Last week, in posting about the failures of the help line, I mentioned wanting to write about failure to examine power dynamics and change the interactions.
I was concerned about how to handle that, thinking it might require some delicacy and nuance. That is not just because it is a topic we often overlook, but that when we do look at it there is often discomfort, at least for those most likely to be leadership.
I was thinking about approaching it from a different angle, and I am still going to do that, but I guess I needed the potentially offensive title to balance it.
Our church tends to hold patriarchy as a good thing: family structure, continuity of gospel and priesthood, and blessings.
In other conversations, patriarchy is a system that can be full of abuse.
Saying that may cause some bristling, but we also know that some family structures are abusive and toxic and harmful. It's not the ideal, we don't want it to happen, but it does happen. There have been wonderful Scout leaders whose troops had great experiences, too, but that's not how it always goes.
Perhaps one issue can be failure of imagination. We need to understand that there are people who will be cruel and sadistic; that is not a misunderstanding that can work itself out.
One obstacle to things working out is an imbalance of power. If the father is the head, the children unanimously wanting change may not be enough. The need felt for loyalty to the father may also keep the children from being unanimous; someone may be trying very hard to be the good one.
This is where I want to go sideways, and approach power dynamics from a different angle.
Fortunately, material always presents itself.
Here is a recent item from Psychology Today:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-state-our-unions/202208/the-rise-lonely-single-men
It briefly goes over an increase in single men. While it mentions more than one factor, the key is that today's women largely want emotionally available men with good values and the ability to communicate.
(The article did not mention this, but it has been more common in previous generations to lose a lot of men to war, and more equal numbers of women and men now may be a factor.)
That certainly makes sense on its own, but it is interesting to see men online complaining about how women just want handsome rich jerks and don't care about nice guys at all. Not what women have been saying, but you can't trust what women say, apparently.
As it is, I remember this same complaint from my 20s. The men who made it were not as nice as they thought they were, often being pretty chauvinistic, bitter, and also quite shallow in terms of what level of looks they would accept, but they knew it was definitely the women who were the problem.
(Patriarchy, by giving men the supremacy, supports this tendency to put the responsibility upon others.)
Perhaps it is not completely unrelated that there was a video going around August 11th where a self-styled guru was very unhappy that he was unable to get another man to agree to strictly defined gender roles. The father of five who has been married for 20 years said that he does what his wife can't get to and she does what he can't get to, and they both do what needs to be done. They also both have jobs, so expecting one to take primary responsibility for home and childcare would be selfish.
The other guy remained frustrated that women who worked full time did not want to cook and clean when they got home, but it was his video. Apparently he cut the other guy off and blocked a lot of people who commented.
If I were to start giving examples of men feeling like they should be able to exert an influence on women, or get service from them, or demand attention from them, this post will become unimaginably long.
Suffice it to say that under patriarchy, men get to expect some deference, and that is hard to let go.
Now I am going to switch to calling it kyriarchy, where we acknowledge that it is not all a direct line and that there are multiple factors. Race and age and physical abilities and economic status can all complicate it.
For example, a white woman might call the police on a Black man who pointed out that she was violating the park rules by having her dog unleashed. She might relish that quite possibly lethal power more because of her awareness of the things that might be held against her in boardrooms or while walking down the street.
At the same time, a Black man might be tempted to align with a white woman over a Black woman, because there is a way in which it is aligning with power.
I can give lots of examples here, too, but they will all sound gross, and I will feel hypocritical giving examples that don't involve white people.
It is more to the point that yes, leveraging your privilege against those with less is gross, not Christ-like, and not gospel. That should be very straightforward... except that when the time comes to actually let go of that privilege in favor of greater equality and equity, that's when people start feeling twitchy.
I think about the opposition of the church to the Equal Rights Amendment. A lot of that seemed to be based on how it would disrupt the family.
If the marriage can be disrupted by legally making both partners in the marriage equal, that can't be a very good marriage.
While women are not equal in pay or treatment or opportunity now in many ways, as we have come closer, yes, some women are choosing to remain single, and are happier that way than being with someone selfish and dominating and disrespectful.
I know there are many marriages where that isn't a problem, but your situation being better doesn't automatically upgrade mine.
All of which is my long way of saying that while the bishop probably would never need to have CPS called on him, and the lawyers at the help line probably also wouldn't need that, the guy that is sexually abusing his children and filming it and posting it to the internet absolutely needs to be prosecuted, for the protection of the children currently in his power and to prevent him from getting access to other children.
In the original article, there is a photo of the mother. She looks kind of young, based on the ages of the children, and also she looks like of brown. The bishop described her as appearing to be "pretty emotionally dead". So, without in any way excusing her not taking steps to stop the abuse, I wonder what she had been through before it started. How much older was the husband? How did he influence her?
When I see that her bishop (who was also her doctor) was asking "What are we doing to do to stop it?", that sounds ludicrously ineffective. If she doesn't have an answer, you can try giving her one, and if that doesn't work either, you do something.
It's easy to feel like the inaction of the bishops is the fault of the help line, but the question then is how relieved were they to not have to do something?
It would be uncomfortable to bring in law enforcement, separate a family, maybe help start divorce proceedings; none of that fits in with our idea of eternal happy families, but that was already past. That's when you need to be able to see a way to take action.
That's what I am trying to get at. I don't think this is a well-written post, but I hope it can at least give some ideas.
So much of what we do is learned without deep thought, until it becomes basically a matter of instinct. The immediate results may not be obviously horrible, especially not for us, depending on how well we fit into our circumstances.
But the horror happens.
Are we going to try and pretend it away, or are we going to deal with it, with all of the soul-searching and changing that entails?
Here is an interesting article exploring abuse and trauma via a television show:
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