Topics you never hear at Church
 

Ok...a previous discussion with another poster made me think...at General Conference, and especially at the priesthood session.

You hear talk after talk to the men, to 1) avoid pornography, 2) keep yourself morally clean; 3) get off your duff and be anxiously engaged...in something productive; 4) do you duty...yadda yadda yadda...

So...why is it that there are no corresponding "talks" in General Conference or a General Relief Society Broadcast that addresses the ills of womanhood?

How many of you have seen a bishop or stake president take on the women and issues that they are having? I really don't know if I can come up with an example where they have?

Anyone?

I've seen several talks about gossip.

Because the vast majority of these talks are given by men who have a much better grip on the problems men create? Or maybe the "womens" issues are simply contained in other talks and presented in a gender neutral way because woman are less likely to respond well to being "taken to task" than men are, and are more likely to respond if they can "liken" it to themselves on their own.

I tend to think that this is a problem in more wards than a few...yet, I have heard talks on this in a 'general' sense...when indeed there was a big riff caused in a ward regarding this very thing (now that you mention it).

But, again, it was discussed in a general, candy coated way instead of taking the women to task.

Perhaps the notion of them responding way differently than men do has some merit. Would be kinda entertaining just to see though!

Stephen Robinson at BYU told his students that some church leaders believe that the analogous equivalent to the problem men have with pornography in the church is the problem women have with prudishness. To make matters worse, one can easily see where this starts a rather vicious cycle.

But find for me one general authority who will teach in the name of God and as a representative of the church that wives need to give it up more often and I'll show you one guy who's name is gonna come up after the words "any opposed by the same sign."

Not for me, mind you. But somebody will.

I ranted about this in our Marriage/Family relations class in Sunday School a few months back. My thesis was this:

Basically all talks in the Church directed at women are positive and upbeat: "You're doing a wonderful job. You are wonderful daughters of our Father in Heaven. Be happy. Our Heavenly Father loves you. Have Joy. We all love you."

Basically all talks in the Church directed at men are to point out some area where men are failing in their responsibilities. "Stop looking at porno. Do your home teaching. Stop looking at porno. Love your wife and kids. Stop looking at porno. Don't gamble. Stop looking at porno. Oh yeah, do your home teaching."

You may find a counter example here or there but the sum of all talks definitely flows in the direction of chastizement for men and postive encouragement for women.

Amen, brother. Well said.

This is done out of guilt. The Church is extremely patriarchal. In the Church, women are second class citizens and everyone knows it. We still cling to the notion of a woman's place being in the home, barefoot and pregnant. When leaders extol the virtues of women in the Church, they are throwing them the proverbial bone, trying to ease their own guilt.

lol....totally agree with this.

Women are pretty hard on themselves as it is. We're never pretty enough or skinny enough. It doesn't take much to make us feel like a crappy mother, wife, etc. We compare ourselves to other women and we never measure up. One of our greatest faults IS being too hard on ourselves and that is addressed in all of those encouraging talks we hear in conference.

It is true, many women could use a good talk on not nagging their husbands (my mom and sisters-in-law for example).

I think you have point there. Sometimes those "encouraging" talks come across as a little condescending.

Several years ago, President Faust stated that woman was God's pinnacle creation, noting she was not placed on the earth until after all else was finished; thus the creation then became perfected.

The sisters in my ward soaked it up in a hurry. Over the next year, they made several references to that quote while in Sacrament Meeting and Sunday School.

It will take a family therapist, psychologist or sociologist to determine who is harder on selves, but do you necessarily believe men are easier on themselves?

Life is encouraging but challenging, and it can tend to beat down either gender fairly severely.

This is a very harsh way of expressing things, but there is some truth to the idea that there is a lesser expection for women. For example, since a man holds the priesthood he is more accountable that a woman for the same sin. I don't really think the source is necessarily doctrinal. I think it is cultural.

I mean this in no sort of critical way, but I believe that because of the age of church leadership that cultural progress in the church lags cultural progress in US society (where all of the leadership is from) by 15-20 years.

I have to believe that a man who is at least exposed to feminist ideas in college (are you at BYU? I would think not.) and who lives his whole adult life with a woman who is the product of feminism (most of the women the guys around here are married to fit this discription) will have a radically different take on the role of women and what is to be expected of them than GBH whose formative years were the 1920's and 30's. The women of that era were raised to submissive. The woman of today is not. Will the first prophet born after 1960 have much in common in his cultural thought process about woman as GBH? I would think only a little.

Since I am not a man, I don't really know. I am way harder on myself than danimal is on himself.

That would be an interesting quantitative study for a qualitative aspect.

Your perspective is valid and worth considering. Whether one gender is "harsher" is indeterminable. Men may internalize their shortcomings differently and manifest the internalization differently.

If I'm not mistaken, men are more prone to depression that women, if that means anything.

The answer is probably a combination of subconscious guilt, culture, and self-awareness. It is difficult to judge the failings, really, of a gender which one is not. So male leaders rather go on the gender least understood by them, go soft for guilt and PR.

Oh well, I better go study my porn, I mean conduct internet research.

A couple of points:

At times, women in the Church are being patronized.

At times, men in the Church are being bullied.

Porn addiction and prudishness can be mutually reinforcing. These problems are also embedded in what I would call a Mormon reification of gender roles, a habit some of us have picked up from the Victorians. As a man who has exactly zero interest in pornography, and who finds it not at all tempting or interesting, I find the frequency with which the subject is addressed rather tedious. I must be in the minority on this. I find women quite attractive; pictures or videos or whatever, not in the least. In my book, from a scriptural standpoint the starting place for dealing with these issues is 1 Cor. 7:3-5.

There is a generational component to how Church leadership is dealing with these things (and not). This has been and always will be the case when human beings are involved.

An excellent find.

And lest anybody be confused by the poetic language, the NRSV shows it more clearly:

3The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. 4For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. 5Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.

Where is Tireseus when you need him? He'd be able to help.

Kristina as the pinnacle creation
 

As printed alongside your avatar I'm inclined to buy into that!!

Kristina is a looker, I can agree with that; however, when I realize that she's not much older than my daughter, I'm reminded that Kristina is just a young kid.

Is your "in the minorty" sentence referring to the fact that you aren't interested in pictures of naked women or referring to the fact that you find the frequency of admonishment tedious? If the former, I would certainly agree that you are in the minority. If the latter, I think you are in the majority.

I kinda tend to agree with SEIQ's assessment of the situation. If I want to see naked women, I'd prefer to see her live and in front, to the side or in other situations proximate to me.

A picture in a screen obviously elicits some prurient interests, but knowing that's all you will ever get from that two dimensional object kinda causes it to run out of steam.

Now, as I'm sure most others would also confess, I don't frequent strip joints and the like but I can imagine how that might become more addictive. I'm aware of a number of young professionals who like to spend some extra dough at those places, but it's really fun to schedule depositions first thing in the morning, especially Monday morning for those types.

This is in a nutshell the explanation for one pair of earringsgate.

Good question.

The former.

Unfortunately, pornography is probably THE most troubling spiritual issue in the church today. As a result the church really needs to address this again and again.

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/jacob/2

I think that part of the problem or at least an aspect to consider is the confession aspect of it...and what I mean by that is (and this is just an opinion) regardless of how embarassing it might be, men confess to a man and because of that (although a bishop, stake pres etc... might not agree with the behavior) there is at least a little bit more of an understanding of the behavior from the leader.

This doesn't change the level of dissappointment or the fact that these leaders can really take a person to task who confesses a problem with pornography. To be frank, men (as leaders) can be a lot more candid with the males that come in to confess their sins than they can be with women...men can take that kind of guilt ridden beating...I don't think women can.

Whenever I've heard mention of women having similar problems, it is merely an after thought, usually presented by a female counselor from LDS social services more as information than listed as a problem. The times i've heard it, it has been said like this..."Many families are torn apart by the evils of pornography. Men who are otherwise responsible in their community and active in the church are tearing their family apart with this problem...and it's not just men, though a higher percentage are men...women share in the problem and responsibility as well."

At an adult session of stake conference last year, we had a counselor from LDS family services speak on the evils of pornography and that is about how it came out. She also, from the pulpit, told bishops that they were not being as sensitive to the needs of the sisters in the stake in regard to their husbands pornography addictions. It was very informative, but more of a lecture and some how tied in with a testimony...and again, any blame the women received was mentioned as an after thought.

I would be willing to bet (with no evidence at all to back this up) that women are more likely to confess pornography problems first to an LDS Social Services counselor before confessing to a bishop.

...just my thoughts.

Perhaps I am naive, but I think the nature of a woman's sex drive (we're less visual) makes her less inclined to view pornography. I am sure there are plenty of female porn addicts out there, but I am guessing that statistically men outnumber us with that sin. Those women who do are likely viewing it with their husband/boyfriend/partner.

That's just plain silly. Pornography is just the boogey-man of the moment in the Church, just like masturbation was the boogey-man when we were all missionaries. Church leaders should be more concerned with the way materialism has infected the Church or with the way that right-wing conservatism has poisoned their congregations. If I had to choose whether my son viewed pornography or whether he became like Johnny Lingo, I'd choose pornography every time.

Why does their need to be a ranking?

All of these issues are serious enough that they will be repeatedly addressed.

Good thoughts. And in a more general sense, I would expect that females would be less likely to confess any sin of a sexual nature to a male leader.

And as to Indy's comment, I agree that pornography is a problem for many. But I argue that it's also a symptom of a much more complex male-female dynamic in the Church and that simply giving talks that condemn it as though it were a problem that exists in a vacuum, or lazily suggesting it is simply the result of an ill-defined "smutty world," won't help much in the aggregate.

In some sense I see the kind of easy thoughtlessness in the usual approach to condemning pornography that I see in the monthly "Do your home teaching" lecture. At some point, Church leaders should have learned that:

A. Lecturing to people and trying to make them feel guilty isn't working, hasn't worked and won't work (at least, not on this issue and not in the aggregate). In fact, it's demoralizing for many and can reinforce an assumption of all-talk and no-action.

and

B. There is a deeper difficulty that isn't being understood, much less addressed.

and

C. Most everyone seems to recognize these things, but no one's doing anything about them so the implication is that no one, including leaders, either cares or expects to make a difference.

and

D. This all fits nicely into the apocalyptic, "the world is ending and we can't do anything to improve things so why try" rhetoric that gets bandied about.

I see something of what socio-psychologists call a "bystander effect." Lots of people are standing around and shouting "Oh no! Oh no! Someone do something! Someone needs to help! Please sir, stop dying!" while the guy having the coronary dies, on the street, surrounded by people.

BTW, the fireside I'm giving on sexuality and the media is scheduled for three weeks for Sunday.

I don't think you can blame the church for creating a male-female dynamic that creates an environment for porn problems. This is a nationwide/worldwide epidemic. I just saw something on TV last night that had a few on a panel, including a divorce lawyer in Dallas, that talked about it from a non-religious, national perspective and said that divorces naming porn as a contributing cause were exploding.

I have an opinion on church leaders constant barrage of "avoid pornography" but at the same time giving no hope or no help to those caught in the trap. It's unfortunate that church leaders do this, but I don't blame them. I think by hammering the topic they scare a certain % of members away from it, which is a good result from a bad tactic. It's a big and scary problem and I don't think they know what to do about it, other than scare people into avoiding it. If this scare tactic helps keep my sons from porn, then yappari I will probably be grateful for the help as a parent. If one of my sons becomes addicted to porn, then I will probably be angry at the church's tactic because at that point I think their methods do more harm than good.

In a sense I'm not blaming the Church. These tendencies are present in the larger culture (which has Victorian influences too). But Mormon's susceptiblilty to pornography has a particular place in the larger nationwide/worldwide epidemic. The smutty world rhetoric doesn't get us anywhere. Our particular problem has more than a little to do with Mormon's post-polygamy Victorian Uncle Tom-ism. It was the Victorians who, after the civil war, came after us for polygamy and eventually kicked our ass. Like bootlickers we've been reinscribing ourselves with their flawed sexual dynamic ever since and were paying the price for that. The cult of true womanhood rhetoric, the angel-whore dichotomy, the priesthood leader as the great Western ideal of 19th century masculinity, the repression of discussion about the sexual deviance of polygamy, it goes on and on. Have you ever noticed that sex differences are reified by many North American Mormons for their own sake and with little reflection? It's nothing short of astrological. People go to this stuff and then try to forge their identities from it. It's just like someone discovering she's a Gemini and then trying to refashion her personality to fit the description in the book.

Take a moment and consider what I've written. There's more than a little truth to it.

You lost me there in the second part of that paragraph. Can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean? I find this quite interesting.

I don't argue there's no truth to what you say. Certainly there's something cultural to the obsession with porn. I've read that porn addictions are more present in strict, religious families in general. I may disagree a little with you in how or why Mormons should be different than other strict religions in frequency of porn addiction. I see the dynamic as similar across the board and don't know much how to change it.

I'm no expert, but about the only way I see that you could lessen the strangle hold porn has on our youth is to tell them sex before marriage is OK. Then they'd be too busy with the real thing like the rest of their peers to be concerned with porn.

This is perhaps the first time I've read an interesting discussion on the topic. I tend to agree with SEIQ's observations, but haven't given it the deep thought he apparently has.

It's just a hunch, but I am going to go out on a limb and predict that this particular option won't fly with the brethren.

You're my favorite risk taker.

Just as a gal suggested that the Church should allow boys and girls between 18 and 25 to have all the sex they wanted and then to be faithful after marriage.

But in essence, to address the "problem", the Church does need to address a healthy viewpoint of sexuality. Its intellectuals such as SEIQ do, but its leaders do not.

It's again focusing upon the negative and not going to the root of the problem. Pornography is a symptom of larger dysfunctions in sexuality. The Church has done absolutely nothing to develop healthy sexual perspectives. (Well I suppose the abstinence to avoid STDs is healthy but other than that, I hadn't considered our repression in light of the Victorians).

Sure.

Many North American Mormons are suffering from a case of hyper-Victorianism. The Victorians attacked us over our sexual deviance (polygamy) and in our defeat we compulsively serve the ideologies of those who defeated us. Victorianism has influenced the larger American culture (the 1950s stereotypes are rife with it and so is the Mars/Venus material), but it is more acute with Mormons because we have been bludgeoned. This is what I mean by Uncle Tom-ism.

Therein we go back to Victorian sex norms like a person going to an astrology book to find himself. We take what we find there and obsessively try to mold ourselves into it. Stereotypes about maleness and femaleness are considered to be universally and objectively true and their cultural constructedness is ignored. The angel-whore dichotomy (which keeps women as objects), the true cult of womanhood thinking, the hyper-enforced sex divisions, the myth of the rugged Western male, the idea that the body is dirty and something to be encaged (Victorian dresses literally put women in a kind of iron cage)--these are all part of it. Sure, biology plays a role in some of these things, but many of them are culturally specific and are not demanded by scipture or a Godly sense of right and wrong.

The Victorians dressed modestly and new how to host in the parlor, but there was a whore house being run out back.