Exponent II's Blog, page 231

#hearLDSwomen: I Was Discriminated Against as a Sister Missionary

[image error]When I went in for my missionary interview with my stake president, the first thing he said to me was, “Sisters are 10% of the missionary force, but they cause 90% of the problems.” Way to discourage me! I felt so humiliated. But I went anyway. End of story is that the sisters district was the highest-baptizing district in the mission.

– Laurie Lisonbee

 

I watched as Elders on my mission repeatedly disrespected, disregarded, and ignored sisters. When we went to a Zone Conference, they always greeted us with “Hi Sisters!” while each and every Elder was always greeted by name (I was wearing a NAME TAG for heaven’s sake. They didn’t even have to waste precious space in their brains to remember it).

– Chloe M.

 

After the missionary age change was made, I overheard a man at church say, “FINALLY, we’re upgrading the quality of women at church! Just imagine how much better the church will be with more women having served missions!”

– Rebecca

 

My zone leader announced a zone lunch after our zone meeting. When my companion and I showed up, they blocked the door to the Pizza Hut and wouldn’t let us in. We were sisters and it wasn’t appropriate for us to join in a zone activity with all the elders. The exact words were “what are you doing here? No one invited you. This is for the real missionaries only.”

– Amy H.

 

Pro Tip: Don’t perpetuate stereotypes about male vs. female missionaries or discriminate based on gender.

Click here to read all of the stories in our #hearLDSwomen series. Has anything like this happened to you? Please share in the comments or submit your experience(s) to participate in the series.

“If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:23)

Severed Connection

A Poem to Heavenly Mother

Once you were there
tied to me.
I grew in your safety
Your cord gave me life.
it fed me
nourished me
I could not survive without you.

Then I was pushed into this harsh world.

The cord was cut.
and I was exposed.
No longer contained in your womb,
that dark, warm place
where the steady sound of your heartbeat
Assured me that all was well.

It’s cold outside.
Where are you now?
Is independence good?
Is separation necessary for growth?

I close my eyes
imagining you there.
I plant my feet on the ground
and feel your presence beneath me.

I cannot see it
but the cord is there.
You nourish me still.

Guest Post: Polygamy as the Answer? Christmas Thoughts

[image error]By Brittany Hartley

After my first son was born, I found myself home for the first time in my life. As a busy teacher, I had many dusty items on my faith “shelf” that were filed away for later. With this newfound free time I decided to take polygamy off the shelf and dust it off. Two years later, my personal journey into the study of polygamy had led me to a faith crisis, faith reconstruction, and faith transition. Accounts I read of the pain Mormon women experienced as their husband took more and younger wives horrified me. Emma’s story of her struggle between love and support for her husband and her disdain for polygamy was more emotionally gripping than any book I had ever read. Reading about Joseph Smith, the same man who gave the King Follett Discourse, and 16-year-old maid Fannie Alger years before the sealing powers were restored broke my brain, especially in light of Emma and Oliver Cowdery considering it to be adultery. Joseph’s mock marriage ceremony for Emma with sisters he had already married shocked me. The fact that these stories of pain and sacrifice had been blotted out of our history, their names nowhere to be found in our manuals, broke my heart into a million pieces. Once I scraped the barrel of LDS polygamy, I moved on from it, my faith never quite the same.

For a few years afterwards I was very sensitive to the polygamy that is still inherent in our theology and in our experience as Mormon women. I did not consent to a polygamous marriage, and yet, my marriage ceremony in the temple to my husband was one where I gave myself to him and he received me. Presumably if I died, he could receive other women whereas I could not be sealed to another man. The temple became hard. Garments became itchy to my conscience. My fascination with Joseph Smith’s theology became more complex and complicated, making it a cognitive dissonance minefield to sing “Praise to the Man Who Mingled with Gods.”

I remember one Sunday in particular we were studying the teachings of Lorenzo Snow. The teacher was giving a brief biography before beginning her lesson where she mentioned he had 9 wives and 42 children. There was this moment where we all sat there with this statement and said nothing. I knew from my studies that Lorenzo married very young wives, his last being 16 when he was 57. Yet we, Mormon women, were studying his experiences instead of those of his sister Eliza, prophetess and poet of the early church. I sat there in the silence as we read over his biography and wanted to scream. No one ever discussed polygamy in Relief Society as a rule. It is only something that quietly weighs on the hearts of Mormon women. We rave about the love between Gordon and Marjorie Hinckley being together in heaven, but polygamy is the uncomfortable squirm that comes when we speak of our current prophet and his two wives that will welcome him in heaven. Polygamy was divine, then frowned upon, then taboo, then other, and now polygamy is silence.

My family has been directly impacted by polygamy and what it can do to a marriage. My living grandmother’s grandfather continued to practice polygamy after the ban. He taught his children, as was believed by many in the Church in that day, that polygamy had to be done away with temporarily but that it was the true order of heaven and would return. When his son, my great grandfather, married he expressed the desire to take on another wife quietly in order to follow the true order. His wife, a firecracker of a woman, divorced him. My grandmother was raised in the social shame of being raised by a poor, single mother, and then later on, a mixed family as her mother remarried. As I sat on the couch at 2 AM listening to my grandmother I began to wonder even more, what was the purpose of all of the pain suffered in Mormon polygamy? What good can come of the reluctant pioneers of our heritage who were asked to participate?

I believe today we have our answer. Polygamy, embracing polygamy, wrestling with polygamy, is the key to Mormonism’s future and survival because it forces us to embrace the idea that God is accepting of families much more messy than one man, one woman, and their active, heterosexual, BYU attending children. When Carol Lynn Pearson wrote her groundbreaking book The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy: Haunting the Hearts and Heaven of Mormon Women and Men she left us with her opinion that polygamy needed to be disavowed as not sanctioned by God; a mistake similar to the race ban or Adam God theory. I see that answer as incomplete. To disavow polygamy would also erase the stories of faithful polygamous women in the early Church as we separated ourselves from that doctrine. It would also truly question the legitimacy of Joseph Smith as prophet to the point where the average member could not reconcile. In short, to disavow polygamy entirely is to abandon our history, our theology, our ancestors, and would destroy Mormonism’s future as a religion led by prophets.

The answer is to embrace the idea that God, for whatever reason, allowed the idea of unconventional, complicated, messy families. Encouraged it even, apparently. The antidote for the heteronormative patriarchy where God is one man and one silent woman that we must emulate is not in our future, it is in our past. It is the hill we have decided to die on as we see what our theology has done to our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. But unlike our Christian neighbors who have to deal with inflexible Leviticus scripture, we have this modern revelation that says that Zion is a community. We have this history where our first modern prophet was connected to women in various ways in various marriage arrangements by threat of an angel. We have an established pattern of heaven being a divine family where what matters more is linking into the chain and not “who is sealed to whom.” As more and more people painfully leave the Church they loved because they cannot find a place in our wards or in our heavens, why not use polygamy as a sign that God made it an important message in the latter days that heaven is not just one man and one woman? Zion was a community and God a community of divine persons. That community can include everyone. To include our prophet’s current wife who he married purely for companionship and not include our LGBT brothers and sisters doesn’t make theological sense in light of embracing polygamy.

This Christmas as diverse families gather around tables I cannot help but be inspired and moved by the small heavens that exist all over the country in dining rooms as single, adopted, black, white, divorced, gay, straight, member, nonmember, parents, aunts and uncles, children, grandparents, partners, and friends gather together to eat a meal and show gratitude for one another. If we can feel God there in our homes with all the different kinds of people that will gather, then God’s heaven is more expansive than our current theology allows. Wrestling with polygamy, for me, has brought pain but it has also brought hope that we have something that fundamental Christianity does not. We have a theological example in our recent history of God’s ability to accept a variety of marriages and people into one family. The hope is that God truly has a place at the table for everyone, in all walks of life, at his Christmas feast table.

Brittney Hartley is a history teacher living in Eagle, Idaho, with her husband and four children. She enjoys the rabbit hole of Mormon philosophy and will have a book out soon called Mormon Philosophy Simplified. Above all, she is a nerd.

#hearLDSwomen: Young Women Are Told No; Young Men Are Told Yes

[image error]My Laurel class president daughter thought it was unfair that the Young Men got a high adventure week long overnight trip white-water rafting. She spent a year planning a kayaking trip for the Laurels only to have it get changed last minute to two hours on a Saturday accompanied by the Young Men.

When she went to ask the Young Women leaders what had happened, she kept getting directed up the chain of command. She finally met with a high councilman who told her she was just spoiled and girls in Africa would never ask for such a thing.

– Shandra Petersen Harris

When I was the Young Women’s president, we were only allowed one fundraiser a year to raise money for camp. The girls organized a baking auction and prepared the goods to be auctioned off. The night of the auction came, and the Young Men set up chairs for the event. We were told at the end of the night that half of what we raised had to go to the Young Men’s budget for their “participation.”

– Sarah A.

When I was a young woman, I asked our bishop why the Young Men could go backpacking out of state. His answer was because they had money for it from scouts. So I asked when we could do a fundraiser so we could go on a high adventure trip, and he told me Young Women weren’t allowed to do one. I was 15 when I learned that boys are literally worth more than girls when it comes to the church.

– MB

My daughter was a Beehive adviser and wanted to take her Beehives sledding in Cedar City, and she was told she could not take Young Women sledding; it was a safety risk. Two weeks later the Young Men went, you guessed it, sledding.

– Sherry Andersen

Pro Tip: Ensure that the Young Men and Young Women have comparable budgets and opportunities. Allow Young Women and their leaders to have autonomy in their organization.

Click here to read all of the stories in our #hearLDSwomen series. Has anything like this happened to you? Please share in the comments or submit your experience(s) to participate in the series.

“If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:23)

Play it Again/Ave Maria

Three is a magic number, they say. People talk about the Holy Trinity and three-legged barstools, but I think about the years when a couple has their first child.  They are years of abundance, and though no part of life is without challenges, this time is one of the sweet things. It is a season of health and love and hot showers. We have one child, and we are grateful for him. We are also grateful for each other, for without our little family of three we would be alone in this world. 

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My son is the latest firstborn child in a long line of firstborn children. I am the fourth in that line, my mother the third. My parents talk reverently, fondly, of the years that we were a family of three. They were years of grit, excitement, adventure, joy. My babyhood constitutes the golden years of their life together. 

We are talking about this because my dad is failing slowly. We don’t know how many years he has left, or how he will experience them. We only know that our family of three, later four and then five, is diminishing, and that every year there is less of him. These are years of scarcity.

When I was in college and Taylor Swift songs were popular, I learned maybe five songs on the guitar. This one had only four chords, and so I enthusiastically inflicted it on my family all summer long. 

“Our song is a slammin’ screen door / Sneakin’ out late tapping on your window / when you’re on the phone and you talk real slow / cause it’s late and your mama don’t know / Our song is the way you laugh / the first date man I didn’t kiss him and I should have / And when I got home, before I said Amen / Asking God if he could play it again.”

I remember when my mother called to tell me that Dad was sick. “I keep thinking about that song you used to sing,” she told me. “Our song; it’s all those things we did together. I keep thinking, ‘Let’s play that again. Please, just… play it again’.”

It would be several more years before I would be able to start a family. Our baby boy came long after we first opened our hearts to him, and we regarded his birth with reverence and awe. His first Christmas came, and I took him to a beautiful church with stained glass windows to hear sacred, heavenly music. Our fellow concert-goers shot skeptical glances our way, concerned about our mobile baby, but to everyone’s surprise except mine, he was a delight that evening. An older gentleman congratulated us on our good-natured child.

I sat in the sanctuary with a soaring, aching, grateful heart, holding my long awaited-son. Opposite us was a stained glass window depicting Mary holding hers. “Ave Maria,” swelled the chorus, “gratia plena”.

Christmas changed for me that night.

Two thousand years ago, a mother held her baby while the man who loved her kept watch. There’s something magical, special, mystical about the number three. The triangle. The trinity. Three family. No one will ever play my family’s song again – when we are gone, no will remember it. There are countless families of three who have held a sacred watch, that are forgotten. No one plays their songs or says their names. Every year, though, we all join with the human race to play it again for that family. For her family. 

Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus.

My faith in Jesus as a literal son of God and savior of humanity waxes and wanes with the seasons of my life. Christmas is a time of festivity and also of sorrow. I am not always able to appreciate the religious wonder of the season, but I am mother to a long-awaited son, and I am also somebody’s firstborn in the wilderness.

If Christmas is nothing more than a worldwide celebration of sacred hope and joy in someone’s little miracle, then gratia plena. Please, play it again.

#hearLDSwomen: LDS Men Don’t Know How to Interact with Me in a Career Support Context

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Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

I was in institute in law school. It was competition season. Some men in the class had just made the national finals of a big competition. The institute director walked in and spent five minutes praising them to high heaven about what this meant for their reputation, careers, etc. The men said thank you and pointed out that two women in the class (including me) had also made the national finals of another competition. The institute director (a 70 year old man) gaped and then said “well, I suppose excelling at education is always good as an example for your future children when you become mothers…?”

– Carolyn

 

I was serving as president of a professional women’s network that is a sub chapter of the local BYU Management Society—led by lots of white, Mormon men. I was also a brand new stay-at-home mother, having left my career position after my first was born but wanting to stay professionally engaged. At a local training for Management Society leadership, the president went around the room giving an example of how the concept he was teaching could be applied in our personal careers. He addressed each person in the room except me – he skipped right over me because I was a stay-at-home mom. He could have addressed my former position I’d been in till just a couple months previous. He could have addressed my role as PRESIDENT of the women’s network, but instead he pretended I didn’t exist or wasn’t in the room. The same man sent my board an article that explains why women’s networks never work (hint: because they don’t include men). So supportive.

– K. Peterson

 

Men at LDS networking events won’t even talk to me. I went to an event when I was in law school (at a non-LDS law school) that was with the local chapter of a group for LDS lawyers. It was co-sponsored by the attorney group and the law student group. When I was introducing myself to some of the lawyers (all men), one of them asked me which of the law students was my husband. I said that none of them were. The lawyer looked completely confused and said, “Then what are you doing here?” I told him I was the vice president of the law student chapter and that I was getting a legal education.

– Trudy

 

Pro Tip: Be inclusive and supportive of the women in your career support organizations, particularly those that have more men than women.

Click here to read all of the stories in our #hearLDSwomen series. Has anything like this happened to you? Please share in the comments or submit your experience(s) to participate in the series.

“If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:23)

 

Notes from a Mormon Pianist

I’ve been playing piano for about as long as I’ve been a member of the Church- right about the age of 8 is when I started.By the time I was a teenager, I could play most Primary songs and hymns without having to do a lot of practice. My mom had taken organ lessons as a teenager, so she was often pegged as a ward organist or the Primary pianist. I knew my fate would be similar.

As a teenager, I often played the opening song in Young Women’s. I also played the opening song for seminary when we had seminary at someone’s home with a piano. I was even the kind of obnoxious Molly Mormon teenager that refused to play The Spirit of God as the opening hymn in seminary because it’s too special of a song to be sung at 6am by a bunch of tired teenagers.

When I turned 18 I joined Relief Society even though I was still in high school. I played the piano sometimes for them, too.

Then I went to BYU. I was looking forward to BYU because BYU was where all the Mormon musicians were. I could probably go years without a piano calling! (Can you guess what will happen next?)

My freshman ward called me to be sacrament pianist immediately. Because we met on campus, there wasn’t a chapel with an organ. I would get to church early for prelude. My roommate would promise to save me a seat in sacrament, but inevitably by the time I was able to sit down in the congregation after the sacrament portion of the meeting was over, that seat she had saved would be taken by another student who had wandered in late. I spent a lot of sacrament meetings in a seat on the side by myself. It was a lonely calling, especially as a college freshman. And it was taxing- as the sacrament pianist, when the ward music leader planned the musical Christmas sacrament meeting, she handed it all off to me to arrange the program with songs and talks.

The next year I was in an off-campus ward. Immediately I was called to be the ward choir pianist. This meant an extra hour after church for practice most Sundays. There is something about being the ward choir pianist that makes people think you have time to accompany them for their special musical numbers. And in a young single adult ward, special musical numbers are a way for the singers to get in front of everyone and get their name and face recognized by other people in the ward. There’s a lot of peacocking involved in a single adult ward at BYU and I sometimes felt like I was there behind the piano to prop up other people’s egos and airs. I wanted to help out and serve my ward members and “magnify my calling” so I did it. The ward choir pianist in a single’s ward is simultaneously overlooked and demanded-of.

My next piano calling was for a family ward in Provo when I was first married. I was the Primary pianist. This was great. I could knit behind the piano in between songs or during sharing time. The kids don’t care if you mess up and the Primary songs are simpler than the hymns so sight reading is easier. There was that one Sunday, though: Primary program. I played all through sacrament and when it was time for Primary, the Primary leaders thought they should give the teachers a break that week so we did 2 more hours of singing time. Guess who didn’t get a break? The chorister. (And me).

By the time we moved to Oakland, I had had every piano calling in the church except Elder’s Quorum pianist and except for a 2 month stint as an RS instructor, I had been a pianist every Sunday of my adult life. I told our new bishop that I did not want a piano calling. It was great! I got to try new callings. I was on the activities committee, the nursery leader, a YW instructor. I did play the piano for a stake RS performance of Women at the Well, and was asked a couple of times to play for the Spanish ward’s primary. I felt my piano skills were needed, but didn’t define me.

A couple of years ago the Oakland ward asked if I could do piano again. It had been probably 5 or 6 years since I had a piano calling and I knew the pianist I was replacing had been doing it for at least 7 years and was also the unspoken designated special musical number accompanist. I figured she needed the break and so I accepted. I’ve been Primary pianist since. And it’s been fine: I do my knitting in between songs and I play easy songs I can sight read. I also ended up accompanying more special musical numbers.

There was one particularly egregious special musical number. I received an email from a family who wanted their kids to sing on the last Sunday they would be in the ward before they moved. The emailed started with “Is there a time we can practice…” without asking first if I was available or even willing. When I responded with an email outlining my available times to practice, I received no email back. There was no practice. When sacrament meeting came, the family was on the program to sing. When I went up to play, I tried to catch the eyes of the parents for some sort of recognition, but I got nothing and I got no word of thanks. That being their last week in the ward, I did not miss them when they left.

With our recent ward boundary switch, I’ve been asked to be the RS pianist. And while I accepted the calling, I do worry about being boxed in piano callings again. This new ward has so few musicians that a senior missionary plays the piano for sacrament meetings (no organist at all).

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From “An Illustrated Dictionary of Words Used in Art and Archaeology”, 1883.

Pros to being a pianist: it’s an easy calling I don’t have to practice for. I have to show up to church with pretty much no preparation (unless there’s a special musical number) and I’m not expected to be at any mid-week activity. There are no extra meetings or councils. If I’m feeling particularly introverted I can use the piano as a shield that day. I’ve definitely gone to church for just the 20 minutes of singing time and then gone home. But I’m needed at church and it’s nice to feel needed.

There are cons, though. There’s the expectation you can play anything at the drop of the hat or the whim of every singer. Sometimes you do have to be early (prelude) or late (choir practice) to church. In a ward where there are no other musicians, it’s every week, no exceptions. When I was a YW teacher, I only taught 2-3 Sundays of the month, so if I wanted a week off, it was already built in. There is no break for the pianist and it’s really hard to find substitutes. You also don’t get to sit and listen contemplatively to the prelude because you’re the one providing the music. When you’re pegged as “the pianist” you get overlooked for other callings. All those talks people give about not feeling suited for a new calling, but then they accept it and grow and learn from it? Those don’t apply to you because you’ve got your calling for the next five decades already assigned. It’s also not a calling where you get the opportunity for inspiration/guidance from the Spirit. The ward music chairperson, or the Primary chorister or the choir director pick the songs. Your input is almost never asked for unless it’s, “Can you play this?” It’s not particularly set up for spiritual growth and learning.

Sometimes pianist is a really coveted calling and sometimes it’s not. For you musicians out there: how do you feel about it? Is it your respite? Are you pigeon holed? Or both?

He Calls Me Honey Hole

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Names are important. What we call someone or something frames our perception and impacts the meaning in our minds. It offends God when we use the wrong name or nickname as President Nelson recently reminded us,

He is serious. And if we allow nicknames to be used and adopt or even sponsor those nicknames ourselves, He is offended.

We are called to repentance by this prophetic declaration that using the wrong name offends God. Churchwide we are called to revise our naming practices. The names we use for classes of Young Women in The Church stand out as a naming practice in need of correction and repentance.

Who controls the naming power in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints?  My 97-year-old grandmother is at the young end of a large family. Her name was hotly debated and settled with the family majority (siblings and mother) reaching a consensus that her name would be Betty. When it came time for her naming and blessing at Church her father ignored the majority consensus and declared her name to be Martha. This declaration was thoroughly rejected by the band of siblings who persisted in calling their sister by the nickname Betty throughout her life as did the rest of their hometown. But the legal name recorded on her birth certificate is Martha. Males control naming power in The Church. As the exclusive proprietors of priesthood power, they wield ultimate control over branding, labeling and other forms of naming. And as demonstrated by President Nelson, naming is a priority for the ultimate authority of a prophet.

In her book, Dance of the Dissident Daughter, author Sue Monk Kidd explores the power of naming and women’s use of this power. She states,

To name is to define and shape reality. For eons, women have accepted male naming as a given, especially in the spiritual realm. The fact is for a long time now men have been naming the world, God, sacred reality, and even women from their own masculine perspective and experience and then calling it a universal experience.

Fellow blogger Violadiva writes on the dangers of this masculine perspective in terms of a Mormon Male Gaze here. How does this gaze show up as we name our adolescent children forming adult identities? If they are boys we name them using scriptural titles of Deacon, Teacher, and Priest, describing them as officeholders with sacred responsibilities. They are called to action and are labeled as sacred actors rather than as objects. In a 1995 General Conference talk titled Acting for Ourselves and Not Being Acted Upon, apostle James E. Faust reveals,

Holders of the priesthood of God are to not only be accountable for their own acts, but provide moral and physical safety for the women and children of their families and of the Church. You young, single men who hold the priesthood and are dating the splendid young ladies of the Church have a duty to do everything you can to protect their physical safety and virtue.

Young men are called to provide moral and physical protection for the “acted upon” objects of The Church: the women and the children.

An egalitarian religious culture would call all adolescent children to offices with biblical names and scriptural descriptions of their duties and responsibilities as they prepare for adulthood. Girls too would be encouraged to act, rather than being acted upon. But in The Church,  the names and labels assigned to the 12-18-year-old girl children are not sacred. The names we assign objectify and sexualize.

[image error]Beehive is the oldest name and classification for girls in The Church and a favorite symbol of industry, productivity, royalty, and Masonry in early Mormonism. As a freshman in college learning to identify symbolism in Renaissance literature, a helpful classmate directed me to, “Pay attention to the poles and the holes. That’s where the sex role messages are represented.” Applied to the Beehive label it is evident that there is a hole at the entrance of the beehive. Inside of the hole is sticky sweetness to be guarded by bees with pole shaped penetrating stingers.

[image error]12 and 13-year-old girls are labeled with a word that means holes of sweetness. Repositories of sugary goodness made by bees penetrating flowers and bringing the fertile essence back to the hive. Duties and responsibilities? None stated, but several implied. A beehive is an object. Be acted upon. Be full of nurturing sweetness. Be valued for what you can give up to the males entitled to take. Be a honey hole. While boys your age pass the sacrament you can be symbolized as a sticky sweet sacrament in a hole. One day you might be feasted upon by a famished prophet seeking holiness in the desert.

[image error]Do our labels for girls get any better as they age? What are they encouraged to become as they grow and progress? Per the LDS.org website: “The name Mia Maid refers historically to the Mutual Improvement Association, which adopted the emblem of the rose as a symbol of love, faith, and purity.” Unfortunately, Mia Maid sounds like, “MY maid” which many a teenage boy has mockingly pointed out to his girl peers at church. Duty and responsibility of a domestic nature are implied in this name. Labor performed is in servitude to another who enjoys ownership of the labor performed.

In addition to the meaning: female domestic servant, maid is also defined as an unmarried girl and as a virgin. Why choose as a name for young girls a word that refers to whether or not they have been sexually penetrated?  [image error]The emblem of the rose associated with Mia Maid reinforces the sexual message. Flowers long have been used to represent female genitalia (as in this anti-circumcision ad by Amnesty International).

The focus on purity represented by the unplucked rose or the virginity associated with maid implies that experiencing sexuality removes virtue or value from a girl. Purity and virtue messaging teach that a girl has greater worth if a male with a legal claim to her(marriage) is the first to use her for sexual service. Messages embodied in the Mia Maid name: be servile, clean up other people’s messes, be sexually clean, be a virgin. Boys of the same age are Teachers.

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A plate from the 1742 deluxe edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

Since at least the 1740 publication of Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson, maids have carried erotic symbolism as an easy to rape object of sexual violence to be preyed upon by the master of the house. The plot of Pamela centers on a 15-year-old maid attempting to resist the seduction, kidnapping and other coercive efforts of her adult employer. The maid as an erotic figure endures today in anime, pornography, and sexual role play.

Beehive and Mia Maid are the labels assigned to classes of girls who have not yet reached the official dating age of 16. Per For the Strength of Youth, these girls are too young for courtship. They are at an age when it is a crime for an adult to engage them in sexual activity of any kind. There should never be any talk of Beehive or Mia Maid bodies tempting adult men. But historically, girls this young were considered marriageable among Mormons as documented by author Connell O’Donovan in the article, Pedagomy: Sealing Girls to Old Men. 

…Girls aged 11 to 16 were married in Utah to men at least a decade older than they were; some men were even in their 60s when they married these girls. These girls were giving birth to children within a year or so of marriage, proving that these marriages to child brides included sex.

In a Victorian era that abhorred polygamy (particularly the inclusion of child brides in the practice), Mormons had sexual relations with children. An institution with a history of pedophilia should reject the optics of naming classes of girl children with sexually objectifying labels. Today, girl children in The Church progress from Honey Holes (Beehives) to Erotic Virgin Servants (Mia Maids) before finally becoming Crowns for Men (Laurels).

[image error]Girls will graduate from the Young Women’s organization to Relief Society as Laurels. The lds.org website explains the name:

For centuries the laurel wreath has been a crown woven from the leaves of the laurel tree. It is given to someone who finishes a significant achievement as a symbol of honor and accomplishment.

While 16 and 17-year-old boys actively engage in the duties and responsibilities of being a Priest such as baptizing or blessing the Sacrament, 16 and 17-year-old girls are coached on how to help their missionary boyfriend focus on his mission with modest dress and inspirational care packages. Priest aged girls are the crown to be given to someone who finishes a significant achievement as a symbol of honor and accomplishment. Is it any wonder that some missionaries believe they accumulate “Hot wife points” in reward for their missionary labors? While they are defined with a heroic label of Priest and aspire to be Elders, girls of the same age are Laurel crowns, a ring of glory for the conqueror to wear on his head as a symbol of completion.

Why are we allowing the sacred reality of our defining names for girls to center on their utility to men? We send a message with our naming that the young women values are: 1. Fertility: Their ability to bring forth children, 2. Labor: Their ability to work for men, and 3. Sexiness: The sexual desirability of their bodies to men. In a church devoting considerable budget and resources to eliminate the Mormon nickname, how can we tolerate the labeling of God’s daughters with offensively loaded words that reduce and objectify?

Returning to the naming concepts explored by Sue Monk Kidd, her words sound like any Mormon woman when she states:

I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give their power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men.

The larger context of this quote is a call to repentance from colluding in the denial and injury of the feminine soul. It is a reminder that when men hold the naming power they will in their imperfection commit grave errors. And if Jesus Christ is offended by our failure to faithfully use his name in references to his Church, how much more offense do we cause to our Heavenly Parents when we package and brand our girl children as objects for the use and pleasure of men?

Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

In the days before the Girls Camp program moved to name classes of girls by their year at camp, our girls were Yearlings, Mountaineers, Inspirators and Adventurers. Perform a Google image search for any of those labels and notice the feelings and values the images represent. They are not overtly sexual or objectifying. Divine daughters of Heavenly Parents are so much more than Honey Holes, Erotic Virgin Servants, or Crowns for Men. We can do better. It is far past time for women to reclaim the sacred naming power.

On Betrayal

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The card Aimee sent me last year. It’s been on my desk where I work on Exponent II since then.

At the end of September 2017, I was feeling broken-hearted and worthless. The discovery that Exponent II’s treasurer had been engaging in systematic theft for years had caused the board to meet to discuss whether the organization had to shut its doors. The complicated deceit had left a wake of invoices and no money to pay them. After donating over 3,000 hours of my time over the previous eight years, I was staring failure in the face. As hard as I had tried, I had not done enough to keep Exponent II alive. In addition, I was grieving the death of an important friendship. This woman had been to my house many times. She had shared vulnerable moments with me. We had worked together on big projects and she had told me many times how much she loved and admired me. I felt like I could never trust my own feelings or intuition ever again.

At one of my darkest moments, I got a call from my sister-in-law, a woman whose wisdom has often set me right. Although it was late at night, she felt inspired to call me at that moment. “I know you’re feeling like you’re stupid and naive for not seeing the red flags,” she said, “But you weren’t.” When I protested, she reminded me of her own experience of betrayal: her husband had had an affair and walked away from their marriage and children after using her money to pay off his debts. She told me that she had spent many hours wondering how she ever could have trusted him, how she could have been dumb enough to put her faith in someone who was capable of such deceit. She wondered whether their marriage had ever been real, how he could have loved her and then chosen to hurt her so terribly. Such a breach of trust made her suspicious of everyone and doubting whether she had any ability of discernment whatsoever.

I have asked all of those questions in the past year. Showing up to continue to edit Exponent II when I was processing so many feelings of regret and rage was one of the hardest slogs of my life. The geographical distance of the board members and the silence we had to maintain for legal reasons meant that I felt alone in my grief, a grief that didn’t merit a casserole. But along with the burden of the organizational work, I was regularly reviewing all of my interactions with my former friend in my mind. Had our friendship been real? Did she care about me at all or was it all a sham, designed to get as much money as possible? What about the spiritual experiences we had shared together? Were those real?

As is often the case for me, the answer isn’t clear or easy. It has been about simultaneously holding conflicting truths in my head at one time. Luckily, my lifetime as a Mormon feminist heavily prepared me for that kind of work. Complexity, ambiguity, unanswered questions, sitting with discomfort–I’m really good at all of that! Years of experience! I am basically a professional at living with cognitive dissonance, so bring it on.

My resting place for these difficult questions, at least for today, is both/and. I believe that she cared about me in some way, even if that doesn’t in any way resemble the way I understand caring about people. I also believe that she deliberately manipulated intimacy to get what she wanted. I believe that we were friends who shared a serious commitment to a community. I simultaneously believe that community was purely functional for her–a vehicle to help in criminal behavior. I am ambivalent. I used to think of ambivalence as feeling in between two points, stuck somewhere in between. It was actually at an Exponent II retreat that someone told me that ambivalence means feeling two contradictory things at the same time–not a space in the middle, but in two different places at once. As has been the case again and again in my faith journey, there are many truths and I don’t have to pick just one.

For right now, I’m walking away from the questions of Did she love me? and Was our friendship real? They’re not helpful questions to me. The question I’m asking now is What do I want to do? And the answer is: I want to trust people. I want to practice self care. I want to have healthy boundaries. I want to work for a community that will continue to thrive for generations.

If any of that makes it sounds like I’ve forgiven her, I want to make clear that I haven’t. I believe forgiveness will come someday, but I’m not rushing myself. The effects of a betrayal of someone close are much greater than whatever material loss is on the surface. Even the most basic of boundary maintenance and self care means that I will never have a relationship with her again. But for this moment, I want to give myself the gift of accepting ambivalence. The relationship we had was real. It was also not real. She was who I thought she was and she also was not. For today, I can sit with that.

#hearLDSwomen: My Bishop Counseled Me to Stay with My Abuser

[image error]When I went to my last bishop about my abusive marriage and told him I was planning to leave and get a divorce, he seemed very supportive. He even offered to be present when I was ready to notify my husband of my plans.

When I was finally ready, my bishop backed out. He said I needed to be forgiving and give my husband another chance. I told him that advising someone to stay in an abusive relationship can be very dangerous, even life threatening. He stood his ground. So did I. I let other female friends know of my plans, and they knew if they didn’t hear from me by a certain time that evening they were to come to the house looking for me and be prepared to call the police. Fortunately, it went smoothly.

But, my bishop tried several more times to talk me into attempting to reconcile. Even after I had explained to him all the times during 20 years prior to leaving I had attempted to reconcile, attempted to get my husband to go to couples’ counseling, etc. After 20 years of me trying and my husband not trying, it was time to go.

– Anonymous

 

I was told when my then-husband, who I’d married in the temple, tried to run me over with our car that I “overreacted” and should try not to be so “difficult.” That was the church counselor my bishop had sent us to. My bishop apologized when I filed for divorce. I never once blamed the church for that. I just no longer trust church leaders with what’s best for me or my family. I still attend and hold callings. I love the scriptures and my relationship with Christ. I take church with a grain of salt…

– Bethanie

 

I left a man who was beginning to punch children and who was a hoarder.



He claimed I was a bad housekeeper. (Have you tried cleaning up or throwing away after a hoarder? It’s not possible.)



My former bishop, who we’d discussed things with for years as my husband refused to see any other (any qualified) therapist, wrote him an affidavit saying he’d never seen abuse. Though Bishop had often directly counseled us to divorce.



Though he’d witnessed my being berated in his office. Though he knew about the rest.



The executive secretary wrote another affidavit.



Nobody could figure out why I’d leave such a nice guy. Those two affidavits cost me $45K in divorce legal bills.



He moved his increasing hoard out two years later.



We finished yesterday. In the meantime, I wasn’t allowed to get my stuff, a one page personal item list.



Getting away was a traumatic nightmare, and yet still better.

– Anonymous

 

Pro Tip: Do not ever counsel someone to stay in an abusive relationship, and do not use your position to make it harder in any way for the abused spouse to leave.

Click here to read all of the stories in our #hearLDSwomen series. Has anything like this happened to you? Please share in the comments or submit your experience(s) to participate in the series.

“If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.” (Mark 4:23)