4

They Use Procreation to Dominate Women

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My mom had nine kids. She was either nursing or pregnant for almost all of my childhood.

I'm pretty sure that most Quiverfull moms (including mine) struggle with postpartum depression for years and never get help for it -- depression is assumed to be caused by lack of faith in the Quiverfull world, not the nasty side effect of chemicals fucking with your brain. Keeping women in a state of constant pregnancy/nursing may not be a conscious tactic of male domination, but it works that way all the same. You try life as a 24/7 lactation pump -- see how "strong" and "independent" you remain while acting as combination Household Operations Manager/Teacher/Brood Queen/Slurpee Station.

Look at this slacker. She's got a whole free arm.

My mom worked as a nurse before my dad retired her to start having kids on a semi-professional basis, but she kept her nursing certification active through the years. That was an anomaly. Some women in the movement may go to college (only as a backup plan in case your husband becomes a paraplegic, of course), but birthing and caring for kids is the highest achievement a woman could or should aspire to. Even little girls aren't really encouraged to dream much beyond that goal. I had a friend who would create complicated strategy games for racing these little horse figurines we collected. Her parents banned her from playing it because she wasn't spending enough time helping with babies, cooking, and cleaning. Later, she wrote a fantasy novel and printed out the final draft in this big binder -- it was over 300 pages long. The family computer crashed and this was the only copy. But because she'd spent so much time and effort on that instead of her scullery maid duties, her parents said the novel was "an idol." She was obviously putting her writing above her devotion to God, so her parents burned it in the living room fireplace. They never even read it.

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Not many people can say they've literally watched a dream turn to ash.

3

They're Obsessed With and Entirely Opposed to Online Privacy

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When we first got a computer, the whole family shared one email address (with the exception of my dad's work email account). This was for the sake of "accountability." No one -- including my mom -- could be trusted with a private online life, because the potential for "temptation" was too great. Then, when I was 16, I was working on a "Christian worldview" magazine with some other homeschoolers, and the team gave me my own email address. When my dad found out, you'd better believe he wanted the password. He had the password to my old Xanga, which was still cool then. And when I went to college and got a Facebook account, he naturally signed up for one too. After all, there are boys on the Internet! Some of those boys might not even be interested in pumping a girl full of nonstop babies. Got to pre-emptively weed those suckers right out of the feed.

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Above: the average secular male.

My mom got her own email address last year. And so we're clear, my dad wasn't being "extreme" at all. That's just how the fundamentalist movement embraced technology -- if people are fundamentally sinful, and if you sincerely desire to follow God wholeheartedly, you'll submit to complete transparency in every area of your life for the sake of your spiritual well-being. A lot of newlyweds who haven't left the movement merge their Facebook accounts to one ("John & Jane Smith") for the same reasons. Well, either that or they're becoming some sort of Cronenbergian merged body-horror Facebook monster.

2

We Don't Date -- We Court

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Here's the rough diagram of Quiverfull's holiness scale for romantic relationships: You've got arranged marriage as obviously the least sinful solution, and then there's betrothal, common among the more firmly devout. If you think you're more "prone to temptation," you might have a brief, chaste "courtship" before getting engaged and married -- three months of courting or less is considered normal.

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"Nice to meet you! Welp, guess it's time we get to that altar."

The parents usually orchestrate romantic relationships, although in a rare case it might be the young man's idea. If that's the case, he'd better be careful to suggest the idea to her father in such a way that the father thinks it's totally his own idea. The best way is to get the mom on your side before approaching the dad. After all, "the woman is the neck."

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"OK, what's a nice way to say 'I wanna do your daughter, but for Jesus'?"

1

Sex Is Worse Than Drug Addiction

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Male masturbation is treated like a D.A.R.E. class treats heroin addiction. If you do it at all, even once, you're considered an "addict." Or you probably think you invented a new sin. So all the little Quiverfull boys essentially grow up and go into marriage believing that they're sex addicts or perverts. It's worse for women, because the slim sex education we girls get never even addresses the concept of female masturbation or orgasm. We just talk about periods and babies. This is the closest to sex-positive most of our educational material ever got: