ex- polygamist sect boys learn that women dont exist to serve males [View all]

[Liberal_in_LA]

After fleeing polygamist sect, boys face a new world


ach Bowers' cultural education included a battle of wills over a simple task: how to mop the kitchen floor.

Just when the teenager thought he was done with the weekly chore, Debbie Hofhines would loom like a drill sergeant, demanding to know whether he'd used enough cleaner. In response, Zach grumbled, slammed drawers and disappeared with friends.

"At first, she was so aggressive she scared me," he said. "She'd say, 'I want this done and I want it done now.' I'd never seen anything like it. I was like, 'Whoa.'"

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This was no typical parent-teen faceoff. Zach, who grew up in a polygamist compound, had always been taught that women served men. Debbie, 51, a veteran foster parent, was determined to show him housework was not just women's work.

"This is my house," he says Debbie told him. "And nobody tells me what to do here."

It took months for Zach to accept that women can be strong and assertive — one of many lessons he would learn about life in the outside world. Now 18, Zach is a defector from the secretive Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a breakaway sect of the Mormon Church that practices polygamy, dictates almost all aspects of people's lives and casts women into subservience.



http://www.latimes.com/news/columnone/la-na-utah-lost-boys-20130508-dto,0,4177150.htmlstory