Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about:

"A man won't buy the cow if he's getting the milk for free."

I know I'm not the only one raised with this ridiculous admonition. So in this episode, we'll break down why this whole paradigm is actually a lot worse than simply thinking of yourself as a cow. And we'll talk about a new to view relationships that gets us out of the transactional and into loving, egalitarian support.

So I think many of you listeners, especially if you were raised in English speaking households. In high control religions in the United States, you will have heard this exact same wording. You know, he won't buy the cow if he's getting the milk for free, but I know that we have actually listeners all over the world and from different groups, and I wanna make sure that everyone's on the same page about what that exactly means.

Because even if that exact phrasing wasn't used, it's likely that the underlying concept was taught in some type of wording or phrasing. So. This particular phrase is just meant to mean that if a woman has sex with a man before marriage, the man won't want to marry her. You know, she will have given up everything of value.

And so he has no reason to commit. The implied meaning for women who were raised with this was, if you want a man to marry you, you'd better withhold sex to incentivize his commitment.

So isn't it funny looking at these commonly accepted rules from the outside using critical thinking? It's like, what the heck? Who thought this was a good idea? This is such an awful, awful perspective on life, interpersonal relationships, marriage and sex. What's crazy is when I heard this growing up, nothing about it seemed weird or off To me, it seemed like a reasonable take on things because I was so steeped in all of the ideas about women and about relationships from this high control, high demand religion that I was raised in.

But when I left my high demand religion, something about this particular teaching or phrasing really started to irritate me. And then as I looked in more detail at it, started, you know, really thinking about it, I kept finding more and more ways it's actually unhealthy and a wildly unreasonable paradigm for relationships and sexuality.

Like what? So. Let's break this down layer by layer.

The first obvious knee jerk reaction that we have when we first think about this critically is, Hey, wait, I'm not a cow. This makes me the cow.

I grew up in a rural area, and so I know that a cow is not. An animal that you have a relationship with. It's not a pet like your dog that you love dearly. A cow is part of an agricultural business model, and a cow is an asset that you purchase to produce something you can sell, which is milk. So if a dairy cow stops producing milk, it becomes useless because that's its function in this business model.

And once a dairy cow stops producing milk or enough milk, that last bit of value. Is captured from the asset by selling the cow for slaughter, and then it's gonna become some kind of lower quality, you know, processed meat product like ground beef or pet food. It can't even be steaks at that point because the cow is worn out from producing so hard, its whole life.

I am not saying that to criticize the dairy industry. I am a cheese lover, an extreme cheese lover myself, and I'm grateful that dairy farms are producing cheese for me. But those are just the facts of that particular business model. Even when the dairy cow is still producing and in its working life, the decisions about.

That cow are made on the basis of maximizing production, not on the comfort or life experience of a dairy cow. It's like how much can we profitably get out of this animal? So it is wild that anyone ever thought that a farmer cow relationship was a good analogy for a marriage relationship, and that really tells us a ton about what the actual viewpoint of women and their role and their value is.

In these high demand religions, the fact that anyone ever thought this was clever or funny is crazy.

And this teaching was, you know, it was designed to teach women not to have sex so that they could get a man and. I learned a little late in life that you actually should run screaming from any man who buys into this paradigm

because if he believes this paradigm, that means that he thinks you are his property. He thinks you are expected to maximize production for the business of his life, not be partners. It means there's likely to be very little concern about your wellbeing as a human, because as a wife, you're designed in, in his worldview to provide things that make his life better without regard for your life or your experience.

And it's, you know, really not surprising that this is the comparison that people came up with for what many of us were taught about the role of women as just a subservient helpmate. Although I'd say being someone's cattle is, uh. Worse. Even worse. It's very telling.

Okay, so let's move on to how messed up of a paradigm. This also is about sex because in the cow farmer paradigm that we have here, sex is the product that the woman sells and the man wants. And sex is the only value the woman has, so she has to make sure to get maximum return for it.

Sex is presented as a thing that's

valuable to the man, not something the woman also seeks out and enjoys. Like what? We do. Enjoy that. That's crazy. Sex is presented as something the woman gives to the man, but not something that the man is going to participate in with the woman.

And sex is presented as the best bargaining chip the woman has for passively aggressively manipulating the man into doing what she wants, which is something that's presented as what he wouldn't naturally want. If he didn't need the milk, he wouldn't marry at all, is sort of the implication. So marriage is presented as something the man doesn't want in and of itself, but as you know, a necessary evil for getting the milk that he needs, which is so gross.

Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. Who would wanna be in a marriage like that? I wish I could tell you that I had that conclusion before I got married in my early twenties in the church, but unfortunately I didn't. And all of the events that followed that are the reason why I'm so outspoken today and have this podcast because when I married in my early twenties, I believed in and followed this paradigm.

Somehow I thought I could participate in this whole paradigm of sexual purity, put that in quotes, alleged sexual purity and a religious marriage, and that I was going to have this loving man who valued me as a person, and I stayed married for 15 years trying to single-handedly fix the relationship.

Find a way to make him love me. Prove to him I was worthy of love as a person, and try to get him to treat me with love and care. And spoiler alert, that did not work. But I'll tell you what did work, getting a divorce and realizing I loved myself and I'm an awesome partner, whoever I ended up with,

I started to realize they would be really lucky. I started dating men who were entirely not in the, this is my cow Mindset of life partnership. Some of the men I dated had been raised in completely different scenarios where they never. Learned that view of women and they never accepted it. And other men that I dated were actually men who'd also left high demand, high control religions.

And that was super healing to see men who had been raised with that idea and had independently concluded that this was harmful to all involved and left those religions. Um, one of the most healing experiences of my life. Honestly, I'm super grateful to those men for their courage in leaving the system as well.

So, you know, before that I genuinely had no idea that these men could exist in the world. I believed from my high control religion that all, all the good men in the world subscribed to this paradigm, and all of those good men would think I was ruined if I had any sexual experience or worldly experience generally of any kind.

It turns out, ironically, that by staying in the pool of men who believe this paradigm, I was basically self-selecting the men most likely to devalue and abuse me in a marriage. So here's what I learned. In my experience, there are good and kind and loving men who want a partner who's equal to them in the relationship.

There are men who are delighted at my intellect, my business success, my wisdom earned from all of the complex life experiences I've had. In equal partnerships, I've been able to trust and rely on my partner and he on me for support and love. It's wonderful, and sex is a wonderful form of communication.

Sometimes it's deeply romantic and connecting. Sometimes it's just purely fun or even silly. Definitely sexy, exhilarating, vulnerable, and beautiful. There is no sale of a product from one party to another. It is. A very good time on all dimensions that I have with my partner. And there were so many stories I believed when I started dating in my late thirties, early forties.

You know, I'd been taught a bunch of dumb things that I accepted as absolute truth. Like no one's gonna want a single mother with an aging body. And it turns out that is such bs. I now have an absolutely wonderful partner who loves me. For me and appreciates my life experience.

He doesn't love me in spite of my circumstances. He just loves me and I love him. And we have a very healthy and collaborative relationship together. So it's definitely possible. So anyway, that's my story about how I stopped being a cow. And you can too, woo woo. But in all seriousness, here are some reflections for you on this topic.

Do you notice any ways your former religion's perspective on relationships and sex was transactional?

What kind of love relationship would you like to have? If you even want to have a life partner, can you allow yourself to believe that such a relationship is possible for you? Because I know that it is from experience and I'm rooting for you.

Who do you know who would appreciate having this podcast as part of her life? Send her a link to the show page at www.brainwashbegone.com.

Tags: Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, deconstruction, exmormon, exmo, exvangelical, recovering catholic, excatholic, former jehovah's witness, women's empowerment, feminism, leaving religion, self-worth, high demand religions, high control groups, high control religion, cult, cult recovery, brainwashed, high demand religion, spiritual trauma, church abuse.