This is a topic that she and I have discussed frequently, as we share similar scars.
The more I dive into this topic, I realize that there is an unfortunate resonance between the way women were valued and categorized in the Unification Church (which my sister touches on her in Ugly post) and how women are valued in our culture at large.
Last year I was invited to New York City to speak on this topic and its intersection with my work and growing up in the church. Because it was in the midst of our mother's struggle with cancer, I never really shared this beyond uploading it to my YouTube channel or posting it as an afterthought on my photo blog.
But here is where it's most relevant. So I'm finally sharing this where it belongs and where, hopefully, it will do the most good.
Huge thank you to my sister and friends who accompanied me to the event, and especially to Lani for filming me:
Hello thank you so much for having me
here. My name is Jen Kiaba and I am a fine art and portrait
photographer from Rhinebeck, NY – about 90 miles north of here.
Tonight I want to share a little bit
with you about my journey in reframing my perspective on beauty,
especially as it pertains to femininity and personal value.
To give you a little bit of background,
I am the eldest of five children who were born into the Unification
Church. For those of you who are not familiar with the group, it is a
religious movement that was started by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon
in Korea and had its heyday in the United States in the 1970s and
80s. In popular culture, Rev. Moon is best remembered as the purveyor
of mass arranged marriages.
So tonight I want to talk to you a
little bit about what I learned growing up in this group, how the
ideology framed my sense of beauty, femininity and value – and
finally what I learned from leaving the group and what I feel is
applicable to our wider culture's binary views of beauty and
value.
In order to give you some perspective
on the world of my youth; I have to invite you down the rabbit hole a
little bit. Therefore, in the immortal word of Lewis Carrol I will
begin at the beginning.
According to church
legend, Sun Myung Moon had a revelation on the Easter Morning of his
15th year while praying on a mountain top, where Jesus
appeared to him and revealed to him that dying on the cross had
actually been a failure of his mission and it was the young Moon who
was supposedly qualified to take up that mission, restore humanity
and become the King of Kings.
By the time Rev Moon's church gained
traction in the United States, many parents were afraid of losing
their children to the organization. And they hired deprogrammers to abduct
their children in order to extricate them from this, and other
groups. Growing up I heard stories of my parents' peers who had been
kept against their will for weeks on end, in slimy motels, sometimes
tied to the bed, while deprogrammers read to them from the bible,
trying to break the spell that Moon had on them.
My parents were
married, along with two thousand other couples, Madison Square
Garden on July 1, 1982. I was the first of five children who were
raised as members of the Unification Church's Second Generation, who
were thought to be the first people born sinless and of God's
Lineage.
The theological text governing the
Unification Church is called the Divine Principal, which combines
eastern mysticism with biblical beliefs. In the church's theology it
states that
“Love is an emotional force given by the subject to
the object; beauty is an emotional force returned to the subject by
the object. The power of love is active and the stimulation of beauty
is passive.
In the relationship between God and
man, God gives love as the subject, while man returns beauty as the
object. Between man and woman, man is the subject, giving love while
woman is the object, returning beauty.”
From this theological basis I learned
that as a woman I was object, to
give beauty was my
main purpose, and that it was a passive behavior. I learned that to
be woman was to be mailable and to remain as unformed as possible
until such time as I was given to a husband of Rev. Moon's choice.
In the Unification Church, one didn't
date. We referred to one another as brother and sister in
order to emphasize platonic relations and dissociate ourselves from
hormonal, sexual and emotional urges.
Sex before marriage was absolutely out
of the question. The Church had a word for that: falling. To fall was
the greatest sin that could be committed. The church also believed
that the fall of man was a sexual sin, perpetrated by Eve having a
spiritually sexual relationship with the angel Lucifer.
Therefore we had a very interesting
cultural dichotomy that we were raised in. While we were taught that
the ideal role of woman was to give beauty to man, our subject, we
were also taught to believe, like in many religions, that sin had
entered the world through a woman.
Thus it was a woman's role to cut
off from sexual temptation – and essentially her sexuality as a
whole. Purity was the defining value for a woman and it was through
this lens that we were taught we would eventually be able to express
our value: our beauty, once we were married. We were taught to dress,
act, and think modestly until that time, so as not to lead men into
temptation.
It took me until 21, after being
coerced into an arranged marriage and then fighting for two years to
get out of that marriage, to gather the emotional and financial
resources to leave the group. Interestingly enough, the moment that I
knew I was going to leave, was while I was on a trans-atlantic flight
from JFK to Oslo to visit my then-husband, and the young woman in the
seat next to me handed me a few beauty magazines to occupy my time.
She was from Romania, and therefore most of the magazines' content
was illegible to me.
However the images that the magazine
contained showed my a very different world than what I had been
raised within. The women in these magazines looked like agents of
their own lives, women who owned their sense of identity, sexuality,
and beauty.
It took me many years after leaving the
group, and assimilating to the current culture to realize that
actually many of the issues that I had with my religious group of
origin can be found within the our secular beauty culture and gender
norms.
We live in a culture that looks at women's value, in particular, from a very binary point of view: hot or not, slut or prude. The ideas of a woman's value coming from an arbitrary standard of beauty is not a foreign one, nor is it one that exists only within extremist religious groups.
Women's bodies, and their sexuality,
are politicized. Every time you look at the news, it seems that there
is new proposed legislation concerning women's sexual engagement,
reproduction and access to contraception.
There is also a resurgence of “purity
culture” in the more right wing religious groups, which has helped
give rise to some of this political discourse. Within this new
purity culture, we also see the phenomenon of things like the Purity
Balls, in which daughters pledge their virginity to their fathers
until they are married.
Therefore, it seemed to me, that the
same problematic equation was presenting itself again and again.
Woman as object. Woman as passive. Woman as either completely pure,
until an outside authority figure deemed it ok for a woman to engage
in sexual activity, and then it must only be within certain
culturally approved constructs – or woman as completely sexually
available and in many cases as an object.
Unsurprisingly that this kind of
objectification has been linked by psychologists to shame,
depression, substance abuse, and sexual dysfunction.
As a photographer who works mainly with
women, much of my goal is to facilitate a conversation around self
and body love before and during the photographic process. My goal as
a photographer is to give people – women primarily – a safe place
to witness themselves and their unique beauty without judgement or
subjective standard.
The biggest problem with that, was that
it had to start with me. I had to walk my own walk and truth be told,
for many years I was not comfortable sharing my story or turning the
lens on myself. I realized
that I had to change that and from that place came my
newest body of work: Burdens of
a White Dress; it addresses these pervasive cultural norms that I see
around femininity both in my childhood religion and our beauty
culture.
The
first piece that I created is called “Hold your Peace,” because
in a conventional marriage contract one is asked to confirm
that they have come to the marriage agreement free from any duress or
any obligation.
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Hold Your Peace by Jen Kiaba |
My experience lacked that confirmation, but I have
also seen how many women enter into culturally approved feminine
roles under psychological duress and obligation without having been
given the opportunity to explore and address their own needs and
goals first.
Within this image I wanted to address the idea that women are bound by the cultural notions of purity and virginity as virtues that are something for a man to claim as his domain either as a father, or a husband.
Within this image I wanted to address the idea that women are bound by the cultural notions of purity and virginity as virtues that are something for a man to claim as his domain either as a father, or a husband.
My next image addressed what goes on
for young women as we are raised in these cultural norms. This one is
called “My Mind is a Lie” and it asks the viewer to really consider what
is at stake with this culture.
Essentially we ask both men and women
to remove their logic and humanity from the equation as we fill their
heads with these dehumanizing constructs of what it means to be
beautiful and desirable and that that is the core of where a woman's
value lies.
![]() |
My Mind is a Lie by Jen Kiaba |
This image is called “At the Helm”
and it looks at the absolute loss that I felt in navigating my way
out of a controlling environment: In the middle of a murky fog,
without a paddle, left on my own.
Unfortunately, as in the first image,
the subject is blindfolded. This plays two roles in the unfolding on
the images. Not only is she unable to see and navigate around her,
but she is also dehumanized by her identity being obscured. Young
women today, without many other options being presented to find value
within are also like this figure, lost and passive and looking for
outside influence to guide them, with their true identities
obscured
I want to jump forward ahead a few
images in the chronology of this project. This image is called
“Matched,” the photograph deals with an overarching theme from my
religious childhood and the ways in which women were raised and
treated, expected to come to the marriage state as completely pure
and malleable.
Uncondoned sexual activity aligned us with murderers
in our theology. In that sense many of us did not make it to be
married without “blood” on our hands.
![]() |
Matched by Jen Kiaba |
But again I have had to reflect on how
this ideology is also present in the world at large. Certainly we see
this treatment of women in other cultures, but even in our own we
could point to many instances of women being devalued for their
sexual experience and how much these ideas hurt women.
To take that idea even further and
examine how it plays out in our culture, I want to speak about
briefly tonight is one that I call “The Purity Knife.” It
references a time in my mid-teens when I was sent out fundraising for
the church. Living in vans, we travelled across the country selling
trinkets as a part of our "fundamental spiritual education."
While I was fundraising I found out
that one of my friends had been found dead, after being sexually
assaulted and strangled. The church leaders did their best to cover
up the incident and urge young people to stay in the fundraising
program. As we prepared to go back out into the streets to fundraise,
the young women were each armed with a personal alarm and mace; some
young women's mothers had given them Purity Knives. This ideological
relic comes from the old Korean tradition where young of women of
high birth wore a knife and were "expected to commit
suicide to ‘protect’ their virginity, as opposed to using the
knife to defend themselves."
And this was an idea that was pervasive
in our church culture, as Moon did recommend that members carry "a
knife to kill yourself before you will be violated.” According to
Moon, "if someone is trying to invade you, you would rather kill
yourself than go through the fall. At least you won't go to hell that
way. Even if you die, you don't go to hell.”
The victim shaming in that ideology is
horrifying. And yet America itself has seen many instances of
terrible victim shaming – with the Stuebenville case as simply one
of the most recent in memory. So women are being raised to be passive
objects, beautiful for man's consumption, they are also being told
that their choices in matters of dress, drink and behaviors means
that they deserve to be victimized and acted upon.
So at the end of the day I want to ask
the question: is that beauty? Is beauty what our culture is so
pervasively trying to convince us it is? A commodity to be owned and
subjugated. Or is it something more intangible and less binary than
the hot or not, pure or sullied, virgin or whore, subject or object,
and even male or female scale that we have been presented?
To me, beauty is a spark that exists
within a person, not something that can be owned or objectified.
And so I want to leave you with a few
final pieces and a call to action: simply to open your minds to the
varied shades of beauty. That it can be powerful, it can be clean and
it can be dirty. It can be conventional and it can be unexpected.
This piece is in its sketch phases, and it is called “Rewiring”
which is something that I hope we can all do.
We need to
emerge anew in order to perceive beauty in its varied and manifold
forms. I believe that our ideas of beauty need to be completely
transformed, and in that way our full spectrum of humanity can be
experienced and expressed. Thank you.
![]() |
Rewiring by Jen Kiaba |
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