Christianity has been a weapon used by systems of oppression to call that which is harmful and abusive; good and God’s will. It has been a weapon to normalize hegemonic power, and keep people from questioning it or challenging it because “it comes from God.”

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“Don’t leave the church because of the people who hurt you. Nobody is perfect, only God”

I’ll explain why this comment is not only not helpful at all, but also very harmful.

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The comment assumes we can’t tell the difference between people and toxic theology, it assumes our issues are with a few people who are outliers and misrepresented God, and we just seem to think that’s the totality of divinity. Which makes us appear unintelligent and petty.

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But, that’s not the case at all. I didn’t leave because a few people hurt me in the name of God, in fact I stayed long enough to get hurt again, and again, and again, and again. Because it’s not a few bad apples hurting people in the name of God what we are dealing with.

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Instead we are talking about systemic abuse due to toxic theology that is taught as righteousness.

Go to any white evangelical church today and conduct all the tests you must to ensure only those who are “good Christians,” remain. I guarantee you people will be harmed there.
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Not because people just hurt people, not because Christians have good intentions but sometimes make mistakes; instead because the harm is caused due to indoctrination into toxic theology and a belief that their social and theological framework is not only good,

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I am going to say something very uncomfortable. Read before you react please.

Purity culture encourages pedophilia, a thread:

Purity culture encourages pedophilia.

Some of the standards of purity culture are innocence (pretty much ignorance about sex), submission (for women), virginity as the ultimate standard, and “modesty” (for women that is wearing clothes that don’t reveal their adult curves)*
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Purity culture makes the desirable standard a child. It makes child likeness desirable in regards to sexuality. It makes virginity, and innocence, and submission; what the male brain should want most in a partner. And your brain doesn’t rewire just because you get married.
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This doesn’t mean every man raised in purity culture is a pedophile, that’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that purity culture wires the brain of men to desire child likeness, which encourages pedophilia. After all desire and objectification happen in our brain.

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Now if you are a pedophile who wants to act on those desires, purity culture does a lot of the grooming for you. Purity culture discourages comprehensive sex education leaving children without the ability to know what’s appropriate and what’s not.

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We live in a society that misunderstands boundaries and consent. Most people think the former is about just saying no, and the latter is about sex. And while that’s a part of it, they are about agency, autonomy, respect and interpersonal relationships.

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Unsolicited advice without consent is crossing a person’s boundaries. Even if the advice is good advice, even if the person giving the advice is a pastor or a parent, even if the advice is important. Most people aren’t talking about their life so that we may solve it.

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It is an honor to be trusted with someone’s life story*, with their thoughts and their challenges, with their struggles and their musings. But it is not an open invitation to try and solve their problems, control their behavior, tell them what to do.

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For a group of people that speak often of free will and claim to follow Jesus, Christians are some of the worst at boundaries and consent in general, and advice giving in particular. Think about how many sermons are not sharing spiritual truths, but just giving advice.

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Think about how much pastoral counseling is just advice giving. Think about the many books that tell you how to parent, how to be a good wife, how to be a good Christian, how to... and how much of it is general advice as though our lives were interchangeable?

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When I say that so long as nobody is being harmed people’s decisions, choices, and actions are always acceptable and should be respected; conservative Christians often ask me: but who decides what harm is?

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They do this to invalidate ‘harm,’ because if we can obscure the notion of harm, and they can decide that people going to hell is really the harm we should be worried about; then they are justified in crossing every possible boundary to keep people from hell.

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They are “helping,” “saving,” not really harming.

That’s one of the main ways in which the concept of sin is weaponized against people; because they decide what sin is, which is what will send us to hell (except not because all we have to do is repent and then we are safe).

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It doesn’t matter how we define harm, how much logic we apply to explaining that when people say they are being harmed we should believe them; or how much evidence we have of harm caused. It doesn’t matter that people are literally and metaphorically bleeding. It’s not harm.

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I mean they justified the genocide of Native people, the forceful taking of our land, the abduction of children with sayings like “kill the Indian, save the man.” By their logic they haven’t caused harm, they have “saved” us. There is no evidence of this, but they say so 🙃.

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Read through a forum thread on Chastity Mansion to see who is talking about the Edge-o-Matic and figure out what more to address regarding frequent questions, as well as scout out user feedback. Here's some thoughts you can carry back to the forums!

My website doesn't have any product reviews, but people scatter them everywhere else in forums, tweets, xtube vids, etc.

If you ARE a previous customer, and you like the thing, can you drop a review on my site to help others?

The price is steep, but that's the amount of coins I calculated to make these. I have several spreadsheets calculating every expense involved with this project.

The current cost sustains production and development of new tech, and is helping create jobs. We are 2 people now!!

It IS 3D printed, because injection molding is orders of magnitude more expensive for the initial tooling, and I am still making small revisions to the enclosures.

Injection molded plastics are a six thousand dollar commitment for fifteen cent parts. Great for mass mfg.

Also, if you didn't know, 3D printing technology allows for some shapes which would be difficult, expensive, or impossible on injection molding or milled parts!!

Undercuts, which I use in this design, require special lifters to mold that cost a tremendous fortune.

"The engineers on my team just want to code. They don't want to have anything to do with product. They just want specs. What do I do?"

1/n Are you asking them do to X *and* do their "day job" as defined by their managers (and frankly your roadmap) ?

If so, start there...

2/n Do they have a reason to believe that doing X will in any way improve the quality of the product and make their lives easier? Have they ever seen X "work" ?

Show don't tell.

3/n Is there average day/week a quagmire of unnecessary meetings, wading through tech debt, struggling to get *anything* to work ... and jumping through process hoops to prove their worth?

If so...no they will not have bandwidth.

4/n How do incentives work on the engineering team? Maybe they want to help, but their "grade" is determined by something altogether different.

"I'd love to, but I am on the hook to deliver [some project] this quarter to make a good impression..."

Talk to eng management.

5/n Have they had any time to practice?

Or did they get thrown into the deep end the first time they were given a shot ... expected to brainstorm on demand, be as vocal as practiced PdMs and designers, and "participate" !

Make it safe to practice. Reasonable expectations.

A lot of women get in touch to ask me about #coercivecontrol and come to the conclusion that their partner is controlling, but not abusive enough that they want to leave.

So when is the right time to leave?

A THREAD

Is it when he calls you an ugly bitch the first time?
Or do you wait for him to call you it again?
Or do you wait until he has so completely undermined your sense of self worth that you don’t think you can leave?

Is it when he says that no one will love you like he does?

Or do you wait until he says that no one else COULD love you.

Or that you are unloveable?

Do you leave when he says he likes women to be women?

Or do you wait until he says you are fat and unless you lose weight, he will divorce you?

Do you leave when he pushes you into the wall and then claims he lost control because you made him so jealous?

Or do you wait until you no longer go anywhere, for fear of making him jealous?