Churchhoney

Maybe he really wanted to be a New York Times film critic. I had to reply to your post because I wanted this to show up in the thread more than once. It's hysterical.

Yes, Ben's family has given him quite a different background, I think. They do embrace a particular theology and they encouraged some external education. Before he came to Duggarland he tried a couple of actual real-world jobs, and as a teen he even met up with people outside his family to play sports. His parents also seemed to encourage actual friendship between him and his sisters, even as they passed puberty. I wonder whether he knows how different the Duggs' experience has been and whether it will eventually bother him, if it's the Duggar principles that start to shape his life and his young family's.

Even worse. This is one of the photos where you can see the two additional mystery girls -- just the tops of their heads in this photo, although they are more visible in some others. If you look closely at how many girls are here, there are 7 daughters. And they only had 5 at the time. Other photos show that all 7 are wearing the dress. Who the heck are they? (cue Twilight Zone music) One might be Amy, but there are two. The photo below shows all seven. (Joy's mostly hidden behind one of the boys here). I'm sure someone knows who the two extras are, but I haven't yet seen an answer. Anyway -- looks even creepier to have even kids who aren't theirs wearing the dress. Somebody was really churning those costumes out. Maybe they had plans to open a Training Center for Right-Thinking Young Ladies? Great fodder for a dystopian YA novel! .... Maybe JB could write it -- just get a ghost to transcribe his fantasies of world domination.

Yep. Hard to argue with that when it comes to our many presidential hopefuls. Interesting thought that JB might follow the model and try to make a one-time grab of what money he can from the currently outraged fans then return to life as a background player ... I kind of doubt it, though, since I think he wants the fame too much! Anyway, interesting to speculate on how the Duggar money-making machine will develop as time goes on. They're certainly going to accumulate more young kids in the next generation, and that will put the pressure on somebody. Don't know how much pressure JB will actually feel to help support the new little ones. But if they do grow up in a money scramble, it's going to be largely his fault, I'd say.

Yeah, I know.(And thank goodness!) I was just referring to the "10 percent (if that) for the cause, and 90 percent for me and my personal purposes" aspect, of which Huck has been one of the (kinda numerous) practitioners.

So ... no education, no job training, no wisdom or true affection imparted by close adults in their lives, no general knowledge, no solid experience of the wider world, no real friends outside the family and no church or theology either. Nice. I wonder if I'll ever stumble across anything that makes me feel these kids have not been horribly deprived and misserved. They were born to be props in photo ops. Apparently.

Thanks! It's great to hear the various descriptions of how these things operate in real life. (and this one makes me thrilled that I was in one of the infant-baptism, coupla years of classes then confirmation around 12 denominations; I was confused enough without this "maybe you should get baptized again" option...)

This is the Huckabee PAC model of fundraising. : )

She's hundreds of miles from the toxic air she was breathing for nearly a quarter century. That might do it.

This points to the reason for my unhealthy obsession with the Duggars. And it's all about Jim Bob (and Michelle, probably, depending on how the power relationships actually play out there.) They've done nothing but infantilize their children, control them to a sick degree and use them for their own neurotic purposes. And then they've handed them over to reality tv, there to be further deluded and warped as they learned, among other wrong things, that the world would give them a living because they're the lucky offspring of these two idiots. And even though I believe that JB and M had no conscious ill intention, they've done a terrible, unforgivable thing to their kids, who'll be followed by the bad consequences for their whole lives. And they just go on doing it. They never never learn. I have irrational loathing for anyone who would do this to children, and for anyone who never stops to think or learn, especially when children are involved. I really need to just look away.

Brilliant. Perfect. Bears repeating.

A lot of people do wear those. White robes go for confirmation, too, in a lot of churches that do that. In JIm Bob's mind, though, I suspect it also makes for a better photo op. Otherwise it looks too much like the Duggars don't have the sense to come in out of the rain. Oh, wait ....

Okay, now I'm really confused. According to this, 8 kids were being rebaptized already in Israel. And the pictured ones look youngish, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Jason and/or Jed were among them.... But in any case, we've got at least eight kid rebaptisms previously, and now either two more -- or one or two who've now had at least 3 baptisms. And yet that's a rare phenomenon? Does any other group do this? If there were a theological shift going on, would it be to any known theology or just to "the Word according to Jim Bob"? Maybe Jim Bob has "baptism" confused with "grandstanding"? Especially since it always seems to be accompanied by a photo op?

I think they mean that women aren't interested in porn but they are interested in romance novels, which have similar dangerous effects on them as porn has on men. They're far from the first or only people who've said that, of course.

I guess when you come right down to it, it's the sexism and the lack of education that are the true horrors, for all the kids ultimately, not even just the girls. And none of them has the slightest idea that that's the case, it seems. Those things are likely going to really squash their opportunities, of all kinds, in the modern world once their "fame" recedes. An even scarier fate for people who've been set up, to this point, to have such high expectations for how the world will treat them.

I agree that they're perfectly free to do it, and to do it in the way they've done it. But the way they've done it raises two issues for me. First, it strikes me as just utterly tone deaf -- a sign of their lack of people skills and empathy and their misunderstanding of how humans behave. If you're going to ask for money, it's for many reasons important to win people's trust and the first way to do that is to provide information about how you envision that money being used, what good things you see it accomplishing. A little child knows this. Not seeing the importance of that betokens a fairly high level of ignorance, stupidity or self-absorption -- or all three? -- to me. Second, it strikes me as a likely example of the warping effect of their reality-tv fame. It seems very likely to me that they think they can just ask for money without any further explanation largely because they're used to being famous. Like the many idiots from tv shows like Big Brother and so on, they're only famous for being famous. But also like those idiots, I'll bet they've come to believe that they're famous because they're fabulous. Combine the hallucinatory ego-boosting effect of reality tv with a lifetime of Jim Bob telling you that you're God's special people and you may produce people whose first thought when they need something is not, How can I get this for myself? but, Why don't I ask somebody for it? Trouble is, being famous-for-being-famous doesn't last all that long. Even the leghumpers are going to find new legs to hump when the weekly tv show and the daily reruns are a couple of years in the past. That's shocked a lot of "famous" people before now, and I doubt the Duggar kids will be the exception. I really hope that I'm over-interpreting again and that they're just doing the usual thing and haven't been warped out of shape by life on reality tv. They have a baby to take care of now and likely more kids soon. But while I don't have a lot of experience with people going on missions, in the small experience I do have there's a different approach to asking for money, one that doesn't seem so entitled and so heedless of the giver's desire to know something about what's going on.

Very well said. And here's hoping.

Exactly. And there's clearly a mood of surveillance around that place. JB and M proudly note, for example, that boys and young men whom they suspect of looking at the "wrong" stuff on their phones immediately get stuck with phones that won't show you anything but phone numbers. And desires that are satisfied by masturbation aren't being "righteously fulfilled," I expect. So major sneakiness is required. In addition, we started this off talking about useful sexual knowledge that the girls might have when they marry. And I can't help but think about the fact that female Duggars, especially, are confined to their parents' house. As someone above mentioned, the boys fairly frequently seem to sleep on the floor, which obviously is a help with shaking beds and so on. But the young women we're talking about are sleeping in the same room -- and even in the same bed -- as their much-younger siblings, right up until marriage -- well into their 20s in some cases. A common story I hear from women who aren't in their situation is that they became more exploratory with masturbation -- and in some cases only just discovered it, some claim-- when they got to college or moved into their first apartment or rented room on their own -- usually at around age 18 or so. Jana's 26. Jill was, what, 23 when she married? Etc. They may know enough to briefly squeeze their thighs together to get a good feeling, but I'd be astonished if they're learning enough to advise Ben and Derick about how to please them, for example. Especially for women, as far as I know, masturbation to orgasm requires a certain level of comfort and relaxation into the process, and I can't imagine that any Duggar girl feels very relaxed about a sexual matter in that house. So I'd say -- Yeah, they all probably have a rudimentary knowledge of how things work. But they're going to start their adult sex lives at square one, even if they don't start them till they're 30, I expect. No dating. And vanishingly little experience with knowing -- or, heaven forbid, feeling comfortable with their own bodies -- either. To be clear, I don't think this is necessarily tragic and it's hardly unprecedented. But it's just one more way that they're all children in ways that other people their ages are less so, I think.

Thanks. That makes more sense, I think.

Definitely it's good in some cases, male ones especially, I would guess. But I'm not sure how well it works for young girls who've had the horror of impurity pounded into their heads to learn about how their bodies respond to touch and experience pleasure, though. They're living under surveillance and a Stasi-type system, as well. Which is inhibiting. I once resorted to an upper room in a public library, which felt safer to me than any place in my own home. So I expect that Duggar kids -- girls especially since their beliefs leave them no room to be sexual since they're actually assigned to keep boys from being sexual -- may feel their parents' presence pretty strongly in the TTH bathrooms. I expect this was quite true of the older kids, though now that JB and M have checked out more, it's likely less true of the younger ones. They have to contend with the sheer numbers of people on site, though. Plus, when we're talking about learning your body -- well, you need more than a quick guilty feel up of yourself to get any real kind of preparation for helping a partner help you, so to speak.

!!!

Yeah. After several years of Jim Bob imagining that completion was imminent when it was years out, I think. Such a firm grasp of reality, has Jim Bob.

It was built from a kit by children.

Someone will need one heck of a linen closet

My favorite thing is that she (if it's indeed she) wants two of them. And she'll need two. Because they are small. Seriously. Three used tissues could fill one up.