How can you feel victimized by the media when its been your ticket to fame and fortune…and possibly a spinoff reality show? Kelly wouldn’t even be interviewing them if they hadn’t been socially conservative tv celebrities.
Most victims of child abuse and incest suffer alone in obscurity. It’s their brother and parents who have been abusing and exploiting them since they were a child. I do hope these women are bright enough to keep Uncle Josh away from their own children.
I vote for the Congress and Presidents that deregulated media to such an extant that crap like these ‘reality’ shows could be broadcast.
Locks on the doors? Does she have any idea how abnormal that sounds? Most parents want their children near enough to them to feel safe at night or to get out of the house quickly if there is a fire.
These women have been taught to fear their family and society. They have had a camera watching them for years, peering into their lives and most intimate moments. It was their parents that set up this scenario not the media. They are the abusers.
As parents, these women are scarred too badly to know what is right or wrong any longer. I really fear for their children and their marriages. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I pray for all of them. I hope their husbands are much, much better men than their father and brother. Let’s hope these men get their wives out of this reality show fishbowl and into some family counseling before one of them breaks.
Thanks for this. I think the term “polygamous cult” is apropos, and these young women are victims of IT, fully funded by their parents’ TV reality show at the cost of their childhood privacy. The demands upon parents in a two-children family, the children’s needs, medical and educational are so great that it is unfathomable to me (who had three siblings in a Catholic household) how the parents of 19 could meet the emotional needs of so many under the public microscope.
You got a believe one of them is. I vaguely remember that the oldest daughter doesn’t participate or something like that. So maybe she’s keeping her powder dry.
Ummm how did the deregulation cause this?
She went on to describe her brother as “a young boy in puberty” who was “a little too curious about girls” when the molestation allegedly occurred.
A boy can be curious abot girls but he doesn’t become curious with 5 girls . He can still be done for being curious with the babysitter .
These girls are so far gone (brainwashed) and clueless there’s nothing much that can be done for them. We just have to wish them well and move on.
Poor TV executives. At least some reasonably large slice of the US TV market needs to be enthralled about a guy who put his finger in his little sisters’ junk a decade ago, and that his dad and mom lied about it because, well, they had their own million-dollar TV franchise to protect.
We have seen the Internet eat away at ad-driven models in print media, radio, and more recently commercial television for two decades now. The reaction of TV executives as a rule is to go with cheap “reality” production models that rely on prurient curiosity (naked dating, UFO rides, Iranian weddings, and wall-to-wall true crime). Unfortunately this only evidences waning interest in a lot of these products. True, some, particularly the elderly and infirm, can be positioned before a screen to watch until their eyeballs fall out, but the sad reality is that the power groups that once laid claim to their part of the electromagnetic spectrum have failed to do much with it. TV execs for the most part are like the lazy heating oil monopolists Abel Morales has to deal with in “A Most Violent Year.”
The wider debate we should be having is not lamenting that cable and broadcast TV have largely become poshlost, but what might be done to develop our information palates. Only 3-4% of Americans can read and understand general scientific publications, and even fairly straightforward legal writings need expert explication. Also, streaming services without advertising (yet) such as Netflix offer narrow selections and the content is what it is.
My sense is that informational fluency may be an important survival and economic skill in the future. The traditional one-way flow of redacted information will give way to active projection of the individual’s informational focus. Telepresence will give way to remote activity. Before even worrying about the ethical and resource fights that will arise from uploading and downloading consciousness, TV execs have to devise new models. German legislation, for example, already anticipates and bans electronic placement of specified goods and services within content (like Google ads), so new versions of old tricks likely won’t be enough.
Thank you! What’s that old saying? – Live by the sword, die by the sword. Same difference, ladies.
The one that Josh didn’t touch.
Sadly, I suspect the “these men” thought that they were marrying into a family business. The girls (young women) kept their Duggar name even though that is a fairly new thing for married women (dare I say feminist influenced). They did not move away and start a separate life. They stayed close enough to the homestead to stay on the TLC payroll. AND one of their father wrote a strong defense of Michelle and Jim Bob.
Too bad Kelly did not ask them how they felt about having husbands chosen for them by their father when they were of prepubescent age.
Of course they are victims. In the mean time the Duggar family blames the media while they are on the media (if Fox can be called that) and promote their cause. How about they shut up for a while.
"But I do want to speak up in his defense against people who are calling him a child molester or a pedophile or a rapist — some people are saying. I’m like, that is so overboard, and a lie, really."
The evil pornographers we call the media are planting ideas into your head that it’s not your fault, and that you don’t have to repress the incident and suffer in silence to protect the family’s cash flow like your daddy told you. How dare they do that!
So, for calling question to your brainwashing, they’re the ones exploiting you, not your parents. Got it.
And given the clear collaboration among you over how to describe the incidents — a description that doesn’t pass the smell test because it asserts a voluntary confession by a tearful remorseful serial offender who then returned to offend again he was so goddamned sorry about it the first several times, an assertion that’s key to your parents’ ability to claim you never knew what happened until they told you so they’re not bad parents for ignoring your victimization — your outrage about what you call lies just to be able to live with yourself is particularly pathetic.
Golly! Just when daddy thought he put all this behind him and his God-fearing tearful and repentant son! God indeed does work in strange ways, huh?
These women need real counseling in order to heal, not this rub-two-sticks-together black-cat-bone cultist bullshit based on the misogyny of the original sin myth. They need to confront their true demons: their parents. But as sad as it might be, there’s no hope for them, because they’re too far gone to seek the help they need.
And still, in the wake of this sick psychotic train wreck, TLC has still not said definitively it’ll cancel the program. The web site is still up, comment section closed. Gotta compete with the bigoted Christo-fascist duck fucker on A&E, I suppose.
Yes, an amazing job of parenting under conservative values.
Agreed. For a young teen to even think about siblings in this way is rare let along act on it. It runs into the incest taboo which seems to be instinctive. Part of what I was trying to say is that even if these young women accept the definition that their parents are trying to suggest, the parents still fell down on the job.
That would cross the border into what is known as real investigative journalism – and Kelly will have none of that when “interviewing” the like-minded.
Tsk, Tsk to you for even suggesting she go there.
Their religion tells them that they are like “a chewed up piece of gum” since they were de-flowered. I’m surprised their husbands haven’t rejected them.
Yes, they are victims. Victims of psychotic parents.