who have been reading the sporkings for a while know that I’m an editor, and that many of the things I edit are romances. Now, I have MAJOR issues with rape, stalking and controlling another person against his or her will being presented as romantic. All of these things are rife in the romance genre and I HATE that, because people are idiots and will believe that if an author SAYS it is romantic, the author must be right.

I’m an oddball in that I will tell the author that X is not acceptable and that we don’t want to send the message that rape and stalking are signs of love. But all too often, both are sugar-coated, so that you read about a man being “overwhelmed with passion” and “taking” a woman as she vainly tries to fight him off, or about a boy stalking someone he has exchanged one word with: “Hello.” And if you repeat something often enough, people begin to believe that is not only the way that it is, but the way that it SHOULD be.

This kind of drivel—which, fortunately, is not the only thing written in the genre but is far too common—causes damage. It tells women that stalking is love, that rape is love, that physical and mental degradation which they loathe and want no part of are love. It’s just the man’s way, and they need to accept that.

It is a vile, contemptible, anti-woman message and the fact that this piece of shit, like most romance novels, was written by a woman just makes the message that much worse.

The fact that I have a couple of friends in the BDSM lifestyle and that their information directly contradicts, oh, THE ENTIRE BOOK, plus the fact that the Suethor couldn’t be arsed to do one scrap of research is just the rancid icing on a very ugly cake.

– Gehayi from The Sporkings of Das Mervin and Company

This is dangerous bullshit, and it needs to stop. We need far less Fifty Shades, and far more Boss trilogies, not to mention our own Greta Christina’s Bending. We need real kinky (and vanilla) love that respects and requires enthusiastic consent. We need truly strong female leads, not glorified doormats. We need series that don’t trigger domestic abuse victims into creating a blog ring to document all the ways this fucked-up shit glorifies violence.

All of the above issues in FSOG are horrible enough. More than enough to torpedo the series. But even setting that aside, there’s the fact that James got so very much about BDSM wrong. Completely, dangerously wrong. Want to know how it should have been done? Read The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades Trilogy. Please, please read it, or download the ebook for a mere dollar, and mark up your copy with copious highlights and notes, before jumping into a BDSM relationship because this asinine series got you curious about kink.

Two strikes. Strike three: the atrociously-bad writing. Jenny Trout and sporkers Gehayi and Ket do magnificent jobs showing the endless errors. James’s grammar is awful, words don’t mean things, the prose is so purple it’s urple, the comma is abused as badly as the female lead, and the bits of plot that sneaked in are tiny and broken things. On top of all that, the research wasn’t done for pretty much anything. Most of the characters are so cardboard you could box up an entire Barnes and Noble with them. The female lead was a shallow chit who was so sexually repressed she used “down there” as a euphemism for her genitals. The male lead was a violent shallow shit who thought rape was an appropriate response to a woman’s defiance. The writing was so glaringly awful, it makes Twilight look like a masterpiece.

And speaking of Twilight… here’s a fairly comprehensive list of what James ripped off from Stephanie Meyer. Remember, this dreck started as Twilight fanfic. She changed a few details, but she basically put a wig on a pig and called it a pony. Not. So.

It nearly finished off my will to live, knowing this crap not only got published, but found such a vast market of willing suckers. And I’m not the only one who has found themselves massively changed:

Just for reference, when I started reading these books I was a church-goer. Now I’m an atheist. I’m not saying they’ve destroyed my faith in God all on their own, I’m just suggesting they may have been a contributing factor.

*shudder* And to think these horrible books are actually responsible for something positive…

Thanks to sporkings and spankings by incredibly talented people, plus the Boss trilogy, I survived. And I have plenty to shake FSOG fans with. And it brought B and I back together – there’s no bonding experience quite like commiserating over awful writing. And I learned a lot about my own sexuality, and am a lot less reluctant to discuss it. Excellent people have wrested some good from this unmitigated horror, and I’ve benefited from their wisdom.

I hope they’ve also given you some gifts. And I hope more than a few of you are now prepared to patiently explain to those who gush about the movie just what this story is actually glorifying, thus preventing some very foolish mistakes by enamored fans.

The post (Repost) Fifty Shades of F**king Abuse appeared first on En Tequila Es Verdad.

Like many cult leaders, Warren Jeffs is busy gradually cementing his hold over everyone in the community by fucking with their health care. His father has already convinced everyone that vaccines are a government plot to make children sterile. Considering previously-vaccinated FLDS women are pumping out children at a brisk pace, it’s amazing anyone believes him. But he’s their leader, the man in charge of their eternal salvation, so they trust him. Warren then comes along to see the ground his father has plowed, telling everyone that the only reason they’d ever need medical treatment is a lack of faith. If they’re truly in harmony with God, he says, they’ll be healed by prayer and fasting.

Content note: medical neglect, spiritual abuse, maiming, physical abuse of a mentally ill person.

Carolyn watches many people in the FLDS end up nearly dead from Warren’s claims. Thankfully, most people are still resorting to the hospital when faith doesn’t heal them. But some have faith in Warren. Ruth, her mentally unstable sister wife, develops skin cancer on her nose, and Carolyn gets to experience the consequences of Warren’s nonsense quite closely.

Merril apparently hasn’t yet fallen for Warren’s crap, because he sends Ruth to the clinic when a sore on her nose won’t heal. It’s cancerous, but very treatable, her doctor says. But Ruth wants to do it Warren’s way. She won’t entertain Carolyn’s idea that maybe GOd was healing her by placing her in the hands of a competent dermatologist. She wants to go the faith route. In addition to fasting and praying, faith also apparently includes questionable caustic chemicals from the health food store. God has revealed a new way of healing her cancer to her! It’s herbal, so it must be safe, despite the fact the caustic part of her concoction is illegal to sell! And while she’s been told to only use a pinhead-sized amount, she slathers it on, turning the entire end of her nose green in the process. God said to go for it.

When the burning pain keeps her up all night praying for mercy, she still doesn’t lose faith. And she won’t wash it off. “If this is what God wants me to go through to be healed from my cancer,” she tells Carolyn, “then I will do it with a humble heart.”

It’s about here I must pause to Paul out.

Fuck faith and the charlatans who prey on it. Fuck the people who spread this nonsense and end up causing vulnerable people to harm themselves.

Carolyn finally gets Ruth to wash the muck off, but the damage has been done. She’s still in terrible pain. But when Carolyn tries to get her medical treatment, she refuses. She can’t admit her faith has failed her.

On the third day, with Ruth crying in pain, Carolyn has had it. She threatens to call “911 and the National Guard if that was what it took to get her medical care.” This is where she learns about the health food store selling an illegal chemical. Ruth is trying to protect them, but Carolyn insists on getting her treatment. When the clinic tells her to go to the ER, Carolyn calls Merril to get him to agree to let her take Ruth in. But he won’t give permission, even after Carolyn tells him Ruth’s “nose is beginning to stink.” He accuses her of getting all excited over nothing. And when he gets home that night and actually sees Ruth’s nose, part of which is literally falling off, the most he does is tells her to see the dermatologist.

Have you noticed what a classic abuser Merril is? He’s a gaslighting pro. And he can’t under any circumstances admit he may have been wrong about something – if he’s downplayed his wives’ concerns and then later discovers they were right, he doesn’t apologize and correct the situation. He goes right on pretending he was right all along.

I don’t believe that violence solves everything, and I really, really try hard not to have violent fantasies about people even when I feel they deserve it, but I can’t help fantasizing about stuffing Merril into a cannon and shooting him into the sun. The world would be improved by a non-trivial amount.

There’s good news and bad at the dermatologists’ office. Ruth did indeed manage to burn off the cancer. However, she’s also burned off many healthy portions of her nose in the process. She has to have plastic surgery to fix it, but it’s a bad job and leaves her poor nose mangled.

Carolyn, happily, refuses to obey Warren’s medical orders. She defies Merril on that front: when her kids get sick, straight into the doctor they go, Warren be damned. She’s not willing to risk their lives and health for the mens’ religious beliefs.

But the medical fuckery is not the half of what Warren’s getting up to. And Carolyn is about to learn just how extreme his beliefs are.

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I think that where Trump and Hitler really diverge from each other is in their sincerity. Trump has always been a con man and a reality show personality. There’s no doubt he’s a bigot and a racist, not to mention a complete misogynist, but those things weren’t tied to his political ambition from the beginning. In fact, he seems to have pursued politics only to revive his failing brand. And the outrageous shit he spews on an hourly basis is calculated to pander, to shock, to get people buzzing. He’s discovered it’s very easy to get his ego fed to bursting by being the most “politically incorrect” politician possible. He hasn’t spent his life dreaming of Muslim registries and letting the religious right overthrow our Constitutional rights. These just happen to be a few of the things that get people sleazy enough to follow him excited, so he pushes them.

Hitler, on the other hand, pursued political power early on. And from the start, he intended to slaughter as many Jews as he could manage.

“Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”

This is a goal Hitler never lost sight of even when circumstances forced him to dial down his overt antisemitism. But when whipping up his followers, he knew hate sells. He used it freely. He spent years blaming all of Germany’s woes on Jewish people. And Germany, defeated and humiliated in the first World War, had plenty of woes. They were far worse off than we are. Desperate people need scapegoats; Hitler offered them up.

Hitler shouldn’t have been around to provide them. After fomenting hatred of the Jews for several years, he made a premature attempt at revolution that ended with him facing high treason charges. He should have been tossed in prison for life or deported. But he figured out what he needed to say in order to gain the court’s sympathies. He learned that with people outside the Nazi party, it was best to dial back the rabid bigotry and appeal to ethnic pride.

Over the next six weeks, Hitler, the uncouth agitator, remade himself into an innocent patriot who had been betrayed by a democracy too weak to defend Germanic honor…. Hitler transformed his public self from a raging antisemite into a resolute tribune of the Volk who captivated audiences with his vision of “cleanliness everywhere, cleanliness of our government, cleanliness in public life, and also this cleanliness in our culture… that will restore our [national] soul to us.”

Of course, “cleanliness” meant purging the Jewish people, but he wasn’t so crude as to actually say that in front of non-Nazis whose esteem he had to win. Instead, he attacked more widely despised and impersonal things: the Versailles Treaty, Bolshevism, and liberals. He cast himself as the doughty patriot willing to sacrifice anything to protect his beloved volk. He sprinkled in appeals to Germany’s proud military past, and finished with an appeal to “the goddess of the eternal tribunal of history.”

He’d found all the right buttons to push. And so, instead of spending the rest of his life moldering in a Bavarian prison or thrown out of Germany with no hope of returning, he received a mere slap on the wrist: five years in prison without subsequent deportation.

So what are we seeing? That a clever fascist will tailor his appeals to his audience. All it takes to rally nascent fascists who won’t respond to overt bigotry and racism is an appeal to be the hero fighting those things they abhor: liberals, socialists, Marxists, and other assorted lefties. Sprinkle in a hefty dose of national, ethnic, and military pride, and you can get conservatives to bless even outright treason.

Sound familiar? It should. Trump is far cruder, but he plays the tune Hitler wrote. Not surprising, considering how much he reportedly admires the genocidal shit.

We’ll see next how Hitler reassured his followers that yes, he still hated Jews. It’s a reminder to never take Trump at his word when he dials back his hatred to pander to less hateful audiences.

Intro • Prologue • 1.1 • 1.2 • 1.3 • 2.1

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