Michelle Duggar’s (Very Bad) Marital Advice

Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on October 13, 2015.

Michelle Duggar, matriarch of the 19 Kids And Counting clan, has recently gone public with some rather questionable relationship advice. An older married friend told the seventeen-year-old Michelle that:

Anyone can iron Jim Bob’s shirt. Anybody can make lunch for him. He can get his lunch somewhere else. But you are the only one who can meet that special need he has in his life for intimacy.

Michelle went on to say that wives should be “joyfully available” to their libidinous husbands, saying:

Smile and be willing to say ‘yes,sweetie, I am here for you’, no matter what, even though you may be exhausted or big pregnant and you may not feel like he feels. ‘I’m still here for you and I’m going to meet that need because I know it’s a need for you.’

Yes, this is a head-slappingly obvious explanation for the size of Michelle Duggar’s brood. And yes, this is also a back-handed slap at her daughter-in-law, Anna.( In case you missed it, Anna is married to eldest son, Josh, who publicly admitted to molesting several of his own sisters as well as opening up an account on Ashley Madison, a website devoted to married cheaters.) After all, if Michelle can blame Anna for not being sexually available enough, she doesn’t have to point the finger at her first-born who has disgraced the entire family with his hypocritical, duplicitous and sexually predatory behavior.

But more importantly, Michelle is also inadvertently giving us a glimpse into how her son became a sexual predator in the first place; while I seriously doubt that Jim Bob and Michelle ever discussed their sex life with their son, Josh probably picked up on Michelle’s I’m-here-to-serve attitude at a young age. It would have been very difficult for a pre-adolescent and teenaged Josh to understand why his sisters — and by extension, all women — had the right to say no to unwanted sexual activity when his mother never did.

And I have a hard time believing that Jim Bob, the family patriarch, wouldn’t have developed an entitled attitude about his sexual needs (if he didn’t already have one) if he had a young naive wife that never exercised her right to say “no.” And guess what? A young impressionable Josh would have picked up on that, too.

Throw in religious teachings that stubbornly refuse to divorce sexuality from procreation and a rigidly patriarchal family structure and you get Josh Duggar, a porn-consuming, sister-molesting philanderer.

While I feel somewhat sorry for Josh (growing up the way he did would have screwed anybody up), my heart and prayers are most definitely with Anna. Whether she stays or goes, she’s in for a long, psyche-scarring battle ahead. And with a mother-in-law like Michelle Duggar, Anna most definitely doesn’t need any enemies.