Tough, Sexy, and Smart: Cultural Ideals in Women's Fitness Videos

For my New Year's resolution and continuing quest to recapture my pre-marital body, I have been spending a lot of time lately looking at workout videos on YouTube. Being more of a sociologist than a fitness freak, I also find myself looking at these videos as a window into American culture, and a commentary on our values and beliefs.

Like any reasonable person, I tend to click on the videos with the most hits. Not only do they tend to be higher quality workouts (and achievable for semi-sedentary academics like me), but they're also indicative of the kinds of things that motivate other women like me. Although the smorgasbord of actual exercises is quite diverse (hips, abs, cardio, warmups, zumba, yoga, pilates, etc.),  the workout videos targeted for women seem to appeal to three distinct cultural ideals:

1. The Tough Girl
Being tough is definitely considered an asset in American culture today. The girls and women we admire are ones that don't care about girly things - and who can beat a boy in any competition she wants. Katniss Everdeen, Hermoine Granger, Mulan and Xena are all strong, independent women who can take care of themselves - and we want to be like that too. Girl power!

The tough girl of the fitness world is Jillian Michaels, who is a trainer on the Biggest Loser, and she has a reputation for pushing people to their limits to get into shape. She has a lower voice, a muscular build, and while the photoshop artists enhance her features for publicity photos and her DVDs, "sexy" is clearly not her mantra. Her favorite exercises are elements of kickboxing. Jillian's points come from being tough, and from making you believe that you can be tough too.
"Power through it!"
"Remember - if you don't get uncomfortable, nothing's going to change. This is not your mother's workout."
“Unless You Puke, Faint or Die, Keep Going!” 
"I want you to feel like you are going to die!"

 

  2. The Sexy Goddess

There can be no doubt that today's women want to be sexy as well as strong. Every video called "Look Good Naked in 40 min a Day" or "Hot Body Warm Up Routine" or "Victoria's Secret Workout" reflects this ideal. A real woman should be sexy - sexy means powerful and self-confident. The best combination is tough AND sexy - think Tomb Raider.

The "Pump It Up" videos from Diane Barry teach fitness through dance. The outfits in this and other similar dance workout videos say more than anything else. While the moves are only occasionally suggestive (body rolls, pelvic thrusts, etc.) the atmosphere with songs like "Satisfaction" and high-cut bikini bottoms are more than indicative that the fitness goal is to look and feel sexy:
"Over the body... nice and sexy"
"Have some fun with it."
"Do this every day and you will see the curves."




3. The Well-Balanced Woman
The third cultural ideal is that we need to be smart and take care of ourselves. This is the ideal that stresses that it's not about how you look, but how you feel that matters most. These women recycle, eat organic, vote, detox, care about what kids are watching on tv, and try to have balance in their lifestyle. They applaud P&G for their Olympic "Proud Sponsor(ship) of moms", and Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign.

The ClassFit Sugar videos are set it what looks like either a home or an elementary school classroom, with bright curtains and cubbies in the background. The women are more average-looking and wear less revealing clothing. The three featured women lead the exercises in tandem - they interact with each other more naturally, and don't have the same polished synchronicity of the Jillian and Michaels and the dance workout videos. The message is - we are just normal women, like you, and you can be fit and healthy and happy like us.


Working out, it seems is mostly motivated by the desire to be tough, to be sexy, or to be healthy. What do you think? Is this accurate? Is it helpful? How do these three ideals reflect the reality in society, and how do they impact women?

Nazi Doctors: The paradox, and what it means for you

Science and religion. There's a debate that's gone on for a while. I stumbled across this article by a medical student at Johns Hopkins that dramatically changed my perspective on the issue, and I hope it will yours too. Here is the first part of the article, and then I will follow with a discussion. Let me only prep the reader by saying, exchange the words "physician" and "medicine" for "scientist" and "science" and the same message will apply:

"Moral Luck and Medical Murder: Are Physicians in Jeopardy?"
by Alessa Colaianni, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Class of 2014

"On a rainy summer day in Oswiecim, Poland, I stood next to the rusty railroad tracks  leading into Auschwitz and realized that I was standing in the same place where Nazi doctors had performed "selections," sentencing millions of innocent Jews to death or imprisonment by pointing either left or right. Though I had spent weeks reading and discussing the role of physicians in the Holocaust, I was in a state of disbelief. The value of physicians to the Nazi regime is clear: physicians legitimized the "scientific" principles of eugenics on which the Nazis built their so-called Rassenpolitik (Racial Policy), and rationalized murder under the logic of "medical necessity." But what could possibly have motivated these doctors to so wholly ignore their own professional code?

"By enlisting physicians, first in the sterilization and T4 "euthanasia" programs, and later, in the "Final Solution," the Nazis seemed to have science and medicine on their side. Without active physician participation, the Nazi regime could not have achieved its murderous aims: physicians helped disguise the horrors by using deliberately misleading medical jargon, by systematizing murder, and by subverting their own professional values. The more I reflect, and the more historical analysis I read, the more elusive the answer to this fundamental question seems to become. How could so many doctors, all of whom presumably took the Hippocratic Oath, have become such an integral part of torture and genocide? (it should be noted that the Nazis were neither the first nor the last to facilitate the transformation of physicians into murderers).

"It is crucial to understand that not all physicians that participate in murder and torture do so because of some latent psychological illness or because they are under duress. It is natural for physicians (and future physicians) to try to find some fundamental difference between themselves and the Nazi doctors - to distance themselves as far as they can from the perpetrators of such heinous crimes - but to do so misses the point. Philosopher Thomas Nagel's concept of "moral luck" provides one reason why. Nagel compares the relative moral status of two men, each of whom becomes equally intoxicated and drives home impaired. one man strikes and kills a small child who happens to run out in front of his car. The other man makes it home safely: no child runs out in front of his car. Both men were equally negligent, but by virtue of circumstance -- luck  -- only one man ended up with blood on his hands. In another oft-cited example, a man who may have led an uneventful life as a German citizen became a concentration camp guard and committed unimaginable crimes when the Nazis came into power. Political circumstances did not entirely cause, but certainly facilitated, the change in that man's moral record. The reality of moral luck forces us to consider the unpalatable possibility that these doctors were ordinary people under extraordinary conditions - and that we, as physicians, have the same capacity for wrongdoing."

She then goes to explain characteristics of medical practice, such as clinical detachment and medical euphemisms, that facilitated physician participation in the Holocaust, and how they exist in medical practice today.

What was the movement that provided the impetus for this terrible behavior? It's closer to home than you think: 
"Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

"Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then (used) their data to serve eugenics' racist aims.

"Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood.

"In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

"Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense" (retrieved from The George Mason History News Network at http://hnn.us/article/1796).

So, eugenics began in the United States long before it reached Germany. In fact, Hitler quotes American scientists in his autobiography Mein Kampf who he says led the way for Germany to learn how cleanse their "racial stock". Racial cleansing occurred in numerous ways, from lethal neglect and poisoning in mental institutions to forced sterilization, especially in the state of California. The Nazis were the first to take these ideals and implement them on a large scale through systematic executions. 

This is all a long-winded introduction to this simple point: just because someone is using scientific methods to distill information is no guarantee that the information will be used for any particular good purpose. Science should be a tool used by the righteous in their quest for truth, but how we find that information, and how we interpret it, and what we do as a result of it, are actions that depend entirely on our personal and social morality. 

As I said in my previous post, physical and social facts are just facts. They're nothing to get angry about, until you filter the fact, or study, or survey through your lens of social understanding and say - "Aha! Someone is being oppressed!" or "Eureka! I've been right all along about men!" (or gravity, or big business, or organized religion or global warming, or whatever). 

In the early 20th century, Eugenics became a popular social framework for viewing people. People's behavior, appearance, thoughts and beliefs were merely considered as evidence for a racial hierarchy. In fact, even those who disagreed with the actions of eugenicists often still adopted the lens of eugenics. Haim Nahmen Bialik, a distinguished Hebrew and Yiddish poet, believed that the eugenics studies proved that Judaism was a race - and a superior one, compared with those who claimed Judaism by practice and belief but not ethnicity. "I too, like Hitler, believe in the blood idea." 

Fortunately, the eugenics framework has taken a back seat over the last several decades, but they have been replaced by other frameworks that now study people in terms of oppression, gender, socialization, media, lifestyle, sexuality, mental illness, etc.

What is your framework? If a house burns down, do you consider it a reflection of crime rates in the area? Are you concerned about the environmental impact of the smoke? Do you think about whether or not God was punishing the people who lived there? The types of questions you ask, and the answers you find, will come from the social framework through which you view the world. 

Notice - your framework influences how you engage with the science, but it is not science in of itself. No scientific study can say "Skin color should not be used to determine how qualified someone is for a job" or "Women should be treated equally". Our frameworks determine that. And our frameworks are determined, to a large extent, by our morality.

So going back to the eugenics movement - How do we know we're not repeating the foolish and immoral actions of our science-loving predecessors in the early 20th century?

First of all, we must recognize that scientific intelligence has zero affect on our moral intelligence. Good people need not be educated, and educated people need not be good. The danger we currently face is that scientific knowledge is rapidly increasing, but our sense of morality is increasingly weak and simple and easily overcome for most people. We are current beneficiaries of the "moral luck" Nagel discussed, and it may take only a mere shift in the political winds, or current rhetoric, or pop culture, to leave blood on our hands as well: "The reality of moral luck forces us to consider the unpalatable possibility that these doctors were ordinary people under extraordinary conditions - and that we, as physicians, have the same capacity for wrongdoing."

Science cannot guide morality. It simply can't. The nature of science answers questions about "what", "where", "who", and "how", but it cannot answer the "why"s, or give any insight about "what should be". If we assume that science will give us those answers, the answers we get will be a reflection of our own beliefs about what is "natural" or "obvious". And if our moral education has not been thorough, the nature of these "obvious" answers will be hugely influenced by whatever winds of political and philosophical change we happen to be experiencing at the moment, whether it's eugenics or feminism. Without a consistent, reliable source of moral education, we can unwittingly make foolish decisions, all the while believing science to be our ally.

Science is not the only Kool-Aid that disguises the poison of immorality. Philosophical arguments, peer pressure, professional norms, politics, pop culture, and rhetoric can also woo us into complacency about moral principles that haven't been sufficiently anchored. Dishonesty because "it's just business", contempt because of someone's party affiliation, casual sex because you live in a frat house. The whimpering voice of morality is an easy target of mockery when everyone is having a good time: Mark Twain said "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." Rhetoric can deceive even very good, reasonable people, as Hitler's impassioned speeches deceived the Germans. Like science, rhetoric can paint an issue persuasively and reasonably, and yet be completely wrong.

So how do we ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of Nazi physicians and all those who went along with the eugenics movement? The answer is this: Our individual and collective sense of morality must be cultivated and educated. Distinct from education in science, philosophy, politics, or sociology, we need to cultivate a sense of morality that derives from religious faith, and recognize that science is a tool, not the brains, behind moral action. 

We have a duty to seek out the best and most correct religious teachings we can find and then teach their principles of morality as the basis for proper social conduct - if not in our public schools then in every other possible forum. I don't refer to dogma or extremism - I mean to say that most world religions teach a common base of principles that emphasize the Golden Rule, respect for others, acknowledgment of a greater power or at least that we don't have all the answers right now, and a desire to seek after goodness and truth. If the overwhelming majority of the world believes these things are good and true, why not put a stake in it? Why not teach it to our kids in formal or even state-sponsored settings? Where else should morality come from?

Who wants to argue that if we practiced genetic selection, we probably would create a healthier, stronger, longer-living population? No one - scientifically, it's still probable. But our sense of conscience dismisses that argument because we believe (for mostly unprovable reasons) that the actions that would come from that argument are just inherently wrong - no study needed. These beliefs can't come from science, and so they must come from religion. We codify these unscientific religious morals in our Bill of Rights and Constitution because we have decided that every person should be granted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Nazi doctors failed their own morality. Their skills, experience, jargon, and trust in the science overwhelmed their ability to distinguish right from wrong. Does that make science bad? No! But without educated core convictions that grow with equal strength to our dependence on science, morality will not have the power to govern our use of science, and as with the physicians in Nazi Germany, we will not hear the quiet voice or moral reason that cuts through the distracting jargon and frameworks and speaks of right and wrong to our innermost souls. 

As we study the history of our society and the foolish, immoral actions of the past, we must never believe, as Coloaianni stated, that our ancestors were simply less moral or less intelligent than we are. They, like us, acted according to contemporary philosophies, politics, and popular trends, and like us, they did it unwittingly. Let us be intelligent about morality; let our social frameworks be grounded in religious truth; let us not only accept but embrace the unscientific, unprovable, and yet essential "shoulds" that give us our humanity and provide an anchor for civilization itself.

How to Avoid Getting Angry at Stupid Comments

I was reading on a Yahoo page today a user that commented on the fact that girls raised without fathers in the home are 7 times more likely to become pregnant. Like many blogs and articles you've read, the comments below were mostly angry, and extreme:

"Wow! Are Moms actually 7 times worse at raising little girls? Wow!"

"So we should make a law forcing the courts to give daughters to fathers, no matter how violent or abusive they are. Great choice."

"The highest rates of divorce and single parent homes are among conservatives - not liberals. So here's my advice to all the 'value voters' - try making YOUR actions fit your words."

"Daughters? What about the sons sticking it in the daughters?"

Each of these comments approaches the issue from a different paradigm. The solution to avoiding getting angry is laid out here:

Step 1: Understand the nature of social facts.
A social fact is like a physical fact in the sense that it is real and measurable, but it's also intangible. Here are some examples:

• Women in the U.S. are paid less money for the same work done by men
• Working mothers are more likely to struggle with anxiety than stay-at-home moms
• The largest demographic group in federal and state prisons are African American males

These are not value statements - they're just facts. Don't get upset yet.

Step 2: Understand the nature of theoretical paradigms.
We rarely discuss social facts without attaching a "therefore" to the end of them. You  interpret these facts through your social lens -  conflict theory, religion, feminism, environmentalism, biological theory, etc. - and you assign values to them as a result. Here are some possible interpretations of the previous examples:

• Women in the U.S. are paid less money for the same work done by men
• Conflict theory/feminism: Overall, we are still a sexist society - and employers are still discriminating against women
• Evolutionary theory: Men are paid more because it's their nature to be more aggressive, and men are more likely than women to negotiate for a higher salary

You see? Same fact, two different interpretations. Let's do one more:

• The largest demographic group in federal and state prisons are African American males
• Oppression theory: Black men are in jail because white men have more social and political power to put them there.
• Organic functionalism: Because of the changing nature of American markets, manufacturing jobs are disappearing from many predominantly black communities. Without jobs, these individuals are more likely to turn to drugs and other illegal sources of income.

Every fact can be valued and judged a million ways, depending on what aspect of the situation is most important to you. When an empty house burns down for example, are you concerned for the safety of the surrounding trees and the decrease in air quality? Do you want to look at crime rates in the area? Are you concerned about the emotional well-being of the owner? Are you angry that schools aren't providing more education about fire safety? 

It's important to note that while individual causes may be studied, you cannot disprove a theory. It's just a way of looking at information. Recognizing and appreciating theories other than your own can be liberating. If there's a theoretical paradigm that makes your life miserable (mine would be the selfish gene theory, which postulates that all behavior is inherently self-serving) - pick another one! 

Step 3: Understand how interpretation leads to emotion

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, probably the most popular theory in modern mental health counseling, postulates that how we mentally interpret a situation leads to how we emotionally feel about it. To return to the article mentioned at the beginning of this post: Saying that girls raised without fathers are 7 times more likely to get pregnant is not a value statement - it's not extremism or propaganda or anything - it's just a fact. Based on your interpretation of the fact, you will be happy about it, angry about it, or not care at all. Here are some options:

• I'm neutral because: Not having a father doesn't CAUSE girls to get pregnant - it's a correlation. The type of families without fathers also tend to be the types of people who are more lax about sexual behavior.
• I'm happy because: There's nothing wrong with that fact. Society is changing, and it will keep changing - it's just going through some growing pains. (or) Having children is a wonderful, beautiful thing and the fact that these girls are become mothers earlier than most is totally fine.
• I'm angry because: People prey on easy targets. Not having a father in the home is a symbolic sign to the neighbors and the community that the home is unprotected, and that the family inside is unprotected, so daughters without fathers are more likely to be victims of sexual predators.
• I'm sad because: Without a father in her life, girls struggle with feelings of rejection and loneliness and a strong psychological need for male companionship, and so they're likely to be more sexually promiscuous, which leads to teen pregnancy.

You can probably think of other ways to see this as well.

What you should probably NOT do is make yourself angry by interpreting facts through a lens of extremism. If you think not having a father is a cause of teen pregnancy, and if you believe that's bad, you must not dismiss that with fallacies like: "Well that may be true, but having a father who beats the living daylights out of you isn't good either." Two horrible choices don't cancel each other out. You can acknowledge that both are bad.

Step 4: Understand the difference between interpretation and action

Acknowledging a fact is not acknowledging an interpretation, and acknowledging an interpretation does not dictate a course of action. In fact, it is crucial that we separate these. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. are classic examples of two men who went through this process together, and then split when they got to action:
Fact: Black Americans are not allowed to ride at the front of buses
Interpretation: Society is structurally discriminating against black people
Emotion: Anger! Frustration!
Action: MLK- peaceful protest, Malcolm X - violent protest

Here's a modern example of how people might behave toward poverty today:
Fact: The gap between the rich and poor in America is increasing
Interpretation: The wealthy have more power to maintain and increase their wealth, while the poor are becoming more disenfranchised
Emotion: Anger! Frustration!
Action (option #1): Lobby to change the tax code in order to equalize the playing field
Action (option #2): Give to charity. Encourage others around you to do the same
Action (option #3): Lobby to put more federal tax money into low-income schools
Action (option #4): Create a families-helping-families program in your local congregation, where individuals can sign up to provide resources, networking, tutoring, etc. for families that are less well-off

Step 5: Realize your own decision making process, and respect the process of others
Once you understand how this process of understanding people's reactions to things, you should recognize how flexible and fluid it really is. That alone should give you the patience and love to allow others to disagree with your interpretation, your emotions, and your actions. Good luck.

Why You Should Be Upset about the Overturning of Utah's Marriage Amendment

Most important issues are also complex, which means they can't be pithily stated in a two-sentence tweet. Explaining how planes actually fly takes a lot longer than just posting "gravity doesn't exist!" So, I hope you will read with sincerity my non-pithy explanation of why gay and straight people alike should be upset about the decision today by a federal judge in Utah to rule their marriage amendment unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby overturned a 66% majority vote on an amendment to clarify the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, stating that "The state’s current laws...demean the dignity of these same-sex couples for no rational reason."

"Why should I be upset about this?", you may say, "This is awesome! I'm totally excited about it" If this is you, my next point may not seem like a big deal, but I will explain: If we want laws to change, it needs to be because we vote on it, not because one person just decides we should.  Suspend for a moment your opinion on this particular issue: are we okay with having one person decide to strike down the voice of the people just because he personally doesn't believe it's a good idea, or because he doesn't like the rationale of the other side?  The judiciary is there to protect our rights, not to decide which laws are terrible. As Chief Justice Roberts said in last year's decision to uphold Obamacare, even though he personally disagreed with it, “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices,”

Do we want a king or a democracy? In the Book of Mormon, a hefty number of people keep saying they want a king. Why would anyone want that? Well, think about it: if the king supports your views, he/she would sure get things done a lot faster and more efficiently than having to go through Congress. We could even still call them "president" or "judge" to make ourselves feel better. But even if you like the current outcomes of that system, you should not be okay with judicial fiat just because this one happens to support your view. The next one may not:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

(from A Man For All Seasons)

"But Kindra", you may say,"the judiciary isn't legislating - they're just protecting the civil rights of a minority group, who are not being allowed to marry." Okay, let's be very clear about this - yes, their job is to strike down laws and amendments that violate the Bill of Rights, but this is not a Bill of Rights issue. Saying that lesbians and gay men are being denied their right to marry is actually a logical fallacy. Let me explain.

Every adult in America has the right to marry. Think about it. No one asks you your orientation at the courthouse. In the sense of how we are treated by the law, we are completely equal. You can be lesbian, black, atheist, whoever - you already have the right to get married. But all states decide what that contract looks like, and WHO you may marry. You're probably more okay with this than you realize. In most states, you are denied the right to marry more than one person, or marry a close relative, or marry a child, for example. Are you okay with these? Yes? No? Well, that's why the states vote on them: because marriage is a social contract with social functions and implications.  Gender theory and conflict theory would have you interpret everything as though it's an issue of oppression, hate and bigotry - it's not. This is just a definition; It's a social contract, and it's flexible, and we can vote to change it. Please keep in mind - those of you who support gay marriage - you can and should still believe this!

"But they ARE being denied their rights", you will then say, probably indignantly. "They have the right to have their loving relationship legally validated just like anyone else." This is very important, please don't be mad at me - but you don't actually have that right, in any state. Getting married is an individual right, but defining marriage is not. Gay supporters - you can still be okay with this too! 

What you're actually saying is, they SHOULD have the right. Aha! If you believe they should have the right to marry, and you think we should change the marriage laws, let's VOTE on it! Let's pass an amendment! This is a time for discussion and campaigning, not self-righteousness and accusations. We have to respect each other enough to do that.

While the justice system ensures that no one's civil rights are violated, the voice of the people decides on the nature and extent of every other type of right, and they are not nearly as clean-cut as we'd like to believe: does the doctor have the right to peace and quiet in his home, or does the drummer next door have the right to play? Do you have the right to walk around naked in public, or do I have the right to experience public decency? According to Hobbs, the mere fact that you live in a society of any kind requires you to give up certain rights. Fortunately, in this country and in this age, you have a say in what those are.

On a final note - while having your love validated is not a right defended by the Constitution (or at least, it is questionable), religion unquestionably IS. That means, whether you worship God or a giant flying squirrel or nothing, you have the right to believe, act, and vote according to your conscience. We are a country that is free for Orthodox Jews and white supremacist groups, gays and straights, progressives and conservatives. The beauty of America is that we don't eliminate any opinions from the table - EVERYONE is invited to come, to discuss, to debate, to persuade, and ultimately to vote. Just because someone believes something for religious reasons does not disqualify them from the conversation. Let's be a civil society - let us uphold American values in the way we treat one another, and let us uphold the system of governance that has been the ensign of freedom to the rest of the world for the last 250 years.

Legislating (All) Morality

If it's okay with everyone, I'm going to argue with myself. I will be "K" and myself will me "M":

M: You can't legislate morality. I don't like religious people shoving their beliefs down my throat

K: I hear what you're saying. That sounds good. There are some flaws in your argument though, that you're probably not aware of. All of our laws are based on moral assumptions - in many ancient cultures, including Romans at the time of Jesus, it was clear to everyone that some people were inherently more valuable than others. The king was even seen as a God. It is a Judeo-Christian idea that America was founded on that all men are created equal - we legislate this moral belief that we all voted on and agreed to.

M: But there are some things that are just being opposed for religious reasons, not for rational or scientific reasons - like gay marriage for example. There are lots of scientific studies on my side.


K: What if I told you that gay couples are less likely to be monogamous, and more likely to be promiscuous? What if I told you that studies have shown that children raised by gay couples are more likely to be homosexual themselves? What if I cited research about the spread of disease, or the increase in social approval of legalized polygamy and incest, or the corollary reduced value of families in general, or the devaluation of gender, or the emasculation of American men?

M: I would say I don't believe you. Or, at least, I want to see the studies.

K: Why are you more willing to believe your studies than mine? I'm guessing it's because your studies make more sense to you - to your worldview, to your set of moral beliefs. What I hear you saying is, even though this is presented in a rational format, I don't believe evidence that disagrees with what I have already concluded I will believe. From the experiences of my life, I've decided that gay marriage is okay and good and not harmful, and I'm not going to change my opinion no matter what.

M: Well, you can twist things to mean whatever you want them to

K: That's the problem, isn't it? Everything can be twisted - even logic, even science. What about religion?

M: Well, religion isn't valid. It's not based on logic or reason - why should we care about religion when we're talking about politics?

K: Because that's the reason you're voting FOR gay marriage. By accepting some scientific studies and not others, you've demonstrated that your decision-making process, or the process by which you determine validity, has nothing to do with science. When you say the word "should", you're implying inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" in the universe, which, although you may call them ethics, others would call values or morals or religious beliefs - beliefs about what is real, what is good, and what is important, things that can't ultimately be proven. It doesn't have to have a Bible or Quran attached to it to be called a religion - it can be whatever you believe. And I won't disregard your beliefs just because they aren't in a specific category, or because they aren't particularly ancient, or because they're not logical, or because they contradict mine. Your beliefs are welcome, but so are mine.

K: Democracy doesn't mean keeping certain groups from legislating morality. It means allowing all groups to legislate morality - or rather, to vote on their own version of morality. That is the great misunderstanding. If we all have the opportunity to exercise our religious rights, hopefully the good that I believe is inherent in all systems of religious beliefs will rise to the occasion, and out of many good people's beliefs, a democratic society will be able to run with peace and prosperity.

Why I Believe in Marriage:

.Having now established the right to vote on the definition of marriage, I'd like to propose a forum to discuss what marriage should look like and why. More than half of Americans are in favor of maintaining the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, and yet, possibly because I live in Chapel Hill, the only voices I hear are those who oppose it. I'm convinced that those on the side of marriage are mostly scared to talk about it, because they don't know how. When the gay marriage movement has found ways to spin their issue using words like "rights" "equality" "love" and "freedom", we are left without a vocabulary of defense. We weren't trained for this! Instead of accepting a lost cause, I propose an opportunity to use one's voice and make a defense on behalf of the founding instutition of our country. Many will disagree with some of the reasons I have listed here - some of them may even be wrong, due to the natural course of changing scholarship - but surely you can all agree with at least one, and any reason to save marriage and families is worth fighting for. I have references and further discussion on a few points, and I can provide them on request.

Why I Believe in Saving Marriage

1. God says it's important for us, and part of his plan for mankind. (Gen 2:24)
2. In order to maintain family stability, there needs a social norm regulating where and when and with whom it is appropriate to have sex.
3. Changing the definition of marriage will increase the belief that the purpose of marriage is primarily about sex, as opposed to children, which will, among other things, further increase the birthrate outside of marriage.
4. Marriage provides the best possible environment for a child to be created and raised, and results in better outcomes for children in virtually every way.
5. Marriage highlights the important gender identities of both men and women in their roles as husband and wife, mother and father
6. Marriage, as a social contract with obligations, encourages responsibility, maturity, and morality.
7. Marriage usually leads to parenthood, which encourages the development of even more responsibility, maturity, and morality.
8. Strong families, tied together by marriage, are directly linked to strong communities and strong nations.
9. Marriage is the most financially efficient way of providing for children.
10. Marriage results in more long-term happiness for both parties than being single.
11. Marriage provides an incredible opportunity to rub away one another's rough spots, like two stones in a tumbler, eventually, paradoxically, becoming smooth and polished. It helps us grow and become better in a way no other institution can.
12. Marriage helps us understand how our Heavenly Father loves and understands us, his family
13. Marriage provides emotional, mental, physical, and financial stability for individuals.
14. Marriage reduces the need for individuals to rely on welfare or the support of the state

Please add your own.

Women and the Church: Cooperation vs. Hierarchy

Women and the Church: Cooperation vs. Hierarchy

I think most Christian women have had difficulty reconciling what seems to be the church's position on the role of women with our 21st century notions of female equality and empowerment. This article relates specifically to the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints on women, but its principles can be applied to all Christians. (I have chosen sections of it to share here: the original post can be read by clicking here)

To Do the Business of the Church: A Cooperative Paradigm for Examining Gendered Participation Within Church Organizational Structure 

by Neylan McBaine

Part I: The Crisis

I will be talking today about how women fit into the functional structure of LDS church governance; but, unlike many of the others speaking today, I do not have advanced degrees in my subject nor consider myself an academic. My credentials as someone qualified to talk about this subject come from: first, a lifetime of personal experience as a woman in the Church and now the mother of three daughters; second, my role as founder, in 2010, of a non-profit organization, The Mormon Women Project, which publishes stories of faithful Latter-day Saint women from around the world; and third, a twelve-year career in marketing and brand strategy including my current role as associate creative director Church-owned Bonneville Communications, the agency partnered with the Church on Mormon.org and the “I’m A Mormon” campaign.

Today, I will be applying that professional lens to examine the way our women are involved in church ecclesiastical functions, and also how we talk about that female ecclesiastical involvement to an external, media-informed audience. As a marketer, I know how important it is for what we say we do in regards to our women, what we actually do, and what the Lord says we should do to be in triangulated harmony with each other. Today, I will explore how we can improve on our current practice of that triangulation.

As I started my research and was still seeking a solid thesis for my paper, there seemed to be a barrage of articles and blog posts that addressed the gendered division of labor in the Church. At first I was delighted by the breadth and volume of these articles on gendered church work, coming from a wide range of sources and philosophies, from ByCommonConsent to A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman to Feminist Mormon Housewives to Times and Seasons. As part of my research, I sent out my own survey, as well, asking friends for their own insight into what the gendered division of labor means for them personally.

What happened was that the more I read, the more I took notes, the more I prayed and studied, the more I realized that my thesis needed to reflect the deeply emotional and sensitive nature of these discussions. Every expression of opinion packs in it feelings rooted in personal experience, in relationships with male leaders and family members, and in one’s personal relationship with God. This was a reality which I’ve understood to be true for many years but which this initial research offered me unfiltered.

I came to rest on a prominent, consistent theme: There is a tremendous amount of pain among our women regarding how they can or cannot contribute to the governance of our ecclesiastical organization and we need to pay attention to that pain. Listen to these statements, recently gathered across a variety of forums: “My 12-year-old son gets the priesthood and all of a sudden he’s got more power and authority than me!”¹ Or another: “I truly wish you could feel the pain I feel as a woman in the Church. I know my potential and worth, and to have it limited to the role of ‘presidee’ in all areas discredits me as a daughter of God.”² Or this one: “I feel like if I had been a ‘good’ Mormon, I wouldn’t have gotten my Master’s degree. I wouldn’t be working now, and I wouldn’t WANT to work so much. I’d want to be a mother and have kids and stay home.”³ Lastly: “I have a PhD and am a full-time professor at a university. I am also married and have three children. The only place in my life where I am treated like a lesser human being is at church.”⁴ I could go on and on.

How is this possible? Why is this happening when you walk into Deseret Book and see shelves of books just for women? What is going wrong when we hear women praised and adored from the pulpit? We have wonderful men in this church who are good husbands, sons, and bishops. If we take off the table the possibility of structural changes and work from an assumption that gendered segregation is divinely mandated, the burden is on us as members to figure out what it is we are doing with our current tools that is not living up to our potential. The pain is real.

 ...

While some too flippantly dismiss or judge the pain, there are others for whom the pain seems to define their spiritual lives and, like my former Relief Society president, they measure every element of their church experience through the lens of that pain. “Women are the support staff to the real work of men. Period,” is one woman’s statement, as she describes how she understands the division of labor. “It’s a patriarchal tradition” is another response I noted in my own personal survey. “There is no such thing as ‘good’ patriarchy,” concludes yet another. Most of our women, however, are somewhere in the middle: not sweeping the issue under the carpet or judging those who struggle, but also not dismissing our ecclesiastical organization as entirely flawed or even abusive to women.

How can we help more in our community find peace in a middle ground, where the pain is acknowledged and we provide doctrinally sound tools and behavioral guidelines for addressing that pain? The first step must be to extract exactly what it is about our current rhetoric and practices that is at the source of this crisis among our women.

Part III: Identifying the Sources of Pain

As we start that exercise, allow yourself for a moment to step into the shoes of someone who struggles with finding her place. Consider, for instance, the narratives that define the rights of passage of our youth and the source of this bitterness may become illuminated.

So many of our narratives about our youth involve those moments when a dad ordains his son to the Aaronic priesthood, and then the first Sunday the son gets to pass the sacrament, or bless the sacrament, or go home teaching or collect fast offerings or become an Eagle Scout or get a mission call…. These are times of spiritual outpourings and parental pride, the joy of eternal progression made tangible through the bodily actions taken on by that worthy son. It’s not often a mother describes a similarly gripping scene when her daughter graduates from Mia Maids to Laurels.

Imagine the disappointment (my six-year old granddaughter discovers that) passing the sacrament is a job only for boys. Crestfallen, and with that childish sense of entitlement, my daughter asked, “But what do I get when I turn twelve?”

…It made me very sad. My question is not what my daughter “gets” when she turns twelve, but what will be asked of her? What messages will she get about her role in the church?

On the one hand we want to impress upon young men what a privilege and honor it is to [act in these sacred responsibilities], while on the other hand we insist to our young women (and women of all ages) that it’s really no big deal. Seriously, ladies, you don’t want [to have to do this stuff]. You shouldn’t want [to have to]. Nothing but trouble, that priesthood! And yet, very important. Without it our church would be nothing. Worse than nothing, a fraud. But at the same time, you aren’t missing out on anything. Trust us!⁹

...

 

The sadness expressed in these narratives and in many others that I’ve heard over the years does not necessarily come from the fact that our daughters won’t get to do the same things as our sons. It is rarely driven by the “pride” the bishopric member I quoted earlier describes as power grubbing or seeking beyond the mark. Rather, the pain simply comes from the disconnect between our identities as women in our day-to-day lives in the external world and our identities as women in the institutional church. We are not a hermetic religion, and so we function in a world where individuality and opportunity are celebrated as the hallmarks of civilized societies. Valuing the individual’s right to aspire to any circumstance or opportunity is practically the mantra of the 21st century. And yet, as women functioning within the ecclesiastical church structure, we are asked to put aside our understanding of how contemporary societies and workplaces ideally should function and instead grasp hold of a very different model. We require that our women suspend their understanding of social equality as it is currently represented in our modern society. This is consistent with our belief that we should be “in the world” but not “of” it, but we members should not flippantly dismiss how difficult this can be in actual practice for a woman whose role in worldly society has changed so swiftly and dramatically over the past hundred years.

Desiring to be used, engaged, recognized and appreciated for our public contributions is not, for most women, about the glory of public praise or being in the spotlight. It’s not about wanting to eradicate the divine differences between women and men. It is simply about a basic human need in every person – man or woman – to be told, “You are needed. You matter. You have a purpose. Your opinions matter. Not just at home behind closed doors, not just with our children, as essential as those influences are, but also in the broadest context of the Lord’s kingdom.” I was speaking last week with a woman who runs an NGO in Uganda, offering reading and computer literacy classes to men and women who are coming out of the bush after ten plus years of being child soldiers or sex slaves in Joseph Kony’s guerilla regime. She told me that most of her students desperately want to create Facebook accounts. When I expressed surprise, she quoted one of her students as saying, “I want people to know that I am. That I have an identity of my own. That I have a personality and can make choices. That I survived the bush, that I am strong.” In the face of life’s greatest suffering, one need that arises above many others is the need to be recognized as a unique and valued contributor

Part IV: The Cooperative Paradigm

Having established the magnitude of this crisis and having struck at some of the roots of the pain, I’d like to turn now to what we can do to alleviate this pain. There is a premier rule in public relations that you cannot tell a story that is not true and still have it resonate or feel authentic to the audience you are trying to convince. PR strategy must reflect how an organization is actually behaving or it can never ring true, and that is true with external audiences as well as internal audiences. The internal audience must be behaving in the way that they say they are behaving, or else they will ultimately be exposed or criticized. Right now in regards to our women, there are gaps between what we say we are doing, what the Lord has told us we ideally should be doing and what we actually are doing. If we bring these three points of triangulation into harmony, we will have greater integrity, stronger convictions and happier women...

Let’s look at one common narrative we share when confronted about our system of gender segregation in this contemporary world. Last year, the Washington Post asked Michael Otterson and representatives from 19 other religious congregations to comment in 500 words on the following prompt: “Former president Jimmy Carter has said, ‘The discrimination against women on a global basis is very often attributable to the declaration by religious leaders in Christianity, Islam and other religions that women are inferior in the eyes of God.’ Many traditions teach that while both men and women are equal in value, God has ordained specific roles for men and women. Those distinct duties often keep women out of leadership positions in their religious communities. What is religion’s role in gender discrimination?”¹¹

The title of the response from Otterson was “What Mormon Equality Looks Like,” implying that there is a system of equality in our leadership that simply needs to be revealed to an external audience. Otterson wrote:

"I put this question to three women in my church and asked them for their own insights on how they see their role and life in the Church….

"Here are their points about life as a Mormon woman.

"Women in the Mormon faith regularly preach from the pulpit to the congregation and lead prayers during Sunday services. As a result, today’s Latter-day Saint women tend to be well educated and confident. Most have experience in speaking in public, directing or presiding over organizations, teaching and leading by example. Brigham Young University turns out more female than male graduates."

The negative response to Otterson’s piece among the Church commentary in the bloggernacle was intense and personally painful to Otterson, who is usually so in tune with the membership. One thing that was misunderstood was that he did not write the title of the piece, which so cavalierly used the big “E” word: Equality. The laudable fact that he reached externally to women to guide his response was overshadowed by one significant disconnect and the disconnect was this: the fact that our women preach from the pulpit and say prayers in Sacrament meeting does not make them “equal” to our men, according to any publically accepted definition of that word.

Why do we do this? Why, when confronted with an intentionally inflammatory accusation like “gender discrimination,” do we instinctively default to defensive claims that our women are actually just the same as our men because they speak in church, go to school, and get to feel the Spirit the same way? We so often instinctually fall back on earthly paradigms to describe our structure. In an effort to bridge our own experience with the experience of our external audience, we rely on comparisons to hierarchical power structures of fallen world institutions: governments, corporations, and universities in which men and women ideally work side by side to advance to opportunities available to both genders. We talk in terms of opportunity, advancement, visibility, of hierarchical power, which are hallmarks of advanced worldly institutions, in America at least. We highlight statistical equalities like how many women graduate from college. If you’d like further proof of this tendency, go read through some of the answers members have given on Mormon.org to the question, “Why don’t women hold the Priesthood?” and note how many times those answers cite the fact that our women speak in Sacrament meeting or run the Primary.

But I call this the Apples-To-Snapples comparison: leading an auxiliary organization that has influence over a subset of the population is not the same as leading the entire organization. According to the world’s definition of equality, women’s leadership opportunities in the Church organization are a watered down version of the real thing, with lots of sugar added.

Continuing to rely on the Apples-to-Snapples comparison is not good enough because, in the outside world, when you say men and women have equal leadership opportunities, you mean — at least ideally — that men and women have the same cleared path to advance to the same positions of influence and authority. When the outside world looks at our structure and sees men ecclesiastically responsible for even the highest ranked women in our organization, the media perceives our claims as being false advertising and we lose our credibility to tell our own story. It then becomes someone else’s job to “uncover” the truth for us, leading down a path of exposes and betrayals.

Is there gender discrimination in the Church? If discrimination means separation according to gender, yes. If it means delineation of opportunities based solely on gender, yes. Many argue that different opportunities based on gender is unfair, adverse, and/or abusive by definition. The Church does not satisfy secular gender-related egalitarian ideals, period; and our institutional behavior fits that definition of gender discrimination in several inescapable ways. We shrink away from accurately representing how we work, thinking it condemns us as a church. And in the eyes of the world it might. But the Church does not, and should not, operate according to secular concepts of power, status, etc.; and if we attempt to justify ourselves in this paradigm we will not only fail, but betray our own ideals.

We need a narrative that doesn’t rely on justifications. It shouldn’t rely on comparisons to fallen world paradigms. It needs to stand on its own, while acknowledging that it may have little precedent and little comparison to worldly paradigms that describe gender-related egalitarian ideals.

What is this new narrative? I’d like to take the time to explore a possible option now that is specifically tailored to a marketing or public relations context and also has integrity for an internal audience.

In preparing his response to the Washington Post‘s prompt, Otterson asked three women to share their opinions with him. I was one of the three women that the public affairs team approached to ask for input, but out of respect to the fact that he didn’t incorporate any of my specific ideas, he left my name out. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with Otterson this since then, and he and the public affairs team have been exceptionally receptive and sensitive to my ideas. I have been thrilled with the seriousness Public Affairs has shown to the concerns and pain of our women. However, at the time he was writing this response for the Washington Post, 500 words in an online panel discussion was not the appropriate place in which to spell out a new paradigm for explaining our gendered structure. I understood these limitations of space and context myself as a marketing professional. I’m grateful to him for the unqualified support and interest he’s shown me since then.

To explore what this alternative rhetoric might be, allow me to share with you some of the thoughts I sent to the public affairs team when they first approached me about how I would respond to the Washington Post‘s prompt:

"I do not suggest presenting a blanket claim that women have leadership roles within the organization. While we can certainly point to the Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary, the ratio of global female leaders to male leaders is so small that pointing it out only serves to highlight the discrepancy. Also, bringing attention to the fact that our women only lead other women and children is playing into the logic of the prompt because it can then be inferred that women are not considered of high enough value to be more than special interest figureheads. I also think that taking the “look… women really do lead!” angle sounds inherently patronizing coming from a male author.

"The prompt suggests women do not hold leadership positions, therefore women are inferior. I suggest we argue it is true that Mormon women do not hold an equal number of global leadership positions as men, but that is not because they are of lesser value. It is because we believe we are working in an eternal paradigm in which roles and responsibilities are divided up cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Mormonism is a lay church so the members are the ministers, and this is a completely different organizational structure than traditional Christian priesthood or ministry, which is defined as an exclusive or trained clergy. Thus, when we talk about our ministerial structure to the outside world, we are starting from very different foundational understandings of what ecclesiastical ministry means.

"The prompt’s logic doesn’t adequately leave room for our organization’s cooperative structure of service, where no one person is paid for his or her ministry or deemed of greater value than another and where each brings unique resources to his or her responsibilities.

• Working towards a Zionistic cooperation within an earthly paradigm means that we often default to the human ordering with which we are most familiar: that of hierarchy and the currency of power. In an organization such as a church where no one is getting rich off of personal dedication to the cause, hierarchical power is sometimes weighed as the greatest currency because it is the human way of measuring success on the way to a goal. However, in a cooperative structure where people are rotating positions every few years and no one is materialistically rewarded over another person, that hierarchy is a flimsy currency on which to base one’s value.
• In the cooperative structure that is the LDS Church’s lay ministry, there is a division of roles for the benefit of the organizational order. This division of labor is, we believe, a reflection of divine mandates given to Joseph Smith. The division of labor — not just among men and women but among varying age groups, geographical groups and also among individuals — is a central theme of the Doctrine & Covenants. For example, in March of 1835, Joseph recorded a revelation from the Lord that specified the organizational structure of the church governance: Section 107. Close reading of this revelation shows how abundantly the Lord uses phrases such as, “of necessity” and “it must needs be” and “to do the business of the church” in describing how important an ordered approach was to church administration. Similar language is used in the Book of Mormon when congregations of believers are organized in ancient civilizations.¹²
• Nowhere does the Lord intimate that various callings and responsibilities are intended to give one person power over another. In fact, the words “lead” and “leader” appear nowhere in this section, and similarly, the word “leader” appears no where in the Book of Mormon. Even that book’s most admirable leaders, like Captain Moroni, are described as “servant[s]” and “righteous follower[s] of Christ.” This emphasis on organizational stability, on the specific roles and responsibilities of various parties to act as facilitators within the larger community, is, we believe, of divine origin and eternal value.

Lastly, the world calculates in terms of top-down power; God’s calculations are exactly opposite. In the divine kingdom the servant holds the highest status, and in the Church every position is a service position. Given the obvious parallels between the Church’s administrative channels and a business organization, it’s easy to mistakenly assess the Church as a ladder-climbing corporation with God in a corner office at the top; but in this line of thinking we only reveal our shoddy human understanding of power.

In concluding my thoughts to the Public Affairs team, I finished by saying, “When we claim, as we regularly do, that the Church as an organization gives women and men equal leadership opportunities (which is simply not true) we’re using the same paradigm of power that President Carter is implying and the prompt assumes, which is an inadequate paradigm for evaluating power dynamics in an ecclesiastical institution such as ours. The paradigm is the problem, and must be addressed if we’re to offer anything beyond hollow excuses for women’s status in the Church. To argue, as Carter did, that women have inferior status and inadequate power because they lack hierarchical leadership opportunities is to superimpose a human construct onto a divine one. I – and many women I know — would love to see us moving away from this rhetoric.”

This idea of a cooperative paradigm is much harder to explain in our modern-day, fast-paced, soundbite-oriented news outlets than simply falling back on the Apples-to-Snapples comparison. My own explanation above was considerably more than Otterson’s allotted 500 words, and there are theologians and scholars who have produced thoughtful commentary of their own, such as Don Sorenson and Valerie Hudson’s Women in Eternity, Women in Zion, and Beverly Campbell’s Eve and the Choice Made In Eden. But whatever rhetoric we move to, it is essential that we rely on a doctrinally-rich explanation that challenges and even confounds fallen world paradigms rather than plays unfavorably right into them.

One of beauties of the cooperative paradigm over the hierarchical paradigm is that the cooperative paradigm more accurately incorporates both ecclesiastical and sacerdotal definitions of priesthood, which seems to be understood generally throughout the church as being much more gendered than a close reading of scripture suggests. For example, let us return to the organizational language of the Doctrine and Covenants. Section 84 states: “And again, the offices of elder and bishop are necessary appendages belonging unto the high priesthood. And again, the offices of teacher and deacon are necessary appendages belonging to the lesser priesthood.” (84: 29-30; see also 107: 5) Pay attention to that word “appendages.” An appendage is “a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important.” Are not the offices of elder or bishop or teacher or deacon appendages to the priesthood, and not the priesthood itself? Are these so different from the female organizations, which we routinely call “auxiliaries”?

Pulitzer Prizing-winning Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has written about the vocabulary we use to describe our various congregants. She notes that our casual interchange of the words “men” and “priesthood” contributes to our misunderstanding that the men only have the power to do God’s work. Have you ever heard a member of the bishopric thank “the Priesthood” for passing the sacrament, instead of the “Young Men” or even the “men of the Priesthood”? The bishopric in my ward does an admirable job of thanking “the men of the Priesthood” rather than the “Priesthood” itself, but it’s likely that each of us, despite our best intentions, carelessly conflates the power to act in God’s name with the vehicle designed to administrate its use. Prof. Ulrich describes the conflation this way, “Because we use the word priesthood to refer to both the vehicle and the power, we get into some curious situations, almost like mistaking a utility pole for electricity or a sacrament cup for water.”¹³ Elder Dallin H. Oaks has spoken on the importance of this clarity of language as well: “We must never forget that the priesthood is not owned by or embodied by those who hold it.”¹⁴

In the survey I sent out to my own network of women, I asked what explanation the respondents would give for why only boys get to pass the sacrament. The number one answer I received was, “Because they have the priesthood.” Equating the priesthood with a gendered privilege, like passing the sacrament, reinforces over and over again the understanding that men “get” something the women don’t and the women are therefore lacking and lesser. Some in my survey included as part of their answer that if men “get” the Priesthood, then women get motherhood, which is an explanation that brings great peace to many. However, it also makes some women extremely uncomfortable. 

Examining the difficulties in the motherhood-to-priesthood comparison would be the subject of an entire other paper, but the arguments broadly fall into a few points: First of all, saying motherhood is the complementary gift to priesthood again solidifies the gendered assignment of the power to act under God’s direction as something only men can do. The complement to motherhood, the argument goes, is actually fatherhood. Secondly, a man’s ability to act in the name of the priesthood is something that is earned through worthiness and by personal triumph of character. The only way a man can exercise the power of God effectively is by being sufficiently righteous to represent God. By contrast, personal worthiness is not a prerequisite for a woman’s ability to bear children. There are many righteous, worthy women who are not mothers and some of them will never be mothers in this life. Becoming a mother is beyond the control of many women, despite their personal worthiness or triumph over character.¹⁵ In a church where more than half of our women are single, we need to tread carefully when claiming a parallel between motherhood and priesthood.

Returning to the cooperative paradigm, it might feel counterintuitive to some to be backing off bold claims of equality in an age when we are striving to be relevant to and more widely respected by the outside world. However, I feel that this alternate paradigm—explained and reiterated thoroughly over time and in the right contexts inside and outside of the Church—actually offers us a much wider platform on which to explore doctrine, bring others along in that exploration, and to value each other cooperatively rather than hierarchically. Most importantly, this alternate paradigm gives us the conviction we need to make sure that the currency of power does not dictate our behavior as servant leaders. For my purposes as a marketer, the cooperative paradigm provides an answer of integrity that opens the door for meaningful external dialogs, as well as internal dialogues, to which I now turn.

Part V: The Internal Shift

Next week on the Mormon Women Project, I will be posting an exclusive, historical interview with Maxine Hanks, one of the “September Six” who was excommunicated from the Church in September 1993. Last year, Maxine was personally invited by church leadership to be rebaptized as a member of the Church, an invitation she heartily accepted after a 20-year journey into feminist theology, including periods as a scholar of Gnosticism and a nondenominational chaplain. In her interview, Hanks reflects on why, after studies and experiences that took her as far away from Mormonism as theologically possible, she choose to again bear witness of the truthfulness of Mormonism.

Hanks says, “I don’t think gender tensions in Mormonism are due to inequality in the religion, but due to invisibility of that equality. The equality is embedded, inherent in Mormon theology, history, texts, structures. Gender equality is built into the blueprints of Mormonism, but obscured in the elaborations…. The inherent gender equality in Mormonism just needs to be seen by extracting it from other distracting elements and contexts.”

What kinds of initiatives could we take as church members to excavate this gender equality that we currently not doing? Harvard professor Clayton Christiansen, known for his work on disruptive innovation, often speaks to LDS Harvard students about how many of the standard Church programs—seminary, Family Home Evening, for example—started from the initiative of a small group of church members who saw a need and innovated ways to address that need that didn’t compromise doctrine or divinely mandated ecclesiastical practices in any way. How can we apply this same innovative spirit to the arena of women’s responsibilities at church? How can we put into practice our desires to see this cooperative community become more of our practiced reality? In essence, while we are reigning in our external claims, we need simultaneously to be broadening the practice of egalitarian ideals in our behavior so that with these opposite pulls we can have both internal and external meet harmoniously in the middle. I ask each man and woman in the audience today: What are you doing to excavate the power of the women in your ward and make their contributions more visible?

(back to Kindra, M.S.W.)
The second half of this article delineates a number of possibilities for making the power and influence of women more visible in families, wards, and stakes. These include considering who is invited to meetings, what order talks are assigned, using quotations by women, what type of activities are planned for young men and women, how auxiliary presidents are addressed, recognizing mothers after a baby's blessing, and having women help in planning and decision making when possible.


While it is difficult to navigate the fine line of changing actions without changing paradigms, I think the potential impact it will have on people's perceptions of the women around them will be powerful. Women have wisdom, and experience, and influence, and they should be recognized for this. We as women, on the other hand, have the responsibility to understand our own history in the church and recognize our influence and power for the impact it has had without filtering it through a worldly paradigm that puts everyone higher or lower than someone else.