Benevolent Sexism

[Moliere]

I grew up in a very traditional household. My dad works and tends to all the finances, Mom stays home and cooks and handles all the household stuff. Giving this context, it's been surprising to me how progressive my dad has become over the years and how entrenched in traditional church-prescribed gender roles my mom has become.

This became evident at a family dinner last night wherein my aunt pulled up the Ordain Women Facebook page on her phone and passed it around with great sighs and eyerolls from my mom, aunt, and uncle. My dad and I sat there very quietly, having had a long conversation just the day before about how we both support women giving blessings and anointings outside of the temple (and more, but at very least that). My uncle declared that if women want the priesthood, they should just "defect and join the FLDS [sic] church and go apostatize there." Since it's obviously impossible to want to improve things from within, right? My mom began an onslaught of criticism and disdain of those "unrighteous women" who "just can't listen to the prophet." When my mom finally cornered me, saying, "Is this just a stupid Utah thing? Because I haven't heard anything about this in Washington," I said that people from all over supported ordaining women, and that it was both men and women. At that point, all heaven and hell broke loose and we had the family argument of the decade. I'd really been trying to avoid a confrontation because it was completely pointless and now we're all just mad.

I'm not really sure why I'm sharing this with you, perhaps other than to demonstrate that not only men engage in benevolent sexism and that people can change (or not) in those attitudes. Last night was extremely discouraging. If my family is representative of general church membership, then I have even less of a place in the church than I hoped.

Good post but it more highlights just outright sexism, which is institutional within the church. I do like your thought that women are just as bad at benevolent sexism as are men.

In all honestly, one of my biggest issues is with the way success is defined in the US. I'd actually go so far as to say that the church defines success much better than "the world". The world ties success to a person's income or social status, when, at the end of the day most of the work performed by working moms and dads is simply pushing paper around. Our jobs can be done by anyone. We are all replaceable.

Ultimately success should be defined by a person's happiness. I hope someday my obituary simply states "Moliere was a great husband, father and grandfather. He lived his life in happiness and spent every waking hour trying to make people smile."

[tooblue]

Good post but it more highlights just outright sexism, which is institutional within the church. I do like your thought that women are just as bad at benevolent sexism as are men.

In all honestly, one of my biggest issues is with the way success is defined in the US. I'd actually go so far as to say that the church defines success much better than "the world". The world ties success to a person's income or social status, when, at the end of the day most of the work performed by working moms and dads is simply pushing paper around. Our jobs can be done by anyone. We are all replaceable.

Ultimately success should be defined by a person's happiness. I hope someday my obituary simply states "Moliere was a great husband, father and grandfather. He lived his life in happiness and spent every waking hour trying to make people smile."

I agree. And that would be a nice obituary.