Sexism inside the church

If you'll recall, last week I promised to spend some more time on the question: why is it so easy for men to suck?

I am posting this late because after multiple attempts to write about that, I think I need to lay some groundwork first specific to gender inequality within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. 

I say that partially because I do sometimes pick up readers who are not members and will not be familiar with some of this, but also, there is that reminder that despite a highly homogeneous culture we don't always hear the same things or pick up on the same things (something I have been noticing more lately).  

First of all, of course this is dominator culture. We can call the specific area "patriarchy". Other words that might work include chauvinism, sexism, misogyny, or male supremacy.

The sexism may at times be benevolent, where women are honored, but so much of what is wonderful about women is how much better we make life for everyone (really men) through our gentleness and intuition, which is largely required in a society that puts men over women.

I want to be clear that this is an area not limited to our church. I will even go so far as to say there are ways in which our church is better about it.

First of all, on religious grounds we seem to be unique in believing that the Fall was necessary. Other religions believing in the Fall will often blame Eve for her action and consider that to be a part of women's weakness, but not us.

Our leaders have specifically stressed that we are equal, while still tending to reinforce gender roles, but then it gets more complicated.

There are really no traits that they attribute naturally to women (at least, no positive traits) that are not also Christ-like attributes that men should aspire to. 

Primarily, you end up with the expectation that men will have the primary responsibility for financial support, while women will handle the domestic front. 

Women will have no greater calling than motherhood, but does a man have a greater calling than fatherhood? Anything more eternal? No.

Now, we could take a whole detour here into how it used to be more possible for a single income to support a family -- except that it was one true if it was the income of a white man -- and that is no longer true, largely due to conservative support of economic policies that lead to wealth consolidation and are supported by dominator culture. We could look at how work responsibilities were shared under more agrarian societies, and how the difference between a job with a set shift and hours feels versus never-ending home and childcare, emotional labor, and how the undervaluing of work performed by women leads to shortages for some very important roles. 

We're not going to do that right now, but remember that those are things.

(Also a thing, how misogyny makes homophobia and transphobia bigger deals.)

Again, I have heard many church leaders talk about showing consideration for your wife and preaching very good things, but it is quite common to hear of men feeling no need to help with housework, childcare, or doing anything to shore up an overworked wife who is probably also earning income as well as domestic roles. 

A smaller subset will then feel they deserve someone younger and hotter. Again, this is an area where I think our church does better, in that the majority of husbands are good enough to not consider adultery or desertion. They may still be coasting enough that the wife might wish they would leave, or consider leaving herself.

This sounds very harsh, but there are a lot of unhappy marriages where the root is ultimately chauvinism. 

This may surprise you, but I don't think the priesthood being restricted to men makes that much difference. 

Based on the amount I have to say about that, I think this will require another post, before we even get to the mediocrity part. There is still one more thing that I want to add to this post.

A while back I was talking with another church friend who also skewed liberal, and we were talking about the disconnect between what we preach as a church -- our flaws notwithstanding -- and what some of the members believed. 

She pointed out that the church leadership has them for an average of 2-3 hours a week, but then a lot of them were listening to talk radio or "news" that preached something entirely different.

I frequently have concerns with the stated doctrine, but my bigger concern is that so many members are worse than they need to be. 

We cannot ignore the influence of the outside. I wrote years ago about us being infected by evangelicals... perhaps "corrupted" would be a better word, but that's still an issue.

We talk of being "in the world but not of the world"; what does that mean to you? I think a lot of people focus on sex, but I worry more about the hate and greed, because not enough people do seem to worry about it.

What are you taking in? How is it influencing you?

Those are important questions, and something to think about before we get to priesthood and men sucking.