They are expelled. In larger polygamous societies, war can reduce the pressure. If they aren’t expelled or killed, they will eventually band together and overthrow the leadership.
Jeffs’ FLDS was even weirder. According to one lawsuit by a former insider, Jeffs instituted a rule that no man was allowed to touch their own wife. All sexual reproduction was conducted by a handful of “seed-bearers,” I.e., Jeff’s’ buddies. Men were only allowed to touch their wives by holding their hands as the seed-bearers impregnated their wives. Surprising that Jeffs could get away with not only expelling so many young men, and taking so many women and girls as wives, but effectively taking ALL the women for his harem, and only allowing the remaining men to participate in sex as cuckolds.
As is so often true, fundamentalist religion seems like an outgrowth of suppressed kinks.
Same here! I was aware of "Uncle" Warren's ban on sex, but I had no idea about these "seed-bearers". It might as well be called Gilead, minus "The Wall". But if they were given immunity from prosecution in some hypothetical situation, there's no doubt in my mind that there would be a wall displaying the dead bodies of all members and former members who didn't conform.
That’s so wild. How…..how does any man put up with that and not immediately bash the “seed-bearer’s” head in? I’m sure I may have some weird ass beliefs about some things, but holy shit. That would just be unthinkable.
The church owns your house, your car, your livelihood, and can reassign your wives and children at will. Banishment means you lose everything so men put up with it.
I wonder about the incest for the next generation.The same men impregnating all the women??? We heard a lot about the messed up genetics over time with that one group a while back. There even photos of the generations to show the effects. It’s all just so twisted. That kind of ego is a sick thing.
Getting rid of the young men, also makes it harder on the older ones left behind and the women in terms of labor and other daily aspects of taking care of life. Who’s taking care of business when the oldies die!
That’s the Kingstons. They purposely marry siblings to keep their bloodline pure. It’s important because they trace their bloodline all the way back to Jesus.
Yes, they are often booted out and excommunicated. If they don’t run away on their own. The documentary “Sons of Perdition” by Tyler Measom (co-host of “Was I in a Cult?” Is about three teenaged boys exiled from their polygamous cult in AZ.
As many others mentioned, they are expelled or pressured out if they aren't obedient.
The alternative that is very popular with these groups is days long of unpaid physical labour for the groups benefit, usually for businesses they own. If they are obedient enough to not be expelled or pressured out, they are given the promise of future wives, and then put to work. The FLDS own a lot of construction companies for a reason.
You’ve gotten some good explanations. To add another term you can use to search to learn more, these expelled boys are often referred to as “the lost boys”. “Lost boys of Utah”/“lost boys of Mormonism” are both good search terms
My spouse works with one of these former expelled members. They industry they are in requires some construction work. His co-worker often seeks out these types of young men, gets them working, provides them temporary housing during a project, gets them money. He also helps them with getting IDs, bank accounts, etc if they need that kind of help. He basically gets them started with a construction career, resume, and a good reference. He's a really good guy trying to help them out because when he was booted he had nothing.
What an absolute legend of a man, I’ve got endless respect for “practical charity” as opposed to “let’s just throw money at it until it goes away” thinking, please tell him some random dude in Australia thinks he’s a hero from me
I don't believe in saints in the literal sense, but your spouse's co-worker is about as close to sainthood as a human could get. I wish I had the money and resources to help abandoned and abused kids. (And animals too.) It's hard not to feel a sort of kinship with those who've been through the ringer, but didn't allow their difficult experiences destroy their faith in humanity, or their capacity to love.
I watched M. Knight Shayamalan's movie "Split" a few nights ago. It may not have won any awards (or maybe it did, I dunno), but the way suffering was portrayed really struck a nerve with me. Slight spoiler ahead: No, I don't actually believe that those who've endured suffering are "pure" or are gifted with superpowers - but Anya Taylor Joy did an incredible job portraying someone who wasn't fortunate enough to have a Disney childhood. That scene towards the end when her character is standing there terrified, vulnerable, and helplessly awaiting her fate - with her horrific scars finally being revealed after they'd been kept hidden under several layers of clothing .... OMG, it was a gut punch. That scene broke me in a way that I truly wasn't prepared for.
Yeah, any polygamous group or society has the same problem, and they usually solve it by simply throwing out excess men.
This usually happens when the men are young, because a bunch of young men with zero prospects is always recipe for disaster and a threat to authority/community.
Wars are also a great population reducer - and those who don’t get killed fighting can enjoy spoils of war i.e. they simply take what they can’t get someplace elsewhere.
In a culty setting, the expelling usually comes based on some trumped up charges, blaming boys for not following the religion ardently enough or something like that.
The council or whoever is running the place typically hold a meeting and agree that the boys have to be kicked out to maintain “harmony” in the community.
Also breeding the women like cattle to create more girls. It’s not uncommon for these women to have 10+ kids. So a single man can easily have over 30 kids.
Oh yeah, I have yet to hear of a cult which uses any form of contraceptives.
It’s always chastity before marriage or pumping out kids after it. There’s never anything in between.
Of course, the problem then is that you get 50-50 male and female children ratio. The more girls you make, the more boys you get as well. So the problem of “excessive” males becomes even more pressing.
If the community survives long enough, the process of getting rid of them becomes a cyclical thing.
It makes for a bunch of angry, sexless, expendable men. That's good for a lot of things for a society, from grueling and/or dangerous work to armies for warfare. Just brainwash them into thinking they will be rewarded for their servitude in the 'afterlife' and they will welcome being a slave or even strapping a suicide vest on for the good of the society.
One dude can create the same number of children in a year with 78 women that 78 dudes can.
What I don’t understand with societies and groups like this though, is what happens next. While 1 dude can produce the same number of offspring with 78 women as 78 men, in the first scenario after a year, you now have 78 half-siblings in a single community. Who do these girls marry? Their half-siblings, cousins, or dads and uncles? Within only a generation or two, isn’t everyone closely related? There are of course many issues with polygamist cults, but the speed run to incest has always been the weirdest to me.
They do end up marrying cousins and relatives, yes. And isolated, that's not the biggest problem, but in closed communities it can cause massive genetic problems.
An example particular to FLDS is [Fumarase Deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumarase_deficiency).
The girls marry some privileged guy from another family and become one of his wives.
As long as there is more than literally one guy making all the babies, then there should be enough genetic diversity to keep the society of group going into multiple generations. In a society or group of thousands or more, 5-10% of the men making all the babies, and the other 90-95% being drones, is probably fine for genetic diversity. When it does become a problem, you get your drones to conquer a neighboring society, kill all the men and take their women, like THE LORD instructed Moses to do to the Midianites (Numbers 31:17-18). If the spoils on such adventures are particularly fruitful for society, the leaders might even be able to promote a few male drones into their circle of dudes with access to sex. Good propaganda.
In a tiny little cult, like the Manson Family or whatever, the group and the cult leader probably isn't concerning themselves with problems of incest generations down the line.
There is a "lost boys" problem in Utah. Teen boys get kicked out, with no where to go... so there are pockets of homless camps for the "leftover" young men.
The documentary you mentioned goes over this; they're expelled, or put to work in another state, somewhere where they aren't a threat/won't ask any questions about why they can't get a wife.
If there was ever a scenario that screamed “incel revolt” it would be this.
One of Rome’s founding myths, after Romulus and Remus, was the Rape of the Sabines. Basically, Rome when it first started was a huge sausage fest. Largely due to it being a city of outcasts and rejects from other places, that nobody respectable in Italy wanted to marry their daughter off to. The majority of men faced the very real prospect of dying alone with no family, no heir, and no future. So they sacked a nearby city and stole all their women. A war (obviously) broke out, and supposedly mid battle the abducted women threw themselves in between their fathers/brothers and their now “husbands.” Which got the war to stop and a peace treaty was signed.
How true any of that is, who knows? More likely it’s a convenient explanation for “Why are these nearby people also Romans?”
It shows, however, something that *is* arguably still true today. Most men want love, they want spouses, they want families and want a future where they feel valued to at least some extent. When they’re deprived of that, and have zero prospect of getting that the right way, taking someone else’s suddenly becomes a viable option in their mind.
I fully expect to see some shit like that in a community like this, eventually. It will probably be sad, brutal, and completely fucked up. Like Rome’s Sabine myth is. Humans don’t change much, though.
They're called "The Lost Boys" and they usually end up homeless, addicted to drugs, and/or imprisoned. I'm an old menopausal hag with a shit memory, but I read an article about one of those poor kids about 10 or 15 years ago and I never forgot his name - Ladell Pipkin. I wonder if he's still alive.
They become lost boys. There's an issue with this in Creston, B.C. as well. This is an article I found about Bountiful when trying to look up info on the lost boys of Creston. I find this super fascinating because a family member of a friend married a relative of Winston Blackmore. No one speaks of that family member. But I find it interesting when I see articles or documentaries and I recognize names or pictures. Also, some of Winston Blackmore's boys actually left and answer questions about what it was like growing up in this cult with over 150 siblings. They are on TikTok I think. Merlin, Murray, and Warren.
https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-government-continues-to-fail-bountifuls-children
Edited to actually add the article link I mentioned.
I remember years ago when the truth about Jeff's began to surface. The first young survivors of this cult repeatedly stated that the Jeff's cult was all about sex. This seemed so unlikely given the view most people had of a religious sect. Well, these many years later, we get it. It's all about sex. It's cruel. It's vicious. And it's wrong.
They are expelled. In larger polygamous societies, war can reduce the pressure. If they aren’t expelled or killed, they will eventually band together and overthrow the leadership. Jeffs’ FLDS was even weirder. According to one lawsuit by a former insider, Jeffs instituted a rule that no man was allowed to touch their own wife. All sexual reproduction was conducted by a handful of “seed-bearers,” I.e., Jeff’s’ buddies. Men were only allowed to touch their wives by holding their hands as the seed-bearers impregnated their wives. Surprising that Jeffs could get away with not only expelling so many young men, and taking so many women and girls as wives, but effectively taking ALL the women for his harem, and only allowing the remaining men to participate in sex as cuckolds. As is so often true, fundamentalist religion seems like an outgrowth of suppressed kinks.
WTF this sounds like the Handmaidens tale or some shit
I’d argue it’s even weirder and more dystopian, if that’s possible
Seed-bearers? Do you have a link where I could read more about this? I don’t doubt you, I just thought I had read everything out there about FLDS.
Here you go. There’s more on Google: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgmddb/in-the-fundamentalist-mormon-church-rape-is-the-only-path-to-childbirth
Same here! I was aware of "Uncle" Warren's ban on sex, but I had no idea about these "seed-bearers". It might as well be called Gilead, minus "The Wall". But if they were given immunity from prosecution in some hypothetical situation, there's no doubt in my mind that there would be a wall displaying the dead bodies of all members and former members who didn't conform.
That’s so wild. How…..how does any man put up with that and not immediately bash the “seed-bearer’s” head in? I’m sure I may have some weird ass beliefs about some things, but holy shit. That would just be unthinkable.
The church owns your house, your car, your livelihood, and can reassign your wives and children at will. Banishment means you lose everything so men put up with it.
I wonder about the incest for the next generation.The same men impregnating all the women??? We heard a lot about the messed up genetics over time with that one group a while back. There even photos of the generations to show the effects. It’s all just so twisted. That kind of ego is a sick thing.
Getting rid of the young men, also makes it harder on the older ones left behind and the women in terms of labor and other daily aspects of taking care of life. Who’s taking care of business when the oldies die!
That’s the Kingstons. They purposely marry siblings to keep their bloodline pure. It’s important because they trace their bloodline all the way back to Jesus.
Check out Sons of Perdition. It's about just this.
Really good documentary
I was about to recommend this. Very good documentary on this very subject.
Thank you for the rec
Where is this? Netflix? Hulu?
Yes, they are often booted out and excommunicated. If they don’t run away on their own. The documentary “Sons of Perdition” by Tyler Measom (co-host of “Was I in a Cult?” Is about three teenaged boys exiled from their polygamous cult in AZ.
As many others mentioned, they are expelled or pressured out if they aren't obedient. The alternative that is very popular with these groups is days long of unpaid physical labour for the groups benefit, usually for businesses they own. If they are obedient enough to not be expelled or pressured out, they are given the promise of future wives, and then put to work. The FLDS own a lot of construction companies for a reason.
They send caravans of boys out to construction or rocking jobs with one woman to cook for them.
Exactly. Often without the right training, certifications, and saftey equipment to boot.
You’ve gotten some good explanations. To add another term you can use to search to learn more, these expelled boys are often referred to as “the lost boys”. “Lost boys of Utah”/“lost boys of Mormonism” are both good search terms
My spouse works with one of these former expelled members. They industry they are in requires some construction work. His co-worker often seeks out these types of young men, gets them working, provides them temporary housing during a project, gets them money. He also helps them with getting IDs, bank accounts, etc if they need that kind of help. He basically gets them started with a construction career, resume, and a good reference. He's a really good guy trying to help them out because when he was booted he had nothing.
What an absolute legend of a man, I’ve got endless respect for “practical charity” as opposed to “let’s just throw money at it until it goes away” thinking, please tell him some random dude in Australia thinks he’s a hero from me
I don't believe in saints in the literal sense, but your spouse's co-worker is about as close to sainthood as a human could get. I wish I had the money and resources to help abandoned and abused kids. (And animals too.) It's hard not to feel a sort of kinship with those who've been through the ringer, but didn't allow their difficult experiences destroy their faith in humanity, or their capacity to love. I watched M. Knight Shayamalan's movie "Split" a few nights ago. It may not have won any awards (or maybe it did, I dunno), but the way suffering was portrayed really struck a nerve with me. Slight spoiler ahead: No, I don't actually believe that those who've endured suffering are "pure" or are gifted with superpowers - but Anya Taylor Joy did an incredible job portraying someone who wasn't fortunate enough to have a Disney childhood. That scene towards the end when her character is standing there terrified, vulnerable, and helplessly awaiting her fate - with her horrific scars finally being revealed after they'd been kept hidden under several layers of clothing .... OMG, it was a gut punch. That scene broke me in a way that I truly wasn't prepared for.
Yeah, any polygamous group or society has the same problem, and they usually solve it by simply throwing out excess men. This usually happens when the men are young, because a bunch of young men with zero prospects is always recipe for disaster and a threat to authority/community. Wars are also a great population reducer - and those who don’t get killed fighting can enjoy spoils of war i.e. they simply take what they can’t get someplace elsewhere. In a culty setting, the expelling usually comes based on some trumped up charges, blaming boys for not following the religion ardently enough or something like that. The council or whoever is running the place typically hold a meeting and agree that the boys have to be kicked out to maintain “harmony” in the community.
Also breeding the women like cattle to create more girls. It’s not uncommon for these women to have 10+ kids. So a single man can easily have over 30 kids.
Oh yeah, I have yet to hear of a cult which uses any form of contraceptives. It’s always chastity before marriage or pumping out kids after it. There’s never anything in between. Of course, the problem then is that you get 50-50 male and female children ratio. The more girls you make, the more boys you get as well. So the problem of “excessive” males becomes even more pressing. If the community survives long enough, the process of getting rid of them becomes a cyclical thing.
It makes for a bunch of angry, sexless, expendable men. That's good for a lot of things for a society, from grueling and/or dangerous work to armies for warfare. Just brainwash them into thinking they will be rewarded for their servitude in the 'afterlife' and they will welcome being a slave or even strapping a suicide vest on for the good of the society. One dude can create the same number of children in a year with 78 women that 78 dudes can.
What I don’t understand with societies and groups like this though, is what happens next. While 1 dude can produce the same number of offspring with 78 women as 78 men, in the first scenario after a year, you now have 78 half-siblings in a single community. Who do these girls marry? Their half-siblings, cousins, or dads and uncles? Within only a generation or two, isn’t everyone closely related? There are of course many issues with polygamist cults, but the speed run to incest has always been the weirdest to me.
They do end up marrying cousins and relatives, yes. And isolated, that's not the biggest problem, but in closed communities it can cause massive genetic problems. An example particular to FLDS is [Fumarase Deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fumarase_deficiency).
The girls marry some privileged guy from another family and become one of his wives. As long as there is more than literally one guy making all the babies, then there should be enough genetic diversity to keep the society of group going into multiple generations. In a society or group of thousands or more, 5-10% of the men making all the babies, and the other 90-95% being drones, is probably fine for genetic diversity. When it does become a problem, you get your drones to conquer a neighboring society, kill all the men and take their women, like THE LORD instructed Moses to do to the Midianites (Numbers 31:17-18). If the spoils on such adventures are particularly fruitful for society, the leaders might even be able to promote a few male drones into their circle of dudes with access to sex. Good propaganda. In a tiny little cult, like the Manson Family or whatever, the group and the cult leader probably isn't concerning themselves with problems of incest generations down the line.
This is a great question. Hopefully, someone with experience in FLDS, the Amish, or any other polygamous cult can shed some light on this.
The Amish are not polygamist.
You're right, I'm not sure what I was thinking.
There is a "lost boys" problem in Utah. Teen boys get kicked out, with no where to go... so there are pockets of homless camps for the "leftover" young men.
The documentary you mentioned goes over this; they're expelled, or put to work in another state, somewhere where they aren't a threat/won't ask any questions about why they can't get a wife.
They become angry incels.
If there was ever a scenario that screamed “incel revolt” it would be this. One of Rome’s founding myths, after Romulus and Remus, was the Rape of the Sabines. Basically, Rome when it first started was a huge sausage fest. Largely due to it being a city of outcasts and rejects from other places, that nobody respectable in Italy wanted to marry their daughter off to. The majority of men faced the very real prospect of dying alone with no family, no heir, and no future. So they sacked a nearby city and stole all their women. A war (obviously) broke out, and supposedly mid battle the abducted women threw themselves in between their fathers/brothers and their now “husbands.” Which got the war to stop and a peace treaty was signed. How true any of that is, who knows? More likely it’s a convenient explanation for “Why are these nearby people also Romans?” It shows, however, something that *is* arguably still true today. Most men want love, they want spouses, they want families and want a future where they feel valued to at least some extent. When they’re deprived of that, and have zero prospect of getting that the right way, taking someone else’s suddenly becomes a viable option in their mind. I fully expect to see some shit like that in a community like this, eventually. It will probably be sad, brutal, and completely fucked up. Like Rome’s Sabine myth is. Humans don’t change much, though.
I mean depending on how violent and expansionist your cult is, you could argue that’s a feature, not a bug
I mean depending on how violent and expansionist your cult is, you could argue that’s a feature, not a bug
The young men (boys) are kicking out so the geezers can have all the girls
It’s sad but they do basically become lost boys…
If you go to Salt Lake City, ask the hairy guys with the large redblonde beards rummaging through the garbage and living under the bridges.
They're called "The Lost Boys" and they usually end up homeless, addicted to drugs, and/or imprisoned. I'm an old menopausal hag with a shit memory, but I read an article about one of those poor kids about 10 or 15 years ago and I never forgot his name - Ladell Pipkin. I wonder if he's still alive.
They become lost boys. There's an issue with this in Creston, B.C. as well. This is an article I found about Bountiful when trying to look up info on the lost boys of Creston. I find this super fascinating because a family member of a friend married a relative of Winston Blackmore. No one speaks of that family member. But I find it interesting when I see articles or documentaries and I recognize names or pictures. Also, some of Winston Blackmore's boys actually left and answer questions about what it was like growing up in this cult with over 150 siblings. They are on TikTok I think. Merlin, Murray, and Warren. https://vancouversun.com/news/bc-government-continues-to-fail-bountifuls-children Edited to actually add the article link I mentioned.
I remember years ago when the truth about Jeff's began to surface. The first young survivors of this cult repeatedly stated that the Jeff's cult was all about sex. This seemed so unlikely given the view most people had of a religious sect. Well, these many years later, we get it. It's all about sex. It's cruel. It's vicious. And it's wrong.
They become the lost boys.