I think it is perfectly fine (and commendable) for you not to have sex until you are ready for it. And if marriage is what it takes for you, more power to you. But, like others, I am a little troubled by this:

“Do I expect my first night with my husband to be the best sex ever? No. It will probably be awkward and without being too crude, it will hurt. But I love idea that this awkwardness and that my body will be only see by a guy who has pledged his life to me. Not just an “I love you” but a concrete commitment. I don’t want to give myself up to just any one. And if he has had sex before ? So what. It’s his past and we move on.”

Do you think it might be a bit different if it was both of your first times instead of just yours? It just seems like you are elevating your own virginity to such a high status, and yet being totally blase about his. Why wouldn’t you want to be with someone who held himself to the same standard you did? Particularly if it is important to you?

Do I expect my first night with my husband to be the best sex ever? No. It will probably be awkward and without being too crude, it will hurt. But I
love idea that this awkwardness and that my body will be only see by a guy who has pledged his life to me. Not just an “I love you” but a concrete commitment. I don’t want to give myself up to just any one. And if he has had sex before ? So what. It’s his past and we move on.

When I said “It doesn’t help that everybody I know is getting married and telling me that it’s “worth the wait”.” I mean that there is a struggle
between what I want physically and what I want emotionally/spiritually. Physically, I’m like “let’s get it on” but emotionally/spiritually I choose
to hold off. I hope this makes more sense.

Even though there is still a problem over churches not mentioning female sexuality, I notice people are standing up. Books are coming out. Churches
all over are recognizing this. I know you may find this difficult to believe, but the Church is actually changing. It’s just no one puts that in the media as much

In something like the FLDS, even the women at the bottom can still feel superior to the sinners outside it. They have the assurance of Heaven, so long as they don’t rebel.

Successful authoritarian systems need incentives for those at the nearly bottom, as they’re usually too numerous for force to work on them on a grand scale.

Leaving the main topic to jump back to something in the OP:

I don’t think any constitutional amendment, especially not one with broad fuzzy language is going, by itself, to work to ensure the protection of women’s rights if judges are appointed who want to subvert it. The history of the Supreme Court is a long history of the Supreme Court twisting laws and the Constitution into origami to justify ridiculous things. Such cases as Plessy vs. Ferguson, United States vs. EC Knight, Dredd Scott, Fletcher v. Peck, etc. demonstrate that you can easily twist and bend the constitution into knots.

What the ERA will do whenever it does finally get ratified is that it will provide a further justification for liberal judges to protect women’s rights and attack discrimination. But it can’t protect women’s rights just by existing any more than the 14th amendment was able to prevent Plessy vs. Ferguson and decades of discrimination. (Which is to say, I’d like to see it ratified, but I don’t expect it to be supremely effective all by itself, independent of who is on the judiciary.)

In this respect, patriarchal structures are like any other form of right-wing ideology, whether corporate, capitalist or fascistic: its survival rests on the very thin yet surprisingly resilient reed of convincing the majority to act against their own interests, either in the hope of gaining power and place (when it is, in fact, permanently shut off to almost all of them), or, threatening to take away what tiny portion power and place they do have.

“Patriarchy” doesn’t necessarily mean “a society where Teh Doods always win”. In strictly formalist terms, it means a society organized so that males dominate the public sphere and women are not considered full human beings. I would agree, with the caveat that it is incomplete. I’m more in agreement with my edited version:

“Patriarchy” … means a society organized so that males dominate the public and private spheres; where women are not considered full human beings; where almost every benefit of the society flows not to males per se but to societal alpha males. Almost all laws and rules and administration and theology and theocracy in the society are designed to protect, perpetuate and reinforce this dynamic.

This is where the opoponax’s comment about Teh Doods is startlingly accurate, because one of the biggest rules for the vast majority of men who aren’t in the alpha category is this: “cross us or try and get even a tinier fair shake from us and we will take away the few benefits and powers that you do have (usu. over women and children) and make you as reviled and powerless as they are”. That,naturally, is the subtext of much of the “they are SO like girls!” stuff flung at Democrats officially by the GOP and unofficially by their servants like Maureen Dowd.

I don’t want to quibble, but yes, in this particular post we are definitely talking about patriarchal social constructs.

“Patriarchy” doesn’t necessarily mean “a society where Teh Doods always win”. In strictly formalist terms, it means a society organized so that males dominate the public sphere and women are not considered full human beings.

The idea that a woman is owned by her father until he chooses to marry her off, whereupon she is owned by her husband, is just about the most patriarchal idea ever thought up. Not in the way that feminists tend to overuse the term to mean “favoring men”, but in the classic anthropological/sociological sense of the term.

Yes, here this is all justified by belief in God, and of course the groups that practice this are also in favor of establishing an American theocracy. But the main reason the fundies want to set up this particular model of society is that this is the sort of patriarchy set forth in the Bible (mainly, to be perfectly honest, because it was the way of the world back then, not really because God Says Teh Menz R Better; the fundies’ beloved Old Testament includes a great many stories of strong women who acted outside their domestic roles and are rewarded for it).

You can’t talk about theocracy without patriarchy, they are inherently linked.

Someone wrote above that this purity crap exists to benefit men. No it doesn’t! Filling boys’ heads with twisted notions about life and love doesn’t do them any good.

The patriarchy hurts boys/men, too. Color me shocked.