Entries Tagged 'LOVE & Other High Risks' ↓

The Girl Revolution is proud to announce the release of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. 

Order Now for only $9.99.

In this compilation of blog posts, I draw a parallel between the reality of dating violence, domestic violence, molestation, rape, date rape (if there is such a thing) and cohesion with the messaging of todays culture and media. Taken from almost 900 blog posts, I’ve chosen 30 posts that draw a concise and compelling picture of the Girl Traps, most stemming from a distortion of the word Love. 

Love Distortion takes a critical look at the Disney Princess Culture and the messages within that set girls up for dating violence and disastrous expectations about transforming bad guys into loving guys, the messages encouraging girls to give up their voices, their talents and their families for the “love” of a boy or man.

Love Distortion also takes a harsh look at other girl culture phenomenon like the Twilight Series and Bella’s willingness to give up her mortality, family, education and future to be with Edward; Gossip Girls, and their emotionally violent and disastrous games to achieve “success” with boys; Hannah Montana and other extensions of the Disney Brand; and posts about dating and domestic violence and the ways in which the word Love is used to coerce and manipulate girls and excuses violent and sexually predatory behavior against girls.

Love Distortion clearly explains the distorted thinking about love on both the part of the girl or woman and the boy or man in a violent, manipulative or abusive relationship. The book makes the connection between the thinking of participants in unhealthy relationships and the cultural messaging we are all inundated with day in and day out.

So as not to leave readers with defeated feelings, Love Distortion provides resources for more positive messages about, what I call, Authentic Love. Readers are given concrete exercises to do with their sons and daughters so as to prevent the distorted beliefs about love that they are inundated with through television, literature, music, Internet, video games, movies, advertising, radio and even, other adults in their lives.

Order Now for only $9.99.

Here’s the scene: Grandma and Grandpa have come to visit. We’re sitting around the dinner table.

“Was my Mom a good teenager or a bad teenager?” Ainsley asked with a bit of a mischievous look in her eye.

Pause. Forks in the air.

My parents and I laugh.

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it will incriminate . . . ————> HER!” my dad said, pointing at me.

“Come on tell me,” Ainsley implored.

“Is she a good Mom?” my Mom asked.

“What?” Ainsley asked.

“Is she a good Mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Then that’s what matters,” my mom said chuckling.

“I bet she was a bad teenager,” Ainsley quipped.

“Let’s just say, if pay back is a real thing then LOOK OUT!” my dad warned Ainsley.

God, if you’re out there surfing the Internet, please, please please give Ainsley an easier, smoother and more loving adolescent experience than my poor family suffered through.

Life Lesson #1 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Life Lesson #10 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Teacher.

Life Lesson #123 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Mom.

Life Lesson #563 through #1,010 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Period.

Until you really, really understand this lesson, you’ll keep learning it into eternity. If you’re emotionally bright, you might really get it and get to start learning something else after your second marriage in your late 30s. (Wait, that’s just me.) If your daughter is really, really emotionally bright, she might actually get it in the 3rd grade, which will spare her the painful lessons around boyfriends in her adolescent years. A mom can dream can’t she?

Bullies are there to teach us this Life Lesson:  I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Happily, they are also there to teach us Life Lesson #2: I have the power to control what I do and how I feel.

If you’re alive, then you know how tricky it is to control how you feel in the face of a 3rd grade pack of girls who are screaming and running away from you every time you look in their direction. Still, it’s a prime opportunity to learn these lessons. Without this experience, a person might walk around for 50 more years believing they can control other people’s feelings by changing their own behavior and frankly, that’s the recipe for every abusive relationship ever experienced by any woman.

In other words: while it sucks to watch and you really want to stop it, as a parent, you really, really want to help your kid learn this lesson ASAP with the 3rd grade Mean Girls. Before the lesson becomes a battering boyfriend or a manipulative adolescent pressuring her to have sex. You really, really want her to fully grasp Lesson #27:  I have the Power to control what I do and how I feel.

So that if that guy shows up , she already knows “he’s lying when he says he will love me IF I have sex with him,” because she already has learned, “I can not control how another person behaves or how he feels. So if he doesn’t love me now, he won’t love me then.”

So, rather than telling your kid you’ll figure out a way to stop the bullying, drill this into their heads: Honey, you can’t control how another person acts or how they feel. You just don’t have that power and neither do I. What you can control is how you react to their behavior and how you feel. You could let yourself feel bad about this, or you could decide that you only want loyal and kind friends, and these kids obviously don’t know how to do that yet. You could chase them and try to make them like you, but that will likely make them meaner. You could just ignore them, and that will likely make it less interesting for them. You can only control how you let this effect you. You don’t have to let it make you unhappy.

More tomorrow.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. —1 Corinthians 13: 4-7

Generally this verse is presented as how we should behave toward others.

My interpretation, and the one I recommend for you to share with your daughters, is to use this as a guide to know whether people truly love them, or want to possess them, want them to be their servant, want to use them as emotional crutch or emotional punching bag.

As a test, we should ask ourselves, and teach our daughters to do the same : Is this person patient and kind? Or envious, boastful, arrogant, rude, insisting on his own way, irritable, and resentful? Is he rejoicing in wrong-doing and being untruthful?

If he can’t pass this test, then, this is not Love. It must be something else then.

There are other things that masquerade as “Love.” Especially when we’re young, naive, inexperienced and hormones are coursing through our mind, body and soul, throwing us off-kilter. Most media messages about love do us no great service by making every single emotional and sexual attraction out to be love.

Our daughters need to know that there are other exciting and thrilling emotions that masquerade as love. You’re the perfect person to explain this, because you’ve probably experienced some of them.

It might feel like what you imagine love might feel like, a rush of Oxytocin to the brain, a Love Drunk, a passionate high, a crazy persistent, all-consuming crush, the smell of his pheromones lighting up yours, sexual attraction, physical chemistry, an irrational need to be desired by a specific person because he’s the quarterback or the cutest guy you’ve ever seen.

Still, if he can’t pass The Love Test, it might be a lot of exciting, thrilling, scary, intoxicating, dangerous things, but it’s not Love.

It’s a great test for any human being who claims to love you, but behaves otherwise.

Valentine’s Day is coming. Now, would be a prime time to address the difference. Love is in the air. But, so are a whole lot of other things masquerading as Cupid and Aphrodite.

I just finished Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer.

I grew up Mormon so I have an historical interest in polygamy. I even have some limited personal experience with it. My father’s great-great’s were polygamous. Legend goes his great-great grandfather was polygamous when polygamy became outlawed in Utah in 1890. This caused a fracture in The Church, where many families continued to live by The Principle and the majority abided by the law. My dad’s great-great remained married to the youngest and prettiest wife and divorced the others, causing resentment from the rest of the wives, his great-great grandmother included. I could have this wrong. It’s only what I recall of family lore.

Added to that, one of the first boys I dated in Junior High in Orem, Utah came from a polygamist family. Two of the wives had divorced by the time I dated him, but he had 19 sibling-cousins. His father had married two sisters.

At times I watch Big Love or read books like this and think, “This might have been my potential future.”

Reading this book, what struck me was the common thread of men using religion and “the Word of God” to get what they want from women. The author, Irene Spencer, speaks in great detail of her personal feelings as a wife. So many of the justifications she used to convince herself to participate in things her own heart, soul, spiritual intuition and her own inner voice told her not to do, she did because her husband told her to and she believed he had to obey him to get into heaven and avoid hell.

The thing is, I’ve heard the exact justifications used by men to control women in every religion. This pattern of women ignoring their own innate spiritual guidance systems, their own promptings from the Holy Spirit, or whatever terminology different religions use, is a common thread in religion and the history of religion.

The other connection I made is her willingness to do anything for the promise of love. Not actual Love – just the promise of it. This is a common thread of women and girls in abusive situations. Love – it’s our Achilles heal. This desperate need for love must have been what the authors of Genesis referred to as “The Curse” when Eve was told she “would love her husband.” That’s why women will consent to abuse, tyranny and inequality in their relationships. In my opinion, the point of the story is to warn women NOT to do this – to overcome her curse – only then will she save herself. This same verse has tragically been used in countless congregations to convince women they should submit to their husbands.

Irene reminded me of Biblical figures like Sarah from Genesis. Following their husbands and prophet to the ends of the earth, often times to disastrous ends.

The fact that these stories end in disaster makes me question whether we’ve been reading The Book wrong. Many of these stories, in fact, appear to me as “what not to do” warnings. Still, we hear it preached from the pulpit as the example to follow.

I read Irene Spencer’s account of being enslaved by the dictates of male religious authorities, social orders of a legalistic religious nature, and blindly doing what her husband commands of her – ignoring what her own spiritual authority and divine connection is telling her – as an account of “what not to do.”

The real tragedy is that women don’t trust their own spiritual authority and divine connection more than they trust male authority figures.

Think of the profound, divine insight the planet has missed out on.