Joanna Lumley's religious bullshit

So where do we draw the line then?! "@Independent: 'Being patted on the bottom is not assault', says Joanna Lumley http://t.co/fatdmRvhCo"
— The Joy of Bex (@debecca) April 21, 2014

Thanks to @debecca for this link

I have never been a model, and I haven't been patted on the bottom a lot, except for the years I lived in Italy in my teens, but I have repeatedly been told this in convent schools:

Referring to a speech delivered by Sister Elizabeth at her convent school, Ms Lumley recalled: “She had never known a man in the biblical sense, but was tremendously wise and when we were in the fifth or sixth form, she said, ‘Don’t lead men on because they get to a point when they really can’t stop, and it’s not fair, so don’t do it and don’t be silly. They are different from us in that way’.

“I thought, ‘What a wise thing.’” 

I  do not consider it a wise thing. As I see it, this is religious bullshit that has enabled sexual assault on children by priests, nuns and other adults in a religious setting. 

The priest who heard my first confession, gave me my first communion and confirmed me, a friend of my parents, who had been my “favorite uncle” from I was 8, first tried to rape me when I was 15. 

Or rather: “Fulfill our pure and luminously glorious God-given love that you are sinful to reject” … yes, he did talk like that, when he wasn’t whingeing about me of being a slutty cock-teaser for hugging him when I was 8 and refusing to let him bonk me 7 years later. 

The nuns in my head told me that I must have led him on. What he did was my fault. It was impossible for me to tell anyone and ask for help, even as a patient in a psychiatric clinic some years later. That was in the 1960s.

And nuns are still saying it to and about others. Some years ago a catholic bishop in Norway admitted to having assaulted an altar boy in the 1990s. 

And in 2010 a nun said to a local newspaper that no one has the right to drag down a person like the bishop has been dragged down. No one has the right to judge people in this way, she said, and then she judged the bishop’s victim: The 10-year old boy he abused was in on the act and therefore not blameless. “I ask myself how many “Our Fathers” this boy has prayed”, she continued.

sorry, link only in Norwegian

Will be continued ... with a description of "acceptance syndrome".

Asked whether she had ever suffered from “wandering-hand syndrome”, Ms Lumley said “it just became what men did”.

The short version is that when we have learned to accept humiliation and othering in our own lives, we expect others to accept the same kind of humiliation and othering.