A Proper Wife

I'm sharing this because I LOVE SO MUCH Neylan McBaine and I LOVE SO MUCH what she says in this interview. She speaks for me and so many other LDS women. She is SO necessary in this conversation. HERE

I wanted to share this article here. It is where I got the quotes in the previous post. It provides historical context for a lot of the more disturbing teachings about gender in our church, especially the more extreme ones that were prevalent in the past. It answered a lot of my questions regarding why Brigham Young sounds so often like such a sexist... well, anyway. Check it out HERE

Man, this gets exhausting sometimes. Just when I start to feel like I'm making some strides getting to the heart of these issues, getting out exactly what I feel I need to express, I get a comment or read someone's blog post that makes me feel like I'm just swimming against the current. The biggest problem with having this feminist conversation in the LDS internet world is that we are not communicating. We are not all even speaking the same language. The word feminist alone gets so mangled and misused that it's a constant battle just to define what you mean by that, let alone words like equality, visibility, power. So I'd like to talk about the word 'preside." A very Mormon word and one, the semantics of which, I hope non-feminists and feminists alike can agree. For me, all of the feminist issues in the church boil down to this word. There has been a lot of amazing progress in the sexist rhetoric that once passed as doctrine in the church. Brigham You...

I hate generalizations. I feel that they're the result of intellectual laziness. When you're too lazy to make the effort to be accurate to reality, when that reality is nuanced and complex, oversimplification and stereotypes help you feel like you "understand." I hate that generalizations make people feel left out, or somehow wrong. I feel like they're about 60% accurate. All of that being said, I have a few generalizations I'd like to make about feminists, using the feminist I know best as a template - that feminist being myself. Feminists are highly logical. - Many feminists that I know tend to be "left brained." We have a lot of respect for reasoning. This also might be why we're so very angered by some unflattering stereotypes regarding "women and their hysterics." Feminists like to be in charge. - And we're good at it too. We are used to being respected in our social groups, looked up to and trusted. We can coordinate l...

Alan Rock Waterman : Publicly questioning for 5 years John Dehlin : Publicly questioning for 9 years Kate Kelly : Publicly questioning for only ONE year and Excommunicated No, there's no sexism in the Mormon church...why do you ask?

It's taken me a few days to arrange my thoughts on this ever so controversial topic. My initial reaction to her excommunication was sadness, but not surprise. I'm sad because I loved what she represented. She was a faithful, RM, temple going woman who was using tenants of the gospel that she loved to seek greater light and knowledge regarding her place in the kingdom. I can't say that I supported all of her methods, but I am so grateful for the extremely needed conversations that she started. I am grateful for her courage to stand up and ask. I was saddened by the response of her leaders. I wasn't surprised, though. I wonder if she could really have been surprised. Being a lifelong member, she must have foreseen how some people would choose to misinterpret her actions. And that is my only criticism of courageous Kate. That she let herself get thrown out of the church. Because in my mind, her greatest asset was her position as a faithful member of the church. That ...

People talk about how the church will not bend to worldly pressures to make the church less gender biased. You need to understand how ridiculous that sounds to a feminist. "The world" is not feminist! Not by a long shot! Young girls are being shot for attending school, rape is used as a weapon of war but it's still used as a punchline, body shaming and objectification are rampant in Western media, more than 125 million women are alive today who have had their genitals cut and mutilated because of men who believe that women experiencing any kind of sexual pleasure is wrong. In India there are now some 35 million fewer women than men due to female infanticide and China is in the middle of  a ‘ gender crisis ’, because their culture places greater value on a male child than a female. In the USA, a woman with exactly the same level of education as her male counterpart can expect to earn around 18 percent less than him , even when factors like type of degree and actual ...

So in college, in one of my classes, they taught us about this principle of reasoning called Occam's Razor. Here's what wikipedia says about it: "Occam's razor is a principle ...  used in problem-solving devised by William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347). It states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better. The razor states that one should proceed to simpler theories until simplicity can be traded for greater explanatory power. " In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.  I'm a nurse. In my job, we follow a similar principle. If your patient has a fever, it's more likely to be a cold or flu than Ebola or the Black Plague. If you hear hooves, expect a horse, not a zebra. That's the basic idea.  So how does this apply to feminism and the LD...

My heart is hurting today. What the the Kate Kelly disciplinary hearing and the recent media attention , I've been thinking a lot about whether people like me really fit in the church. I've read/heard the criticism from some members of the church that they feel like the members of OW and their supporters are inevitably in for heartache if the answer to their question is no, women can't receive the priesthood. What people who say that don't understand is that all feminists feel that heartache anyway (regardless of their feelings about the ordination of women), every time they go to church and everything's just the same. I recently read  THIS ESSAY , in response to the Mormon Priestess essay and it gave me a lot of hope and encouragement. It was a feeling that has become familiar to me over years of seeking, struggling, questioning, discussing these types of issues. Every once in a while, you find a golden nugget of someone who just GETS it. Their testimony buoys ...