Last night, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar sat for an interview with Fox News's Megyn Kelly to discuss their son Josh's molestation of five children. What viewers got was a long defense of the Duggar parents, a minimization of Josh's crimes, and a fuller illustration of why a misogynist "purity culture" is bad for girls, boys, and sexual assault victims in particular. What the Duggars proved is that their own self-interest in gaining status, influence, and money outweighed the needs of their own daughters — and that Michelle and Jim Bob aren't just kooky religious extremists, but parents capable of remarkable manipulation and cruelty.

The Duggars' own version of Josh's numerous molestations remains a bit muddled. Josh touched the girls — including his sisters, two of whom (Jill and Jessa) will also sit down with Kelly this week — over their clothes while they were sleeping, Jim Bob said, and the girls weren't even aware. Josh confessed, and according to Michelle they put "safeguards" in place. Jim Bob said authoritatively, "Nothing like that ever happened again in the girls' bedrooms."

And it didn't. Instead it happened on the couch.

Again, Jim Bob took great pains to clarify that it wasn't like this was some sort of terrible violation. It was just a little sexual groping of one's sleeping sisters.

"This was not rape or anything like that," he assured Kelly and the Fox viewing audience. "This is like touching somebody over their clothes."

And it was. Until it wasn't.

"There were a couple incidents where he touched them under their clothes," Jim Bob said. "But it was a few seconds."

In other words, Josh comes to his parents to say he's molested his sisters in their bedroom. They don't do much beyond feel "devastated" (that word comes up a lot in the interview), watch him closely, and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time on the couch. They feel devastated. They watch him closely and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time under their clothes. At some point he also molests a babysitter. They feel devastated.

After the third time, they decide to get Josh "help" — which doesn't involve actual trained professionals or licensed therapists, but rather a Christian friend who needed some help with home repairs. Josh goes there, he comes home, his parents take him to the police station, a cop (who is now serving a 56-year sentence for child pornography) gives him a stern talking-to, Josh asks for forgiveness, and everyone moves on. To a reality TV show where the family makes thousands with every episode.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story, though, isn't that the Duggar parents gave Josh three strikes against his sisters before taking any action; it wasn't that they never actually got him (or, it seems, the girls he molested) professional help from a licensed therapist. The most disturbing part of the story wasn't even captured on Fox at all. What should disgust us the most — and permanently remove the Duggars from both television and their gilded moral high horse — is how they raised their kids in the aftermath of the abuse.

Key to the Duggar philosophy is sexual purity. In order to be a good, desirable, moral, and honorable person, you must remain "pure" until marriage. Purity is especially important for girls. To not be "pure" is to be, obviously, soiled, dirty, undesirable. While girls have the responsibility to guard their purity, men, who are always authority figures over women, are in charge of controlling and surveilling the girls to make sure they stay in line. The Duggar girls could not date; they had to be "courted," which essentially meant that a local young man would select the one he wanted and the two could go out under the watchful eye of a chaperone — sometimes Josh. The girls do not kiss or touch young men until their wedding day.

To explain the concept of sexual purity, Jim Bob Duggar told his girls a story about a bike. He asks them to imagine their parents got them a shiny new bicycle for Christmas, but someone comes and rides it first, leaving it all banged up.

"I'm sure you would still be grateful for the bike, and you would have fun riding it," Michelle recounts Jim Bob saying, "but it won't be in the condition your parents had hoped and dreamed it would be when you received it. You would miss out on a lot of the enjoyment they meant for you to have."

It's not the most subtle of metaphors: Let a boy ride you, and your husband will still have fun riding you himself, but he'll miss out on a lot of the enjoyment he was meant to have from riding a virgin.

But in case that's not clear enough, Michelle also offers this:

"Another story Jim Bob shares starts with a disgusting image: 'What if we were at a meeting with about 100 other people and the speaker asked that a large cup be passed around and that everyone spit in the cup? What if you happened to be all the way in the back — the last person on the last row — and when the cup finally came to you, the speaker asked you to drink out of the cup? What would you do?'"

Engage in any kind of sexual activity before marriage and you're as desirable as a banged-up bike or a cup of spit: That's what the Duggar parents taught girls who had been sexually assaulted by their older brother.

Purity culture is insulting and degrading even when it's not directed at victims of sexual violence. It tells women and girls that they aren't valuable because of who they are as human beings — for their intelligence, their kindness, their hard work — but because of what they can offer a future husband. And even then, the supposed value they're bringing is ignorance — about their own bodies, about sexual pleasure, about what they might like in bed and out of it, about what they want in a partner, about their own rights and desires in a relationship. The whole thing is structured to keep women clueless and subservient, to maintain male power, and to assuage seemingly delicate male egos unable to cope with a partner who may know what she likes and, presumably, find him lacking.

Survivors of sexual violence have their rights to their own body momentarily taken away by someone else. Sexual violations are particularly egregious because they're located on a part of the body that should feel good; they take an act that at its best is one of the most transcendent, enjoyable things human beings are capable of experiencing, and turn it into an act of violence, compulsion and control. Restoring a sense of ownership, control, and pleasure over the most intimate parts of oneself is crucial to healing.

The Duggar sexual philosophy denied their daughters that right. That's an incredible act of cruelty.

The Duggar sexual philosophy is that girls' bodies never belong to the girls themselves. They're under the authority of their father or another male figure, and then they belong to their husbands. There is no individual right of female sexual pleasure. There is no value placed on female bodily autonomy or ownership or control. Instead, the message is that girls' bodies are never their own, that the girls themselves are simply vessels for male pleasure, male desires, and male authority, and the girls' job is to preserve their bodies to hand over to the appropriate man.

It's the same mentality — male authority over and right to female bodies — that begets sexual assault in the first place.

Compounding the sexual abuse and then the raising of their girls to believe that sexual touch sullies them was the Duggar parents' decision to put the whole family on TV and turn their then 16 kids into a cash cow.

"They've been victimized more by what has happened in these last couple weeks than they were 12 years ago," Michelle Duggar told Megyn Kelly about her daughters, "because they honestly they didn't even understand or know that anything had happened until after the fact when they were told about it. In our hearts before God, we haven't been keeping secrets. We have been protecting those who honestly should be protected. And now what's happened is they've been victimized."

Now, Michelle says, the Duggar daughters have been victimized — not when their brother was sneaking into their bedrooms to molest them or when he was molesting them on the couch or when their parents never actually got him professional help. It's now that the story is public. And surely this is awful and traumatizing for them. Surely they do feel victimized.

But who put them on TV in the first place? Who turned them into public figures? Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar invited cameras into their home to put their family in the public eye, both so they could make money and so they could spread their religious beliefs (evangelism is part of the requirements of their religion, and what better way to spread the word than a television show beamed into households across the country). They believe their way of living — the woman at home and subservient to her husband, girls not pursuing higher education, forgoing contraception, and having as many children as God gives you even if it kills you — is not just right for them, but the only righteous, acceptable, moral way to live. They presented themselves as living examples of a particularly strict, misogynist, and retrograde sexual morality. They made their many children into minor celebrities. They wanted the public to be interested in them, because that interest meant cash and it meant influence.

They did that knowing their own family's history. They sold a narrative of sexual restriction as noble, of sexuality as shameful, knowing their daughters were sexual abuse victims and that being publicly identified as such would be, to use their word, "devastating."

They did that. That was a choice. The tabloid media may have also behaved poorly, but if the Duggars were just another big family in Arkansas, no one in the national media would have cared.

People from all backgrounds, religions, and walks of life do terrible things. It's not the Duggar parents' fault that their son molested their daughters. Nor would Josh or the rest of the family have been served by throwing him in jail — juvenile offenders often can straighten out with the right professional help, and incarcerating kids is a bad solution. It's even understandable, although certainly not commendable, that the Duggar parents, confused and upset and loving all their children, didn't take their child to the police immediately and instead tried to deal with the matter themselves. No one is perfect, and parents can be particularly imperfect when it comes to their own children's bad acts.

But what the Duggars did instead, in seeking out a Christian friend instead of a real counselor, in raising sexual abuse victims to believe that being sexually touched makes you about as valuable as a broken bicycle or a cup of spit, in exposing their entire family to the exact kind of vulture tabloid obsession that accompanies reality TV shows? That was a series of cruel, craven, greedy choices. That borders on abuse.

When Kelly asked the Duggar parents about TLC potentially canceling their show, Jim Bob responded, "I don't know if the rest of our family should be punished for the act of one of our children."

It's not exactly "punishment" for the reality TV paychecks to stop flowing in. But it would be a tiny sliver of justice, far too little and far too late.

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Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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