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June 18, 2009

The Priesthood is Magic

Here's the basic process of how you get a PhD at an American university:

1. You graduate from high school or get a GED.

2. You graduate from college with decent grades.

3. You take the GRE.

4. You apply to universities and get accepted somewhere.

5. You do coursework for a few years.

6. You pass your comprehensive exams.

7. You do a lot of research and write a prospectus for a dissertation.

8. You write the dissertation.

9. You defend the dissertation.

10. You get a diploma.

It generally takes somewhere from four to fourteen years, and you change considerably over the process--supposedly you mature and your ideas become more complex, and you also get poorer and more cynical and tired of living without decent insurance. But after that, you're considered an expert in something--not necessarily something important or relevant to your life in general, but something. You even have a title to demonstrate that.

In other words, you have to earn the degree, and there are tests and requirements to help ensure that people do. And while some PhDs are more prestigious than others, the power or relevance of any is greatly limited outside of certain contexts. Having a PhD in art history doesn't help you make wise decisions about retirement investments. Plus, most people don't really give a shit that you decided to go to school forever.

Here's how you get the priesthood in the Mormon church, which supposedly is this great power that can affect almost every aspect of the priesthood holder's life:

1. You're born male.

2. You're baptized. Let's say for argument that you're baptized at age 8, which is the soonest people can be baptized into the Mormon church.

3. When you turn 12, you're made a deacon in the Aaronic priesthood, provided you go to go church from time to time and aren't a juvenile sex offender, though there's some wiggle room on that last bit. Twenty-five years ago or so, the bishop asked the congregation of my home ward to sustain the decision to give the priesthood to a kid in the ward. Everyone agreed that this was completely appropriate--except for my mother, who raised her hand to say that she was opposed this. It caused quite a stir--it had never happened before in our ward that anyone could remember. After the meeting she was asked why she objected, and she pointed out that the boy they wanted to give the priesthood to had been caught molesting his neighbor's four-year-old daughter. Eventually the leaders agreed that that was a reason to withhold giving the guy the priesthood--but it never occurred to them themselves. He was 12; he was male; his parents brought him to church; why wouldn't he be made a deacon?

4. When you turn 14, provided you still attend church and aren't in juvey, you are made a teacher in the Aaronic priesthood.

5. When you turn 16, if you're still attending church and not in juvey, you are made a priest in the Aaronic priesthood. It's desirable that you adhere to other commandments of the church, like not fornicating or stealing or getting drunk or high, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who knew her male friends were getting rip-roaring drunk or stoned on Saturday night, then blessing the sacrament with raging hangovers on Sunday morning. (Wearing sunglasses and falling asleep while you're on the stand before the congregation is a pretty good giveaway.)

6. When you turn 18, provided you're still attending church, not a felon, and express a desire/willingness to have it, you graduate to the Melchizedek priesthood and become an elder. That's right: you're made an elder at 18, which confuses a lot of people who quite logically assume that "elder" means "dude who is older."

7. You'll probably stay an elder for a good long while, but eventually, when you're almost old enough to be a REAL elder, you might be made a 70 or a high priest.

Anyway, the point is, being made a deacon, teacher, priest or elder isn't a recognition of anything special about a person, except for HIS gender. You don't EARN the priesthood if you're male; you can only FORFEIT your right to it, by breaking a commandment (or rather, by getting caught). And as homophobic as the church is, it's striking that being gay doesn't automatically disqualify a man from the priesthood; you can BE gay and have the priesthood; you just can't DO gay.

Getting the priesthood doesn't require any special wisdom or goodness or maturity; instead, it's supposed to CONFER those things. Except that it doesn't, as GMA notes in this comment, writing,

So when you?re ordained and nothing changes, and they tell you that you have the priesthood and it?s the most important thing in the universe but you don?t feel anything, you start to question what this whole thing is all about...

Instead, it makes it harder, not easier, to be righteous, and even Joseph Smith recognized that when he wrote "We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion" (D&C 121:39).

The real point of the priesthood is that it's A) magic and B) the way you show who's in charge.

It's this mysterious magic power that works when men who have it put their magic hands on the magically-receptive heads of others. It's how the sick are healed and evil spirits are driven out and spaces sanctified. The only ritual accessory needed is a little oil to put on the heads of people getting blessings. Other than that, you don't need fire, or smoke, or special rocks, or anything.

It's not surprising that Joseph Smith would claim and confer a special magic power, since he was always interested in magic.

But the fact that this power is magic means it doesn't have to be A) just or B) logical.

Magic gets to pick who it exercises it. Magic doesn't have to explain to mere mortals how it works. Magic only works as magic, in fact, if it's mysterious and unexplainable. If its functions and processes are understood, it's called science. (There's my undergraduate education coming in handy again: I picked that insight up from a book I read in 1985, called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A Yates.)

The priesthood sucks because it works without accountability to human beings. It doesn't have to meet their needs, or be fair, or be earned, or be monitored, or be understood. In fact, it maintains its mystery and its power by NOT doing those things, by being random and selective and illogical.

This is one more reason I don't want it, and think institutions should renounce it.

Posted by holly at 2:56 PM | Comments (2)

June 17, 2009

Stunted and Misshapen by the Priesthood

The concern I closed my last entry with was this:

I began to wonder if it was the fact that I DIDN'T have the priesthood, and therefore DIDN'T have a certain respect for it, that has made me willing and able to call these guys by their first names. I wonder if men respect the authority of the priesthood more because they have it.

In 2002, Sunstone published an essay of mine in which I recount standing up in a zone conference and saying to my second (as opposed to my much cooler first) mission president, when he got Melchizedek on our asses and started issuing punitive, brutal directives, "President ___________, why are you doing this? This is stupid. It's wrong."

This was analogous to a private standing up during a briefing by a colonel about a military mission and saying, "Why are you commanding us to do these backasswards things? This is stupid. It's wrong."

In other words, it was a big fucking deal. Now, to my mission president's credit, although he responded by shutting down the meeting in order to shut me and everyone else up, he also admitted right then and there that I was RIGHT, and he never said another word about the horrible policies he had once wanted to institute.

We discussed the incident later, when I apologized. As I wrote in the essay,

Even though I felt that what I'd said was right--and as I realized upon reflection, he hadn't contradicted me after I said what he was doing was stupid and wrong; what he'd said was "You're right, Sister"--I still knew that the rule I had broken by saying it was simply too important. "I'm so sorry, President," I said. "I was wrong to disagree with you, and I'm sorry I made a scene."

"Well, mostly I was hurt," he replied. "I thought that you of all people understood me better than that. You should have known that it had nothing to do with you. When those elders started nitpicking about how to keep the rules in the most precise way possible, you should have just ignored them and me and sat and read your scriptures, and then when it was all over, you should've just gone about your business the way you wanted to. I know why you do what you do, and I wish you would've trusted my motives a little more too."

But how could I have understood him as well as he wanted? I know now that any person or institution that requires unquestioning obedience forfeits not only the right to be understood, but the possibility of it: understanding can happen only after questioning, comparison, exploration. Men in the Church, I was told often enough, were in authority over me; I should not try to be on an equal level with them. But exerting the authority of the priesthood seemed to render men not larger and stronger, but stunted and misshapen, unworthy to demand from me the mutual respect and understanding I felt ought to exist between me and other women, who were my equals. The good relationships I achieved with men occurred when they sought to minimize their authority, not when they sought to enlarge it as President Bertram had done that day. (emphasis added special, for this blog entry.)

I realize that the process of leaving the church differs for everyone who goes through it. But I confess that I have never understood a certain deference to or interest in the priesthood. It's not just what Jonathan points out in this comment, that the priesthood is largely administrative; it's that seems to hurt all but the strongest, most moral of men--same as political power. I don't know if there's something extra pernicious about the priesthood itself (I'm perfectly willing to believe that there is), or the sense of entitlement it so often involves.

This sense of entitlement plays out not only in the fact that men with positions of authority feel they have the right to tell others how to live, to chastise or excommunicate them when they misbehave, to ask about the details of sexual activity--you name any of the conventional ways priesthood leaders "exercise" that authority. It's also obvious in the ways that even men who see the limitations of the priesthood still focus on men's concerns, at the expense of women's, and privilege men's voices to the exclusion of women's. This is something I've written about repeatedly: Even at Sunstone, there are more straight men participating in panels on how to make life better and more just for gay members of the church (admittedly, a very important topic) than there are men on panels about how to improve the lives of women (which should also be an important topic). Furthermore, most of those panels ostensibly about the concerns of gay members of the church (though there's rarely a mention of lesbians) are filled entirely by men. Gay men often feel entitled to claim and retain the privileges of the priesthood at the expense of their wives' happiness and well-being. It's fucking INFURIATING.

I know, I know--most of these guys are NICE guys, and they can't be expected to understand certain things about others' experience, because (as a member of my family told me) empathy is just too difficult to strive for. (This was before political conservatives turned empathy into a liability.) That's a position I critique here.

I don't have priesthood envy, mostly because I don't think the priesthood is good for people. This is not to say that I don't want to see gender equality and parity--I do, not only in the church, but everywhere else. But I really doubt that extending to women the priesthood, at least in its current form, is going to help with that. I think it would be better to abolish the priesthood, or to reinvent it. I realize that's never going to happen, but I still think it would be a good thing.

The thing is, Jonathan is right that "Women in the church can heal others, perform ordinances and miracles" but what he doesn't acknowledge is that HUMAN BEINGS can do these things--in and out of the church. We don't need these old gits in Salt Lake City or Rome or wherever to give us permission to develop our potential as human beings.

So what I want to know is this: why, even after we realize that, do we defer to them? Why does it often take time and work, beyond merely leaving the rejecting the doctrines of the church (which theoretically should be enough, right?), for people to feel they are the equal of the person who, however blameless or generous or honorable his (and it's virtually always a HE) motives in wielding this coercive authority and acting on behalf of a repressive institution, is, nonetheless, wielding coercive authority and acting on behalf of a repressive institution?

That's the first question. And the second is, Does holding the priesthood make it harder or easier to question and/or reject the authority of the priesthood?

Posted by holly at 6:46 AM | Comments (2)

June 16, 2009

Men with First Names and Sweaty Palms

In John R's account of the conversation with the stake president in which said SP informed him of his impending excommunication, John wrote

This is the first time I've stood toe-to-toe with a Mormon leader and felt like his complete equal in every way. It's liberating to not feel beholden to Church authority and priesthood power.

In her discussion of John's post, chanson responded to this statement by writing

This jumps out at me because it's so alien to my own experience. Have other former believers felt like John has here? The last time the church leaders held any power over me, it was at BYU, where they had power to do real things to me, like expel me and withhold my transcripts, not just woo-stuff like withholding the keys to the Celestial Kingdom, etc. And before that, church leaders had authority over me because they were grown-ups and I was a kid. To me, John's statement would be like me being surprised that high school teachers are now my peers, when once they were so intimidating.

in a comment, I stated that I was nonplussed by John's statement. First of all, John has the priesthood (at least currently, whether he chooses to exercise it or not); he is the equal of certain church leaders in ways that I as a woman never would have been in their eyes. (Note: after I had drafted this entry and was finding all the links for comments and so forth, John responded to that, stating, "even if I (supposedly) held the priesthood, a) I was never comfortable with it, and b) in the Church I was still placed firmly in hierarchical relationships with other men.")

In this entry I'm going to provide all of what I said in that comment on Main Street Plaza, plus a little extra stuff, mostly as background and because I want a record of it here, but really this is all preliminary stuff to get to a discussion about gender and the priesthood.

Anyway. I certainly felt that I was the equal if not the superior of a great many Mormon leaders throughout my life.

It was, interestingly enough, a Mormon leader who helped me see this clearly and acknowledge it explicitly. Before my mission, there was a meeting in which a couple of men flexed their priesthood muscles and said, "Things are going to be the way we want, because we're in charge and we said so."

Afterward I complained to my favorite institute teacher, who had also been in the meeting, saying that these guys abused their power. He said, "I'd like to draw a distinction between authority and power. Those guys, they have authority. You have no authority. What you have is power. None of them has the personal power you have, which is why they got so upset when you disagreed with them. They could never stand up to authority; they can only wield it."

After my mission, before I finally left the church in my mid 20s, I went toe-to-toe with Mormon leaders all the time, who were often outraged by my refusal to shut up when they told me to. And rather by accident, I learned how deep their sense of entitlement and superiority was. Since I didn't respect some of these guys or their positions, it was rather natural to begin thinking of them as "Bob" or "Jim" instead of "President Smith" or "Bishop Jones." But when I slipped up and actually used their first names aloud, oh my god! It was like I'd assaulted them! How dare I! How dare I presume a level of equality! How dare I address them as they addressed me!

After that, except for a few really remarkable men who had treated me with respect and equality from the get-go, they were all just middle-aged dudes with first names and sweaty hands I'd prefer not to shake.

And even the good ones--well, if I was ever in a situation where they invoked their church authority and I wanted to show that it didn't much carry much weight with me, I would use their first names. Admittedly, THAT felt weird. One night, almost six or seven years after my mission, my first mission president tracked down my parents, got my phone number in Iowa where I was going to grad school, and called me, so he could ask me about entropy, a concept I had introduced him to once during an interview on my mission. It was nice to catch up with him, and of course by habit I called him "President Carlson" at first. But then at the end he said that he "was worried about my soul and wished I would come back to church" so I wouldn't go to hell (that last bit about hell was implied rather than stated explicitly). It was kindly meant--he really did care about me--so I responded to that kindness rather than the judgment and told him that I didn't worry about that, but I still ended the conversation by saying "Good night, Monte" rather than "Good night, President Carlson." This even though I continued to call him President Carlson in my mind (and in the occasional blog entry).

So I was really interested by this comment from John (which follows a really funny comment you have to read for its own sake) in which he says

I couldn't bring myself to address him as "President", so I called and introduced him as "Doctor." So I guess even if it took me three years to finally shake off my irrational fear of ecclesiastical authority, my inerudite lips still pay homage to the power of the institutionally bequeathed title

I would have called the guy by his first name. We both would have found it weird, but that's what I would have done. That's what I DID do in similar situations.

And as I thought about this, I began to wonder if it was the fact that I DIDN'T have the priesthood, and therefore DIDN'T have a certain respect for it, that has made me willing and able to call these guys by their first names. I wonder if men respect the authority of the priesthood more because they have it.

p.s. Please also read The Priesthood is Magic.

Posted by holly at 7:42 AM | Comments (8)

June 13, 2009

Torture and the Temple

There's an entry I've been meaning to write for a long time, about the links between Mormonism and torture in the Bush administration, but luckily I found that someone had already done it, and done it quite well. In the April 2008 issue of Sunstone, Boyd Peterson has an excellent essay entitled "Mormonism and Torture--Paradoxes and First Principles." I didn't read it when it came out because the magazine arrived when I busy getting my house ready to sell, and I stuck magazines in boxes rather than read them.

I am glad I finally got around to correcting that oversight. I highly recommend this essay if, for some reason, you missed it like me. My only complaint with it is that it makes no mention of the ways torture is enabled by the temple ceremony.

Now, Sunstone has a strict policy of not discussing the details of the temple, which isn't all that remarkable, since when you go through the temple, you make a vow never to discuss it. There was, however, an article in the most recent issue about how Mormons might make the temple seem less weird and more respectable to people who will never understand what's going on in there. The article is seriously whacked. It enraged me as few things have lately, and I seriously considered both A) posting an angry rant about it and B) writing a letter to the editor of Sunstone about all the failings in the article, but then I decided I had better things to do than explain to the pompous Mormon man who wrote that delusional piece of shit just how clueless he is about the reasons why people REALLY dislike the temple.

But then John R posted something on his blog about how he's probably going to be exed for a previous blog entry about the gruesome death threats made in the temple.

In a comment, John illustrated how he felt about the vow of silence he made in the temple with this analogy:

let's say I had a consensual sexual relationship with a much older and caring adult teacher while I was, say, thirteen. S/he swore me to secrecy, and out of affection, I complied. I grow up and realize that the relationship was wrong and that the same teacher was still sleeping with their students. Would I be morally bound by my promise to secrecy or by the need to protect potential victims from harm.

Well. This caused A LOT of consternation among believing Mormons. How dare John compare the temple to any sort of abuse?

So I wrote this (which I am cleaning up here a little, because a bout of PTSD hindered my proofreading):

I think John's analogy is very apt, deficient only in the level of violence, threat and divine retribution involved. If the adult also did something like, say, drown a puppy in a bathtub and inform the minor that any discussion of the details of the relationship would make God so angry that he would want the minor to die, both in this life and next, then it would mirror more closely what actually went on in the temple.

(and, incidentally, I am able to offer that insight because I read a book where something similar happens: Riptide by Marion Smith. It has its problems as literature, but as a discussion of abuse and coercion in Mormonism, it's pretty damn great.)

And this is where I circle back to what I opened this blog entry with:

I realize that the temple ceremony was changed in 1990, but I went through at a time when you still had to enact your own ritual execution through several possible methods and were told, explicitly, that you deserved to be brutally murdered if you talked about this stuff.

Most of the time I think that I've gotten over most of the harm done to me by the church. But I am shaking and fighting the urge to vomit as I type this. The threat of violence, the coercive, punitive tone, made the temple a form of spiritual rape.

Just as we are seeing with the whole torture debate, information and promises extracted through violence or threat of violence are legally invalid. Therefore I do not feel that my vow is at all binding. Furthermore, not only do I feel no obligation to abide by it, I feel an obligation to inform others of what I experienced.

Much is made of the fact that it was an LDS judge who authorized and two LDS psychologists who created the Bush administration's torture program. Given that these men were trained to believe that coercion and threats of violence were actually part of the pinnacle of spirituality and communion with God, is that really surprising?

To anyone who objects to the characterization of the temple as coercive or abuse, I must point that the death threats and penalties were DESIGNED to be scary and intimidating, and to compel silence. A desire to scare and intimidate is why the penalty for betraying the vow is death, as opposed, to, say having to drink lemonade and eat cookies for dinner on alternate Tuesdays.

And yet, feeling scared and intimidated and coerced by scary, intimidating, coercive statements and ceremonies is seen, in the Mormon church, as evidence of a disordered psyche and resistance to divine truth.

No wonder our society is so violent. It's how we think our god expresses love to his children: he threatens to kill us. And if we find anything wrong with that, well, we deserve to die.

Posted by holly at 10:53 AM | Comments (2)

May 28, 2009

Story, Wikipedia, Story

Eight or nine years ago I submitted an essay to Sunstone that began "One day my companion Sister Knight and I met a 'weird funky lady,' as I described her in my journal, who tried to explain to me her adoration of some reincarnated Buddhist monk." It did not begin "One day when I was a Mormon missionary, my assigned working partner or companion (to use the term we employed for said assigned working partners) Sister Knight and I met a 'weird funky lady,' as I described her in my journal (which I kept because doing so was a religious commandment I was obligated to obey because angels might some day quote from my journal if I said something inspiring), who tried to explain to me her adoration of some reincarnated Buddhist monk, a conversations many Mormon missionaries wouldn't have had because they generally talked to rather than listened to other people about religion."

It's a good thing the essay didn't begin with the second sentence I offer above, because that sentence sucks. But if I had submitted that particularly essay to a mainstream secular journal whose readers weren't necessarily familiar with Mormonism, I would have felt obligated to provide lots of background and context--maybe not in the first sentence, but certainly SOMEWHERE in the essay. Whereas I knew that as soon as a Mormon audience was informed that I had a companion named Sister Knight, readers would assume, correctly, that I was a woman somewhere in my 20s who had elected to serve a mission.

Despite or perhaps because of their self-proclaimed and cherished status as a peculiar people, Mormons hate to be misunderstood. As a result, when they talk about their religion, they explain A LOT. Sometimes--perhaps usually--they explain TO EXCESS.

Two groups especially prone to excessive explanations are missionaries and Mormon writers.

Missionaries indulge in excessive explanations 'cause it's sorta their job. The missionary discussions are rudimentary introductions designed to make people see the church the way it sees itself. The goal is not to intrigue or excite, but to inform, and to do so in a way that is dignified without being pompous (though an individual missionary can certainly make the message pompous with very little effort).

Mormon writers who take Mormonism as their subject matter indulge in excessive explanation because they want readers to understand not only Mormonism, but what Mormonism means to the people they're writing about. They believe--with some validity--that readers won't understand their work if they don't understand certain things about Mormonism. But I have come to believe that while some explanation is order, Mormon writers should strive always for the barest, skinniest minimum.

And then there is a third group of excessive explainers: Mormon writers who write about missions. They over explain more than anyone else I have encountered. They 'splain, and then they 'splain, and then they 'SPLAIN SOME MORE, JUST FOR FUN. Except by that point, it has stopped being fun--for the reader, at least.

Several years ago another Mormon writer and I thought it would be cool to put together an anthology of personal essays about missions. We put out a call for submissions and got LOADS of essays in response. A few were phenomenonally good; several were pretty great; most were mediocre; a few more were egregiously bad. But with very few exceptions, all of them contained too much exposition, too many foreign words or terms unique to Mormonism followed by parenthetical translations or glosses, and little wikipedia entries about Mormon doctrine, practice or culture.

It was PAINFUL to read essay after essay with the same problem. It was also very educational, because I suddenly realized how annoying it was when I did precisely those things in my own work.

I thought that including Chinese terms throughout my text gave it color, flavor. It might--but it's also precious and pretentious unless a term is actually relevant to the narrative or argument. In order to keep my eyes from glazing over, I started skipping over all foreign terms in the essays I read, whether they were Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean. And when I finished, I went through my own work and started getting rid of any foreign terms, unless I felt they were absolutely necessary to the intrinsic meaning of the text. I would never again throw one in just for "flavor."

And the mini wikipedia entries, the three paragraphs complete with footnotes--about baptism for the dead, or the MTC, how you fill out your papers before going on a mission, what happens when you get your call.... I mean, yes, it all really MATTERS--to us. It really, really, really MATTERS. A LOT. I want the people who read my work to understood, fully, why a call is called a call. But maybe they can sorta get it on their own. Maybe even though I care, they don't. Maybe if they have to wade through my explanation of what happens when someone, anyone gets a call, they'll lose interest in the still more important details of what happened when I got my call.

Certainly that happened with the essays I read: I became impatient with long passages about baptism in general and so didn't care as much when I got to the account of an individual baptism. It's true that I already knew all about the stuff being explained, which might have made me more impatient. But it's also true that I had an investment in the subject matter and a reason to continue reading that many readers don't. I really want to know how other people talk about their missions. I would LOVE an anthology full of thoughtful, interesting essays about the good, the bad, the ugly, the miraculous, the tedious, the heartbreak, of a mission. So if I gave up on work that tried to provide that, well, it means something.

My co-editor and I didn't abandon the project in that we both still think, theoretically, that it's a great idea for an anthology. But we just didn't get enough truly strong work to fill it. We could have devoted huge chunks of our life into reshaping the mediocre essays into pretty good ones, and at one point we actually intended to, but it didn't happen.

Shortly before Christmas I read a really great blog entry by Stephen Carter, the editor of Sunstone, at the Red Brick Store, about the myth of the writer genius (later revised into a piece about the author bunny). Stephen claimed that he learned all sorts of important things about story craft from reading one single book on screenwriting, a claim that intrigued me, so I put the title on my amazon.com wishlist, and someone bought it for me for Christmas.

And then it sat on my shelf, for almost six months. Last weekend I read it. And I'm here to agree with Stephen: Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee is a freaking great book, one I wish I had read not just when the postman dropped it off in January, but years ago. It's very wise, and I will reread it before very long, I think. A bit of advice that particular resonated with me is this:

Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.... Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more. (335-337, emphasis in original)

That is one thing we'll have to achieve in order for Mormon literature to grow up: we'll have to stop EXPLAINING and EXPOSING and DEFINING to excess. Yes, we'll have to do some a little explaining, a tiny bit of exposing, and of course we have to acknowledge how weird it is that "elder" means someone who is very, very young instead of really old. But I sincerely hope that eventually I will stop reading works that go "story, definition, story, wikipedia entry, story, wikipedia entry, different wikipedia entry, story."

I especially hope I'll stop writing work like that. It won't be easy. But I'm determined to try.

Posted by holly at 10:17 PM | Comments (2)

May 16, 2009

Dong Bu Dong?

As I've mentioned before, I love living in Salt Lake City. Along with Iowa City, it's one of the most liberal, left-leaning places I've ever lived in my life; along with Tucson, it's one of the most geographically beautiful spots I've been lucky enough to call home. It's well planned (kudos to Brothers Joseph and Brigham for that), well maintained, clean, diverse, prosperous, interesting. It has a truly magnificent library that is always packed because I and countless others use it all the time; it has really great public transportation that I hardly ever use because it's so easy to walk in this city and I prefer that to riding the bus or figuring out train schedules. It has a vibrant arts scene, lots of green space, a fascinating graveyard, and plenty of fascinating architecture. It even has a violin making school!

OK, it also has a bunch of homophobic Mormons and the headquarters of the Mormon church, but all of that is remarkably easy to ignore, because as I said, the city itself is really liberal, and that affects life in the city itself (I'm NOT talking about the rest of the state) more than the Mormon church does. And some Mormons here do really great things for the city, the state, and perhaps even the world.

I'm speaking of the current governor, Jon Huntsman Jr, the Republican who miraculously succeeded in making Utah's liquor laws less weird and who has alienated more hardline conservatives by arguing for gay rights. (He balks at legalizing gay marriage, but advocates recognizing civil unions, which is much more generous than many conservatives.) He's a decent guy who makes careful policy. And now Obama has appointed him ambassador to China.

While I'm sorry that Utah will lose a prudent, effective, likable governor, I'm thrilled with this appointment. I think that the ambassadorship to China is one of the more important diplomatic positions within the US government, and I think Huntsman is an ideal candidate to fill it.

Like me, Huntsman became fluent in Mandarin when he served a mission for the Mormon church in Taiwan; unlike me, he appears to have maintained his fluency. But aside from the language issue, I think a mission in Taiwan was probably really good training for understanding a lot of issues in China. I mean, if you want to be a xenophobic jerk who learns nothing at all about the culture you're living in, you can manage that as a missionary, but if you want to understand what motivates people and what they care about, you can manage that too, fairly easily. Actually, I take that first part back. You couldn't even get in the door of someone's house or buy groceries if you didn't understand something about Chinese attitudes toward courtesy and indirectness.

There's also the fact that at the time Huntsman served a mission, diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the Mainland were nonexistent--people couldn't even send mail between the two places. Even when I was there, missionaries were often enlisted to help people in Taiwan correspond with family or friends on the Mainland: missionaries would mail letters from people in Taiwan to the missionaries' families in the US, who would then use US postage and a US return address to send the letter to Peoples' Republic of China. That was a huge lesson in international relations right there.

Plus Huntsman is a billionaire, which I have a feeling the government of China will totally respect.

And unlike Mitt Romney, another Mormon governor/rich businessman with lots of hair, he's not a douche nozzle, which I think will help things too.

The title of this blog entry, by the way, is the Romanization for a question easily translated as "do you understand?" "Dong" doesn't rhyme with "long," you should know; the vowel is the same as in "don't." The question is composed with a standard way of constructing a question in Chinese: you offer someone a set of options and they pick the accurate one--about like, "Do you get it or not?" Even when posing a question that could be answered with "Yes" if the question were posed in English--say, "You understand this, right?"--the answer would not be "Yes" but "I understand" (or even just plain "understand") because Chinese doesn't have a word that corresponds exactly to "yes." All of which is important in effective communication in Chinese, and all of which Huntsman already dongs.

Posted by holly at 9:09 AM | Comments (4)

May 13, 2009

More Important Virtues

Gay men are not known for being "nice," which might be one reason I like them. In fact, two of my favorite statements about niceness come from gay men. In "Disappointed," Morrissey sings

Don't talk to me
about people who are nice
for I have spent my whole life
in ruins
because of people who are nice

And in Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim, the witch tells the townspeople

You're so nice
You're not good
You're not bad
You're just nice
I'm not good
I'm not nice
I'm just right

I have long had a problem with niceness myself, not because there is anything wrong with it in and of itself, but because it is too often a shoddy substitute for more important virtues.

This is something I've been thinking about for a long, long time, but I'm writing about it now because of a post on Letters from a Broad. CL Hanson links to a very weird, very pompous editorial in some BYU publication by some guy all pissed off because women at BYU don't always accept dates from "nice" Mormon guys. It's such a weird editorial that CL wonders if the guy is a Poe (which I had to look up), but I don't think he is: he too easily plays the part of what a "nice" Mormon guy is: pompous, shallow, entitled, certain of his own authority, and ever ready to blame all relationship problems on women and their shallowness, fickleness and susceptibility to beguilement by the serpent.

Of course none of that is truly "nice," but it's what passes for "nice" in conventional Mormon manhood--along with a firm handshake and a willingness to help out at elders' quorum service projects.

Niceness for women is a little different. There is lots of smiling and the cultivation of a particular tone of voice, high-pitched, lilting and little-girly. Also, there is reminding people that "heavenly father loves them" and commanding them, in that bright, perky voice, to "smile!"

Other elements of niceness include 1) never saying No, no matter how passive-aggressive you have to be in order not to utter that dreadful word; 2) avoiding, at all costs, direct confrontation; 3) mustering enough superiority for people who disagree with or thwart you that you can "pity" them for the way they have been led astray by Satan.

I think a lot of times people are "nice" so they won't have to strive for the more difficult virtues of kindness and compassion, which involves actually figuring out what will make others' lives easier, instead of just resorting to the familiar standards of "nice" or "decorous" behavior. I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a kind, compassionate Mormon, but I do want to point out that it's much harder to be compassionate when you honestly believe that people who don't think and act as you do are led astray by the devil.

I mean, think of some "nice" people: Sarah Palin, for example. She smiles and winks and has that bright, perky voice--but she's a heartless bitch who makes rape victims pay for their own rape kits.

Or there's Miss California. Carrie Prejean smiled brightly and ended her explanation that because she's a christian, she doesn't believe that gay people deserve equal rights or recognition of their relationships by adding, perkily, "No offense to anyone out there!" That was the "nice" way to be an unkind, unchristlike bitch.

Or Bill Bennet, whom Jon Stewart skewered a few nights ago for being too fastidious and proper to tolerate the humor at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, but nonetheless defending torture.

Mitt Romney is probably "nice" too, though I find him so reptilian and repellent that I can't bring myself to think of any examples.

All of which is to say that as far as I'm concerned, as long as this is what passes for "nice" in our society, I hope it is true that "nice" guys finish dead, dead last.

Posted by holly at 1:44 PM | Comments (7)

April 18, 2009

An Anonymous Group That May or May Not Be....

You've probably already seen this--it's on all the cool blogs. But to ensure that all three dozen people who check my blog with some frequency see it at least once, I'm posting it too.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Posted by holly at 6:40 AM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2009

Excommunicate the War Criminal, Already!

Just in case anyone is unclear on the relationship of state-sanctioned and inflicted torture--and more particularly state-sanctioned tortured inflicted on political prisoners by a western army occupying some portion of the middle east--let me remind you that that's how Jesus died.

Jesus was tortured to death. The "Prince of Peace" (not the Prince of Abstinence, nor the Prince of Sobriety) was tortured to death. So if someone else also tortures people--maybe not to death, at least not on purpose--but as violently as possible without causing death ON PURPOSE, does that make the person or people doing the torture followers of A) the Prince of Peace or B) his executioners?

The Mormon church worked hard to say that the reason they excommunicated the guy who created the shirtless elder calendar wasn't because he created the shirtless elder calendar; it was because he had stopped wearing garments, didn't pay tithing and was inactive. This is pure bullshit. The church doesn't excommunicate inactive people who don't pay tithing, wear garments or attend church; it bullies and harasses them by sending home teachers, and devotes part of each General Conference to inviting them to come back to church. (My sister mentioned that when she heard that in the GC two weeks ago, she said to someone she was with, "Those people aren't listening!" No duh.)

The stated rationale for excommunicating the guy might have been that he didn't wear garments, but the reason he had to be disciplined was the calendar. He embarrassed the church. That was his real crime.

Other people who embarrass the church are kicked out, even when they're doing work vital to keep the church honest, like Lavina Fielding Anderson.

So there are two questions I am waiting to see answered now: A) Will the church feel embarrassed by the fact that some of the most egregious memos from the Bush adminstration justifying torture were written by a Mormon, Jay Bybee; and B) will it do anything to discipline him?

My guess about the answers is: no, to both questions. But both answers should be YES.

Someone might argue that the answer should be NO, because after all the Mormon church hasn't informed its members that they are endangering their membership or their salvation if they support, justify or engage in torture.

That is true. The LDS Church is too busy working to deny women and gay people full civil rights to care about the things like war crimes.

If the church were truly a moral institution, it would condemn war crimes, even when commited by its own members. That's easy. But it's not a moral institution. It's a repressive structure devoted to preserving its own power, and it doesn't give a shit about ethics or the rule of law, unless that law is its own form of sharia.

I honestly believe that the church's indifference on this topic is as vile as its active work to deny marriage to gay people. I think anyone who cares about justice should be outraged by its silence.

I can only say, Flip Monson, Fetch the Twelve.

Posted by holly at 11:41 AM | Comments (4)

April 16, 2009

The Bad Boy of Mormon Culture

Check out this complimentary article in the Washington Times on the role Sunstone plays in LDS culture. If you're not familiar with Sunstone, you'll get some sense of why, although it's by no means the only magazine I subscribe to, it's the only I read as soon as it arrives.

Posted by holly at 5:52 PM | Comments (1)

December 13, 2008

Why the Original Story of Job Was Good, and Why This Version Sucks

In a recent comment, Parker asked me if I'd read a story entitle "Calling and Election" currently posted on a Mormon website known as the Red Brick Store. He asked for my response, so I offered one.

And then I kept thinking about the story.

I called the story "craven," and while I knew that was the right term, I had a hard time pinpointing why. But I think I've got it now.

A couple of commenters call attention to the fact that the story is based on the story of Job. It's pretty obvious: this Lucifer character, the way the protagonist's life is thrown into chaos, the three false friends who think they're comforting him.

I have always felt that the single most important point in the entire story of Job is his commitment to justice, so much so that he demands an audience with and accountability from God, in such a way that God knows Job deserves it. Of course God gives him the audience but not the accountability--just shows up and says, "Who the hell are you? I'm way more powerful than you, so don't tell me what to do."

And Job cowers before the display of power and takes all his criticism back.

And God tacitly admits the injustice that has been done to Job and God's role in it by giving Job a completely new family, as if the children he lost were interchangeable with and replaceable by some new kids, new wealth, and telling everyone who questioned Job, "Job wasn't the wicked one; you are."

But the Job-like character in this story is too craven, too timorous, too gutless to call out to God and say, "I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment" and "Oh, that I knew where I might find God! That I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand what he would say against me."

This is it, this is the core problem of Mormonism: it refuses to hold its scripture, its prophets and its God accountable. Mormonism claims to reject the notion of infallibility for anyone but God--his prophets are not infallible--but practically speaking, that's not true. If you question the brethren, you're guilty of wickedness.

This is why the state where George W. Bush has the highest rate of approval and popularity is Utah: Mormons don't understand accountability. They don't require it. They aren't capable of it.

A system that does not hold its leaders--even divine leaders--accountable cannot admit its mistakes, and cannot evolve and improve as needed, and cannot demand true accountability and maturity from its followers.

Good grief, stuff like this makes me so glad I outgrew the church.

Posted by holly at 11:56 AM | Comments (5)

November 13, 2008

I Need to Get This Out of the Way

Remember a long time ago, when I wrote about selling my house? Or last month, when I wrote about how a 99 cent plastic statue of St. Joseph may have helped me sell my house? Well, what I haven't written about is where I moved after I sold my house. And I guess it's time to 'fess up and make the announcement:

I moved to Salt Lake City.

Now, what I want to make clear is that although I have moved back to the west and am damn glad to be here, I have not moved BACK to Utah. One thing that offends me no end is when people assume that because I grew up Mormon, I am FROM Utah. I am not FROM Utah. I am FROM Arizona. Check out my archives: the first topic listed is Arizona. There is no topic in the archives for Utah, because it has never been, until recently, my home. (Though I did add, in May 2009, an SLC stuff category.)

Until late this summer, the only significant amount of time I spent in Utah was the two months I was at the Missionary Training Center, a place I loathed as I have loathed few places in my life. I never went to BYU. I never wanted to go to BYU. I always vowed I would NEVER live in Utah.

And then I moved to Salt Lake City, and I freakin' love it, in ways that continue to surprise me and would disturb me too if it weren't much nicer to like one's home than to not.

It's so amazingly beautiful here--that's the first reason I love it. OK, the mountains here aren't quite as cool and idiosyncratic as the Catalinas north of Tucson, the vegetation not as funky. But late summer here was merely quite hot rather than FREAKIN' BLEEDIN' HOT, the way August is in AZ. And fall has been AMAZING. I love seeing the snow on the mountains. And you know that thing everyone says about the heat in Arizona, how it's a dry heat, and therefore not as oppressive as if humidity was involved? The same goes for cold: it's a dry cold here. You don't feel chilled to the bone the way you do when there's a wet wind blowing off some massively unfrozen great lake.

And Salt Lake City itself is great! It seems more cosmopolitan than many cities its size. There's stuff to do. It's easy to navigate (aside from the construction messing up the roads). It's affluent without being completely horrifying and gross. And I especially LOVE MY NEIGHBORHOOD. The architecture is interesting and fun. OK, there are lots of Mormon churches close to my front door, in every direction. But they are matched by an equal number of cool independent coffee shops. Seriously, I can get four different kinds of strong, delicious non-corporate coffee within three blocks of my home.

I honestly think my neighborhood is probably the most liberal place I have ever lived in my life. Before the election, there were as many Nader/Gonzales signs as McCain/Palin signs--and there were 20 times as many Obama/Biden signs as either of those.

The rest of the state is another matter entirely--it's a really red state, one of the reddest. I face certain challenges when I venture far from my very pleasant home. But it's nothing I can't handle and more than amply compensated by how great SLC itself is. Particularly after living for five years in a town as intellectually blighted as Erie, Pennsylvania.

And despite the fact that I can see the spires of the Mormon temple from the stairwell of my apartment building, I feel oddly insulated from the church. I remarked on this the other day to a friend, who said, "Absolutely! It's like living in the eye of the storm. The real impact is somewhere else. Here, it's pretty calm."

It really is strange and I wouldn't have believed this was the case before I moved here. But while you might be more aware of the church here in Salt Lake than in other places, you're also more aware that ultimately, it doesn't change how you want to live your life, and doesn't have much effect on how you can live it, aside from weird limitations on your ability to purchase booze. (And even still, Utah's liquor laws aren't as weird as Pennsylvania's. At least I can pick up a six-pack of beer at the grocery store here, something I couldn't do in PA.)

However, in California, for instance, it's another matter entirely, especially if you're gay--but as I say, that's the havoc and destruction wrought by the hurricane that is Mormonism. If you were an entirely secular, selfish resident of SLC, you'd never have to know anything about the misery Prop 8 has unleashed elsewhere. And maybe I am too insulated here, but I remain sanguine and hopeful that Prop 8 will be overturned soon, either by the courts or another ballot initiative. Of course, I'll be doing what I can to help the process, via protest and other means.

Anyway. There were things I couldn't really blog about until I clarified where I live now. So I've done that. But just to recap, please, please remember: I now live in Salt Lake City, but I AM NOT FROM UTAH.

Posted by holly at 11:54 AM | Comments (4)

October 15, 2008

The Other Saint Joe

I grew up in the St. Joseph Stake, the 25th stake of Zion. When it was organized in 1883, its eastern limit was El Paso; its western limits were St. David, on the road to Tucson (which didn’t have enough Mormons to need any sort of church leadership), and Miami, AZ, on the road to Phoenix (which was taken care of by Mesa). Its headquarters were in Thatcher, the little farming town whose first white inhabitants were my great-great-great grandfather and his family. Still located on Church Street is the Stake Presidency Building, thank god--so many other important buildings in Thatcher’s history burned down in the 1980s due to faulty wiring installed by some douche nozzle, including the wonderful old church where I was baptized, and the administration building of the old Gila Academy, one of the first junior colleges built west of the Mississippi.

Because I grew up in the St. Joseph Stake, I knew exactly who St. Joseph was: Joseph Smith, the first latter-day saint, the guy who made it possible for me to grow up a saint. When I would encounter things like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin, I would think how nice and how strange it was that a bunch of heathen recognized Joseph Smith’s importance by naming their pills after him.

I was pretty old--in junior high or so--before I realized that the aspirin was actually named for the other St. Joseph--you know, the guy who married Mary, the mother of Jesus. I remember thinking, “All he did was marry a pregnant lady. How does that qualify him to be a saint?"--not in the Mormon way, of course, where all you have to do is be born into a family who believed in the proper set of doctrines but in the Catholic way, where you have to do miracles or something.

It became easier to understand when I learned that another translation of “saint” is simply “holy,” and another translation of holy is simply “set apart, unusual, other,” or special. It’s very easy to think about how a guy in an old patriarchal society who is willing to go ahead and marry his fiancé when she’s knocked up with someone else’s kid is, indeed, special.

This preamble has been designed to establish two things: one, I still have to remind myself, every time I hear a reference in the world at large to Saint Joseph, that it’s about the other Saint Joseph, not the Saint Joseph of my childhood (indoctrination runs deep); and two, I’m now going to tell you a story about that other St. Joe.

As I mentioned back in July, I sold my house. What I didn’t mention is that I was lucky enough to sell my house less than a month after I put it on the market, at a price high enough over what I paid for it that I made a small profit, even after I forked out for things like painting and some upgrades; and with my equity, I had a nice chunk of change in my pocket after all was said and done.

And although I can’t say for certain, St. Joseph might have had something to do with this. See, there’s a belief that he can help you sell your house. My loyal reader and commenter Juti told me about this, and, not one to skip out on divine intervention when I can get it, I paid 99 cents plus tax for a three-inch plastic statue of St. Joseph at my local Catholic book store, buried him upside down in my backyard; then, when he'd done his job--because I didn't want to lose the magic, should I ever need it again--dug him up just before I moved away and hauled him to my new home.

Here he is on my kitchen table in my new apartment, soil from my old garden still clinging to him.

I left the mud on him because I thought it would make for a cooler photo, but I was too hurried to take a picture right when I dug him up. Now the dirt has flaked off considerably, but I kind of like the look. (And I realize it's the pears behind him that are in focus, and that the sunlight from the window behind him makes him even blurrier, but I like that too--it looks like a halo to me.)

So--if you're trying to sell a house, invest a buck in a plastic statue and bury it in your backyard in some appropriately hopeful and respectful ceremony. OK, if you're a hardcore nonbeliever when it comes to supernatural and religious phenomena, you might be betraying your principles, but aside from that, what can it possibly hurt?

Posted by holly at 9:02 AM | Comments (5)

September 7, 2008

Proving Something Important

My family and I have gotten along pretty well in some ways. OK, I am the black sheep and have profound political and religious differences with them, but they just go along most of the time as if there was no one in their midst who disagrees with them, and most of the time I don’t make a stink about it. I fold my arms and say “amen” when there’s a blessing on the food, even if it involves requesting blessings for President Monson. I make a point to congratulate my nieces and nephews on their baptisms. I simply walk out of the room when someone has Fox News on. I turn off lights (and more lights, and unused appliances, and unplug cell phone chargers and adapters plugged into the wall with nothing plugged into them) rather than pointing out how careless and profligate a certain branch of the family is when it comes to electricity and power. I even went to Nauvoo, Palmyra, the Sacred Grove and the Hill Cumorah with my parents, because those places were near where I was living, and they wanted to see them. Until Friday, I never said anything to anyone about how vile I consider the Proclamation on the Family.

Sometimes it takes all my willpower not to say something. One night at dinner during the cruise my family took together, a certain lawyer in my family commented that one reason the church is so afraid of gay marriage is because it knows that if gay marriage is legalized, there’s much more chance that polygamy will be decriminalized, and the church would be caught in a terrible dilemma, since it will never embrace polygamy again but doesn’t want to be forced to admit that. Another of the women stated passionately that she believed the way polygamy would work was through cloning, that God would simply make additional copies of each man righteous enough to make it to the celestial kingdom, and in any event, that better be what was going to happen, because she would never share her husband with another woman. Eventually I just rose from the table and walked about the deck for a while. But I really wanted to vomit, and scream.

At the Sacred Grove, my dad went on all the tours, though he commented on how insulted he felt that there were all these young missionaries delivering long spiels about basic church doctrine and practice, as if the people on these tours didn’t know the first thing about the church, even though 95% of the visitors to the sites were Mormon. Even my mom got so annoyed she wouldn’t do the last few tours. (I of course wouldn’t do any; I just walked around on my own.) Dad came back from a tour of the recreation of the tiny farm house where Joseph Smith had grown up, and said, “Most of these tours are a waste of time, but I learned something important on that one.”

“What was that?” Mom asked.

“Well, in pictures of the first visit, you always see Joseph alone in a bedroom while the angel Moroni talks to him. But it turns out that he was in a loft with two beds in it, and there were three boys in each bed. The girls were in a loft on the other side of the cabin. Joseph was surrounded by other people when the first visit happened. Some of them were sleeping only inches away from him. But no one else heard or saw a thing. And that proves something really important.”

I caught my breath and waited. Was my father about to admit that Joseph Smith was a fraud, that he'd made the whole story up? After all, that was the logical conclusion, the most obvious inference to draw from what he’d just discovered. But what my father went on to say was, “It proves that if God has a vision for you, he can make it happen so that you and you alone see it.”

He went on to explain that this was of doctrinal importance, because some offshoot of the church claimed that someone had seen the light under the door and heard the noise when God or an angel appeared to someone alone in a room with the door shut, and used this secondary observation of a heavenly visitation as proof of someone’s authority to do something counter to the preferences of the real Mormon church.

It was hard not to laugh. It was hard to acknowledge just how vast was my father’s capacity for self-deception. It wasn’t hard not to say something, because what could I say that would A) persuade him how flawed his thinking was and B) not piss him off?

Occasionally I’ve said something. Sometimes it’s been angry and inflammatory. On the cruise I finally said something when a conversation arose about the war. I was so angry I couldn’t refrain, though I didn’t say nearly as much as I wanted to. I found out from my mother the other day that one of my in-laws has never forgiven me for that--and of course part of what made my statement unforgivable was the fact that I was, from the start, right about the war and how disastrous it would be.

Sometimes I’ve said things that aren’t inflammatory, just clear statements of my boundaries. Particularly given how angry my family becomes when I air my views, I have forbidden them from bearing their testimonies to me. One Sunday I agreed to go on a drive with my family to look for the graves of family members who chose to be buried in the middle of the nowhere rather than a proper cemetery. The driver put in a cd of church songs for children, horrible smarmy indoctrination set to bad music. I took several deep breaths, and said, “Please take me home or else change the music, because I absolutely cannot listen to this.”

Mercifully the cd was removed, and we listened to classical music instead. But my nephew was unhappy and said, “Why did you change the music?”

The answer: “Because Holly asked us to listen to something else.”

But couldn’t they have guessed beforehand how much I would hate that music? Couldn’t they have thought about why I wouldn’t want to listen to the Articles of Faith set to music? Couldn’t they have made a gesture so I didn’t HAVE to say something?

As my sister told me Friday, No. They couldn’t. It’s too hard to try to imagine what my life is like or how I feel. I shouldn’t ask that of them.

Admittedly, she backed off from that eventually and said she’d try to have more empathy--though she had trouble remembering the word and at first said she’d have more apathy.

That to me sums up political conservatism: I can't imagine what life is like for other people, because it's too hard. After a lot of prodding, I can grudgingly admit that my attitude is really uncool and violates the religious creed I advocate, and I'll say I'll try to do better, but empathy is so rarely used in my vocabulary or my life that I confuse it with apathy.

Heretofore I have tried to protect my family from my blog in a couple of ways: I’ve never suggested they read it, and I’ve written very little about them that wasn't bland and complimentary. But I think a discussion of certain things is now warranted. For one thing, I’m tired of being punished for being right by people who can’t admit that they were wrong. I was right and my family was wrong about the war, about climate change, about what Bush’s economic policies would do. I think they need to be accountable for that, and I’m saying so publicly.

For another, I predict that McCain and Palin will win, and the results will be disastrous. My entire family is going to vote for John and Sarah, and it may well cost at least a few of them their jobs, because they work in areas of business or industry made vulnerable by the Bush administration’s fiscal recklessness. If that does happen--and I pray it won’t, but I think it will--I want it on record that I could see, even if they couldn’t, where their foolishness would lead.

Posted by holly at 11:49 AM | Comments (5)

September 6, 2008

Underestimating Conservatives

In 2003, as preparations for the inevitable war intensified, I decided to do something I’d never done before: I decided to march in a protest. Marching and chanting aren’t really my style; I prefer to protest by writing. But this was important, and I wanted to do something extra. So I made arrangements to head to Phoenix for the long weekend of Presidents’ Day.

When my mother asked me about my plans for the long weekend, I told her I was going to visit friends. I didn’t tell her why I had asked these friends if I could stay with them for a few days, because I knew it would upset her. I did tell the friends about my plans.

These were people I’d known since I was an undergrad. At one time H, the husband, had been more liberal than I was. But he got more conservative as he aged, while I got more progressive. By 2003, he’d given up driving small fuel efficient cars and drove a giant truck on his hour-long commute to the prestigious hospital where he worked as a doctor. He and his family made no effort to conserve water, even though they lived in a particularly water-deprived region of the Phoenix area. And he supported the war--although more cautiously than a lot of people. But he still thought it was the right thing to do.

The night after the protest, H, his wife and I went to dinner. He told a story about going home teaching to some inactive guy. The man wasn’t there when the home teachers arrived, but the guy’s roommate was. He was pleasant to the home teachers, but said there was no reason for them to come back, because the guy had realized that he wasn’t welcome at the Mormon church. One of the home teachers kept saying, “That doesn’t sound right. We welcome everyone. Our doors are always open. We invite people back, and we mean it.”

The clueless home teacher’s partner was writhing in embarrassment, and tried his best to cut the visit short. In the car, he said to his hapless companion, “Didn’t you realize?! The guy is gay! That was his partner we were talking to! He can’t come to church because he’s gay!”

Brother Clueless was mortified, and at first suggested that they return, so he could explain to the guy that he just hadn’t realized that they were gay. The less idiotic one said that would only compound the embarrassment, that they should just act differently when they returned, or else not return at all.

Given that H had told--and laughed at--a story that underscored how backwards and clueless Mormons were about homosexuality, and given that he had made it clear that he understood that gay people truly aren’t welcome in the Mormon church, no matter how many official church statements are issued claiming otherwise, I thought he would be agree with me when I said I just didn’t see what the big deal was, that being gay was a perfectly acceptable thing to be, that gay partnerships could be every bit as respectable and ethical as straight ones.

But H said, “I don’t actually believe that. I do believe that homosexuality is evil, that acting on gay desire is a sin.”

I sat dumbfounded for a moment; finally I said, “You really think that someone’s choice of a sexual partner is automatically a more important indicator of a person’s moral character than things like, say, how honest and kind they are?”

He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Really.”

He said, “Yes. I think that fornication is a sin akin to murder.”

I said, “You really think that having sex with someone you’re not married to is as bad as willfully ending another person’s life.”

He said, “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s as bad in its own way, yes."

And I thought, wow, I really underestimated this guy. I didn’t realize just what a prick he’d turned into. (I have to wonder if he thinks Bristol Palin’s fornication is a sin akin to murder, or if he’ll let her off the hook for any number of reasons, like Bill O’Rielly and others.)

Our contact decreased considerably after that. There was occasional email but little else. And then, in 2004, as we prepared for another presidential election, I read something about the horrific trauma and suffering the war had brought to the Iraqi people, about the fact that we don’t even count how many of them we kill.

So I sent it to H, along with a note saying something like, “Here are the results of the war you supported. Do you still support it?”

In response I got a note in which he told me, “You have underestimated me. I take no pleasure in dead Iraqis.”

Boy oh boy did I ever underestimate him. It had never occurred to me, in my wildest dreams, that he might take pleasure in dead Iraqis. I had mistakenly believed that he’d be SAD about the senseless, painful deaths, the brutal suffering.

I told him that, and I ended the friendship.

I’ve confronted lately a number of ways in which I’ve underestimated other conservatives. I’m trying to decide what to do about it.

Posted by holly at 4:40 PM | Comments (4)

August 21, 2008

God Fought the Law, and the Law Won

I’ve been thinking, ever since I wrote a response to that dreadfully illogical, dishonest, hypocritical document published by the church to explain its opposition to gay marriage, about struggles framed as a battle between the forces of god and the forces of who or whatever.

The thing is, god so often loses.

Several apt examples drawn from Mormon history:

1. God could not keep his people safe in Ohio, Missouri or Illinois. Mormons were persecuted, raped and murdered--and God couldn’t or didn’t stop it.

2. God could not make Utah sufficiently self-reliant that the church could exist without the trade and support of the US federal government, resulting in a showdown between the US government and the church over polygamy.

3. God could not influence the hearts and minds of the rest of the country enough that people would allow Utah to become a US state unless the church renounced polygamy.

Or look at Jewish history. God couldn’t or didn’t do much about the destruction of the temple, the diaspora, or the holocaust.

Or look at Catholic history. If it was the one true church, God should have been able to do something to stop Martin Luther and John Calvin. He should have been able to prevent the accession of truly immoral popes like the various Medicis and Borgias.

Mormons believe that god is omnipotent, but I’d like to see some serious evidence of that. When you look at what god actually manages to do, how good he is at furthering his agenda, the claim of omnipotence seems like the pathetic blustering braggadocio of a schoolyard bully. Seriously: according to Mormon scripture, God’s work and glory is “to bring to pass the eternal life of man,” a state that requires people to become Mormon. But when you look at how long the Mormon church has been around, and how few people actually join the Mormon church, well, the numbers show that god is pretty damn lousy at achieving his work and his glory.

Truth be told, god is a big fucking prurient loser. The only way to argue otherwise is to look at history after it happens, and decide AFTER the fact that whatever happened was god’s will. The civil rights movement? Oh, despite the resistance to it among christians, that was actually god’s will. The defeat of Nazi Germany? Well, despite the fact that it took a really long time and almost didn’t happen, and despite the fact that the Nazis’ victims numbered in the MILLIONS, it was actually god’s will that that happen. God didn’t have particularly strong feelings about other genocides, however. Cambodia, for instance--he wasn’t too anxious one way or the other about that one. And he stayed pretty neutral in Vietnam, sorta like the Red Cross, except without the part where he actually dispensed aid and comfort. Even now he ignores Africa as much as all the G8 Nations--the suffering of that entire continent isn't something he will ask his followers to redress, 'cause it doesn't involve his major obsession: letting white guys police how other people approach sex and relationships. And the conflict in Palestine/Israel seems to have him stymied, too. Especially given all he did to create that particular problem, you’d think he’d work a little harder to solve it--at least, he’d work harder if he wasn’t A) so feeble and B) such an asshole.

God is going to lose the battle over gay marriage, which is as it should be: god should lose any battle where his edicts and decrees are in opposition to the full development of human potential for love, compassion, intelligence and wisdom. Recognizing gay relationships by allowing homosexuals to marry is a positive step in developing that potential.

Now, there are some people who will say that because I am in favor of gay marriage, I am a tool of Satan. But that’s like calling me a servant of Voldemort or an agent of the Cylon Empire. Satan is a metaphor for evil, not an actual person. DUH.

And in return, I say that people who are opposed to gay marriage are not tools of Satan--they are just tools.

Opposing gay marriage makes people stupid, embarrassingly so. It requires them to resort to illogic and fear in order to fight something that isn’t going to hurt them. Which isn’t to say that opponents of gay marriage won’t have to change when it's finally accepted across the globe: they will be forced to join those who have seen the light and admit that the earth is round, that the earth orbits the sun and not the other way around, that other races are not genetically inferior to whites, that slavery is not a divinely sanctioned institution, that kings do not rule by divine decree. And that will indeed be painful for those who resist, but in that good way that maturing spiritually, emotionally and intellectually always is.

Not only that, but opposing gay marriage and taking the Lord’s name in vain by saying that he opposes it too just helps to show what a pathetic loser the god these bigots worship really is. You think they’d learn the lesson of the face-off between Jehovah and Ba’al and find themselves a god who can actually get something done. But no. They’re content to worship the puny, inept idol they’ve created in their own image, confident that one day, he’ll show up and reward them for being as small-minded, bigoted and cruel as he is. Whereas they’ve got their reward all along: they are as much like their nasty loser god as its possible to be.

Posted by holly at 10:24 AM | Comments (5)

August 19, 2008

Church Fears Another Marriage Showdown

In a comment on my recent summary of Sunstone, Chris Bigelow asked me to respond to this document from the COJCOLDS, justifying its attack on gay marriage. So I’ve done just that.

The document begins

Marriage is sacred, ordained of God from before the foundation of the world. After Creating Adam and Eve, the Lord God pronounced them husband and wife, of which Adam said, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Jesus Christ cited Adam’s declaration when he affirmed the divine origins of the marriage covenant: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.”

First of all, I must point out that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, that it begins with existent human institutions and argues backwards to explain their creation.

Given the fact that the church cites as a historical fact a made-up story used to explain the origins of the world, it's hard to take any of their arguments seriously.

It's also hard to respect any of their arguments, given the way they cherry-pick their scriptures: after all, Jesus also said that in the next life, people are neither married nor given in marriage (Matthew 22:30). And he also questioned the primacy of biological family relationships (Mark 3:33).

The document goes on to state, “In 1995, ‘The Family: A Proclamation to the World’ declared the following unchanging truths regarding marriage,” before listing a bunch of entirely subjective opinions regarding marriage, as a way to threaten and bully people who advocate for greater equality and justice for all human beings. The Proclamation makes many assumptions and assertions about how this or that must be the case because it supports this or that in the Mormon "Plan of Salvation." However, the plan of salvation is bullshit and has neither basis in fact nor any logic except that of a narcissistic fear of change. It allows human beings the comforting but false belief that the next life will be an extension of this one, and that personalities and relationships will make the transition to the next life intact.

The document further states,

Marriage is not primarily a contract between individuals to ratify their affections and provide for mutual obligations. Rather, marriage and family are vital instruments for rearing children and teaching them to become responsible adults.

Historically, marriage had little to do with affection and everything to do with rearing children. Women were often little more than beasts of burden or brood mares. This is still the case in far too many parts of the world. (See Afghanistan.)

While governments did not invent marriage, throughout the ages governments of all types have recognized and affirmed marriage as an essential institution in preserving social stability and perpetuating life itself. Hence, regardless of whether marriages were performed as a religious rite or a civil ceremony, married couples in almost every culture have been granted special privileges aimed primarily at sustaining their relationship and promoting the environment in which children are reared. A husband and a wife do not receive these privileges to elevate them above any other two people who may share a residence or social tie, but rather in order to preserve, protect, and defend the all-important institutions of marriage and family.

An important fact here is that "the couple" might have received privileges, but the conveying of them upon "the couple" almost always resulted in a loss of privilege for the woman. Don't forget the English law of coverture, which states that "a husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband." Women lost the right to control their own property or persons, ownership of which passed to the husband upon marriage. Husbands had the right to beat, be unfaithful to, and in some cases, even sell their wives. Marriage was primarily about patriarchy, about men's rights and privileges, about the way property and status were conveyed from one generation of men to the next.

The ignorance demonstrated by this document is profound, but not surprising, given its source.

It is true that some couples who marry will not have children, either by choice or because of infertility, but the special status of marriage is nonetheless closely linked to the inherent powers and responsibilities of procreation, and to the inherent differences between the genders. Co-habitation under any guise or title is not a sufficient reason for defining new forms of marriage.

This is not historically true. "Common-law marriage" is recognized by many societies.

High rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births have resulted in an exceptionally large number of single parents in American society. Many of these single parents have raised exemplary children; nevertheless, extensive studies have shown that in general a husband and wife united in a loving, committed marriage provide the optimal environment for children to be protected, nurtured, and raised. This is not only because of the substantial personal resources that two parents can bring to bear on raising a child, but because of the differing strengths that a father and a mother, by virtue of their gender, bring to the task.

The church's hypocrisy here is profound. Can it forget or ignore how families were constituted under polygamy? Most households who followed that "divine law" resulted in homes in which women were, for all intents and purposes, single mothers for most of the year. And certainly that one male role model, divided among six or ten or 22 wives, did not provide much in the way of "personal resources" or the "differing strengths" that two parents in one home bring to the task of raising children.

In contrast, those who would impose same-sex marriage on American society have chosen a different course. Advocates have taken their case to the state courts, asking judges to remake the institution of marriage that society has accepted and depended upon for millennia.

As I said, Mormons are afraid of change and narcissistically rewrite all of history to support their view of themselves. The institution of marriage has changed significantly throughout its existence in western society.

In sum, there is very strong agreement across America on what marriage is. As the people of California themselves recognized when they voted on this issue just eight years ago, traditional marriage is essential to society as a whole, and especially to its children. Because this question strikes at the very heart of the family, because it is one of the great moral issues of our time, and because it has the potential for great impact upon the family, the Church is speaking out on this issue, and asking members to get involved.

The people of America once felt that getting rid of slavery, allowing women to vote, giving black Americans access to decent education, and permitting inter-racial marriage, would undermine the family and all of society. They realized eventually that these were actually positive changes.

Those who favor homosexual marriage contend that “tolerance” demands that they be given the same right to marry as heterosexual couples. But this appeal for “tolerance” advocates a very different meaning and outcome than that word has meant throughout most of American history and a different meaning than is found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Savior taught a much higher concept, that of love. “Love thy neighbor,” He admonished. Jesus loved the sinner even while decrying the sin, as evidenced in the case of the woman taken in adultery: treating her kindly, but exhorting her to “sin no more.” Tolerance as a gospel principle means love and forgiveness of one another, not “tolerating” transgression.

Jesus also preferred hanging out with sexual sinners and prostitutes to hanging out with the pious and judgmental. He did not “tolerate” but condemned those who focused too much on rigid adherence to formulaic approaches to morality.

Legalizing same-sex marriage will affect a wide spectrum of government activities and policies. Once a state government declares that same-sex unions are a civil right, those governments almost certainly will enforce a wide variety of other policies intended to ensure that there is no discrimination against same-sex couples. This may well place “church and state on a collision course.”

Oh my god! This is hysterical coming from an institution that had to abandon its concept of marriage in order to preserve its existence!

Given that God had to back down in a confrontation between him and the government of the United States, it's easy to see why the church is so fucking afraid of the game of chicken that looms ahead over the prospect of gay marriage. God is going to lose on this one too, and the church is going to lose face.

Many of these examples have already become the legal reality in several nations of the European Union, and the European Parliament has recommended that laws guaranteeing and protecting the rights of same-sex couples be made uniform across the EU. Thus, if same-sex marriage becomes a recognized civil right, there will be substantial conflicts with religious freedom. And in some important areas, religious freedom may be diminished.

Plenty of so-called “religious freedoms” are diminished when in conflict from the state–like the right of a 58-year-old man to marry and knock up a pair of 14-year-old girls. I don't feel this is a bad thing.

Possible restrictions on religious freedom are not the only societal implications of legalizing same-sex marriage. Perhaps the most common argument that proponents of same-sex marriage make is that it is essentially harmless and will not affect the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage in any way. “It won’t affect you, so why should you care?’ is the common refrain. While it may be true that allowing single-sex unions will not immediately and directly affect all existing marriages,

thank god they at least acknowledged this.

the real question is how it will affect society as a whole over time, including the rising generation and future generations. The experience of the few European countries that already have legalized same-sex marriage suggests that any dilution of the traditional definition of marriage will further erode the already weakened stability of marriages and family generally.

What? Provide some evidence for this. This document claims earlier that the US has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, and there are all these initiatives to “protect” traditional marriage. How is it then the case that European countries are experiencing this terrible weakening of the family?

Aside from the very serious consequence of undermining and diluting the sacred nature of marriage between a man and a woman, there are many practical implications in the sphere of public policy that will be of deep concern to parents and society as a whole. These are critical to understanding the seriousness of the overall issue of same-sex marriage.

When a man and a woman marry with the intention of forming a new family, their success in that endeavor depends on their willingness to renounce the single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment and to sacrifice their time and means to the nurturing and rearing of their children. Marriage is fundamentally an unselfish act: legally protected because only a male and female together can create new life, and because the rearing of children requires a life-long commitment, which marriage is intended to provide.

OK, this is really dicey, so let’s dissect it: Marriage is an unselfish act because A) a man and a woman do it, and B) when a man and a woman get married, then they have sex, and C) when a man and a woman have sex, they often conceive children, and D) having children requires someone (almost always a woman) to set aside her previously “single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment and to sacrifice [her] time and means to the nurturing and rearing of [her] children.”

I don’t know very many women who have EVER had a “single-minded pursuit of self-fulfillment,” and those I know have not had children when they married.

Nor does it take a lifetime to rear a child. Plenty of Mormon women have no children at home by the time they turn 50 at the latest.

Societal recognition of same-sex marriage cannot be justified simply on the grounds that it provides self-fulfillment to its partners, for it is not the purpose of government to provide legal protection to every possible way in which individuals may pursue fulfillment. By definition, all same-sex unions are infertile, and two individuals of the same gender, whatever their affections, can never form a marriage devoted to raising their own mutual offspring.

Recognition is not sought for same-sex marriage because it provides self-fulfillment of its partners, but because same-sex marriage involves commitment and sacrifice. What gay people want the rest of the world to recognize is NOT their selfishness but their commitment to their partners, the mutual enrichment and support, and the ways in which this primary relationship augments their other relationships.

It is true that some same-sex couples will obtain guardianship over children--through prior heterosexual relationships, through adoption in the states where this is permitted, or by artificial insemination. Despite that, the all-important question of public policy must be: what environment is best for the child and for the rising generation? Traditional marriage provides a solid and well-established social identity to children. It increases the likelihood that they will be able to form a clear gender identity, with sexuality closely linked to both love and procreation. By contrast, the legalization of same-sex marriage likely will erode the social identity, gender development, and moral character of children. Is it really wise for society to pursue such a radical experiment without taking into account its long-term consequences for children?

Well, I suppose there the church is speaking from experience, given how crappy its own experiment with radical restructuring of marriage turned out: as I said, God lost the fight in the US on polygamy, and the state won. But its hypocritical failure to mention any of that is reprehensible.

And why is marriage really the only place where this argument about what’s best for children gets invoked by the church? To paraphrase Parker’s argument, what is best for children in terms of warfare? What is best for children in terms of environmental policy? What is best for children in terms of how we structure our educational system? What is best for children in terms of how we train and pay our teachers?

But even in this one arena, I don’t feel that the church’s argument is truly sound. The children of gay parents I’ve met who are most confused and angry are those whose family was destroyed because one parent tried but failed to make a straight marriage work, because s/he wasn’t straight. I have met adults who were raised by same-sex couples, and they’re OK.

As just one example of how children will be adversely affected, the establishment of same-sex marriage as a civil right will inevitably require mandatory changes in school curricula. When the state says that same-sex unions are equivalent to heterosexual marriages, the curriculum of public schools will have to support this claim. Beginning with elementary school, children will be taught that marriage can be defined as a relation between any two adults and that consensual sexual relations are morally neutral. Classroom instruction on sex education in secondary schools can be expected to equate homosexual intimacy with heterosexual relations. These developments will create serious clashes between the agenda of the secular school system and the right of parents to teach their children traditional standards of morality.

Oh good grief. Is there really much attention to divorce in school curricula? It’s a reality of human relationships, but we don’t take time in school to define it.

Parents manage to teach their kids that evolution didn’t happen and that god created the world in six days, despite what kids are told in school.

This is bullshit.

Finally, throughout history the family has served as an essential bulwark of individual liberty.

What? They argue that marriage is NOT selfish, that it’s NOT about the individual, and here they argue that it IS.

The walls of a home provide a defense against detrimental social influences and the sometimes overreaching powers of government. In the absence of abuse or neglect, government does not have the right to intervene in the rearing and moral education of children in the home. Strong families are thus vital for political freedom. But when governments presume to redefine the nature of marriage, issuing regulations to ensure public acceptance of non-traditional unions, they have moved a step closer to intervening in the sacred sphere of domestic life. The consequences of crossing this line are many and unpredictable, but likely would include an increase in the power and reach of the state toward whatever ends it seeks to pursue.

Again, these statements are laughable in light of the church’s refusal to admit that is already once redefined marriage to fit the state’s definition--and fighting tooth and nail to defend the definition that was imposed on them.

What a bunch of lousy scare-mongers. “Oh! This is the first step towards a totalitarian government!” Yeah, right. Whereas allowing an administration to dishonestly pursue a war of aggression--that’s no real threat to our civil liberties.

To hell with those nasty old men in Utah obsessed with defining everyone else’s sex life. Let them put their own houses in order and do something about the abuse and unhappiness so rife in Mormondom.

Posted by holly at 2:49 PM | Comments (5)

August 10, 2008

Sunstoned

I have a hangover--an intellectual and social hangover. I spent the last three days at Sunstone, and it was the standard mix: really meaningful connections with thoughtful people, new friendships, profound intellectual insights, and a few unpleasant social interactions. As usual, I got asked "So why are you at Sunstone?" in this angry, accusatory tone, as if I have no right to be interested in discussions about one of the primary institutions to shape my life. I think in the future I might photocopy this essay and have it on hand to give people when they ask me that.

There were many discussions of gay marriage, particularly given the church's activism regarding California's Proposition 8. You always hear upsetting stories at Sunstone: tales of religious and emotional abuse, profound spiritual suffering, sheer mind-boggling stupidity. But I was gobsmacked by the tales I heard from a California lawyer who is horrified by the church's homophobia. He said that each ward in California is told how much money it must contribute to the church's campaign to amend California's constitution to ban same-sex marriage. He also said that a member of the high council got up in a meeting and informed the congregation that Satan is behind all the efforts to legitimize homosexual relations, and that he frequently works in some really pernicious ways to get people to embrace things they shouldn't:

1. He creates sympathy among good people for the lives, hopes and unhappiness of others.

In other words, compassion is of the devil.

2. He uses rational thinking and logic to create doubt about God's commandments.

Or, to paraphrase D&C 93:36: "the glory of Satan is intelligence, or in other words, truth and light."

But enough about that. Here are a few of the cool things that happened.

First of all, a shout-out to my friend Parker Blount, who delivered the best paper I heard at the symposium. Entitled "Proclaiming the Family: Which Family?" its abstract read

The document "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" declares that "the family is ordained of God." Are we to assume that means all families, or just so families of a particular type? When the Proclamation warns of the "disintegration" of the family, what exactly does that mean? And what do "responsive citizens and governments" do "to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society"? What are we hearing from Church leaders to answer those questions and fill in the gaps? In this session, I present my take on those questions and suggest that we in the Church may be seduced by our own rhetoric about family.

I have long admired Parker's thinking and figured this would be an intelligent critique of the church's limited and limiting definition of family, which is a cover and excuse for attack on homosexuals, feminists, etc. And the paper did offer that critique, but it went far beyond it and also critiqued our current environmental and economic practices. The real threats to families, Parker suggested, include destruction of ecosystems that support us and all other life on the planet, rampant capitalism, and war.

It was fabulous: intelligently reasoned, politically engaged, attentive to the entire world and not just the somewhat insular community Mormonism intentionally creates. It made me realize that I would love to see an entire symposium focusing as much as possible on the intersections of Mormonism, politics and activism, well beyond Mitt Romney, the ERA, and same-sex marriage.

Margaret Toscano gets my award for the single most profound thing anyone said in my hearing. She offered me a really great definition of "taking the Lord's name in vain": it's not swearing, she said, but invoking God's authority and claiming that YOU know his will and can tell other people, with God's authority, how to think and/or behave.

In other words, though Margaret didn't say this, Thomas S. Monson takes the Lord's name in vain every single day of his life.

Another good thing: I wore these shoes and all sorts of people complimented me on them.

My primary contribution was a paper using trauma studies as a way to read religious autobiography; it was a major expansion of the paper I presented at NonfictioNow back in November. It's not my finest Sunstone offering, as it's fairly new stuff, an introduction of sorts for both me and my audience, but it's a topic I like and plan to pursue, so I hope the next version of the paper will be better.

I also read a really short essay as part of a panel called "This I Believe," modeled on the NPR segment. There were nine presenters and the panel was filmed for YouTube. I tried to find it this morning but it hasn't been posted yet. My essay was on God's sense of humor--I don't really believe he has one, but that doesn't matter so much, as I don't really believe in God. Anyway. If the panel actually gets posted, it will be my YouTube debut, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Posted by holly at 11:45 AM | Comments (12)

May 12, 2008

Habits vs. Routines vs. Accomplishments, and the Overriding Significance of Goals

Last week someone emailed me a story from the NY Times, and when I read it, I happened to look at the list of "most popular emailed stories." Near the top was something titled Unboxed: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Which was a question I wanted to read about and have answered.

One of the reasons I continue to value my Mormon upbringing was the whole goal program I grew up with. There was this official church curriculum for teenagers, which presented them with six specific areas of well-rounded humanity--physical health, spiritual development, social interactions, personal ethics, I don't remember them all--and we were expected to set and complete two goals in each area every year while we were in junior high and high school. If young women completed the program satisfactorily, they got a really ugly necklace. I don't remember what young men got. Maybe a merit badge; their version of the program might have been tied up in scouting, which the church has sort of commandeered.

I used the goal program to great advantage, collecting a slew of virtuous habits such as thrift and punctuality. I made running three miles every school-day morning a habit--albeit one I hated--and the fact that I managed to do that for a full year helped me acquire that necklace I never wore once. I wasn't in it for the necklace, you see: I was in it for the habits and the accomplishments themselves.

And yes, I didn't just focus on habits; I also set goals for specific accomplishments: prepare a bassoon solo for regional Solo & Ensemble competition. Be valedictorian of my crappy high school, just like my big sister--which included all sorts of habits for how I dealt with school work: listen in class, take good notes, attend to assignments promptly, complete them thoroughly, keep them organized so I could find things when I needed them, etc.

I still have all those habits--or rather, their equivalents in the adult world--and I don't want to relinquish them; they've served me well. I can find stuff when I need it. I don't bounce checks or get parking tickets or library fines or any sort of late fees. If I'm given a specific project to complete, I pretty much get it done on time.

And yet, I can feel a laxness and laziness and tiredness in the way I approach my habits. Now that I'm in my 40s and have been keeping an elaborate to-do list since I started grad school (my to-do list as an undergrad wasn't so elaborate, but I certainly had one), it's not really a habit; it's more an element of my character.

My goals these days are almost always about accomplishments, rarely about habits. I think this is a problem. Because while some of the habits I worked hard to cultivate have become an integral part of my personality, other habits I've acquired are more like the absence of intentional habits--just lazy routines.

One the thing I like about academia is that on the days I don't teach--and if I'm lucky enough to get a schedule were I don't have to be in a classroom until after noon, even on the days I do--I don't have to set an alarm clock. This means I habitually go to bed and get up whenever. Admittedly, I have sleep issues, and having to set an alarm is sort of anxiety-inducing for me; and yet, given that I usually wake up around 8, I would hope I'd be able to create a more structured, although still not rigid, approach to retiring and getting up.

Then there's what I do when I get up: I habitually sit down at my computer and read the news until I A) run out of news or B) get bored. I could devise a schedule; I could also say that other things would take precedent over reading on-line newspapers every morning. But it's a morning-appropriate task, and my brain isn't always ready for something for strenuous first thing in the morning....

I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, and that's part of the problem--not for this entry, but for my life. I want some new habits, but the thought of pursuing them seems vaguely uncomfortable--which is precisely what I should be seeking. I found the NY Time article really compelling for statements like this:

brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try ­ the more we step outside our comfort zone ­ the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

I have been trying to step outside my comfort zone in the last few days, in small ways. Friday I spent a good deal of time in the car, and I forced myself to listen to my least favorite of the radio stations I can tolerate: NPR. (I know I seem like the kind of person who should love NPR, but prefer music to talk on the radio.) I've been setting my alarm clock for 8 a.m. and making sure I'm in bed by 11:30 p.m. I even did yoga yesterday! Now there's a habit I'm sorry I lost: poses I used to be able to hold for a good long while I couldn't even get into in the first place when I tried them last night. I lost that habit--which I loved, which sustained and enriched me--for a variety of reasons: I moved away from Iowa City, where I had a house with a big expanse of bare floor perfect for plopping down a yoga mat at a moment's notice, plus a yoga teacher I adored who would teach me new stuff every week; and I got cable.

But I don't just want to do something new and different, once or twice--or something old abandoned so long ago that it feels awkward and difficult. Yes, I would love to take a ceramics class--I've wanted to do that for a long time. But I don't know if throwing pots would become a habit for me, and I want some new habits.

But what? I guess I could start crocheting more and knit less. I could follow Benjamin Franklin's template, provided in his autobiography, for "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection":

1. Temperance
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. Silence
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry
Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice
Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation
Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. Tranquillity
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. Chastity
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

13. Humility
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

But to be honest, that was part of my model back when I was a teenager, so even though I'm not as successful in some of the areas as I once was, they all seem pretty familiar....

I could resolve to blog every morning, or every other morning.... I could resolve to be a more faithful, regular commenter on my favorite dozen blogs or so. (That means your blog.)

Is anyone willing to help me out with this? Having had a few posts lately that garnered a lot of comments, I am reminded again that there's just no predicting what people will feel like responding to, and I also think that asking for comments is sometimes the surest way not to get them. But I'm taking the risk. Gentle readers, what are the habits you find most useful and or/enjoyable in your own lives? What are the habits you would most like to cultivate?

Posted by holly at 8:23 AM | Comments (10)

January 25, 2008

Boring the Saints

A few days ago I finally finished watching the Helen Whitney documentary on The Mormons. I know, I know: this is old news; most people watched it months ago and I could have done so too if A) my tv got decent reception of PBS, but it doesn’t, or B) I was willing to watch it on my computer screen, but I wasn’t, or C) I had moved the disk to the top of my Neftflix queue weeks ago, but there were other things I wanted to see more.

Anyway, I watched it, and it was pretty good, I guess--it seemed balanced and reasonable and accurate. The voices presented included those of the faithful, the dissenting, the ambivalent, the scholarly, the mainstream, the extreme. There was nothing particularly objectionable about it, aside from this Terryl Givens guy, who embodies so many things I despise about a particular type of Mormon and set me teeth on edge every time he appeared on screen or opened his mouth. What a sanctimonious, prissy prig! How pig-like in his appearance, how like a mosquito in his intonation and speech. Ick.

But aside from that, nothing upset me, or moved me, or challenged me, or informed me. Watching it was like watching “The Trouble with Tribbles” and a few other episodes from the James T, Kirk series of Star Trek: OK, they were pretty good to begin with--at least, I enjoyed watching them at the time--and it has been a long time since I last watched them, but STILL, I saw them so many times in my youth that they remain really familiar and not that fun to watch. All that’s different now is that my TV is a lot newer and the commercials are more sophisticated.

So that’s my main reaction to the documentary: It bored me, not because it was badly made or anything, but because I already knew everything it contained, even down to the Reed Smoot hearings. Which is fine: it means I had a decent education about the church in the first place, that not that much has changed since I left over 18 years ago, and that I haven’t missed all that much by being gone.

But it did make me reflect on just how little most people outside the church really know about it. The documentary had to be so basic and and rudimentary because most non-mos don’t know much about the church except that A) the Mo-Tabs are a really big choir housed in a really funky building and B) the missionaries are annoying and C) Mitt Romney probably can’t get elected because he belongs to it.

And that lack of information has made it hard for me to write about Mormonism for a non-Mormon audience, so I am actually quite grateful that Helen Whitney chose to bore the saints.

Posted by holly at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)

December 19, 2007

Maybe It Really Was Two Minutes In Heaven

Episode 18 of VM, which I discussed yesterday, opens with Veronica making out with Deputy Leo (whose reappearance near the end of season 3 is a much needed bright spot) before her front door. He wonders why he’s never been invited in and wants, he says, “to get a really good, long look at your bedroom ceiling.”

“Wow! College girls must be easy,” she replies.

The focus of the scene is the talking, not the kissing. There’s no dramatic music, nothing unusual in the camera shot. You understand, from everything in the scene itself, that these two people like each other, but you also understand that Leo likes Veronica a lot more than she likes him. I thought Deputy Leo was a great character and was sorry Veronica wasn’t nicer to him. But the show doesn’t intend for them to have incredible chemistry, and they don’t. The show does intend for Veronica and Duncan to have incredible chemistry, and they still don’t.

The show intends for Veronica and Logan to have incredible chemistry, and they do. And it makes sense that they do. Because as they work together on things like finding out who stole the money at the poker game, what’s going on with the various witnesses who claim to have seen Lynn Echolls jump off the bridge or ride away in a van, who is using the credit cards of Logan’s supposedly dead mother, they come to see one another’s virtues and vulnerabilities.

The kiss signifies something complicated and wonderful: they’ve discovered they have an emotional connection. As they acknowledge this emotional connection, it allows for an embodied attraction. (I use that slightly odd phrase because I think it covers more than calling the attraction merely “physical,” as opposed to some other sort, like “emotional” or “intellectual.” Emotions and thoughts are not just emotional and intellectual, they are embodied, and can cause physiological changes, including alterations in blood pressure, pulse, expression, posture, digestion, etc; and embodiment includes things like the way we carry ourselves, what our voices sound like, and how we adorn or decorate our bodies.) Admitting and acting on that attraction allows their emotional connection to deepen. And lust is part of every aspect of the embodied attraction and connection.

These people want each other, and the kiss makes it clear. OK, it’s a pretty tame kiss in a lot of ways: it’s just a first kiss, and just first base, and they’re juniors in high school, and while Veronica isn’t a virgin in that she was roofied and raped while unconscious, she’s never had consensual sex she remembers, so she could be considered a kind of psychological virgin. But there are little things, aside from the camera work and soundtrack, that show how passionate this kiss is. One gesture I particularly love is when Logan slides his hand down to the small of Veronica’s back and stops there for a moment: he knows that according to the protocol of a first date, his hand can’t venture any farther down, but it then allows him to slide his hand back up along her spine--not too far up, mind you--but this time, his hand is under her shirt. The kiss continues a moment longer, before they break apart and stare at each other, alarmed, excited and confused. There’s an awkward disengagement from the embrace, then Veronica goes to her car and shrugs at Logan before she gets in and drives away. Days later, after an inconsequential conversation about something else, Veronica will think to herself, “All right-y, Logan. We’ll just skip over the two minutes in heaven we had. You want to pretend it never happened? No argument here. My lips, for all intents and purposes, are sealed,” but there’s virtually no talking involved in this kiss. And it wasn’t two minutes in heaven: it was closer to a minute.

I acknowledged Monday that I could watch a fairly explicit, completely naked sex scene I enjoyed and admired, and still not get worked up, because the sex wasn’t about me. Whereas this kiss I’ve just described is, as I’ve already acknowledged, pretty tame. And yet, as I imagine my account of the details make clear, watching it is a complete turn-on. This is because the kiss replicates both my experience and my fantasies in really lovely ways. The kiss is a nice, accurate representation of what I have been taught to consider the early stages of how you act when you want to deepen not feelings of friendship, nor admiration or respect or esteem (though I think things develop more nicely when you feel all those things), but feelings of lust. And I have found, that just as turned out to be the case with Veronica and Logan, lust can make you feel more kindness, affection, respect and tenderness for the person with whom you explore it.

I grew up being told, flat-out, “Lust is evil.” We had countless lessons on it in every venue the church could provide. Lust is evil. Love is pure and virtuous, and completely unconnected to lust, which is evil. Lust is an evil feeling, and the actions that proceed from it are, from start to finish, evil. Never mind that, more than just about any other branch of Christianity, Mormonism is obsessed with sex, scorning and condemning celibacy as abnormal and insisting everyone get married, while the big whoop-de-doo reward of Mormon heaven is that you get to have sex for all eternity, which you wouldn’t find much of a prize if you didn’t have an active enough libido to experience lust to some degree and with some frequency. In Mormon culture and doctrine, you get married, you have sex, but somehow, you’re supposed to do it without feeling lust, feeling only this other, pure desire for children or SOMETHING that is divorced from anything erotic or bodily--again, ironic, since Mormons claim to love bodies, and insist that God has a body.

I don’t believe lust is evil, any more than hunger or illness or being incredibly, incredibly cold, or even buoyant good health, all of which can also prompt people to commit evil acts. (I think people get up to mischief sometimes when they’re feeling REALLY good.) I believe that the Mormon church’s vilification of lust is evil, and one more reason that Utah is the most depressed state in the nation.

All right. I have to run off to meet a student now and I’m going to be late. But I’m still moving towards my final point, and I promise to get there eventually. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by holly at 1:45 PM | Comments (3)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

December 6, 2007

I’m Glad I Didn’t Tell That Joke, Because It’s Still Not Funny

It’s 4:30 a.m., I’ve been crying for hours and the medication I took to combat my insomnia isn’t working, so my judgment isn’t the best. This entry is overwrought and earnest and I hope it’s not too annoying but it’s one of those things I have to post because it really matters right now. I just I hope I don’t sound too ridiculous and unproofread later.

Monday during an appointment to have my teeth cleaned I picked up the newspaper to read while I waited for my dentist (whom I love--he’s both a good dentist and a very nice man) to check my teeth after the hygienist cleaned them, and read an item about how South Dakota (who knew?) is the least depressed state in the country, while Utah is the most depressed. (There are also only six states in which people commit suicide more readily than in Utah.) I laughed. “Of course it’s Utah,” I said aloud to no one in particular, shaking my head. I wrote down the details of the study in the notebook I always carry with me so I could find a link to it later, thinking I would write a glib, funny blog entry about how appropriate it is that Utah is not only the most depressed but the most depressing state in the country, filled as it is with miserable Mormons.

And then yesterday I read this account on Young Stranger of a young man’s desire to kill himself because he is both gay and Mormon, and I lost all enthusiasm for mocking the misery an actual human being experiences when his life is in conflict with his religion.

I’m going to do that incredibly maudlin 80s thing and quote a Smiths song, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” which always makes me weep when I think seriously about the lyrics:

You should know
time’s tide will smother
and I will too
when you laugh about people who feel so
very lonely
their only desire is to die
well I’m afraid
it doesn’t make me smile
I wish I could laugh
but that joke isn’t funny anymore
it’s too close to home
and it’s too near the bone
more than you’ll ever know

The main reason I didn’t blog much in November was because I was traveling, and one of the things I traveled to was a conference, where I presented a paper on religious trauma, in which I finally found a way to make damnation intelligible to a secular audience. I’m not going to go into the details of that now, because if one wants to publish one’s scholarly work in journals one doesn’t explain it on the web. But suffice it to say, believing you are damned really, really sucks, and although it is outside the range of many people’s experience, it is not outside the experience of people who are devout Mormons and desire nothing so much as to live a virtuous, spiritually meaningful life sanctioned by god’s approval, but who feel that, for whatever reason, something about their core self or primary identity or most cherished concept of human ethics and responsibility or whatever somehow prohibits or violates true virtue and is beyond god’s approval.

I felt that. I felt it about my mission. I felt that my impulse to let people choose their own paths, to say sincerely “That’s a perfectly acceptable choice,” when they said, “I want to be an ethical person according to these principles and beliefs, and I don’t feel I really want or need to be Mormon to a good person,” put me outside the realm of god’s love.

It sucked.

But this suicide thing..... It reminds me of Puritanism, for which I felt a profound affinity when I finally studied it in grad school. I’m not the only person to write about the similarities between Puritans and Mormons, which go beyond a certain sexual reticence--after all, the 19th century form of New England Puritanism was Congregationalism, with which Joseph Smith was extremely familiar, and one of my favorite elements of Mormonism, the emphasis of careful reading of texts and of writing a journal in order to turn one’s life into a text to be read for evidence of god’s workings upon the soul, was inherited straight from the Puritans.

But the Puritans had a very dark side: The theology required people to imagine damnation if they weren’t up to par, to confront "the imaginative impact of the idea of being loathed and daily victimized by an all-powerful deity” (John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination) and to write about the experience of doing so. No wonder, then, that they were prone to despair, to the point that they killed themselves far more readily than other people. In fact, as I said in my paper,

the frequency with which puritans committed suicide was used by others as evidence that the religion’s adherents weren’t among the saved. It might also help you understand why the Puritans had such a propensity to call people witches, imagining dark rituals in which people celebrated their hatred of a god who hated them. It might also help explain why there aren’t many Puritans around today: the theology was too brutal and punishing to last.

Mormonism is fairly brutal and punishing in its own way, and yet it thrives. It thrives, as does the misery and despair it engenders when someone doesn’t measure up to its rigid demands. It thrives, even as it prompts people to write eloquent suicide notes, eloquent explanations of why suicide is a morally and theologically justifiable choice for a person who is gay/ an artist/ single/ infertile/ whatever.

Myself, I wrote my first (and still unpublished) book as the defense I would offer at the final judgment, explaining why I stood by the ethical choices I made, and I could well imagine the look of revulsion and contempt on god’s face as he rejected my defense and opened a trap door to send me straight to hell.

I don’t still believe in a god who would do that to me--I don’t still believe in any god, really. But you don’t write a text like that if you don’t care A HELL OF A LOT about religion and spirituality and ethics. Which brings me to my next point: Mormonism often punishes most those who invest in it most.

But that goes for religion in general, doesn’t it. I’m thinking of Karen Armstrong, and her amazing admission at the end of Through the Narrow Gate. Unable to to acquiesce quietly to the intellectual helplessness orthodoxy encourages (or to deal with ways the faints caused by her undiagnosed epilepsy are contemptuously dismissed as a moral and spiritual failing), she suffers a breakdown, and after a few months, is forced to admit that the life of a nun is not for her. While waiting for the dispensation that will release her from her vows, she listens one day to the choir sing the prayer of Saint Ignatius, which reads

Take and receive, O Lord, all my liberty; my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have, all that I am, Thou hast given me, and I give it all back to Thee to be governed according to Thy will.

All I ask is Thy grace and Thy love. With these I am rich enough and I do not ask for anything else.

Armstrong details her response to the prayer; she writes

It was the last words that stung. I did want things other than God’s love. I wanted human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind. I probably wouldn’t get them but I wanted them. God’s love should have been enough. It was in one sense everything. But I did ask for other things, and if I stayed I’d be grabbing at little unworthy human satisfactions [and she gives an example, as when sisters fell in love with a cat because they could not devote any affection to another human being].

The prayer left an aching sadness. That perfect self-giving. That image of God as Everything that still couldn’t satisfy me. How could I be happy when I’d rejected Everything?

Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their homosexuality often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their sense that certain human choices outside of Mormonism are entirely valid often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who want human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind in addition to god’s love often feel they have rejected Everything.

And yet we are entitled to human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind, and to be who we are, and I believe that in some fundamental way, rejecting Everything is really the only way to go: because saying that you want those things is a way of saying you are willing to lose your eternal life, to risk damnation. And as the scriptures also tell us, s/he who will save his life shall lose it, and s/he who will lose his life shall find it. And I don’t think that’s a religious truth; I think that’s a spiritual truth, explaining the fact that, as posters in so many adolescent bedrooms have explained, if you let something go and accept that it is not yours to keep, it often comes back to you and stays with you.

But losing your life is not the same as taking your life. Dear god, dear god whom I don’t even believe in but invoke because nothing else has quite the power of that word, please let that young man not take his life. Please let no one else in Mormondom ever take their life because they believe they do not please you.

I don’t know what else to say. My heart aches for Young Stranger’s friend, and I don’t even know him. I have burst into tears at least a dozen times while thinking about him over the past day. I’m up because I’m thinking about him--and about my dear friend R, whose husband has been in the ICU since Saturday and will probably never walk again because, of all things, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house--and I feel hopeless and powerless and utterly betrayed yet again by the spiritual training of my youth, which I still somehow continue to value, because it gave me things I cherish, like my love of autobiography and journal-keeping, or my marvelous sense of self-tied-up-in-place.

Anyway. I should go back to bed. It’s so late it’s early and my judgment is clouded--insomnia and the medication I take to counteract it often do that to me--and when I am fully awake and sober and it’s daylight, I may regret posting this, but what the hell.

Posted by holly at 4:30 AM | Comments (6)

September 26, 2007

Warren Jeffs Found Guilty

I was triumphantly relieved to read that Warren Jeffs, "prophet" of the Fundmantalist COJCOLDS or whatever it's called, has been found guilty in Utah of two counts of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl. He faces more charges in Arizona as well.

The arguments of the defense in all this just sound so gross. I'm glad the jury focused on the fact that the girl was 14, and that she was told that if she didn't submit to this marriage she didn't like, she'd go to hell. Those are, I think the most relevant issues in the matter.

Posted by holly at 11:34 AM | Comments (1)

September 11, 2007

Baring Their Chests and Testimonies

I got this link from my friend Troy, who sent it to me with the note "as if missionaries weren't gay enough...."

It's for Mormons Exposed: Men on a Mission, a retailing enterprise promoting a calendar featuring a buff, bare-chested RM (returned missionary) every month. The faq page (an acronym I always read "fag" unless it's capitalized) states that "the calendar celebrates these missionaries' great looks and beautiful bodies, as well as the amazing stories of service of these deeply spiritual men," adding that

Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story - one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity. The fact that twelve young returned missionaries are posing shirtless will certainly raise eyebrows, but may also help to sort out some common misconceptions about Mormons. The shock value of what these traditionally conservative young men have helped to create has the power to build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance.

It also notes that the "This product may be the must-have stocking stuffer of the year, or even be the gag gift of 2008"--or do they mean the "gay gift" of 2008?

You'll see what I mean if you go to the "meet the missionaries" page, click on the little photo of each missionary, then run your cursor over the larger photo that appears on the plaque on the right of the screen: each missionary appears in his shirtless pose! What cracks me up is that they simply removed their shirts and posed in their dress slacks, with their belts still on. But you must check out Matt, who holds is scriptures in his fully-dressed pose, but has his thumb tugging down the waistband of his pants (just a bit of his garments peek out) and his hair coyly disheveled in his shirtless pic.

I shouldn't be so snarky, I know: it's not like most Mormon men know much of anything at all about how to be sexy, since all they're taught for most of their lives is how to repress.

But they do know how to be pompous and white. I must point out that while the twelve young men who posed for the calendar served all over the world--Ukraine, Japan, Mozambique, Argentina, Las Vegas--they're fairly homogeneous in their origins: four are from Utah, two are named Brandon, one is a Matt and one is a Matthew, and they're all white, white, white! Not a Hispanic, Asian, Native American (or, in Mormon-speak, "Lamanite") or African-American (or, in Mormon-speak, "seed of Cain") in the mix. Not one.

If you ask me, that's a pretty serious lapse for an enterprise that claims it wants to "build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance."

They're so entrenched in their own view of who they are that they can't even realize the extent to which WHITENESS is part of the stereotypical ideas about Mormons, and that seems to be one stereotype they have no wish to defy.

(And oh yeah. There's also the "deeply closeted" stereotype. They're not doing much to defy that one, either. Which is why you need to read Troy's essay on embracing queerness.)

Posted by holly at 9:11 AM | Comments (4)

August 1, 2007

Some Pretty Nasty Shit

Warning: read no further if you have if don’t want to be grossed out, because frankly, my title should be taken literally. This entry includes a link to a site with thoroughly disgusting photos, as well as references to bodily functions many people prefer not to discuss.

In other words, don’t get to the end of this entry and leave me a comment about how I gave you too much information, because I’m telling you right now, if you don’t really want to know what I’ve been doing for the past five days, don’t read on.

So here it is:

I’ve been cleansing my colon.

Yep. A few weeks ago in an entry about lucid dreaming, I mentioned that one trick in the new age bag of steps to enlightenment is colon cleansing--the idea is that toxicity in the bowels impedes both physical and spiritual health. Not too long ago my acupuncturist recommended some outfit called Blessed Herbs--said they sold a mean colon cleansing kit. I had nothing better to do during the final weekend in July than drink a load of apple juice and trot to the bathroom, so I figured, why the hell not?

The specifics of this cleanse involve, as I say, apple juice. And packets of some toxin absorbing powder you mix with said apple juice five times a day. And some powerful digestion-stimulating herbs packaged in handy capsules so you can swallow some right before bedtime. And six to eight glasses of water. And, ideally, nothing else. Which is a basically a juice fast, and you do it for five days.

Before I go any further, let me say that I HATE FASTING. I HATE IT. I have ALWAYS hated it. Even when I was anorexic I hated it. I did it, but I hated it.

I especially hated it as a Mormon. Don’t know if you knew this, but all Mormons in decent health are supposed to fast for 24 hours the first Sunday of every month. Now, fasting can be good for you in moderation, provided you drink enough water while you’re doing it to keep your organs lubricated and healthy. But the thing about fasting as a Mormon is this: you go without water for 24 hours too. And that’s just bad for you. It’s not only onerous and boring, it’s flat unhealthy.

But even fasting as a regular Mormon wasn’t as bad as fasting as a missionary. Because as a missionary, you had to ride around on a bike and sweat and get dehydrated, and you still weren’t supposed to drink anything--or if you REALLY needed some liquid, you have a very little bit of water, just enough to wet your mouth.

Plus it made Sundays really long not to be able to go home from Church and cook dinner. The only good thing about fast Sunday as a missionary was that when we finally did get to cook dinner and eat, we usually just stayed in for the rest of the night, instead of going back out to work for three more hours like we were supposed to--we called that P-Day eve, because the next day was our Preparation or P-day, the one day a week we go to do things like listen to music or write letters.

Anyway. Back to the fact that I hate fasting. It’s painful and boring. I personally don’t have much energy when I fast--something about not consuming food just does that to me. But I do recognize that at times, being bored and uncomfortable is worth it.

This was one such time. Fasting got easier the longer I did it, partly because I wisely cleared my refrigerator of actual food before I started, partly because I kept reading the website and the instructions obsessively and learned that I could consume things like vegetable broth and miso if I really wanted to, partly because my stomach shrank (boy did it shrink) and partly because, well, the process was producing satisfactory results.

Now I’ve done colon cleanses before. But I’ve never seen results like those I got with this system. I won’t bother to describe them, because if you really want to know what they were like, simply go to a page aptly titled It’s Gross and It’s Mine! and see what happened.

There was a point when I wondered how I could have six bowel movements a day (hey! I told you not to read on if you weren’t prepared to encounter grossness!) when I wasn’t consuming any solid food, but according to the experts what I was expelling wasn’t anything I’d eaten recently: it was “mucoid plaque.” I got out an anatomy book and read up on the colon: turns out one of the main things the colon does is produce lots and lots of mucus, and it doesn’t always go anywhere. And when it just sits in your colon for over four decades, it becomes caked with very old feces and all sorts of nastiness.

By the end I had to wonder how there was room for my food to pass through when there was all that other stuff in there. Which is pretty much the point: clearing all that out so there’s room for your food, so nutrients are absorbed more easily, etc etc.

Overall I am quite happy with the results. I lost several pounds and my stomach is MUCH flatter. I feel like my complexion looks healthier--I might be making that up. But it’s really nice to know that all that stuff is just GONE.

In other words, I actually recommend this, and I might even do it again.

Now, one question you might be having is why doing that would prevent me from blogging. It didn’t, really; I just didn’t feel like it. I felt lethargic and vulnerable and all I really wanted to do was monitor my body and its various functions. But now that’s all done and I’m back to clogging up my gut rather than clearing it out. But who knows. Perhaps some new lightness and clarity will be reflected in my writing.

Posted by holly at 6:41 PM | Comments (6)

December 9, 2006

Blessed Is the Man Who Goes Around Banging on People's Doors, at All Hours of the Morning, For He Truly Is Jesus's Friend

Here's a clip from John Safran, a guy from New Zealand, who rails, quite amusingly, about what's wrong with the ways Mormons conduct door-to-door proselytizing. And then, just to see how Mormons would feel if someone treated them the way they treat each others, he flies to Salt Lake with a friend, some pamphlets on atheism, a copy of The Origins of Species, and a nametag that says "John Safran, Atheist." Then he goes around and knocks on doors.

The whole thing is pretty damn funny, but I especially love when he says to one person, "May I offer you a reading from 1980s concept band XTC...."

Posted by holly at 2:40 PM | Comments (7)

November 5, 2006

A Little Love for Big Love

All the disks of season 1 of Big Love are somewhere in my Netflix queue, but I can't be bothered to move them closer to the top. First of all, I'm currently far too preoccupied with getting through season 2 of both Project Runway (which I'm rather obsessed with--if I had any skill in making patterns and such instead of just sewing them together, I'd be auditioning to get on) and Battlestar Galactica (which I respect and am intrigued by but find kind of tedious--the tone and tenor of each episode is too unvarying).

Plus I can't get all that excited about a watching a show that will require me to look at both Bill Paxton and Chloe Sevigny, two of my least favorite actors. I honestly don't understand why they are ever cast in anything. Shows with just one of them are bad enough, but I will really have to grit my teeth to make it through an entire season of something where the two of them share screen time. Chloe is so whiny, and has SUCH horrible posture: I want to slap her across the shoulder blades and scold, "Didn't your mother ever tell you how important it is to stand up straight?" As for Paxton, I find it a shame that he's not torn to pieces by aliens in every show he's in.

But I will watch Big Love some day, because I feel a commitment to seeing how Mormons are depicted in the mainstream media, yada yada yada. Then there's also the fact that one of the most interesting panels I attended at Sunstone was on Big Love, and two of the panelists were women who work on Mormon Focus, the pro-polygamy magazine that supposedly served as the inspiration for the series. These two women consider themselves "independent" polygamists, meaning that they are not affiliated with some fundamentalist group telling who to marry whom. And they LOVE the show.

These women, who were articulate, bright, educated and capable, if very conservatively dressed, love the show because they feel it portrays polygamists truthfully, sensitively, generously. It does a good job, they say, of depicting both the affection between the husband and the sister wives, as well as the strife than can occur. It also presents the polygamists as "normal" people who choose an alternative lifestyle.

Polygamy is seen by many people as extremely repressive for women--and I'm certain that in many forms (particularly the variety overseen by the likes of Warren Jeffs), it is extremely repressive. Nonetheless, the women in independent polygamist marriages are much more vocal and visible than the husbands, because the husbands can be prosecuted for bigamy and the women cannot. The women are vocal and visible in part because they are arguing for the decriminalization of polygamy between consenting adults (which I'll discuss further in a future post).

Neither woman on this panel, it should be mentioned, is actually in a polygamist marriage right now: one is a widow, and the other was a second wife, but not long after she joined the family, the first wife became unhappy with the arrangement and left. So these women are left in the position of espousing a lifestyle they cannot currently enjoy. It will come as a shock to learn, I'm sure, but it's not actually that easy to recruit "independent" women to "independent" polygamist marriages--independent women tend to want an independent husband of their own.

So that's why I will, someday, watch all of Big Love, just like I watched Orgazmo. I've seen two episodes of BL already, courtesy of some friends with Tivo, and I admit I wasn't overwhelmed, one way or the other. It didn't irritate me the way Angels in America did or impress me with its rigorous accuracy the way the South Park episode on Joseph Smith did. When I try to remember it now, I remember mostly annoyance: I was annoyed by the way the youngest wife dressed--no one trying to pass as Mormon would wear such skimpy outfits--and by the fact that the characters mispronounce "temple recommend," putting the stress on the last syllable of "recommend," as if it's a verb, when Mormons stress the first syllable--stuff like that would be so easy to fix if they just had a Mormon as a consultant for the show! And I didn't find Bill Paxton a good fit for the role he plays: he lacks a certain... glossiness Mormon priesthood holders exude, so the fact that I hate him to begin with made his position in the show even more annoying. But I've been told by plenty of Mos and Post-Mos that overall the show is pretty good and gets enough things right that you can enjoy it quite thoroughly. So I'll watch it all, truly I will--when I get done with the stuff I really want to see.

Posted by holly at 9:46 AM | Comments (6)

November 1, 2006

Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the excerpt)

Here are some excerpts from the paper I presented as part of this panel.

As part of my presentation, I pose this question, "why isn't it politically correct for a gay man to venture into the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?," first posed by Ben Christensen (whose temple garments are all in a twist because I claim the right to think he's a self-deceived, selfish gas bag--see the comments on this post) and cite ancient Athenian and Hebrew society (both of which required men who had sex with men to nonetheless marry women) to support my contention that Christensen's basic assumption is flawed. As it happens I am all for opening what has been the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--to gay WOMEN. But Christensen shows little care for the rights and opportunities of women, gay or straight: his concern is with preserving the privileges of MEN, straight or gay. Thus remains a question needing an answer, which is this:

What does it mean for a homophobic, patriarchal, misogynist society to require men to marry women and impregnate them as part of their duties as members of the community?

Why should a gay Mormon man give a damn about women's sexuality, since doctrine created by straight Mormon men doesn't? Consider Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants (a.k.a. the "new and everlasting covenant," a.k.a. polygamy): a man can have an infinite number of wives who belong to him, but no more than one man can belong to a woman, because women are given to men to multiply and replenish the earth. Women's pleasure and subjectivity aren't factors.

I know it can take a while to figure out one's sexual identity, and that people who avoid sexual behavior during their teens, only to marry in their early 20s, might not have a firm handle on their sexual orientation. I've known people who figure out after a decade or two of marriage that maybe they're not straight after all. I know from watching friends go through it that it's profoundly painful. But I also think from observing various marriages and divorces that there's something different happening when men who know ahead of time that they are gay marry women they know are straight. Whether or not these men are seeking some kind of "cure," they still seek to assuage their own suffering and discomfort through means that create profound suffering and discomfort for women, suffering and discomfort women have been trained to believe they should accept. I submit that patriarchy endows men with a sense of entitlement--witness Christensen's resentment that marrying women and fathering children is still the "exclusive territory of straight men"--that blinds them to the real cost of their actions, whereas women are trained, through doctrines like the new and everlasting covenant, to expect that they will not have the exclusive regard or affection of their husbands, that indeed their feelings about their marriages are less important than the patriarch's wielding of authority.

Both Fales and Christensen stress that they informed their wives of their homosexuality before the wedding. They did NOT make this revelation at the start of the courtship; they waited until marriage had been discussed. If a gay man truly wants to be honest and honorable, the real time to make this admission is on the first date, before the woman is in love and has a vision of her future with him. Admitting to a serious girlfriend that you're gay ends the deception, but I doubt it improves the chances for success of any subsequent marriage, given how naively and earnestly hopeful Mormon women are about marriage--and how ignorant they are about sex if they've obeyed the law of chastity.

In his commentary to Christensen's essay, Ron Schow notes that Christensen oversimplifies "his options as either temple marriage or ‘a rampant life of unrestrained queerness.' Obviously," Schow points out, "there are many choices between the two extremes" (139). Christensen ends his essay by relating an epiphany that occurred after a "BYU fireside where they tell you to get married. I'd pretty much tuned out the entire thing," he writes, "because it didn't apply to me, but then I got home, sat on my bed, and had a distinct impression that yes, it did apply to me. Yes, I was gay, but that didn't mean I was excluded from Heavenly Father's desire for his children to marry and have families" (131).

I am glad Christensen had that epiphany--I accept its truthfulness. What I don't accept is his oversimplified and religiously predetermined interpretation, that any marriage he might have must be with a woman for whom he feels little sexual desire. While I acknowledge the right he and his wife have to do as they please, I have the right to find their efforts foolish and destructive rather than admirable. Why should he settle for a partner he doesn't desire? Why should his wife settle for a partner who doesn't truly desire her? The fact that they're willing to doesn't strike me as adequate justification.

I want for these gay men who marry straight women what they seem unable to want for themselves or their wives: to be able to form their families and raise their children with a partner beloved, cherished and desired body and soul, and I think the world will be a better place for me and all other straight women and men when gay women and men have that right.

Posted by holly at 9:20 AM | Comments (4)

October 30, 2006

Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the introduction)

During the six years I've attended Sunstone, I've noticed that sessions there discussing homosexuality tend to focus on male sexuality, and that discussants, regardless of orientation, are generally male. For the 2006 symposium, I proposed a panel entitled "Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism" in part as a way of calling attention to the fact that homosexuality is an issue that also affects women. Admittedly, my panel did not include lesbian voices, but it seemed artificial to ask a lesbian to comment on the topic just as a way of correcting previous imbalances. I hope future sessions will address the concerns of lesbians, or include their voices.

I thought a lot about the title: I went with widely-recognized references to pop culture to show how common this issue is. I invoked Will and Grace because I want to underscore how genuine, precious and pleasurable my platonic friendships with gay men have been. I invoked Angels in America because it's a Pulitzer-prize winning set of plays featuring an unequal marriage between a closeted gay Mormon man and an unhappy Mormon housewife. (Though I admit I HATE both installments for so many reasons, including the fact that they're full of self-indulgent speeches that go on and on beyond the point of being either narratively or philosophically interesting, and that Kushner is a really shitty fact-checker, and that his female Mormon characters are not at all believable to me--no Mormon woman--no Mormon, PERIOD--would ever complain that it was a bad idea to leave Manhattan and move to DC, because DC is less righteous--hell, DC is overrun with Mormons, and there's a goddamn temple there!) I invoked Brokeback Mountain because it was current and also I really loved it.

That's the stuff before the colon; after the colon we get STRAIGHT WOMEN first, and then GAY MEN, because I wanted to foreground women in all of this. And then we get Mormonism, because it's the spin that complicates the matter.

Mine was not the only session dealing with homosexuality; one reason Dan Wotherspoon was so enthusiastic about the timing of my panel was that 2006 was the 20th anniversary of the publication of Good-bye, I Love You, a memoir by Carol Lynn Pearson, one of Mormondom's most beloved writers, about her temple marriage to a gay man, their divorce, and his death from AIDS. Carol Lynn presented a heartbreaking discussion of the suffering gay Mormons often endure. Her daughter Emily, who also married a gay man (I mention his one-man play here), was one of the panelists in my session. And Carol Lynn's ex-son-in-law also presented some of his more recent work.

My remarks for my part of the panel were drawn in part from material I first grappled with here. Relevant posts are, in order of posting, Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men, The Society of Buggers, Brokeback Mountain, Old Testament Weirdness, It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard, and The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus.

OK. That's all preamble. Tomorrow is Halloween and I'm planning to go that with theme in tomorrow's entry, so check back Wednesday or Thursday for the more substantial account of my remarks at Sunstone, if you're interested--or, if you're not, you know to stay away until the weekend.

Posted by holly at 10:10 AM | Comments (2)

October 6, 2006

My Least Favorite Kind of Mormon Man: The Dirty Old One

So far I've been pretty lucky when it comes to trolls: I haven't attracted too many. I think it helps that my blog isn't devoted to a single issue: OK, I write about feminism, and sex, and Mormonism, and teaching, but it's not like you can show up here and now that you'll find some polemic on gender or religion every single day.

Unfortunately, as of early this week, some filthy old coot has taken to showing up and leaving long, rambling, poorly edited comments here, full of questions about, speculation on and advice regarding my sex life. He is, of course, Mormon, at least in the cultural sense.

That's important, because Mormon men often hold positions of power where it is their duty to ask explicit questions about other people's sex lives, and to hear "confessions" about what the church considers sexual impropriety. I don't know if this guy was once a bishop and so got to hear all about people losing their virginity or visiting prostitutes or sleeping with the babysitter or hooking up with a truck diver etc etc or if he resents that he was never a bishop and so could only fantasize about how great it would be to hear such confessions, but he seems anxious to use my blog as an opportunity to play the role of enlightened priesthood holder passing judgment on someone else's sex life.

But that ain't gonna happen. So I'm telling you, asshole: go the fuck away.

Oh, yeah--that's something he has a problem with: my profanity. I really shouldn't swear so much! It offends him! Somehow, it hasn't occurred to him that he is precisely the kind of head-up-ass fuckface-dickwad I hope to offend, alienate and avoid.

I admit I hardly paid any attention to his first comment. It was LONG, poorly organized, condescending, boring as all hell. He invoked Mormonism and referred to me as "sister"--sister!-- early on, and at that point I knew I would never post the damn thing. I tried to skim the rest. He chided me for writing such long posts (how dare I use a personal forum as I see fit! Apparently prolificacy is the exclusive domain of self-important, emotionally and intellectually clueless middle-aged men) and trotted out that old Mormon attitude about how, since I still care about religion even though I no longer attend the Mormon church, I must be stuck in the past--of course there's no way I simply care about my spiritual development. He seemed pretty sure that since I owned a pair of mannish green shoes, I had to be gay. He really wanted me to talk about being gay.

As I say, I didn't read it too closely; it went in the trash bin and I assumed that was that. But yesterday he showed up again, seemingly unaware that I hadn't bothered to post or even read his first comment. This time, I read the comment, because this time it's starting to be harassment. He offers observations about my "strident feminism" (!), my vulgar mouth (!) and the "divine slut" within all women, as well as this utterly asinine and insulting assessment:

Women are: more than other creations of the universe, meant to feel. They are uniquely situated to feel sexual pleasure in a way a man cannot imagine, tolerate or last long enough to experience. And you are celibate? I hope that was then and not now.

He suggests that I become a lesbian since all the good men (like him, maybe?) are taken. In particular, he recommends that I begin sleeping with former female students.

Never mind that I'm not gay, would rather not sleep with former students and wouldn't trust this fuckhead to offer advice on how to open a can of cat food, turn on a light or take out the trash. No, what really matters here is that this scumbag seems to be turned on by lesbian sex.

He thinks I should do this because "People without sexual partners tend to become bitter, acerbic, outspokenly critical, judgmental and generally unpleasant." I wonder if never getting laid is his excuse for being bitter, acerbic, outspokenly critical, judgmental, generally unpleasant, as well as officious, remarkably lacking in self-reflection, disrespectful, sexist, offensive, intrusive, gross, foolish (because he used his real name, and thanks to google, I was able to find an address and professional affiliation for him) and downright creepy and vile.

I banned him from commenting and hope I've seen the last of him. If not, well, I'm not afraid to contact the society that oversees his profession and seek their help in getting him to stop harassing me.

Posted by holly at 7:23 AM | Comments (6)

September 2, 2006

Intro to my Sunstone Synopsis, Finally

Yeah, here it is: the day some of you have waited for, and others have dreaded: I'm finally gearing up to offer my report on Sunstone.

I should explain a little about what Sunstone is, since it has become obvious to me that even people with a background in Mormonism aren't quite clear on that.

Sunstone's website states that it is the "sponsor of open forums on Mormon thought and experience." The forum I attend each summer in Salt Lake is a symposium on Mormonism, not a conference. The two words are interchangeable in many regards, but General Conference in Mormonism means something special: it's a big meeting held every six months (the first Sundays in April and October) during which the faithful listen to exhortations from the brethren and reaffirm their commitment to the church by sustaining said brethren.

There's very little of that going on at Sunstone, which is probably one reason that some years ago (10? 15? anyway, before my time) the brethren issued a statement condemning alternative forums, which was, I am told, understood to be a condemnation of Sunstone in particular. Scholars who worked at church institutions were warned that their jobs and their membership could be imperiled by participation in Sunstone. As a result, attendance at the symposium declined sharply.

So you won't find too many conventionally devout Mormons delivering papers at--or even attending--Sunstone. It's not that you won't find any; they're just not the majority. Instead, Sunstone is a place where people from the fringes meet and mingle. For instance, at the plenary session one evening, the opening prayer was given by Susan D. Skoor, an ordained apostle of the Community of Christ (formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the branch started by those Mormons who did not follow Brigham Young to Utah after Joseph Smith was assassinated in Illinois--that's right, they ordain women now, and Apostle Skoor was extremely cool) and the closing prayer was given by a guy whose name I didn't catch but who freaked me out with his peremptory command that the audience stand while he prayed and who (I later learned) is a member of a fundamentalist polygamist offshoot of the church.

You ain't gonna find too many of those sorts offering prayers in mainstream Mormon functions.

I'd guess the majority of attendees are people who still maintain their activity in the church but are fairly unorthodox. (I admit I don't have data to back this assertion up, and I might be wrong, but it seems a reasonable guess.) The next biggest contingent, I imagine, is people like me: cultural Mormons who don't practice but maintain an interest in the religion that was once so important to them. Also in the mix are scholars who are not and never have been Mormon, but who have an academic interest in it. There is also a respectable showing from members of the Community of Christ (which never embraced polygamy), and from polygamist groups as well (which never stopped).

The only group not represented is any group that has as its raison d'etre convincing people to leave the Mormon church, because although Sunstone is most definitely not devoted to Mormon apologetics, its goal is to explore the role Mormonism plays in people's lives, not end that role. At Sunstone, you can voice long and loud the opinion that the church is entirely full of shit; you just can't make it your work to convince everyone else to feel that way too.

More to come.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)

August 28, 2006

As Good as the Replacement

I recently discovered something amazing: It is possible to play solitaire without a computer! Just get a regular old deck of cards--the kind you use to play poker or some such game--and replicate on a table or some other flat surface the layout of your favorite version of computer solitaire. The rules and so forth are the same, except that you must shuffle and move the cards about yourself.

I think part of me always knew this--now that I plumb my memory, I can recall a time in the 1970s, back before VCRs were commonplace; back when there were only three networks, all of which showed reruns in the summer, so that there might be nothing to watch on television, necessitating other ways of amusing oneself after the sun went down (which it does around 8 p.m. in mid June in Arizona, a state that resolutely refuses to observe Daylight Saving Time); back when my mother would try to get my sisters and me to entertain ourselves quietly from time to time and so taught us all to play every version of solitaire she knew of and bought us each our own deck of cards. (Which was kind of a big deal because there was this whole weird to-do in Mormondom in the 1970s and 80s about how "face cards were Satanic." Rook cards were fine; Uno cards were fine; Gin Rummy played with Rook cards was fine and Go Fish! played with Uno cards was fine; but play those same games with a deck of face cards and you were practically ringing the doorbell of hell, because cards bearing stylized representations of European royalty were the devilish creation of Lucifer himself, and the sin in such cards was so potent it would rub off on your fingers if you even picked up a deck.)

But seriously, when I recently came across a deck of cards and thought, "Huh. I so rarely run into anyone who enjoys playing cards any more; what am I ever going to do with these?" it felt like a discovery to realize that I really truly could, all by myself, play a game of cards that wasn't virtual, that the object itself was every bit as good as the electronic replacement.

Posted by holly at 10:12 AM | Comments (6)

August 11, 2006

Sunstone and Its Effect on Me

Yesterday I explained why I go to Sunstone; here's something I posted last year about why it's hard to attend, and how I always feel weird in Utah.

Posted by holly at 10:30 AM | Comments (3)

August 10, 2006

Why I Go to Sunstone

Today is my first day at Sunstone. Several people have asked me recently why I go to Sunstone, especially given my relationship to the church. Since I've already written something that addresses that question, I'm posting it here. This essay was published last year in Sunstone's print journal. It's kind of long, but if you're interested, here it is.

"What are you doing at Sunstone, then?"

It's a question I am asked each year. Sometimes the question is posed with genuine curiosity; sometimes it's an accusation. Why would someone who isn't a practicing or believing Mormon attend a symposium on Mormonism? It's also a question I asked at one point. Although I had read, subscribed to, published in, cited in my own scholarship and learned from the print version of SUNSTONE for years, I never attended a symposium until 2001--and the decision finally to do so wasn't easy. Early in 2001 I submitted an essay for publication; a few months later I got a message from Dan Wotherspoon, letting me know that he'd accepted the essay, and requesting that I read a version of it at the symposium. I told him I'd think about it.

"Why would I want to go to that?" I asked myself. "It's all fine and good in print, where you can read what intrigues you and ignore what doesn't, and nobody interrupts the author in the middle of a point. But this live version...I'm sure it'll just be a bunch of disgruntled inactives arguing about stuff with a bunch of bossy hard-liners"--and I'd seen and participated in enough of that already. But Dan was graciously, persistently insistent that I'd enjoy the symposium, so I queried a few friends who had attended.

"Of course you should go," they told me. "For every panel that doesn't interest you, you'll find one that does. And you'll meet so many incredibly cool people."

So I went. And Dan and my friends were right--so right, in fact, that I've been back every year since, and plan to go again. But what is it that draws me?

The short answer is that Sunstone is a place where I can ignore pronouncements about what I should believe and value and figure out what I do believe and value--about my own history, my own faith, about how to move through this complicated world as a moral, ethical person, all the while employing a vocabulary and frame of reference shared by the people I'm talking to. I certainly can and do spend much of my time pondering questions of ethics and truth with people who have no connection to Mormonism, but sometimes it's nice not to have to explain how the particulars of my Mormon upbringing affect my views on larger questions of spirituality and ethics.

The long answer goes something like this:

I try to accept that Sunstone is everyone else's forum as much as it is mine. I know there will be plenty going on that doesn't matter to me, and that's OK. Chief among the panels or presentations that don't interest me are any that focus on Joseph Smith. He may or may not have been a living prophet once, but he's not a living prophet any more--at least not to me. I find him only marginally more interesting than, say, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; or William Miller, the farmer from Upstate New York and Baptist preacher whose apocalyptic visions help launch the Second Great Awakening of 1820s and 30s. But I accept that to many people, even to people who are no longer or never were faithful Mormons, Joseph Smith and his teachings are of vital interest--after all, he made a lasting impression on US history, and he shaped an institution that affects millions of lives. And I don't discount the possibility that the right presentation could succeed in making Joseph Smith's life compelling to me again.

Nor do I worry much about the daily workings of the Church. At the time I'm writing, Gordon B. Hinckley is still president, but I can't name his councilors. Weeks will go by in which I don't hear a single mention of the church. Unless the Church takes a political stand, I don't see the current institution as having much effect on my life. But these days I don't live in the inter-mountain West where I spent my childhood. If I did, I might feel differently.

What I do care about is how my training as a Mormon has shaped and continues to shape the choices I make and the ideals I espouse.

Primo Levi wrote, "Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this." I would add that changing moral codes rarely involves a complete renunciation of one's old ideology. Often the change comes because a beloved and honored aspect of the ideology (for instance, an emphasis on disciplined religious study and the belief that each person should ask for confirmation that something billed as scripture is indeed a source of spiritual truths) somehow comes into conflict with another aspect of the ideology (such as directives not to probe religious mysteries or question the utterances of leaders). In such a situation, the first belief often is not abandoned; in fact, it is embraced all the more fully.

There are parts of my Mormon past I shed easily enough, parts I struggle to escape, parts I still embrace gladly and parts so inescapably central to who I am that it takes careful, deliberate scrutiny to tease them out in the first place--and even more work to understand them. How I see the world, what I find meaningful in the world, is irrevocably shaped by my Mormon upbringing.

For instance: I have ancestors who joined the Church in 1832. One of my ancestors survived the Haun's Mill Massacre only by pretending to be dead. I had two ancestors in the Mormon Battalion, one on my father's side and one on my mother's. One of my ancestors arrived in Salt Lake with Brigham Young and was named the first bishop of the city--indeed he was the only man to be bishop of the entire city. There are polygamists all over my family tree. Every one of my siblings has been married in the temple. I grew up in a town so Mormon that we held our high school prom in the church's cultural hall. One of the primary, crucial events of my life was my mission in Taiwan and the crisis of faith I suffered there. I even approach my job as an English professor in a way shaped by Mormonism: I love exegesis, or critical exploration of a text, and I know one reason for that is all those exercises I learned to do with scripture: leave it in context and see what it means; take it out of context and use it to explicate something; find something else to explicate it.

So if anyone can claim to be an ethnic Mormon, I think I can. And it is partly by virtue of my religious training and partly due to my temperament that I believe quite strongly Plato's maxim that "an unexamined life is not worth living." Thus, if the church somehow lost all its members tomorrow and existed only as a historical relic, I would still be concerned with scrutinizing and puzzling out how my present life has been shaped by my past, including the 26 years I spent as a devout Mormon, obeying the commandments, participating in the culture and passionately studying the doctrines of the Church.

Chances are slim that the Church will lose all its members tomorrow, and so I am also faced with the challenge of interacting respectfully with my parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends who remain in the church. I share with my family the legacy of sacrifice and creation given to us by our Mormon forebears, and I value that legacy. I chose to honor it by imitating my forebears and swapping a belief system I no longer find meaningful for something that offers me greater hope of grace and redemption, just as they did, while many in my family honor that legacy by remaining in the faith our ancestors chose. The challenge for all of us is to love and be happy for one another.

Maturity and generosity aren't always required in order to be happy for someone who behaves exactly as you believe s/he should, and is then rewarded for that behavior. But it can take maturity and generosity to be happy for someone who flourishes in a system that made you miserable, or in a system you don't approve of. How, then, do those who are gladly devout and those who are cheerfully inactive or excommunicated manage to share the cultural legacy of Mormonism and the network of relationships forged through Mormonism? For instance, should I cease to care about or pretend not to know people I loved on my mission, simply because I no longer believe what I preached then, that membership in the Mormon church is necessary to salvation? How do those of us who are no longer among the faithful reconcile a view of the world shaped by Mormonism with the sense that Mormonism is not adequate in helping us navigate the world? How do we avoid conflict with those we love who still rely on Mormonism as a moral and spiritual compass?

These are some of the questions that concern me, and I come to Sunstone because it helps me pose and answer those questions in meaningful, lively and constructive ways.

In March 2004, Karen Armstrong, one of my favorite writers and scholars, published The Spiral Staircase, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Through the Narrow Gate. In The Spiral Staircase, she discusses the difference between orthopraxy (right behavior) and orthodoxy (right thought), and convincingly cites the argument that in many religions, orthodoxy and doctrine are of little significance--what matters is behaving rightly, cultivating behaviors that change us for the better, regardless of what we believe.

This argument was so revolutionary and astonishing to me that I needed to explore it further. Remarkably, once I abandoned the idea that orthodoxy--that troublesome, unswallowable bone in my throat--mattered at all, I felt more at liberty to celebrate and embrace those practices inherited from Mormonism that truly have enriched my spiritual life. Thus I proposed a panel for the 2004 symposium: "Doing Things That Change Us: Mormonism as Praxis" (reprinted in SUNSTONE December 2004). I wanted panelists to consider the special benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely Mormon manner. I hoped the panel would be positive and validating for any audience: active, faithful Mormons could affirm those practices that reinforce their faith, while people who were no longer active or believing Mormons could acknowledge and remember what was valuable about their training as Mormons. The idea was to celebrate the ways in which Mormonism inculcates and encourages behaviors that truly do make us better people, regardless of belief.

That panel was one of the highlights of my five years at Sunstone--and I've been to some stellar presentations. It truly became a celebration, and no one in the audience seemed to think that anyone would need to justify a desire to identify and embrace the elements of our religious training that help us live lives of greater spiritual awareness and maturity, despite the fact that we had also shed elements of that training.

That's what Sunstone offers me: a forum where I can work to identify and embrace the elements of my religious training that help me live with greater spiritual awareness and maturity, which, admittedly, is something you can do at Church. But Sunstone also offers me a forum where I can ask if there have been elements of my training as a Mormon that get in the way of spiritual maturity, which is something you really can't do at Church. For me, it's about deciding, as consciously and deliberately as possible, what I want to keep and what I want to lose--and in order to do that, it helps to be around people who recognize some value in Mormonism to begin with, who don't think religion as a whole and Mormonism in particular are a waste of time. I am sure I will continue to encounter people who find it baffling that I want to discuss any element of Mormonism when I no longer subscribe to its doctrines; but at Sunstone, I also find people who understand where I'm coming from--and who are also willing to help me figure out where I want to go next.

I would differentiate here between community and kinship. I admit, I don't feel much of a sense of community at Sunstone: there are too many different groups devoted to too many different doctrines and too many people who don't fit in to any group for there truly to be a community. But I don't see that as a bad thing. That lack of cohesiveness means there's room to ask your own questions, spend an hour listening to someone else's questions. You may not agree with people or change their minds, but no one even pretends that that needs to happen. And at each symposium I have been lucky enough to meet someone who becomes a genuine friend, who challenges and inspires me not only for one weekend in late summer, but all year long.

A yoga teacher once explained the spiritual quest to me this way: it's as if we're all wandering through some giant maze of a corn field, the stalks too high for us to see who or what is in the next row. But if we're lucky, we find people we can wave to at those moments when we come out of a row, before we forge back down the narrow paths of the field, just so we remember that others are pursuing the same quest, even though ultimately, we must all do it alone. I buy that explanation; it resonates with my experience. Sunstone for me is the end of a row: I come out, take a deep breath, look around; I greet others seekers and hear something about their quests; then I get on a plane and head home, where I plunge once more into the maze.

Posted by holly at 10:00 AM | Comments (4)

July 24, 2006

Pioneer Day

Today is a holiday I haven’t celebrated since, oh, 1976. It’s Pioneer Day, anniversary of the day in 1847 when Brigham Young and a bunch of other guys (including my great-great-great-grandfather Tarleton Lewis, the first bishop of Salt Lake and the only man to be bishop of the entire city) arrived in the Salt Lake valley. Supposedly when they reached the descent into the valley, Brother Brigham, who was quite ill, sat up in his bed in the back of a wagon, surveyed the scene, then said, “This is the right place. Drive on.” (It’s often shortened to “This is the place.” But my dad, who reads lots of history books and loves correcting misinformed tour guides--he's done it all over the country, on topics ranging from the burial place of Wyatt Earp to the birthdate of Joseph Smith--always insisted that we say it correctly.)

When I was little we had big Pioneer Day celebrations; we dressed like pioneers and had parades with handcarts. But then the Church got ambitious and wanted to shed its provincial western image, and Pioneer Day ceased to be a big deal outside of Utah, where it's still a state holiday. I’m not complaining; it’s not all that fun to put on a long dress and sunbonnet and walk up and down the streets during monsoon season in southern Arizona.

But I admit I am totally captivated by the story of the trek across the plains, which killed a few of my relatives: Tarleton lost one of his sons that way, a small child of three or four, who wandered off one evening while collecting cow patties for fuel with a group of children. They found his bucket, but they never found the boy. Tarleton was heartbroken. Then there’s the story of the Willie and Martin handcart companies, a group of people who got a late start and so were overtaken by snow storms and blizzards. The survivors were eventually rescued by a bunch of young men. It chokes me up even to think about it.

In Primary we used to sing this song I absolutely loved, called “Pioneer Children.” It went,

Pioneer children sang as they walked... and walked... aaannd waaaaalked
They walked for miles....

and I can’t remember the rest. I just remember the way we’d draw out “aaannd waaaaalked.” It was fun.

So happy Pioneer Day! If you get a chance, take a walk. (I still can't--my gimpy hip is still bugging me.)

Posted by holly at 2:02 PM | Comments (9)

July 22, 2006

Not the Star I Paid to See

Picking up where I left off yesterday on the matter of unpleasant parents:

Another good thing about the way Mormons deal with kids: everyone (well, almost everyone) learns very early that there are places where it's just not appropriate to bring children. This doesn't cause kids much pain or resentment, because a lot of those adult forums are plain boring, and kids are rightfully glad to escape them. You learn that your parents can go off and leave with you a babysitter and it won't kill you, the babysitter OR your parents--in fact, if the babysitter is cool enough, you might even have fun, and you usually get something special for dinner.

The last ward (a Mormon congregation) I attended was an young adult/student ward at the Institute at the U of Arizona. There were no kids in this ward, because you had to be a childless university student and/or single person over the age of 18 but under 35 to attend it. The idea was to help young people meet potential mates, though childless couples in which at least one spouse was enrolled as a student could also attend this ward.

But there was this divorced woman in her late 20s who insisted on bringing her five-year-old daughter with her, and largely because the bishop felt sorry for her, both mother and child were allowed to attend. The daughter went to all the meetings with her mother, including Relief Society, the meeting for women. Well. One Sunday I was teaching the lesson, and I made an off-hand comment about how there was no Santa Claus.

Well!

The child was upset to learn that there was no Santa Claus, and the mother was incensed that I let that secret slip, and wanted me reprimanded. However, the RS president dealt with the matter in what I consider the most appropriate way: she told the woman, "If you don't want your child to hear adult conversations, don't bring your child to adult forums."

I really resent parents who refuse to get babysitters, who insist on bringing their kids with them to ANY and EVERYTHING they want to do. Neither I nor my sister (who had four kids of her own, but she and my brother-in-law got a babysitter) will ever forget the 2002 midnight premier of The Two Towers, mostly because some young couple brought their three-year-old. He cried for a good long while, and the parents let him. He kept saying, "I'm tired! It's noisy here. I want to go home." And finally, since he couldn't go home, the poor boy did what he could to escape the noise: he went out in the hall and fell asleep on the floor--and the parents left him there. There is no way in which such profoundly selfish behavior constitutes acceptable parenting. In fact, it might even considered criminally negligent--what if someone had stolen the kid? It wouldn't have been hard. And although the greatest wrong was done to the child, I also felt sorry for everyone else in that theater: we should not have had to listen to him cry. The parents should not have brought him, and when he began to cry, they should have left the theater.

The theaters where I live now try to prevent such situations; there's a sign at the box office with the picture of a really cute baby. Underneath is a caption reading, "Cute as you are, you are not the star I paid to see." The sign explains that no child under six years of age will be admitted to any R-rated movie beginning after 6 p.m. (I always used to wonder who would bring a child under six to ANY R-rated movie, no matter what time it showed. Then I found out.)

Restrictions like that really infuriate one of my friends, who fairly burst with pride as she told me how she'd taken her six-month-old child to a showing of Brokeback Mountain. And I kept thinking, "Brokeback Mountain is a really great movie, but you're an ass." She spent all this time telling me how lonely and depressing it is to be around a kid all day without other adult company, and how hard it is to get people to accommodate her motherhood. And then she and her husband and child and I went to dinner, and a fair portion of the meal was spent retrieving the silverware the child constantly threw on the floor. I have 14 nieces and nephews; I understand that small children need to be entertained. But I also understand that entertaining children requires energy, and that if you want a certain kind of adult conversation, you don't involve a kid. And as I listened to my friend go on and on about how lonely she is, I thought, "Could part of the problem be that you alienate people who would be DELIGHTED to give you the adult conversation you claim to crave, if you were just willing to pay a babysitter?"

In other words, I accept that if I visit friends who have children, part of my time will be spent getting to know and interacting with their children--and in many ways, I enjoy that, because as I said, I like kids! But if you assume that my primary motive in making the effort to visit you (particularly if it involves forking out several hundred bucks on airfare) is to watch you watch your child shred magazines, or if there's nary a single kid-free moment in a period exceeding seven or eight hours, or if over 50% of what you say to me is about your kid and the style of parenting you've adopted, well, I probably won't be back to see you until the kid's at least in junior high--and for god's sake, don't ask if you can bring the kid and visit me! Because cute as s/he might be, your child is not the star I really want to see. And as I have other friends who manage to raise children while retaining an identity other than parent, I'll just hang out with them.

Posted by holly at 8:38 AM | Comments (20)

July 17, 2006

Go Away, Parent, You Bother Me

I think of myself as someone who likes children, mostly because there are a lot of children I like. OK, occasionally I meet a kid I truly dislike, same as with adults: a couple of my friends had five children, four of whom I found mildly repellent: they were not only badly behaved, but just plain weird--one in particular I rather expect to end up in the penal system. But generally, I'm well disposed to like kids. If I see a cute baby in a stroller, I usually smile and try to make eye contact. If I hear a child crying, I usually think, with a pang of genuine sympathy, "Oh, that poor thing."

I especially like kids old enough to walk and say at least a few words and feed themselves a high-chair-tray full of diced broccoli, but still small enough that you can pick them up and tickle them and play peekaboo with them: there's something profoundly wonderful about making those wee ones squeal and clap their hands in delight. I also like little kids whose parents buy them really cool electric train sets (that would be my brother and his wife). As I've watched my nieces and nephews grow up, I've noticed that sometimes they get hard to talk to around nine or ten (and they can stay that way for about a decade), but if a kid likes to read, I can usually manage a reasonably interesting conversation. And I'm gratified by the fact that the kids I like seem to like me OK, too.

There's a famous scene where WC Fields (I have no idea what movie it's from--I tried to find out) says to some child, "Go away, kid, you bother me," a particular expression of his general antipathy for children. I was always baffled by that in my youth, and offended as well: how could anybody who'd been a child dislike children on principle? I still sort of feel that way.... Because I really do like kids at least as often as I like adults. Change that: I like children more often than I like adults. It's certain parents, I've realized lately, that I really have problems with.

I've also realized as I've considered this matter that most of my attitudes about childrearing are influenced by my upbringing as the second of five children in a Mormon family. Not only did I have four other siblings, but I both watched and helped my mother raise the younger ones--especially my baby brother, who was born when I was almost nine. I also did a hell of a lot of babysitting for other Mormon families. And the entire situation left me, I honestly think, with some fairly sound ideas on the matter.

For better or worse, having children--plenty of them--is normalized in Mormon culture, and the culture accommodates the existence of children in many sensible ways the rest of society could benefit by imitating. Churches generally come equipped with playrooms for kids under three, and at least two or three people are given the specific assignment of taking care of all such children while everyone else goes to Sunday school. (I spent a couple of years in high school serving in the nursery.) Breastfeeding has always been encouraged in Mormondom, and many churches have a room where mothers can go to nurse or simply to tend a fussy child. Moreover, these rooms are often wired to the microphone in the chapel so the women can hear what's going on during Sacrament meeting. (In some wards, they even send an intrepid deacon--a boy 12 or 13 years of age--to bring these women the sacrament.) And because everyone has kids, people frequently trade babysitting during the day. Furthermore, teenagers know how to act around small kids, so you can trust many of them to care for your children for a couple of hours on a Friday night.

I realize not everyone lives like that. I realize that decent, reasonably priced child care is not necessarily a reason to join or remain active in the Mormon church if you don't believe its doctrines. I realize not everyone wants four to six (or eight) kids. Which is a damn good thing--as I mention in the comments to this post about my response to An Inconvenient Truth, reproducing has more impact on the environment than anything else we do. And while I don't advocate anything like China's "single child" policy and would never tell anyone how many children they could have, I don't think it's at all unselfish to have a huge family, which is what we were told at church: instead, I feel it's extremely selfish at this point in time to have a very large family, and that it's wise and a mark of consideration for everyone else you share the planet with to be content with fewer offspring. And indeed, even in Mormondom, families are getting smaller: couples frequently have three or four kids whereas 30 years they might have had seven or eight.

But I do think most--if not all--public buildings should have rooms where women can breastfeed or pump milk or whatever they need to do, and I also think that breastfeeding in public should be not only accepted but encouraged. I think new parents need a decent period of maternity/ paternity leave. I think K-12 education needs better funding at the local, state and federal level. I think anyone who doesn't like kids but still goes to Disneyland is an idiotic masochist.

In other words, like Jack Black in School of Rock, I believe that children are the future, and I want to see them well cared for. But there are plenty of ways in which I am not at all anxious to make someone else's child the center of my universe. And I've dealt with a lot of them lately.

This has become very long, so I'll continue it tomorrow. And maybe the day after that, too.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (7)

May 31, 2006

The Best Home Teaching Story I've Ever Heard

He went out and drank a quart of peppermint schnapps.... He ripped all my clothes off, he started to beat me with the cat furniture.... And I left him. And that's when he jumped out the kitchen window.

I just heard those lines of dialogue in a movie--and not just any movie, but a documentary about a Mormon temple worker. One of the reasons I so love nonfiction is that you just can't make shit that weird up.... OK, you can, but credibility is strained. A Mormon temple worker once drank a quart of peppermint schnapps, ripped his wife's clothes off, beat her with the cat furniture (my favorite detail by far), then tried and failed to commit suicide by jumping out the kitchen window!? (The ellipses in the dialogue, I should mention, represent not anything I have deleted but editing cuts in the film itself.) To paraphrase Aristotle, the only reason something that weird can be believed is because it really happened.

The even weirder thing is, the Mormon temple worker was once a rock star, Arthur "Killer" Kane, a founding member of the New York Dolls. In 1989, as he lay recuperating in the hospital after his failed suicide attempted, Kane called a 1-800 number and requested a copy of the Book of Mormon. Two sister missionaries later showed up at his door and taught him the discussions.

Greg Whiteley, director of New York Doll, met Arthur Kane when he became his home teacher (meaning he was supposed to visit Kane once a month and make sure he was doing OK) in LA a few years ago. He started interviewing and filming Kane, but probably nothing would have come of it if Morrissey hadn't arranged a NY Dolls reunion at Morrissey's Meltdown in London 2004. This reunion was the fulfillment of a dream Kane had cherished for 30 years.

I had to stop this film right after the interview with Kane's estranged wife Barbara (be sure to click on that link for a truly bizarre coda to the whole story) because it shifted to a bunch of Mormon priesthood holders explaining what it's like to receive a witness of the Book of Mormon. I thought about not finishing the film--I was afraid there would be too much Mormon content--but curiosity got the better of me and I watched the rest.

I really liked it. It was a sweet movie, with interesting interviews from Morrissey, Bob Geldof, all kinds of people, and it was touching to see Kane's reunion with David Johansen (a.k.a. Buster Poindexter) and fascinating to watch Kane explain the Word of Wisdom.

The kicker (and this is sort of a spoiler, except that if you've read any reviews or heard anything about the movie in the news, this detail is usually mentioned) is that Kane died of leukemia a mere 22 days after returning from the festival in London--not only that, but he died two hours after he was diagnosed.

And that moved me and I thought, "Oh, how lovely that he saw the completion of this goal before his death; how tragic that he had so little time to enjoy it."

And the credit rolled and the mailman dropped my mail through the door slot and I sort of watched the credits and sorted my mail.

And then the pop song that had accompanied the credits ended and there was David Johansen singing A Poor, Wayfaring Man of Grief (Joseph Smith's favorite hymn) accompanied only by an acoustic guitar in tribute to Arthur and I simply burst into tears and sobbed until I couldn't breathe.

I never cared for that hymn--too slow and too long and too didactic in an earnest, Victorian way--but for some reason Johansen's performance of it was terribly moving, not only because it was a loving tribute to a friend but because... because it reminded me of my own loss, the loss of the church? I don't know. I'll try to figure it out. It's partly the amazing generosity of human beings...? Kane loved both the Church AND his band. And Johansen didn't seem to be judging that hymn; he let himself be moved by it as Kane would have been.

And after about half an hour I calmed down.... And then I went through the bonus material and heard Brian Koonin (I don't know who he is, I just noticed his name on the screen) playing Come, Come Ye Saints, which has always been one of my favorite hymns, and then Johansen sang the final verse, which goes

And should we die before our journey’s through,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too;
With the just we shall dwell!
But if our lives are spared again
To see the saints their rest obtain,
O how we’ll make this chorus swell,
All is well! All is well!

The hymn is about the trek to Utah, which so many of my ancestors undertook.... I couldn't even sit up at that point. I lay on the floor and cried as if my heart had just broken. I'm still crying, to be honest.

If you've seen the movie, I'd like to know what you thought. And if you haven't seen it, watch it and let me know how you react. There will be a presentation on it at Sunstone this year; I'm really looking forward to it. I think this is a movie I need to own.

Posted by holly at 5:04 PM | Comments (19)

April 8, 2006

License and Licentiousness (Or, Self-Portrait as Loud-Mouthed Slut)

Here are some examples of what I looked like as a painfully inexperienced 25-year-old Mormon virgin. (They're popups instead of embedded because that way they don't end up anywhere else on the internet; sorry if this inconveniences anyone.) The first is the portrait of me my mother still displays in her home:

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This next one was taken in Provo, Utah, before I went to my second mission president's homecoming talk. Check out the shoes! I still have them but I hardly ever wear them, these great peau de soie pumps with rhinestones on them.

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This last one was taken in the family room in my parents' house. I like how this huge television (by the standards of the late 1980s) is still surrounded and dwarfed by this massive wall of books. There were heavily-laden bookshelves in every room of the house I grew up in, with the exception of the bathroom--and in that room, there was a magazine rack built into the wall by the toilet. I think that explains something about who I am.

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Anyway, the quality of the photos isn't the greatest: they were scanned on an old scanner and resized with old software. Still, I think I am not flattering myself excessively when I suggest that although the photos are blotchy and blocky in the way that digitized images sometimes are, they nonetheless suggest that I was a reasonably attractive young woman--at least, I had good hair and great ankles, and I knew how to work a clutch purse.

Now, I realize that this might sound like sour grapes, but the fact of the matter is, that at the point in my life when I was pretty much the hottest I'll ever be, I hardly ever dated. Why? Because I was Puritan feminist with a piss-poor attitude about pretty much everything, but especially religion and relationships.

That state of affairs had a lot to do with my mission, which I've written about in bits here on the blog and which was the greatest trauma of my life. I finished it six days before my twenty-third birthday. When I returned to college to finish my bachelor's degree a few months later, I attended Church meetings sporadically and tried to cultivate friendships with non-Mormons, but since I didn't drink, hated going to bars, was constantly obsessed with God and usually melancholy, I met with little success.

You would have been hard-pressed to find someone more virginal and uptight than I was. I had thoroughly absorbed the message about sex crammed down our throats at church: "Sex is filthy and disgusting; save it for someone you love." Occasionally some non-Mormon guy would ask me out, but I ended things the second he asked me to put out. I just wasn't going to do that, for so many reasons, ranging from fear of religious reprisals to deep-seated prudery.

As for how things fared with Mormon guys, well, let's see: a grand total of, hmm...TWO asked me out between the time I returned from my mission and the time I left the Church nearly three years later. The first guy asked me out after I first invited him to see Depeche Mode with me (I won tickets on the radio--about the only time in my life I've done that) and we dated for a while, until he got too thoroughly on my nerves. The second guy--well, he was a 20-year-old missionary, which means he was expressly forbidden to date, but since we'd fallen in love at first sight I hung out with him anyway, made plans with him to get married and live happily ever after, etc, none of which happened because he was, it turns out, gay, though we're still good friends to this day.

Why wouldn't Mormon men date me? I was pretty; I was bright; I had FABULOUS homemaking skills--I cooked, baked, sewed, knitted, and kept a clean house. I was good with babies. I managed my finances well. I would have made an ideal wife. Except there was that piss-poor attitude part....

I was outspoken, you see--outspoken to the point of being confrontational, and I simply could not muster any reverence for patriarchy, which translated into a profound cynicism. If I thought something was full of shit, I said so, even if I was talking to a priesthood leader in direct authority over me. And the fact that I was outspoken and not cowed by male authority was a sign, someone finally told me, that I was also a slut.

I'm not kidding.

Like I said, I was about as virginal and uptight as a girl can be. But plenty of people at church believed I had been sexually active for years. The logic went like this: I was outspoken and critical; because I claimed license to speak, I had to be licentious. It's a very old argument. It has gotten many women in trouble, including Anne Hutchinson, who liked to elaborate on each Sunday's sermon later in the week in her seventeenth-century New England Puritan home. That was fine as long as she only taught other women as they sewed together, but she acquired a reputation for wisdom and insight--and men began showing up to hear her. But church leaders knew that women could not possibly teach men, and stepped in to stop it. Hutchinson was put on trial, where she claimed the authority to preach the word of God. The prosecution argued that any woman who formulates doctrine and interprets the word of God must by definition be sexually promiscuous, for she has betrayed her sex by claiming a role allowed only to men. Hutchinson was convicted of a number of crimes and expelled from the community--she was excommunicated.

Which is why I shouldn't have found it the least bit remarkable that when a Mormon man wanted to shame me into shutting up in the discussion on John's blog, he resorted to criticizing what he knew about how I have conducted my sex life, information he gained from reading the sex archives of my blog. After first belittling my credentials and questioning my professionalism (which was every bit as offensive as he intended it to be, but I could live with it), he wrote:

And since when is sleeping around enlightened behavior Holly? You yourself have come to the conclusion that casual sex outside of a committed relationship is unlikely to bring you any kind of lasting emotional or physical satisfaction. I sincerely hope that isn't what you meant by "working one's ass off to figure certain things out." You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by asking your average Beehive or Mia Maid about the law of chastity; they would tell you (standing on the shoulders of their enlightened ancestors) that it wasn't intended to keep you from having fun, but rather to bring happiness and trust, and save you from heartache and unhappiness, in your personal relationships.

A Beehive, by the way, is the name given to 12- and 13-year-old girls in the Church youth group; a Mia Maid is the name for girls in the 14- and 15-year-old category. As I said, I thoroughly absorbed the church's message on sex and could have spouted it back to myself, but it wouldn't have saved me any trouble, since it never told me how to deal with getting my heart broken by a man I never slept with, or by one who dumped me in the midst of one of the most committed relationships I've ever been in. "Fun" had little to do with it, and I also can't help thinking that if I'd been given healthier messages about sex when I was indeed a Beehive and Mia Maid, I might not have had such problems figuring out how to navigate gracefully through the challenges involved in sex when I finally started having it.

I said a bit of that to him.... I also wrote,

I want to point out something else you've done in this conversation that I haven't: I haven't heretofore resorted to pointedly denigrating your personal decisions about how to live your life. I admit I read your comments to John about why you stick with the church and thought, "Here's another one of those cowards who knows the church is a crock of shit, but doesn't have the guts to do anything about it." But I refrained from bringing that up, or trying to use it against you.

To the guy's credit, he did apologize for getting personal, and acknowledged the accuracy with which I characterized him. But it was small comfort after he got Melchizedek* on my ass, talking to me like he was some priesthood leader empowered to discuss the details of my life while the details of his were off-limits.

And I think that's all I have to say on that topic for the time being. My next post will have nothing to do with Mormonism, I promise.

*The Melchizedek priesthood is the authority by which adult men wield power in the Mormon church.

Posted by holly at 2:06 PM | Comments (18)

April 7, 2006

Pots Shocked and Dismayed to Learn Kettles Also Able to Call Things Black

A progressive Mormon blogger I know recently posted something about a book he's been reading, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence by Mark Juergensmeyer. One of the blogger's conclusions was that "the perpetrators (and those who support their acts) are not necessarily sick or crazed--they merely have a different way of looking at the world."

I found that statement a bit troublesome, and left a comment stating, "It's all fine and good to remember that about the perpetrators, but the world would be a better place if they'd remember that very same thing about the rest of the world they're attacking: the secular establishment doesn't promote birth control and women's rights because we're sick or crazed; we just have a different world view."

I then added,

The whole thing is just one more reason why anything that teaches people to say something like, "The church I belong to is the only true and living church on the face of the earth" [a phrase commonly spouted by Mormons] is bad. Any time you have an institution that teaches its adherents that they are singularly special possessors of a singularly complete truth, then you're going to have problems. Which is one more reason I consider being a devout Mormon and actually "having a testimony" [which means knowing, not merely believing, core precepts of Mormonism are unimpeachably true] a form of spiritual darkness, and prefer to keep my distance from such people.

The wisdom of such an attitude, of course, is self-evident and therefore unremarkable to a great many people. However, to a "devout" Mormon, even an open-minded progressive one, it's so astonishing and troubling he can scarcely wrap his mind around it. Hence the comment that soon followed mine:

I've never bought into the notion that "The church I belong to is the only true and living church on the face of the earth", though I recognize there are many (perhaps most) LDS that say that.... I don't feel like I have to distance myself from such people as much as educate them to broaden their horizons and choose their words more carefully, because I do consider myself "devout LDS" (whatever that means). I feel I do have a testimony of certain gospel principles, but I'm puzzled why you might think that indicates spiritual darkness. Isn't the realization of specific truths more of an awakening? Or are you talking about a wholesale, unexamined buying into the whole package (speculative traditions, doctrinal warts and all)?

while someone else wrote

I still resist your spiritual darkness label for devout believers, partly because this implies that people who aren't constrained by such beliefs are somehow more enlightened.

As I related this story to a friend, (the son of a Baptist preacher), he interrupted at this point to ask, "Wait a minute. You mean these guys have never exercised enough imagination to figure out what it feels like to hear the message of Mormonism, and be told that if you don't buy into the teachings of the Mormon church, you're just not seeing the big picture or grasping the truth? You mean it's never really occurred to them that someone might think about Mormons the way Mormons think about everyone else?"

"That's pretty much what I mean," I said. "And when they were confronted with someone who did, they not only couldn't understand why I'd feel Mormons are unenlightened, they also got all defensive and hurt because of my preference for, as I put it, ‘the average secular beer-drinking Jill or Joe,' because I think such people are not only more intellectually interesting, but kinder than the average Mormon. And again, this despite the fact that Mormons are notorious for preferring their own company and not playing well with others. You're told repeatedly as teenagers not to date non-Mormons. Some parents don't even like their kids having non-Mormon friends, because they can lead their kids astray, help them embrace things like R-rated movies and patronizing establishments like Starbucks, even if all you buy there is hot chocolate."

Anyway.

There's a lot more to rest of the story.... But the rest of the story sucks. My final comment read

Throughout Jesus's ministry, he distanced himself from the establishment. He preferred hanging out with sinner and publicans to spending his time with loyal defenders of the faith, both because he found sinners and publicans more receptive to genuine truth, and because they seemed to have purer hearts, their good deeds seeming to spring from more honorable motivations. When he did end up in discussions with the orthodox, and even with those less orthodox who were nonetheless loyal to the establishment, he argued that it was harmful and beside the point to focus rigidly on things like a person's sexual history or adherence to dietary codes; instead, he thought people should consider the ways in which buying too quickly into a doctrine could be a form of spiritual darkness.

I don't want to say that I've been Jesus in this scenario, but I do want to suggest I haven't been a scribe or pharisee.

But I don't want to trace the course of how I ended up there. I want to focus on the way sexuality was eventually used against me, because it is so often used against women who challenge the religious establishment, but this is already kind of long, so I'll wait to do that later.

Don't neglect to read yesterday's post on the 11th Article of Faith.

Posted by holly at 9:32 AM | Comments (8)

April 6, 2006

High Councilman Calls Eleventh Article of Faith "No Longer Relevant"

Remember when I vowed that I'd never get sucked into another icky discussion with Mormon women who WANT to be feminists, but can't quite bring themselves to acknowledge the problems inherent in patriarchy? Well, I am happy to say I've managed to avoid doing that--however, I somehow forgot that something much, much worse than Mormon wanna-be feminists is bona fide Mormon priesthood holders!

Yeah, that's right, Holly's been smacked down by an avuncular servant of the lord, who finds it hard to understand why she feels the church is A) intellectually inadequate and B) inhospitable to someone like her--and this despite the fact that he all but calls her a slut! There will be more on all this later--I'm planning an entry, but it involves uploading photos, and because my software is old, I always have problems getting the photos the right size.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post something I came up with for the Sugar Beet, a (now defunct) website of Mormon satire, that expresses what I think of most Mormons' attitude toward tolerating other people's religious and ethical beliefs.

FYI: today is the anniversary of the founding of the church. That's right, 176 years ago today, on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith hung out in some old guy's living room (Peter Whitmer Sr, to be exact) and officially organized a church which had as its basic tenet the claim that Joseph Smith was the one and only person on the face of the earth authorized to know and transmit God's will to the rest of us. And hey, in case you thought accepting bullshit like that might be a sign that you're a bit gullible, well, let me tell you, a high-minded Mormon man has told me recently that that just ain't the case!

****

(Pima, AZ) In a recent talk to the Pima Fourth Ward, High Councilman Layton Bryce warned members not to be led astray by too much emphasis on the Eleventh Article of Faith, which states, "We claim the privilege of worshiping the Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship, how, where, or what they may."

Bryce began his talk by reading the passage, then stating, "Sometimes people use the Eleventh Article of Faith as an excuse to refrain from doing missionary work. They say, 'I don't want to force my beliefs and opinions on people I have to live and work with. My friends and neighbors know what I believe, and if they're interested, they'll come ask me.'"

"But that attitude doesn't really fit in with our ideas about missionary work, brothers and sisters," Bryce added. "We know that we need to convert the world to the true gospel. I'm not saying we should force people to be Mormon, but we need to do all we can to persuade and teach people as to the right way to believe."

Bryce explained that the Eleventh Article of Faith was necessary in the early days, when the Church faced oppression and had not converted millions of people to the truth. "But now that the truthfulness of the gospel is accepted by so many people, that particular article of faith is no longer relevant in the ways that it once was."

Bryce went on to say that, "The events of September 11th have underscored the danger of letting everyone worship God as they see fit. There could always be some extremist who believes that worshiping God involves killing innocent people."

Reaction to the talk was mixed. Marge Pepper stated, "I definitely felt the Spirit as President Bryce was talking. I have always been bothered by the Eleventh Article of Faith. First of all, it doesn't start with 'We believe' like all the others, and I never could see why we should just let everyone else believe whatever they want when we know the Church is true. It would be better if we just got rid of it--after all, twelve is a much nicer number than Unlucky 13."

However, Roger and Joan Cannon both expressed concern over the message. "I thought Free Agency was central to the Gospel," Joan said. "It's as if he's forgotten the story of the War in Heaven, where it was decided that we all needed to be able to choose what we accept."

"What's President Bryce going to do, anyway?" her husband Roger asked. "Write to the Brethren and ask them to delete that passage from the scriptures?"

Upon hearing of such objections, Bryce dismissed them. "My talk has nothing in common with Satan's plan in the pre-existence. Remember, Satan was evil and wanted to thwart God's plan, while I am simply trying to help God accomplish his plan in the most straight-forward way possible. After all, I did say that we shouldn't force anyone to be Mormon."

Posted by holly at 2:04 AM | Comments (8)

March 27, 2006

What I Drink for Breakfast

My family drank boiling hot Dr Pepper every morning for breakfast the whole time I was growing up, and as a matter of fact, we drink it still.

The rest of this post has been deleted, because I revised it substantially and included it in an essay.

Posted by holly at 10:10 AM | Comments (12)

March 19, 2006

Blood and Guts in Mutual*

I know, I know: I said I was going to quit hanging out at blogs written by devout Mormon feminists, because they annoy me so. And I haven't gone back on my word, because I haven't been hanging out, exactly: I've just visited a time or two. You see, Jana posted something really interesting about Mormons and menarche, and she began this interesting post with a quote from me. When she emailed me about it, I couldn't resist checking it out; and when I saw that it was, like many things Jana posts, insightful and provocative, I couldn't resist commenting. And then I couldn't resist going back later and seeing what other women had to say, and those comments were interesting too; so I commented again.

And then I thought, "Wow, maybe I over-reacted; maybe these devout Mormon feminist bloggers aren't so bad." So I followed some links and looked at some blogs and I can admit that I sort of over-reacted, but I can also see that I sort of didn't. I found sites that really upset me, but instead of freaking out, I took a deep breath, clicked on something else, and simply resolved never to go back to the sites that bother me.

But I encourage you to check out Jana's post and leave a comment on what you think we can and should do to make menarche a positive (if private and personal) milestone for young women.

*Mutual is one of the old names for the Mormon youth organization. I'm not sure what it's called now.

Posted by holly at 9:57 PM | Comments (1)

February 15, 2006

A Journal Worth Keeping (Whether the Angels Quote from It Or Not)

Frankengirl posted an entry about diaries and whether or not they are meant to be kept or burned. This is a topic that gets ME burning. In the December 2004 issue of Sunstone, I published an essay detailing my attitude about keeping a journal. It seems relevant, so I'm posting it here.

Although I am no longer a believing or active Mormon, I still live a lot like one. OK, I drink an occasional beer, though I have never been able to cultivate any interest in substance abuse. I don't worry about the ratings of the movies I watch, though I have enough sense to avoid films that are obviously crap. I don't go to church on Sunday, though I have tried to find a congregation where I feel at home, but I can't help noticing other meetings' short-comings when compared to a Mormon service: I hate having to stand, then sit, then kneel, then stand again; or I hate that other worshipers sing tacky devotional pop songs accompanied by guitars or recordings, like it's some group karaoke thing; or I hate that people show up in t-shirts and shorts, like it's the grocery store.

But I still write down goals. I still strive to be scrupulously honest in my business dealings and to give a good portion of my earnings to charity. I still buy groceries in bulk. I still can't throw away anything, from a scrap of fabric to a cardboard box, without asking myself, "Is there some possible use left in this thing?" I still keep a journal.

For many years I kept a journal for the same reason I flossed, made good grades and exercised: because somebody told me that when I was seventy, I'd be glad I'd done such things in my youth. In general, the journal has given me more pleasure than the flossing. I was 11 when President Kimball issued his encouragement to

Get a notebook...a journal that will last through all time, and maybe the angels will quote from it for eternity. Begin today and write in it your goings and comings, your deepest thoughts, your achievements and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies. (4)

I'm now on volume 14, and I still look at old volumes from time to time. For instance, volume five, my mission journal, is almost 100,000 words long and quite hefty. I wrote in it my goings and comings, my deepest thoughts, and things like this, from June 14, 1986: "I have decided that the angels will not even flip the pages of this journal, though imperfect beings might find something of interest here."

Many people consider a journal the most private and intimate of texts. In certain ways my journal is intensely intimate, in that it contains personal details and deep yearnings and struggles. Nonetheless, I was affected very early and very thoroughly by the Mormon view that journals are documents providing personal accounts of shared experiences--an example being the diaries or journals kept by those who crossed the plains--and are in some ways intended to be shared, just like the experiences they record. I took to heart the admonition that someday, when I am dead, someone, somewhere, might come upon my journals and use them--as faith-promoting stories, as cautionary tales, or simply as historical documents. Thus I have long been acutely aware of audience--it's a concept I understood instantly when teachers tried to explain it in composition courses. And even though I began to suspect early on that the angels would not quote from my journal, filled as it was with doubt and dissent, still, I couldn't help wanting, at the very least, to entertain and edify those other potential readers, the human ones--to give them an occasional good laugh, or pose from time to time a difficult question worth pondering.

In short, I wanted to give them reasons to keep reading, and give myself reasons to keep writing. I felt an obligation to make the record of my life relevant and compelling, both for myself and for that future audience, and I don't think that sense of obligation hurt either my journal in particular or my writing in general--or my cognitive skills, for that matter. I've learned that to be a good journaler, one must develop an eye for what is interesting and meaningful in one's daily life, as well as some skill and insight into analyzing one's own behaviors, utterances, and relationships. I believe that a journal should accurately capture not merely what happened, but the mood it left you in, the effect. Anyone who has kept a journal for very long knows that a journal that does nothing but record events makes for singularly dull reading--and yes, I have resorted to that minimalist strategy from time to time when I'm feeling lazy or overwhelmed; I do it primarily to maintain my habit, not because I imagine that such entries are particularly valuable in and of themselves.

I no longer attend much to a future audience (if someone really wants to read through all those thousands of pages once I'm gone, s/he is welcome to, but I'm not planning on it); these days I write my journal mainly for myself, but I haven't lost my sense that my journal needs to be, on the whole, worth not only writing in the first place, but reading again later--even if I'm the only one ever to read it. Which raises the question: what does make my journal, for me, worth the writing and reading of it? I won't deny that I find keeping a journal a pleasant and entertaining use of my time, and that I do it in part simply because I enjoy it. But I believe that a journal can indeed perform a spiritual function, and I find that aspect extremely valuable. A journal can be written with a specifically spiritual bent, as an inventory of our efforts to live morally and behave appropriately, what Catholics call "an examination of conscience." It can be a meditation upon issues that interest us, topics that trouble us. It can be a way to pose important questions and seek answers for them--as well as a place to record those answers when they come, so that years later, we can look back and be amazed by a youthful wisdom we somehow managed to forget.

As a writing teacher, I also believe that spiritual discipline can be built into the endeavor of writing well: although my students don't always believe me, I remain convinced that good writing is carefully crafted and coherent, and makes use of things like 1) transitions, 2) support for ideas in the form of specific and apt examples, 3) musical, rhythmic prose, and 4) syntax that is lively and varied. Any account of your life will, of necessity, be molded and shaped, whether poorly or well, and the transitions you use, the examples you select, even the vocabulary you employ, can help you see a pattern to your life you might otherwise miss. I can't imagine how I would make sense of my life without the profound and useful insights that come upon me as I wrestle to bring inchoate sensations and unconnected experiences, ranging from the devastating to the delightful, under the greater order of organized prose. Sometimes these insights arrive years after I've written a journal entry, when I'm thinking about a new situation that bears some similarity to an old experience. I'll haul out an old volume, read through it, and some mental flash will suddenly illuminate both situations in remarkable and useful ways--an event I often then record in the new volume, also quoting the old passage that sparked the insight.

In her essay, "On Keeping a Notebook," Joan Didion writes, "The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing and thinking." Instead, she says the point is to remember

How it felt to be me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook....I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

While I agree with Didion that it's wise to remain familiar with the people we used to be, I am, unlike her, interested in having "an accurate factual record of what I have been doing and thinking"–as the descendent of Mormon pioneers and geneaologers, how could I be otherwise? In Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-Century Mormon Women's Autobiographical Acts, Laura L. Bush points out that

Mormon autobiographers pay close attention to ‘truth' and to ‘accurate' history. They often begin their narratives with recitals of their precise ancestry and exact place of birth, carefully researching and marking the progression of the story of their lives until ending the story with a formal testament of faith in God.... Mormon autobiographers' meticulous attention to testifying of God and to producing accurate historical details...follows biblical and Book of Mormon writing traditions. (9)

I confess: I've written an autobiography of sorts, a memoir of my mission, and I was not the least bit surprised to discover that my book adheres to the formula Bush describes, since I was very aware at the time of following a tradition. I wanted my book to be as accurate as I could possibly make it, especially since when I wrote it, I imagined it as the defense I would muster in my behalf at the final judgment, and God would be well aware of any conscious lie I might tell. I was trying to produce a work of art, but it was also a deadly serious moral enterprise. My first act in writing my book was to transcribe every word of my mission journal--in which I had meticulously recorded entire conversations, detailed impressions, and the dates, places and times of significant events; I had even included supporting documents such as letters, zone conference programs, and those yellow planners on which we scheduled our work.

At a writing conference in June 2004, I met a woman who, like me, is a scholar and writer of literary nonfiction, and who, like me, had her heart well and truly broken by a man she was ready to marry, and who, like me, suffers from insomnia. She told me that to help herself unwind, clear her mind and prepare to sleep each night, before bed she would write in a spiral notebook, usually about how upset she was with Michael, her ex, and how devastated she was that as soon as the engagement ring was on her finger, he turned into someone else, someone she couldn't marry. She wrote pages and pages, she said, about how she hated him, loved him, resented him, could never forget him although she wanted nothing more than to erase him from her memory. I sympathized, with the difficulty in falling asleep, with the heartbreak, with the confused writing. But then she mentioned that when she got to the end of each notebook, she threw it away. "You threw it away?" I repeated, dazed.

"Yeah," she said. "It was just my ranting about Michael. It's not like the world needs any of that."

"But what if there was...an insight? Or a good line? And you threw it away?" I asked slowly, attempting to resist the horror of it all.

"There wasn't," she said. And since I was having difficulty breathing, having just heard someone be so cavalier about an action absolutely inimical to my world view, I made no reply and the conversation moved on to other topics.

I tell this story to call attention to one part of keeping a journal: the keeping part. As I mentioned, my journal does contain boring, uninspired passages; I haven't deleted them and I don't intend to. For one thing, when I'm overwrought, it's kind of nice to remember times when nothing much happened; it's also good to remind myself how flat even the most exciting events can seem later if I don't render them fully. Furthermore, preserving what you produce is built into the activity: keeping a journal means you not merely write but hang on to the journal. And that keeping is also a spiritual practice: finding the discipline to make writing a habit, to live with a growing and on-going document that demonstrates who you were, who you thought you'd become, and who you actually ended up being. If you're lucky, it might also help you figure out who you want to be next, and how to achieve it.

I'll end with Job, who, if he lived at all, lived before paper was readily available:

Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! Job 19:23-24

We don't have to be so desperate. If we want something written, we can write it. We've got plenty of paper, plenty of ink, and really fast computers. All of which make keeping a journal so easy that it's something of a luxury, a way of acknowledging how blessed--and I use that word advisedly--we are.

In conclusion, I bear testimony of the power of a journal to help us live with more awareness of who we are and who we want to be. I will always be grateful that I followed President Kimball's advice to keep a journal. It has enriched my life immeasurably.

Works Cited
1. Kimball, Spencer W. "The Angels May Quote from It." The New Era 5, no 10 (1975): 4-5.
2. Didion, Joan. 1968. "On Keeping a Notebook." In Slouching Toward Bethlehem. New York: Noonday Press. 131-141.
3. Bush, Laura L. Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth-Century Mormon Women's Autobiographical Acts. Salt Lake City: U of Utah Press, 2004.

Posted by holly at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)

February 12, 2006

Women Who Won't Blame the Patriarchy or Anybody Else

Here are a couple of basic spiritual truths I've learned in my life:

1. You gotta leave the garden. You can't truly learn and grow while you stay within the confines of a system designed to protect you and keep you innocent.

2. She who will save her life shall lose it, and she who is willing to lose her life, will save it. If you stay inside the garden because you're afraid you'll perish in the lone and dreary world, well, here's some news! You're going to perish anyway, but you'll never know the potential, growth and possibility you could have experienced in the outside world. But if you venture out, you just might discover the means of not merely surviving, but thriving.

3. The Mormon church is one of the most pernicious "gardens" out there: yeah, there's plenty of produce, but it's thoroughly tainted with pesticides, fungicides and fertilizer. You can eat it, but it will give you cancer of the soul. You're better off applying the lesson of the fall and expelling yourself from the garden.

Because I am still technically a Mormon woman (they haven't excommunicated me yet, and I promised my mother I wouldn't ask the big boys to do it for me), and because I became a feminist partly because I was once a Mormon woman, and because I am occasionally an idiot, I sometimes find myself drawn into conversations with devout Mormon women about feminism.

I should know better. Because no woman will ever truly espouse the cause of feminism while she's still a devout Mormon. No human being will ever truly espouse the cause of justice while she's still a devout Mormon. No human being will ever truly espouse freedom of mind or plain good sense while she's still a devout Mormon. She'll do the best she can, and that's all the rest of us can ask. But devout Mormon women are still, fundamentally, stunted, because they insist on a diet of that horrible tainted fruit--and then spend all this time saying, "Oh there's nothing wrong with this fruit! There's nothing wrong with the garden! There's nothing wrong with anything--except maybe a few of the other gardeners, but that's not really important! Let's all just be nice and good, and then everything will work out--because God says so!"

To which I say, Yada yada fucking la-di-da. Grow the hell up.

And if I ever again start participating in forums for Mormon feminists who still support the patriarchy, will someone who's not in that benighted category remind me of this post?

Posted by holly at 2:50 PM | Comments (12)

January 27, 2006

Holy Underwear

The Happy Feminist posted an entry about words and phrases she doesn't like, one of which is panties. I also hate that word, but I quit using it when I quit wearing conventional underwear and started wearing the temple garment, or Mormon sacred underwear.

This is a strange thing a lot of non-Mormons don't know anything about, and I've been accused of making this up. I swear to God, I am not. Anyway, below is the explanation of garments I provide in my book, which is forthcoming god-only-knows when. (Supposedly my agent has it at a couple of presses now.)

***

Because of the Fall of Adam and Eve, I had to begin wearing special long white underwear known as the temple garment before I could go on a mission. The temple garment symbolizes the status of Adam and Eve before God after they ate of the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Upon discovering their nakedness, Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves, then hide from God when he visits the garden. When they finally come forward and confess, God first curses Adam and Eve, then replaces their flimsy fig leaf aprons with coats made from animal skins--which, as someone pointed out to me once, means that God had already introduced death into the garden, since he had the hides of dead animals to give Adam and Eve. It's those skins that the temple garment represent: a shield against primordial nakedness, a reminder of what can happen when you deceive or disobey God.

Garments are not to be discussed. They're underwear, they're a daily fact of life, but they're forbidden as a topic of conversation. It would be easier not to talk about them if they functioned better as underwear, but they're neither very practical nor comfortable. They also look funny: they have small geometric symbols embroidered at the navel, each breast, and the knee. They cover enough of you to limit the clothes you can wear over them. It's easier for men; their version has sleeves about like those of a t-shirt. But the women's version has short cap sleeves, which means you can't wear sleeveless shirts. Nor can you wear mini-skirts or low-cut blouses. The worst feature is that women's garments are made to fit a single body type: a woman with full but not huge breasts. I am not especially bosomy, and I never had a single pair of garments that fit me properly.

Anyone who has been in the Church for any length of time knows about garments: it's hard not to notice what your parents' underwear looks like when it comes out of the laundry. You develop an eye for certain details and often can tell when someone is wearing garments, which conveys instantly the fact that this person is a practicing Mormon in good-standing who has been through the temple. You get the garment just prior to a ceremony called the endowment, which Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Church, explained this way:

Your endowment is, to receive all those ordinances in the House of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the Holy Priesthood, and gain your exaltation in spite of earth and hell. (Journal of Discourses 2:31 1853)

In other words, heaven is a very exclusive club, which God has guarded by a gauntlet of angels. And no matter how righteous you might have been as a mortal, you can't get in if you don't know all the passwords and the secret handshakes as revealed in the temple. It's because you get the garment in the temple that you aren't supposed to discuss it; the temple isn't discussed, the rhetoric goes, not because what happens there is "secret," but because it's too "sacred" to be the topic of small-talk. You come to understand the meaning of the temple garment and endowment more by absorption than by instruction.

***

If you want to read more about the temple garment and what it represents, I recommend the chapter, "Mormon Garments: Sacred Clothing and the Body," (198-221) in Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) by Colleen McDannell. A passage from it:

To wear garments is to assent to the "secrets" of the ancestors and elders. By placing a cloth over the most intimate parts of the body and embroidering on it sacred signs, Mormons acknowledge the claim that their religion has over them. At the same time, they interpret the limits and meanings of that claim. That reflection brings tensions and ambiguities that are never easily resolved.

McDannell also points out that "Mormons who decide to stop wearing garments make a strong statement to themselves, their family, and their community. Mormons may challenge doctrine, drink a beer or two, or stop going to services but when they stop wearing garments those around them know they have left the faith."

Which was true in my case: it was the symbolic act by which I told my family I was leaving the church.

It was really hard.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)

January 26, 2006

Church Condemns Homophobia on National Coming Out Day

Here's the bit of satire I promised yesterday. This piece was originally published in The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire, in 2002. I got in a spot of trouble for it--plenty of people couldn't understand why anyone would attack a document claiming that "that the disintegration of the family [caused by things like uppity women and gay people wanting to get married] will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." But I still feel the attitudes I mock here deserve to be mocked.

You can still find the original version on the web if you want to go looking for it. The version below differs slightly from the earlier one: I've changed a sentence in the third paragraph because I am a compulsive fact-checker (that's one reason I had to leave the Mormon church: its facts don't check) and discovered that my original summary of McKinney's defense was incomplete, so I had to fix it.

(Salt Lake City, UT) October 11 was National Coming Out Day, a day on which gays and lesbians admit their sexual identity to themselves and others. In a show of support for the day, the Church issued a statement condemning homophobia. "Homophobia is un-Christlike," a spokesperson for the Church said. "We can't tolerate or condone violence against so-called gays and lesbians, even when they do something so heinous and disgusting as to insist that their perverse desires are actual parts of their eternal, god-given identities."

The spokesperson went on to say, "Remember, these people are sons and daughters of God, and are welcome as members of the church, as long as they do not imagine that they have any right to find happiness and companionship in a relationship with someone of their same sex, as God finds that utterly repugnant. We must do all we can to help these unfortunate people see that they are violating their divine natures, as well as the divine decrees of God, by ever imagining that there is nothing grotesque, obscene and evil about same-sex relationships. And pistol-whipping them and leaving them to die by the side of the road doesn't really help in that mission."

The mention of pistol-whipping was a reference to Matthew Wayne Shepard, a 21-year-old openly gay student at the University of Wyoming. On the night of October 6,1998, Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence on a remote highway in Wyoming, and left to die by several young people, one of whom, Aaron McKinney, was LDS. Shepard died of his injuries on October 12, 1998. McKinney did not deny that he kidnapped, robbed and beat Shepard, or that he pretended to be gay in order to lure Shepard into leaving with him; his defense was that he intended only to kidnap and rob Shepard, not to kill him, but flew into a rage when Shepard "fell" for the gay act and grabbed McKinney's genitals. McKinney was eventually convicted of felony murder. He received visits from home teachers up until the conviction.

Many members of the Church responded with support for the statement. "We shouldn't kill those 'so-called gays and lesbians,' to use a phrase you hear at Church, even though it would do the world a lot of good to get rid of them once and for all," said Marjorie Kimball, 34, of Walnut Creek, California. "Have you ever walked down Castro Street in San Francisco? It's disgusting. But taking a gun and cleaning out the whole area really isn't what God intends, since he can just wait until they all die of AIDS and then send them straight to hell."

Mark Jefferson, 42, of Madison, Wisconsin, stated, "In a really liberal place like Madison, where you can end up being friends with people who are gay or lesbian and kind of grow to care about them before you even know certain things about them, it can be hard to keep in mind how wrong homosexuality really is. It's a good thing we have the Proclamation on the Family up in our house, to remind me 'that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.' It's kind of weird to realize that all the terrorist attacks and the impending war in Iraq are a result of efforts in Hawaii and California and Vermont to legalize gay marriage. But even though these people are bringing about Armageddon, we have to try to forgive them anyway and hope they go straight before it's too late."

Posted by holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2006

Non-Homophobe Fears Homosexuality Will Hasten Decay of Civilization

A practicing, believing Mormon I've collaborated with on a couple of projects has posted something on his blog about how, although he doesn't think he's a homophobe because he has been friends with gay people and recently drank decaf with a gay man in his own kitchen, still, he's upset about Brokeback Mountain because

there's something about homosexuality that always makes me think of the Roman empire crumbling and stuff like that. It seems to come to a head pretty late in a civilization's decline, By the time it becomes prominent, I think it's equivalent to the bruises you start to see on a piece of overripe fruit. It represents a new, deeper level of decay.

He acknowledges that there are probably

many individuals for whom homosexuality does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homosexuality is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homo vs. hetero). I haven't seen [Brokeback Mountain] yet, but I think depictions like this that get people thinking about homosexuality will cause many to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

He goes on to conclude that

deep down, I'm alarmed. I see more bruises forming on the fruit. I think we're in trouble. To mix in another metaphor, compared to the heterosexual sexual revolution of the '60s, I think the gay movement is like crack cocaine next to pot, in terms of potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things. (emphasis added.)

Before discussing this further, I want to say that I'm sure there are many individuals for whom homophobia does not seem like a choice. But I think there are as many or more people for whom homophobia is an option but not a foregone conclusion (in other words, they're in the middle of that 6-point spectrum used to rank homophobia vs. tolerance). Having spent 26 years as a practicing Mormon and seen Mormon homophobia in action up close, I think the post by this guy is a perfect example of how religious doctrine that justifies homophobia will cause many people to go ahead and explore it, whereas they probably never would've if society kept a better cap on it.

The author of the post I quote here, for instance, probably started out as a two or a three--more tolerant than not. But years of indoctrination into the Mormon church have helped him become an advocate of one of the most dangerous threats to all humanity: ignorant intolerance dressed in the guise of righteous religion.

Reading the post upset me profoundly, because this is someone I work with, and not only is his message homophobic and bigoted, his logic sucks: he feels justified in announcing his conviction that the gay movement is extreme in its "potential to ruin people's lives and upset the right balance of things"; he expresses openly his dire fears and grievous worries that acceptance of homosexuality will hasten some sort of dangerous, dreadful moral decay--but he rejects the label of homophobe! And this despite the fact that homophobia means "an irrational fear of homosexuality and homosexuals." Given that he proclaims his uh, righteous fears of homosexuality's threat to virtuous, upstanding society, given how overwrought, paranoid and hyperbolic his fears are (what the hell is he doing invoking the fall of the Roman empire? I thought that had to do with putting an emperor in charge of the government, and with the fact that the Goths sacked the capital.... Then there's the fact that the Greeks accepted homosexuality, and they are, after all, the basis for what we in the Western world call civilization), he seems to fit the definition of a homophobe to a rigid, straight H--OK, he's not a virulent, rampaging homophobe, just a mild, meandering one, looking for rotten fruit in the garden of life, blaming the rot on others--god forbid he consider the possibility that HE and his beliefs are responsible for such things.

How can he fail to see that he is a homophobe? Why is he willing to embrace thoroughly homophobic attitudes, but not the label that goes with them? (I do wonder why people are afraid of being labeled a bigot, but not of actually being one. I also wonder why they aren't afraid to reveal such thoroughly inadequate thinking, so that they end up seeming not only bigoted, but unable to follow clear reason.)

I also found the post profoundly ironic, because one of the projects I worked with him on was The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire modeled on The Onion. And when I wrote for the Sugar Beet, I got in a little trouble for a piece I produced to assuage some of the grief and shame I felt when I learned that Aaron McKinney, one of Matthew Shepard's murderers, had grown up Mormon and received officially sanctioned visits from representatives of the Mormon church up until his conviction--at which time the visits ceased and he got excommunicated, because you can't be a convicted felon and a practicing Mormon, any more than you can be an uncloseted homosexual and a practicing Mormon.

I've had people tell me--make that, I've had Mormons tells me--in all seriousness, that homosexuality is a sin akin to murder--and the treatment McKinney received pretty much demonstrates that, at least in the view of the Mormon church, that's true.

And omigod, it's not attitudes like that that will cause the end of civilization! It's not bigotry and greed and vicious illegal wars and wanton devastation of the environment that will destroy the United States--no, it's the fact that there are people in this country who think it's OK to choose a same-sex relationship.

Good god, that is so FUCKED UP.

I'll post the story from the Sugar Beet tomorrow.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (16)

January 7, 2006

In Praise of the C Word

In the January 1, 2006 Sunday NY Times Magazine, there is a piece by Daphne Merkin as part of "The Way We Live Now" column that begins, "These are cruel times for vaginas." The piece goes on to describe various procedures that can be done to "improve" the appearance of external female genitalia, ranging from the "so-called Brazilian waxes" to labiaplasty, which "fixes" labia that are too big or too small or otherwise "defective."

I rather like the tone of the article: Merkin makes it clear that she finds the whole business hogwash, though I think the best section is devoted to the silliness of "hymen-reattachment surgery,"

once a desperate stratagem undertaken by young women from Muslim, Asian and Latin American cultures that demonized the loss of virginity before marriage, [which] is now being hawked as a way to enjoy a second honeymoon. If it's unclear whom this procedure is meant for--aging women hoping to catch a flagging penis with the semblance of undeflowered innocence?--it's even more ontologically ungraspable how stitching a hymen back together vitiates the psychological experience of having already lost your virginity.

Nonetheless, I was bothered by the fact that in her opening sentence, Merkin uses the term "vagina" when she should have used the term "vulva" or "pudendum."

Don't believe me? Consider these definitions:

vulva: The external genital organs of the female, including the labia majora, labia minora, and vestibule of the vagina. [Latin, womb, covering.]

pudendum: the human external genital organs, especially of a woman. Often used in the plural. [Latin, neuter gerundive of pudere, to make or be ashamed.] (The fact that the term is literally rooted in shame is the main reason I will avoid using it.)

vagina: The passage leading from the opening of the vulva to the cervix of the uterus in female mammals. [Latin, vagina, sheath.]

I know, I know: some of you are pointing out that we've covered this territory before: there's a section on it in Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues: Ensler includes a letter from Jane Hirschman, honorary chair of the Vulva Club, membership in which cannot be extended to Ensler (much to the dismay of those already in the club), because membership is "predicated on the understanding and correct usage of the word vulva and being able to communicate that to as many people as possible, especially women." Ensler includes the letter without responding directly to it, and although she names the next monologue "The Vulva Club," once that piece is done, she goes right back to using the word vagina to mean both vagina and vulva.

I think it's good that we can talk openly about the vagina, but I wish we could talk openly about the vulva too. I think how awkward it would be if, when we wanted to talk about an arm, we never used that word--even though it was available to us--opting instead to use the word hand, which was supposed to mean both that thing at the end of your arm with fingers on it, and the arm itself, in contexts that didn't always make it clear which body part you were actually referring to.

Sadly, in pop culture, the generally accepted and acceptable term meant to invoke all of female genitalia is vagina. Vulva, apparently, is too fastidious and precise; cunt and pussy are too crude. (More about those terms later.) But that raises the question: WHY is vagina the more familiar, accepted term?

In 2001, at Sunstone, I participated in a Mormon version of The Vagina Monologues, though it had to be retitled: it went by the name "Sacred Spaces: Mormon Women's Faith and Sexuality," though I thought it should have been called "The Vagina Testimony Meeting." I began my piece by stating that

I am happy to participate in the project of claiming the sexuality of Mormon women as sacred spaces. But I'd like to ask: what does space mean? Are we talking geometry, as in "the infinite extension of the three-dimensional field of every day life"? Are we referring to "sufficient freedom from external pressure to develop or explore one's needs, interests, and individuality," as in, "I need my space"? Or are we talking about "a blank or empty area"? I'd like to cast my vote for the freedom to explore our needs, interests and individuality, but I have a feeling that first we'll have to carve out a blank or empty area in which to claim "sufficient freedom from external pressure"--in particular, pressure from the dogma that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is evil--in order to make that exploration.

I go on to ask

Should I think of my vagina as a space? I know that in the male world, a vagina, mine included, is defined primarily as a space, an empty area. But unless you're giving birth, spaciousness is not a vaginal virtue--tightness is what makes for a good vagina, and exercises are prescribed to tighten a loose vagina up.

The vagina, spacious, tight or otherwise, is not the only organ of female sexuality. Why, aside from the fact that it is a receptacle for a penis, is the vagina so often the focus of discussions of female sexuality? The vagina is a deep subject but I would like to broaden this discussion, add a few contours. I would like to say the word pussy. I would like to say the word cunt. These words, unmentionable in many circumstances, refer not to the vagina but to the vulva, which includes the major and minor labia, the clitoris, and the "vestibule" of the vagina. I need these words to help me answer another question: What is the female equivalent of phallic? It can't be vaginal, which sounds as clinically medical as penile or testicular. It better not be hysteric, which, derived from the Greek word for womb, has too many negative connotations. Phallic refers not just to genitalia but the symbolic power of masculinity. What is the female equivalent, what word refers not only to genitalia but the symbolic power of femaleness? And what is that power? If such a word already exists, I don't think I've heard it, and so I propose a word: vulvic. I want to invoke the power to unsettle present in the word cunt. I want a word involving not just a sacred space but a sacred presence.

So that's right: I'm one of the few people--if not the only person--to say cunt at Sunstone, in front of an audience that included 75-year-old Mormon men. An audible gasp of astonishment rose when I said the word, and a few people strode from the room in outrage, but I kept right on going. I'm used to pissing off Mormons.

I admit that like Kate at Cruella-Blog, I am and have long been a fan of the C word. (Scroll down for Kate's defense of the word. As for why I include a euphemizing asterisk in the spelling of it, it's just so my blog doesn't come up when people are googling the term for porn sites. Note: I finally decided that writing "c*nt" was silly, and I came back and just wrote the word properly, as it deserves to be written: CUNT.) I like how strong it is: one clipped syllable, with plenty of firm consonants. I much prefer it to the term pussy, even though I quite like cats. I don't like that pussy is diminutive or animalistic, and I HATE that it's used by men as a term of derision for a weak, cowardly man: it really bothers me when straight men, who claim to take pleasure in women's bodies, invoke women's bodies as a way to insult other men. Admittedly, calling someone a cunt is about the worst insult you can hurl at him/her (compare it to calling someone a dick) in part because of the term's generalized ability to unsettle people, but to me, that's one indication of the word's inherent strength, one more reason it deserves my usage and respect.

I praise not only the word itself, but what it represents, and I also praise women who love their cunts as they are.

A follow-up to this is posted here.

Posted by holly at 5:24 PM | Comments (10)

December 27, 2005

Greetings from the Valley

Greetings from "the valley," short for "the valley of the sun," the local name for Phoenix and its environs (aka "Maricopa County.") I admit this is not my favorite part of Arizona. I prefer Tucson, which has fewer people, less pollution, a better skyline, my wonderful alma mater, and a longer history. But this is where my sister lives, and yesterday I drove up here from Tucson so I can hang out with her, her husband, her four children, and her really cute dog.

It's also where Wayne's parents live, and since arriving in Mesa, I'm also hanging out with Wayne. Yesterday we went to a bookstore, walked around a mall, drank coffee, tried to find a Mexican restaurant we were willing to eat at (which shouldn't be that difficult in this part of the country, but we had a hard time) and talked about how very weird Mesa is.

Mesa started out as a Mormon settlement--one of the first temples outside of Utah was built in Mesa, and I admit it drives me NUTS when people find out I grew up Mormon in Arizona and react as if I'd told them I'd gone to a private pingpong college on Mars. "I thought Mormons lived in Utah," they say accusingly, then tilt their chins and narrow their eyes in suspicion while they wait for me to admit that I've just told a great whopping lie. At such moments I sometimes become indignant at the illogicality of such responses, as if I didn' t know full well where I was born and raised; as if Utah and Arizona didn't share a freakin' border; as if people who forged a trail from Illinois to Utah (a journey precipitated by the fact that they were driven by murderous mobs from their homes in Illinois, an expulsion that occurred in the midst of a MIdwestern winter so severe that the MIssissippi froze solid, which meant it was unimaginably cold if you haven't experienced temperatures like that but also meant that the refugees were able to drive wagons containing the few possessions they managed to salvage across the Mississippi, but then had to weather the next few days in TENTS [and the shock of the temperature--60 below zero Fahrenheit or so--was so extreme that over a dozen pregnant women went into labor] on the Iowa bank of the river), said trail requiring these people to find a way up eastern edge the Rockies, then drag their wagons up and down god knows how many peaks and valleys, before they decide to settle down in a valley dominated by a huge, smelly, inland lake saltier than the ocean, a valley they somehow figured out how to make habitable by doing things like setting up one of the best irrigation systems in the entire US--as if people who could do all that couldn't also make their way south and figure out how to build houses with big windows and sleeping porches so you can deal with the summers, even 150 years or so ago,which is when several of my ancestors arrived in Arizona.

Then there's all that missionary work Mormons do all over the world--they actually manage to convert people now and again, and some of those people reproduce. I have friends who were born and raised Mormon in places as far from Utah as Argentina, England and Taiwan.

Well, THAT was quite a substantial side comment, not what I meant to discuss at all.... For those of you who wonder why, despite the fact that I'm no longer a practicing or believing Mormon, I still feel so attached to my Mormon heritage and was so invested in my Mormon upbringing, I've either clarified things or made you even more confused.

Anyyway. My point was going to be that these days Mesa is this huge sprawling awful suburb of Phoenix, albeit one that still has a high concentration of Mormons. Every couple of miles you see the same pattern: a bunch of tract homes built around a Mormon church, then a Walmart and/or a Target and/or a Costco, then a few restaurants, including a Coffee Bean and/or a Starbucks for the heathen; then it all starts over again.

Though we mustn't forget the Sonics: a Mormon custom--one I admit I partake in when I'm here, because Sonic has good sodas--is going to Sonic during Happy Hour and getting a big ol' soda. My sister and many women like her have a special sticker on their cars when they pass through the drive-thru, the person at the service window knows they are part of a special frequent buyers' club.

I'm hoping to spend more time with Wayne today, though he may have to hightail it back to LA for work, which would SUCK, since he's one of the main people I wanted to see here. But I'm having fun with my nieces and nephews and then there's always the weather: it's really beautiful. And there's also the fact that if I want a grapefruit for breakfast, I can just go outside and pick one. Which I think I'll do now.

Posted by holly at 10:23 AM

December 6, 2005

Just Freakin' Say No Already

This is something I wrote back in August. I was unwilling to post it at the time because the person it was about was reading my blog. But he's gone, so at long last the post gets posted. It begins with a long quotation from Isak Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes in My Life":

The family of Finch Hatton, of England, have on their crest the device Je responderay, "I will answer.''...I liked it so much I asked Denys... if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first...was its high evaluation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them...Secondly, I liked the Finch Hatton device for its ethical content. I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible.

One thing that drives me crazy is people who can't say no, not in the Ado Annie from Oklahoma! way, but in the general sense of not being able to risk disappointing someone. This affliction affects every segment of the population, but Mormon women seem to have an especially bad case of it. I notice it every year when I go to fill up panels for Sunstone: I'll start gathering names of people I could invite to participate, then email or call them. There's always at least one Mormon woman who simply can't tell me no, though she desperately wants to. She clears her throat, she dodges the question (always invoking an obligation to her family--she's just so busy with the kids!), not wanting to give me a straight answer because she's afraid it will hurt my feelings.

What I want to know is this: why is being led on, strung along, forced to interpret vague clues of resistance, somehow kinder, nicer and more tactful than simply being told, "I'm really sorry, but I have neither the time nor the inclination for what you're proposing, so I'll have to decline your generous offer. I heartily wish you the best of luck in finding someone who's interested"?

One of my friends told me that when he came out of the closet to his mom, the conversation went like this:

My Friend: Mom, I'm gay.

His Mom: Did you take some hamburger out of the freezer? Because if we don't start defrosting it now, it won't be thawed enough in time for dinner if we want to make spaghetti.

I'm having one of those conversations right now. I keep trying to talk about the big pink elephant sporting a grass skirt, carrying an ukulele and dancing the hula in the middle of the room, and the person I'm trying to talk to keeps saying, "Did you take some hamburger out of the freezer?" Or else he says nothing at all.

Circumlocutious, evasive and oblique are not among the words most people would use to describe me. Candid, forthright and honest are. Not only am I not circumlocutious, evasive or oblique, but I don't trust or respect people who are.

Just freakin' say no already!

Posted by holly at 6:59 AM | Comments (4)

October 21, 2005

Outsmarting the Gremlins Part II

Read Part One.

The biggest things Mormons plan for, of course, is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse that will precede it. Gotta be righteous, so you don't get burned with the heathen! Also must stock up on a two-years' supply of raw wheat (don't forget the hand-cranked grinder so you can still grind it when the power goes out), a two-years' supply of potable water, and a two-years' supply of toilet paper. Mormon pantries are a sight to behold, as are the spaces under Mormon beds: cans of dehydrated potatoes and cornmeal and god only knows what.

At some point, when the church grew large enough that its membership wasn't concentrated in the spacious intermountain West, where people could have huge basements in which to store foodstuffs well beyond the expiration date (ever walked into a basement where two dozen cans of potted beef have exploded? That stuff stinks even when it's not rancid), someone in charge said, "OK, we'll let you scale back to just a ONE-YEAR supply of all those necessities. And don't forget to rotate your canned goods!"

You may think I'm kidding, but in her attic, my mom really does have a one-year supply of toilet paper. Outside the house, my father has a ten-year supply of rotted firewood, as well as dozens of old car batteries that can be hooked up to a generator and recharged and power various special appliances he has bought because they will run off old car batteries. (He also has two old Cadillacs: a 62 with rocks in the gas tank courtesy of some nasty neighbor boy, and a 49 that still runs, which he periodically has repainted, drives for a day or two, then parks again for ten to fifteen years. In addition, he owns an ancient aluminum motor home, a piece of junk whose only virtue is that its exterior is recyclable; a small RV in which he and my mother have driven across the country a time or two; a 40-year-old green Chevy pickup, the vehicle in which I learned to drive and which we all agree Dad should keep because sometimes, you need to haul stuff; a hideous white suburban with a broken driver's seat that he refuses to sell because it might come in handy, but which never will because of the truck; and a Ford Yukon he drives every day and complains about every day because it's not a Lincoln, which is what he really wanted, but he bought that damn little SUV brand new because my brother could get him a deal on it through his job, and Dad was too cheap to fork out the cash on a Lincoln, even though he could afford it. The front of the house looks fine, but the side view.... I swear to god, it looks like the opening shot of a movie about people who leave their empty whiskey bottles under the bed and tether a goat to the lawn so they don't have to mow it. The only thing that redeems the scene is the fact that none of the cars are on blocks.)

Adults were taught to Buy in Bulk and Never Throw Anything Useful Away; as for young people, we learned about Goals! That's what the Mormon church teaches its youth: the Importance of Setting Goals! For six years, from the time I started junior high until I graduated from high school, as part of official Church curriculum, I had to set two goals every month in areas covering my spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, social and artistic development. I was good at setting and meeting goals. "Run three miles every morning." "Earn straight A's." "Never be tardy." We were told that "a goal not written is only a wish." I guess that's why I ended up serving a mission and getting a PhD instead of marrying a nice Mormon boy: I forgot to write down the goal to get married!

Anyway, the point of all this is that I learned, well and truly, how to plan ahead--not just for things I know I'll have to deal with (like three classes full of students every Tuesday and Thursday), but for emergencies. I keep a valid passport around, even if I have no plans to leave the country, because what if I suddenly have to fly to Italy on a moment's notice? I check the ten-day weather forecast so I can plan what I'm going to wear during the next week. I change my clocks BEFORE I go to bed when the time arrives to go on or off Daylight Savings Time (which I loathe) so that when I wake up, I know as soon as I glance at the clock what time it really is. I even plan ahead with my blog, so that I always have backup material in case I am having WAY too much fun living my life to write about it. I do this because it makes my life easier and more orderly in the long run, but I also do it to outsmart the gremlins, whose purpose in life is to cause chaos in mine, and I like to keep the chaos at bay.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (2)

October 11, 2005

The Deep Green Door

As I mentioned, a few weeks ago a friend and I visited Kirtland, Ohio, an important site in Mormon history. I've been sitting here preparing to write the sentence, "Church history doesn't really interest me," but something stopped me, because it isn't quite true: I've always found the story of the Saints Crossing the Plains thoroughly compelling, but I think that's partly because it involves the vast, expansive landscapes of the West. I guess it's more accurate to say that "Church history in Ohio never really interested me;" all that stuff about how Joseph Smith and his hardy band of trusting converts moved hither and yon after Joseph exhausted his credit or a bank failed or whatever always struck me as feeble preamble: after all, they were moving distances of a hundred miles or so, from one small- to medium-sized eastern state with trees and stores and ROADS, to another. That is an enterprise much less romantic than carving a thousand-mile-long path across a wind-scoured landscape where you encounter more wolves and buffalo than people, and where, if you want something like grains or vegetables, you either have to bring them with your or camp for several months while you plant, grow and harvest them.

Can you tell I'm a little homesick right now? We had a string of glorious fall days, but autumn has well and truly arrived now, not as the culmination of summer but as the harbinger of winter, with vicious cold rain flung from a sullen sky. I can't help checking the weather report for Tucson.... Anyway, this was not supposed to be a post about why I still prefer the parts of this country west of the Mississippi to the parts east of it; it's supposed to be an opportunity to post a picture of myself, so I'll get back on topic.

The walls of the Kirtland Temple are now an elegant, understated cream; the building is roofed with unassuming gray shingles. However, our tour guide told us that when it was originally built, its color scheme was anything but understated: the treatment the shingles underwent to make them fireproof rendered them a vivid, vibrant red; the plaster (which may or may not have contained bits of ground china, fine tableware sacrificed by the women of the church so that the House of the Lord would glitter like the jewel it was intended to be) was a rich blue like the late afternoon sky when it's barely tinged with gray; and the massive double doors at the front were painted a deep green that various members of the staff struggled to describe: not quite olive, one said; sort of a forest green, another explained.

The (once sparkly) plaster has subsequently been covered by many coats of paint, and the red roof has been replaced. However, the building has its original doors, which were recently removed and stripped, and in the process their original color revealed. They were repainted that shade and rehung. They're FABULOUS! I had my picture taken in front of one of them, and you can see it here. The color of the door is not truly captured, but still, I wanted to share.

View image

Posted by holly at 7:58 AM

September 30, 2005

Call It Intimacy

I am suspicious of individuals and institutions who refer to a whole range of sexual activities with the bland, modest, careful euphemism, "intimacy."

Mormons in particular do this. For Sunstone this past year Laura L. Bush and I planned to do a presentation on Mormon sex manuals, and the first thing you notice about them is that pretty much none of them (not a one that we found) mention sex explicitly in the title; instead, they have titles like Sacred Intimacy or Becoming One: Intimacy in Marriage or Purity and Passion: Spiritual Truths about Intimacy That Will Strengthen Your Marriage.

If you don't believe me, go to Deseret Books (a publisher of LDS books) and search Intimacy. Then go to Amazon.com and search books on Intimacy. You'll see how differently the words are used: at Deseret Books, "intimacy" is shorthand referring almost entirely to sexual intimacy; on Amazon, the titles that come up cover a range of topics, and if the focus is sexual intimacy, that's usually made clear in the title. In fact, after doing just some basic research, I've learned that in the non-Mormon world, there are FOUR types of intimacy: intellectual, experiential, emotional and sexual.

Anyway, at first this project aroused in me the restrained but palpable anticipation a bevy of 15-year-old Mormon mall goths would feel pawing with feigned nonchalance through a new shipment of Evanescence t-shirts at Hot Topic. Laura and I both thought it would be a good follow-up to the presentation we did about Mormon women's sexual training, but then Laura sent me one of the books she found in the BYU bookstore. I sat down, flipped through it, read some of the saccharin prose and doctrinaire pronouncements and thought, "Omigod, to write this paper, I will actually have to READ this book and many more like it," and that excited me as much as the prospect of wearing an Evanescence t-shirt myself.

Emotional intimacy can and often should be a part of sexual activity; sexual activity can complement and increase emotional intimacy. But they can also exist separately, and no doubt there are times when they should--for instance, siblings can be very emotionally intimate, but I admit I believe there is good reason for our society's taboo against incest. And I will also admit to engaging in certain mild forms of sexual behavior (i.e., making out) with someone with whom I was not particularly emotionally intimate, and still feeling the experience was pleasurable and worth my time. So when someone or some institution consistently conflates the two, it suggests to me that they Have Issues They Don't Want to Deal With.

Mormons have to change "acceptable sex" into the blanket term "intimacy" because they work so hard to make sex in general dirty and disgusting--and they do a pretty good job in the Bible dictionary and topical guide that accompanies my Mormon scripture. There's no entry on "sex" or "sexuality" in the Bible dictionary. In the topical guide, the only entry found in the S's where "sex" would appear is "sexual immorality," which includes the invitation to "see also Adultery; Excommunication; Fornication; Homosexuality; Lust; Whoredom."

Which is quite a list.

So I looked up Lust; all the scriptures listed for Lust were resolutely negative; the same goes for all the references provided under the heading "sensuality," which was cross-listed with Lust.

So then I looked up Love, and found this invitation: "see also Affection; Benevolence; Brotherhood and Sisterhood; Charity; Family, Love within; Fellowshipping; Friendship; God, Love of; Grace; Kindness; Marriage, Continuing Courtship in; Neighbor."

That "Marriage, Continuing Courtship in" looked as promising as an gold-plated engagement ring with a diamond the size of a dust speck; indeed, when I turned to it, I found references that included Ephesians 5:22: "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord." Whoo! That's a turn-on.

All in all, the basic message the Church communicates about sex is this: "Sex is Filthy and Disgusting; Save it for Someone You Love." So you save it for someone you love, marry them, and then you call it "Intimacy," which somehow makes everything "healthy" and OK.

For anyone who wants more on this topic, check out the comments John and I posted on Venus Pandemos.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (1)

September 28, 2005

Feminism vs. Mormonism: the Argument after the Panel Part I I

See Part I

As for what I think of the rest of the discussion, well, it's complicated. As I've made clear, I think the church sucks. And I figured out before I was 20 that it sucked, for reasons having to do with gender and bigotry in general (I was 14 when the church finally let black men hold the priesthood, and the generosity in extending it wasn't as striking as the perverseness of withholding it) as well as the wacky doctrine.

But I didn't work up the courage to leave until I was almost 26, and leaving was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life. I did it entirely on my own, without the benefit of a spouse or a friend to go with and support me; I did it in the face of great resistance and sorrow from my family; I did it because I had a been a feminist since I was 17 or 18 (I say in response to Luke's argument that you can't be both a feminist and an active member of the Mormon church). While I respect those who left in solidarity with and mourning for the intellectuals persecuted by the Church in 1993, I left in 1989 because the hierarchy made it clear to me, a desperately unhappy 25-year-old woman with no virtually authority, that it would not allow me to dissent even on the local level--I couldn't even talk about polygamy in my Relief Society lesson!

People leave the church if and when they're ready, and someone like Luke, who was its staunch, unquestioning defender for many years, should know that. I don't see much point in "destroying" the church because until people are ready to live without it, something else will just appear to take its place. This doesn't mean that I don't work to advance the institutions and ideologies I support and believe in. I'd just rather focus my energy on building something rather than tearing something else down. After all, Martin Luther and Galileo Galilei, two men who arguably did more damage to Catholic hegemony than just about anyone else, did not have its destruction as their goal; Luther wanted to heal and save the church from its sins and errors, and Galileo just wanted to figure out how the universe worked.

But even all that doesn't mean that I don't feel the right to express my negative views about the church to anyone who expresses their positive views about it to me, especially given how emotionally and intellectually manipulative Mormons often are when "bearing their testimonies," or asserting their knowledge that "the Mormon church is the only true and living church on the face of the earth." A few weeks ago I went to Kirtland, Ohio, a very important site in church history, with a friend of mine. We toured the Kirtland temple (which, with its removable pews and prominent pulpits, has more in common with a modern-day Mormon cultural hall [read: carpeted dance hall/gym with a stage at one end] than a contemporary temple), which is owned by the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), who don't do much proselytizing; they're mainly interested in promoting intelligent and open discussion.

Which stands in stark opposition to the plain old LDS church, which values proselytizing above all else. My friend wanted to see the sites owned by the Utah branch of Mormonism (as the CoC quite accurately refers to it), including a reconstruction of the saw mill used in construction of the temple and a recreation of a store whose owner, a member of the church, provided lodging and meals for Joseph Smith and his family. When we arrived at the LDS visitor's center, they told us we couldn't go visit those things until we watched their movie; I said, "There's no way I'll watch the freakin' movie," because I've just seen too much church propaganda already in my life. Then I headed off to pee in the pristine bathroom provided by mandate in all Mormon buildings.

While I was in the bathroom, my friend somehow wrangled a private tour led by some affable, wide-eyed young woman named Sister Nelsen, with calves as broad and intonation as flat as a church parking lot. She asked where we were from; we told her; I asked her she was from; she told me; then I asked if much of her mission was devoted to finding investigators and teaching discussions, or if she spent most of her time giving tours. She started to give me a vague answer about missionary work in general, so I said, "You don't have to explain that stuff; we're both returned missionaries, though neither of us is active any more. But we know how missions work." She was as startled as a 14-year-old boy might be upon awaking to find a glowing resurrected prophet standing at the foot of his bed, but she soon recovered her plucky aplomb.

Later, in the store where Joseph Smith received many of the "revelations" in the Doctrine and Covenants, she bore fervent testimony of the truth of Section 88, with its vision of the resurrection of the dead. I sat with my face averted and impassive, as if I were just lying back and thinking of England. She talked about how membership in the church brings us so much joy, as does sharing it with others, then said, "But you guys already know that, because you both served missions."

And that point I felt entitled share some of what made my own bosom burn. "I wouldn't call what the church brings ‘joy,'" I said.

"Holly's mission was very... difficult," my friend said.

"It wasn't just my mission," I said. "It's the whole structure of the church. It is not a benign institution. You think it's this great thing, but I think much of what it does is evil, downright evil. It retards spiritual and human development. It makes people small and afraid."

My friend later told me he thought those were very insulting things to say to a missionary, and I thought, Well, duh. But the enterprise of missionary work is insulting: trying to get people to believe just like you do. And I point out that I didn't try to get all emotional and intense--sometimes called "invoking the spirit"--and "bear testimony" of the "truthfulness" of my beliefs to Sister Nelsen before asking her to accept them as her own, which is what she did to me; I just told her what I believed in no uncertain terms.

So back at Sunstone, when the discussion continued to center so much on why people should or shouldn't leave the church, I started tuning out and started heeding my grumbling stomach. I also kept looking at my watch; it was past 7 p.m., and at 8 p.m. a dear friend of mine was speaking in the "Pillars of our Faith" session. I often skip that particular session in favor of steeping like a weak tea bag in the hotel jacuzzi, but I wanted to hear my friend, and that meant I needed to eat before 8 p.m. "Anybody hungry?" I asked.

No one responded to me. Someone mentioned general politics; most of us have families absolutely lousy with Republicans. Talking about that took a long time.

"Could we continue this over dinner?" I asked, more than once.

More than once, no one responded.

I'd been standing up so that I could see and speak to all the participants clearly, but when it became obvious that no one cared about dinner as much as I did, I sat down. I can leave, I thought, I can leave all by myself and go get dinner by myself, just like I left the church by myself. But once again I am caught up in this group dynamic where we have to act as a group, and in order to do that, everyone must persuade others to do what we want them to do: Luke has to convince everyone else to leave the church; Bob and Aimee and Alan have to convince people to stay in the church and change it from inside; and I have to convince everyone to go get dinner with me.

OK, I admit it: first of all, I'm oversimplifying the situation a bit, and secondly, I didn't really think that. But perhaps I should have thought it, because there's a patient, persistent whisper of truth in the idea. I should have said, "Well, I'm going to dinner now, and anyone who wants to may join me," and left off worrying about what everyone else would do. Above all, I should have forgotten about this man who said he wanted to have dinner with me but wouldn't direct a tenth of his sentences to me when dinnertime arrived! But I didn't. Instead, I thought, M&M's. I bought a package of M&M's earlier today and never got around to eating them. So I rummaged through my backpack, found them, opened them. From across the room Bob pointed intently at the package in my hand, as if it were a philosopher's stone that would turn the base metal of Mormon sexism into golden equality and justice. "Sorry to interrupt," he began, "but I just have to say, you could be having something WAY better than that if we'd all just go eat."

"I've been trying for half an hour to move this conversation to the restaurant," I said, "but so far I haven't managed to get any takers."

And then everyone else agreed they were hungry and several people acknowledged that, "I've got to get some dinner before ‘Pillars of My Faith' starts at 8" and we moved to the restaurant for a hurried meal of pasta--that's about all a decent kitchen (read: one that doesn't rely on microwaves) can knock out in under ten minutes, we were told. I heard my friend speak (I'm tempted to reveal his name, because he really is a lovely, lovely, wonderful, kind, humane, generous, thoughtful, intelligent man, but I guess I'll make you look it up instead), then ditched out on the rest of the session and was immediately waylaid in the hall by someone else who didn't understand my original question about sex.

Which constitutes the end of that particular round of that discussion, but not of that discussion itself. It has continued on blogs and on-line forums, and I'm extending it here, since I'm interested in the even larger discussion of which it is only a part. I invite comments about how feminism and Mormonism oppose each other, and whether or not--and if so, how--they can possibly be made more congenial.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (4)

September 27, 2005

Feminism vs. Mormonism: the Argument after the Panel Part I

The Sunstone panel on "Advancing Feminist Sensibilities among Mormon Men" occupied the final time slot of the afternoon, which meant it ran until 6:15 p.m. I was starving by the time it ended, and would have headed out the door to get dinner, except for two things: One, I'd posed this ambiguous question about sex no one could understand, and people kept asking me for clarification; and two, in attendance at the panel was a man I barely knew who had caught me off guard earlier by telling I was one of his very favorite writers and asking me to have dinner with him, and I kind of wanted to see where things could go. It was only later that I realized I should have learned something from the fact that however great the interest he professed in me, when push came to shove, he would rather stand around arguing about the church than talk specifically with me or fulfill the offers he made me.... But that's another story.

So I ended up as part of this prolonged discussion about the panel and its implications, whether change in the church was possible, and what we should or shouldn't do to encourage change.

There were dozen or so of us: a young couple active in the church, whom I'll call Bob and Aimee; a woman I'll call Debbie who had never been Mormon (she was Episcopalian, as I remember), but was married to a post-Mormon; two members of the panel, one of whom I'll call Alan; a long-time LDS feminist who has done graduate work on the topic of women and religion, and who remains active in her ward (which she loves, as opposed to being active in the church at large, which she does not love), whom I'll call Judith; a guy I'll call Luke, who has avowed a desire to "completely destroy the church;" two or three other people whose names I didn't know or won't reveal; and me.

I do not claim to be absolutely accurate in my summation of various positions; this happened two months ago, and while my memory is usually pretty precise and thorough, I was distracted by constant hunger and occasional frustration, so I wasn't always paying close attention. I invite anyone who was part of the discussion to correct any mischaracterization I might make of their beliefs and opinions.

At one extreme was Luke, who refused to believe that any of the members of the panel were truly feminists, since they still remained active in the church. He argued that because the church systematically discriminates against women, one cannot be both a feminist and an active member of the church. "What's more important than justice?" he kept demanding.

The other extreme, that women in the church are treated just fine, mercifully was not taken up by anyone. Everyone in the discussion recognized that when it comes to dealing with gender, the church sucks.

Bob and Aimee, young and hopeful, seemed to feel that with regards to women in the church, change was not only possible but inevitable, as people became more aware of the cost of the sexism and called for change, and as younger, more enlightened men were called to lead the church.

That was also basically the position of Judith and Alan as well. Judith stressed to me later, however, that change can't happen in the church quickly enough to suit her, so her loyalties to it are limited. Alan is an academic, and retained, in many regards, an academic's detachment on the matter. A very nice guy, he is nonetheless remarkably difficult to pin down, even on questions like, "What is your favorite dessert?" For various reasons he has decided to remain within the church, even though he knows it's a flawed institution, and will work to effect change from the inside.

That last bit, which drove Luke crazy, was also echoed by several other participants in the discussion. But as I'll discuss tomorrow, I'm not convinced it's such a bad approach for those who can manage it, even though I was not one such person.

Debbie had asked a question during the Q&A about economics and feminism--as I understand it, she thinks we need to rethink labor and work in order to achieve equality between genders. In the discussion afterwards, she drew a distinction between paternalism and patriarchy. Patriarchy is "a social system in which the father is the head of the family and men have authority over women and children" while paternalism is "treating or governing people in a fatherly manner, especially by providing for their needs without giving them rights or responsibilities." This distinction supports the argument that the church is not merely a patriarchy but paternalistic, and so infantalizes EVERYONE but those who wield power. (Debbie told me later that her views on such matters are heavily influenced by Richard Sennett, whose book The Hidden Injuries Of Class [co-written with Jonathan Cobb and published in 1972] offers, according to the Guardian UK, a "sensitive and subtle exploration of working-class lives. It dissects the ways in which doctrines of equality may work against most people in the modern world; with inherited social distinctions now apparently erased, ‘social difference can now appear as a question of character, of moral resolve, will and competence.' It is an argument which has as much resonance in the age of so-called depressed affluence as it had 30 years ago.")

For a while those of us in this discussion after the panel talked about the possibility that the church might accept gay marriage before it truly empowered women, because gay marriage was this new thing the church didn't know how to deal with, whereas the subjugation of women was this thoroughly entrenched thing with all this cultural baggage that people felt invested in, in ways both large and small--actually, I might have been the one to bring that up; I don't remember. If I wasn't, I agree with it, for the reason mentioned above as well as the fact that gay men, until they leave the church, are able to enjoy the "blessings" of holding the priesthood and wielding (albeit limited) power in the hierarchy, so they are more likely to affect change. Even at Sunstone, there are more straight men participating in panels on how to make life better and more just for gay members of the church than there are men on panels about how to improve the lives of women. Consider as well the situation in the Catholic church, which has recently decided to bar gay men from becoming priests. Many gay priests and seminarians are expressing pain and outrage at the move to exclude them from the priesthood, but how many of them have worked actively to extend the right to hold the priesthood to women?

(You read more of my opinions on the topic in The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man and Mormon Social Taboos.)

This has gotten quite long, so check back tomorrow for the end of the story, which involves M&M's.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

September 23, 2005

Three Rules for Before You Get Involved with Them, Two Rules for After

Or, Why I Am Not a Swinger

For the introduction to this post, read Bad Coffee in Bed, September 22, 2005

Wayne drank bad coffee just because it was coffee and he believed that he liked coffee; I had bad sex just because it was sex and I believed that I liked sex.

But I decided at some point that I'd had enough bad sex to last a lifetime, and that I'd like to limit its occurrence in the future. This has pretty much resulted in celibacy, which I'm fairly OK with. The fact of the matter is, if celibacy is the price I have to pay for not having sex I regret later, I will pay it.

What happened is this: I had one too many one-night stands with someone who A) had no investment in my life and B) was a bad lay to boot. This last guy couldn't muster enough courtesy or decency to call me even ONCE after having two orgasms in my bed while I went thoroughly unfulfilled. There had been a moment, when, in a drunken haze, I thought getting naked with this guy was a FABULOUS idea, but many hours later when he was gone and I was left with my hangover, I realized that all I got out of the experience was some very troubled sleep and a few weeks of wondering if my contraceptives had really worked.

So I figured I needed some rules to have sex by. These are the rules I came up with.

1. I will never sleep with anyone BEFORE the first date. This means I will never again pick someone up at a bar, take him home and f*ck him, though there are things I am willing to do that stop short of that. I think there are circumstances where it is OK to engage in certain forms of sexual behavior with someone with whom I am not (yet?) emotionally intimate; I think it can be both thoroughly fun and perfectly harmless to make out for a while with some unattached (see Rule #2) hottie (whether this hotness comes from a fabulous exterior or a really exciting mind) you just met. But as far as any activity for which a healthcare professional would recommend that you use some type of "protection,"--well, that ain't going to happen ever again in my life (at least not consensually) until AFTER there has been a phone call, dinner and a movie, or some equivalent, pre-arranged activity. I want the guy to demonstrate some investment, you know?

2. I will never sleep with someone who is sleeping with someone else. I have a real problem with infidelity. I've pushed the boundary a time or two: dating, the second he became single, some guy who had made it clear before he broke up with his girlfriend that he was interested in me; dating someone who wasn't the least bit over his ex; kissing someone who still had a girlfriend, though it was pretty obvious the relationship was about to die a miserable painful death. But I have never carried on a full-fledged "affair," and I don't want to start now--in fact, I want to back off even from the boundaries I was willing to push before. It's just weirdly complicated and I prefer unencumbered clarity.

I'm also not interested in swinging, or being involved with anyone who swings. I know it's often done successfully among gay men, who, according to those of my acquaintance who live the lifestyle, tend to know both the playing field and the rules. I have also met straight swingers from time to time, and some have suggested to me that my insistence on monogamy makes me a prude. Of course a prude is the last thing my Mormon mother would EVER call me, but perhaps it's true, since when I went to Amazon and looked up titles on polyamory, or being free to have sex with as many partners as possible, what I found pretty much turned my stomach. If the reviewers (even the enthusiastic ones giving the books five stars) are to be believed, the best books spend lots of time detailing how to avoid jealousy and breaking people's hearts--and, they admit, even with the books' advice, those things are hard to avoid. I once got hurt by a swinger who didn't seem to play by or even understand the rules. He told me simultaneously that A) there were no marriages like his that could serve as models to help him figure out how to deal with other women and B) there was this really great book called The Ethical Slut that he wanted to read but hadn't got around to buying. I wish he had read the goddamn book before pursuing me--apparently there are many marriages like his.

In fact, some of my ancestors had marriages rather like his. Something in the rhetoric about how "it's not infidelity if everyone knows what's going on" smacks too much of the rhetoric in the "revelations" Joseph Smith produced, in which God told him that there was not only nothing wrong but something deeply righteous about having sex with lots of women as long as he was married to all of them, then "commanded" him to go out and start doing just that. It's perhaps a strange condemnation, but it's true: heterosexual swinging is just too close to historical Mormonism to appeal to me.

(For information on Joseph's wives–-at least the ones historians are fairly certain about, go here:
http//www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/)

There is of course a belief in Mormonism that at some point polygamy will be reinstated, when humanity is finally ready to live that "higher" law. Some men say they have no interest in acquiring a second wife, since it's hard enough making one marriage work; some men don't bother to conceal their delight at the prospect of having more than one sanctioned sex partner. When I was still active in the church, more than once some married man paid me what he thought was a fabulous compliment: "Holly, when polygamy is reinstated, you'll make the greatest second wife." Gee! Thanks ever so much, but I'll pass.

3. I will never have another one-night stand. They're just too goddamned depressing! As Liz Phair points out, you wake up from them disoriented, and almost immediately you feel sorry. I don't ever want to feel sorry quite that way again. This means that anyone who wants to sleep with me has to agree to do it on two separate occasions, separated by at least 24 hours. I'm not asking for a HUGE commitment: we're talking a weekend. And then, if the first occasions aren't horrible, there can be future occasions; and if they are horrible, well, sometimes there's no reason to test out the old adage that "third time's a charm."

I began making it a practice to share these rules with any man who made it clear that he was interested in sleeping with me. They never had a problem with Rule #1 and Rule #3, but Rule #2 took many a man by surprise. They sputtered out their disappointment and surprise to me.

"But...but...but I just moved to town and I don't know that many women yet and I'm already sleeping with this other woman I met and I don't know who I like better so far, you or her," one said.

"I think it's clear that you like HER better," I replied. "That's great! I hope things work out really well for the two of you."

There were a couple who said, "But... but... but I'm still sleeping with my ex-girlfriend!"

"Hey, whatever works for you!" I said. "I can completely understand why you would prefer to continue sleeping with someone with whom things didn't work out right the first time instead of investing in a new relationship. It makes things easier, after all."

Recently I have been thinking about the ways in which my evil ex Adam screwed me up and screwed me over. I would not have violated any of those rules in sleeping with him, but what was awful about him was not that he wanted irresponsible sex from me, but that he wanted irresponsible sex with everyone else, and he wanted me to provide an emotionally stable and supportive friendship while he was having that irresponsible sex, even after he dumped me cruelly. In case you've forgotten, this is the guy who said to me, "I can't sleep with anyone who knows me as intimately as you do," and "After a week of sleeping with you, I've begun to feel a commitment not just to you, not just to the relationship, but to being a person I'm not yet ready to be, so I'm going to sleep around with undergrads," then DEMANDED that I remain his best friend while he conducted these shallow sexual relationships. Which resulted in Rule #4:

4. I will not remain emotionally intimate with a man who extends and then withdraws the offer of sexual intimacy.

Even more recently, prompted by the advice of friends who hate to see me fret endlessly over some guy who has treated me badly, I have come up with yet another rule:

5. I will not remain emotionally intimate with--or even continue to speak to--a man who deceives me, either deliberately or through carelessness, about his status or intention with regards to the other rules.

The thing is, although that rule seems emotionally and ethically healthy to me, I'm bad at cutting people off. I always want to give people another chance, and while that has prolonged my misery in some cases, in others it has turned out well. I mean, yeah, there have been plenty of mistakes in my sex life. But even some of the guys who were jerks when I dated them turned out to be decent guys later, and I'm really glad to be friends with them. How many chances do you give someone to turn into a decent person?

So those are the rules for what I won't do. As for what I will do, well, right now it all seems kind of moot, given the dating pool where I live, and the paucity of men who are truly interested in 40-something women with PhDs and bad attitudes. Not that I'm complaining. I've always been fond of solitude, even as a child, which I shall discuss in the future.

And I might also talk about good sex at some point–-I actually have had some, in case you wondered.

Posted by holly at 7:34 AM | Comments (5)

September 22, 2005

Parody Never Faileth

This website offers very funny song parodies. Some are political, some deal with entertainment, a whole bunch deal with Mormon stuff. My favorite so far (haven't listened to them all) is "Give a Talk at the Fireside," which includes the line, "And the CTR's go 'Do, to do, to do, singing a song is fun to do....'"

http://spaff.com/

Posted by holly at 1:34 PM | Comments (1)

September 21, 2005

The Exclusive Territory of Straight Men

There are lots of posts on this topic. They are, in order of posting, Mormon Social Taboos, A Happy Marriage with a Good Man, the post you're reading right now, The Society of Buggers, Brokeback Mountain, Old Testament Weirdness, It's Not Just Mormon Men Who Don't Want to Lose the Beard, The SL Tribune Joins the Chorus, Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the introduction), Will, Grace and Angels in Brokeback America: Straight Women, Gay Men and Mormonism (the excerpt), Marriage Manifesto, The Ex-Exes from Exodus and the Agency of Gay Men, Sex, Misogyny and My Blog Stats, Narcissism and Misogyny, and Really Long Comment, In Which I Disavow the Cow Part.

Let me quote a paragraph from the essay by Ben Christensen in the most recent Dialogue that upset me so.

I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option. In my mind, this kind of thinking is anti-progressive. The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles. We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered "white" and for women to do what was once considered "male"--get an education, have a career, etc. Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?

God, where do you even start with a paragraph like that.

I guess I'll do this sentence by sentence.

"I don't understand people who call themselves liberal and progressive but are threatened by homosexual reparative therapy enough to try to stop people like me from having that option."

I'm not "threatened" by homosexual reparative therapy, and I would never stop anyone who truly wanted to pursue it, provided that person is over 18 and pursues the endeavor willingly. I would add, however, that while I would never "stop" someone from pursuing reparative therapy, neither would I particularly respect a decision to pursue it. There is considerable evidence that while it may convince people not to have gay sex, it doesn't make them straight. And it seems a sign of such self-loathing and desperation, that I can't help feeling the time, effort and money devoted to reparative therapy could be better spent in other ways.

"The whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movements was to allow blacks, women, and other minorities to break free of what had been their traditional roles."

Actually, no, that was not the whole point of the civil rights and women's liberation movement. Both of those movements had and continue to have many goals during their long existences. An important goal of the civil rights movement in the 1960s was to pass and enforce legislation that would remove the threat of violence blacks so often lived under. It was not simply about acquiring the right to go to school or keeping a seat on the bus; it was about living without the fear of lynchings and murders. The same goes the feminist movement: there has been a long struggle to force law makers and law enforcement agencies to treat sexual and domestic violence as they crimes they should be.

"We live in a world where it's okay for blacks to do what was once considered ‘white' and for women to do what was once considered ‘male'--get an education, have a career, etc."

Actually, we live in a world where some people think it's OK for blacks to do what is still considered "white" and for women to do what is still considered "male" (interesting that the only examples Christensen cites are the basic human rights of getting an education, seeking meaningful employment) but the fact that it might be "OK" for racial and sexual minorities to pursue the same goals as white men does not mean they have as many opportunities to do so or receive the same rewards for their efforts.

"Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that's what he chooses to do?"

Wow.

Has this guy REALLY never read about the social structure of ancient Greece, where citizens (who were always and only male) routinely had both wives and male lovers? Has he never read The Symposium? Has he never heard the theory that Shakespeare was gay? Has he never heard anything of Oscar Wilde's biography (Wilde married and fathered two children) or read Blanche Dubois' speech about why her young husband shot himself in A Streetcar Named Desire?

It is not accurate to say that marrying a woman and having a family has usually been considered the exclusive territory of straight men, since "straight" and "gay" are relatively new categories. Before that, there were pretty much just men, and even men who had male lovers routinely married women and conceived children for any number of reasons, including a desire to appear respectable, to be "righteous," to appease parents who wanted grandchildren and heirs, or simply because that's what people did.

It's called "having a beard," Ben, trying to appear butch so you can get on in society, and men who wanted to do so have managed to have both wives and male lovers for millennia.

And of course it must be pointed out that one need not enter into a straight marriage to have children. There is such a thing as artificial insemination. Lesbian couples manage to bear children and gay men manage to adopt or father children. One of my friends fathered a child with a cherished friend who was a lesbian; she and her partner have primary custody of the child, but my friend is an involved and dedicated father, and his partner is an active parent as well.

Christensen's comments reveal his factual ignorance, his emotional and spiritual naivete, and a profound sense of entitlement. He tells us he feels he was dealt a bum hand by being gay, but he also feels he should retain the blessings and privileges of white male domination and patriarchy. He should still be head of his narrow little world, in which the civil rights and women's movement are about "education" and "career" and marriage is a "territory."

Having been involved in the struggle to legalize gay marriage since the early 90s, after a lawsuit on the issue was filed in Hawaii (which brought about an alliance between those two historical enemies, the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church) and believing that couples of consensual adults who desired to have a union of love recognized by the state deserved that right regardless of sexual orientation, I was astonished in the late 1990s to meet gays and lesbians who believed that not only was the right to marry something they did not need, but that if acquired, it would harm the gay community. Marriage was so sexist, so patriarchal, so obviously an economic and political proposition designed to support a diseased status quo, that opting into it would not bring equality to gay people but would instead insure that one partner in all marriages--gay or straight--remained submissive while the other was dominant. The better option, they argued, was to pursue non-traditional, egalitarian partnerships, and wait for the straight world to abandon marriage after it recognized how vastly superior these egalitarian gay relationships were.

Christensen's essay supports that argument. Marriage as he sees and practices it is perhaps socially respectable, but it is not ethically respectable. It is born of ignorance and fear rather than wisdom and courage. It is neither generous nor enlightened but is instead a self-serving attempt to claim as many of the privileges and as much of the power that society can possibly offer him. If that is marriage, it is something we should all shun.

Posted by holly at 7:32 AM | Comments (2)

September 20, 2005

Mormons, Male Feminists, and Sex

This post continues ideas discussed in three earlier posts: Ripe Peaches and Peach Schnapps, Venus Pandemos, and Male Mormon Feminists-–it's Part II of MMF, actually. For background information on all these topics, see Mormon Links.

When the panelists had finished and the session was opened to questions, I was (I think) the first one out of my seat. I thanked the guys for their comments, complimented them on having the courage and the conviction to declare themselves feminists, and said something like this--or rather, this is a more coherent version of what I wish I'd said:

"I've spent most of my adult life in academia in the humanities, which is someplace where almost everyone, male and female, is a feminist. In a graduate program in English or film studies or philosophy or the likes, it's hard to find a man who doesn't call himself a feminist--probably partly because he knows if he doesn't espouse it, chances are good he won't get laid very often. But despite these guys' declarations that they're feminists, they often treat the women they're involved with very badly."

I have dated enough myself and watched enough episodes of Sex and the City that I feel safe asserting that in conventions of heterosexual courtship, seduction and dating, men still retain most of the power of acting and choosing, while women have the role of waiting, and accepting or refusing. It is generally the man who is supposed to say, after a date or after sex, "I'll call you," and it is the man who is generally supposed to call. Certainly, there are women who are take the initiative in sexual matters. But there was only one Samantha to the other three more traditional, passive women in the cast of S&tC--it is not only Mormon women who are trained to be objects rather than subjects.

Of course there are women who treat the men they date very, very badly. But that does not change the basic facts of how power is generally understood and distributed in our society when it comes to courtship and sex.

There are plenty of men in the world who know it is wrong to disempower women politically and economically, but have little compunction about deceiving and demeaning women when it comes to dating and sex. Their reason for doing so is, according to Greg Behrendt, author of He's Just Not That Into You, that most men are willing to sleep with women they don't really like, but not so willing to call them afterwards.

OK, OK, that's a fairly harsh summary. But I did read the book, and Behrendt does provide a fairly long list of really bad behavior that men engage in and women put up with, because... because they hope the guy will change? Because they hope the mixed messages aren't really so mixed? Behrendt's mantra is, "Don't waste the pretty," or don't expect a guy who treats you badly to stop treating you badly, because even if he's the nicest guy in the world, he won't stop--until he meets the right woman. (And supposedly that causes a huge improvement in his character and behavior.)

Well, maybe. Maybe that's true. But if it's true, it's one of the issues feminism needs to confront. Because if a guy finds it OK to treat women with contempt, discourtesy and unkindness in the most personal of relationships, does he really respect women and have an understanding of their lives?

And as I considered issues like these in that session on male Mormon feminists, it occurred to me that perhaps the average Mormon guy, who was probably much less promiscuous than most of his non-LDS counterparts, who might have been (technically, at least) a virgin when he married a woman who was also a virgin, and who might even be extremely faithful to his wife, might also treat her better than the average 20- or 30-something single guy who served as Greg Behrendt's examples of the guys whom smart, pretty women should kick to the curb.

So I tried to say that, or something to the effect that, "It occurs to me that one way in which Mormon women--at least, the ones lucky enough to be married to decent guys with feminist sensibilities--might be treated better than their secular counterparts is when it comes to courtship and sex. I just started thinking about this, and I don't know if it's true. But I want to think about it some more. And I want to ask all of you about it. John is the only one who mentioned sex, but sex and reproduction are pretty fundamental to feminism. So what about sex? How do you reconcile your ideas of being a male Mormon feminist with how you think women should be treated when it comes to sex?"

And then I sat down, and everyone stared at me, and the room was very silent.

The guys on the panel looked at each other. It was becoming obvious to me that I had not phrased my question very well, since no one knew what to do with it. Finally one man took the microphone, and from his answer it was clear that he had interpreted my question to mean, "Do you as a feminist like sex with women?" And while I was glad to know that he did, it wasn't really what I had asked.

It also became clear to me after the panel that I'd phrased the question badly, since throughout the next few days, people approached me and asked me for clarification. But it also became clear to me that a lot of people just didn't get the issue to begin with. One guy asked me what I could have possibly meant, and I said, "Well, it kind of changes how seriously you take a guy as a feminist if he date-rapes you, or bites your nipples until they bleed and won't stop even when you're screaming in pain and begging him to quit, or stops you in the middle of sex and says, ‘I don't really like it when a woman gets that worked up.'" (And yes, all those things happened to me--the last one more than once, in slight variations. I know other women who have heard something similar as well. By no means did the majority of men I slept with express such a sentiment, but still, it's remarkable how many men prefer passive sex partners.)

And the guy said, "Huh. I can see how that would be true, but I never thought of feminism as anything other than a political movement."

And then a bunch of us stood around after the session and had a long argument about feminism, loyalty to the church, and whose family was most terrifyingly conservative, which I have written about in two posts--click here for Part I and here for Part II.

Posted by holly at 5:59 AM | Comments (4)

September 19, 2005

Mormon Links

In case you want some background information on Mormonism, including its beliefs about gender and sexuality within the family, here are some links.

First of all, you should check out the Proclamation on the Family, which all good LDS are expected to display prominently in their homes--it's one of the first things you see when you walk in the door of my parents' house. It warns that "the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets." That's right--uppity working women and gay marriage, not global warming or rampant capitalism or immoral wars, will bring about the end of the earth.

And here is a bit of snotty satire of that idea I wrote when I was a writer for The Sugar Beet, a website of Mormon satire based on The Onion and another story satirizing "tolerance".

You'll also want to read Boyd K. Packer's Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council, delivered May 18, 1993. It has become infamous for this statement:

The dangers I speak of come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals. Our local leaders must deal with all three of them with ever-increasing frequency.

which is often paraphrased as something to the effect that "the church's three main enemies are feminists, homosexuals and 'so-called' intellectuals."

I offer a critique of how stupid his statement is in an entry entitled Answering My Own Question.

You might also enjoy Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which contains "the revelation on the new and everlasting covenant of marriage," or polygamy. See especially verse 52, where God tells Joseph Smith's first wife, Emma, that she better shape up and learn to like sharing her husband with other women, OR ELSE:

And I command mine handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph, and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.

If you have never been inside a Mormon temple, or if you received your endowments after 1990, you might be interested in this discussion of the temple ceremony and various changes made to it--I'll be discussing this in future posts. The website is good because it manages to avoid being particularly obscene or offensive. Unfortunately, the temple ceremony itself used to be extremely offensive and obscene: among other things, initiates had to swear a blood oath that they would never reveal certain signs and tokens they were taught in the temple. To underscore the point, we had to enact several gruesome ways we could be executed. If you were lucky enough to miss that version, you might want to learn a few details about the penalties, which were discontinued in 1990.

Happy linking!

Posted by holly at 9:44 PM

September 14, 2005

Male Mormon Feminists

At Sunstone this year, I attended a panel entitled "Advancing Feminist Sensibilities among Mormon Men." The abstract read

Why aren't there more visible and vocal male feminist voices within the Mormon community? The all-male panel will talk about their journeys toward becoming feminists, the challenges they face in maintaining feminist sensibilities in Mormon culture, and ideas they see for encouraging other Mormon men to take more active feminist stances. Audience discussion will follow.

The panel had four members, and I suspect it was rather hard to fill. One of the panelists was 30-something; one was 40-something; I'm guessing one was 50-something and I'm pretty sure the last was 60-something, so there was a decent range. All four panelists were still active participants in the church, though they might describe themselves as more or less devout.

I couldn't help but be thrilled that someone had wanted to put this panel together. I couldn't help but be thrilled that the topic was being discussed. I couldn't help but be thrilled that there are Mormon men who are willing to call themselves feminists.

All four men said interesting, valuable things. There was a lot of talk about how having a daughter broadened and deepened these men's appreciation of the challenges women face. They talked about a commitment to justice and a willingness to be proactive in their efforts to improve the lives of all women on the planet.

What they didn't talk about was sex.

The closest was a comment by John, the 30-something guy on the panel. He acknowledged that he still had work to do in perfecting his own feminist sensibilities, admitting, "I'm still guilty of lookism. I still objectify women."

John, I should mention, is a good friend of mine, someone I like and respect very much. We first met in 2003 when I chaired a panel called "World Religions 101: What Studying Other Faiths Has Taught Me about My Own." John's mother was a Japanese Buddhist, and John joined the Mormon church in high school. His comments were moving and profound–-among other things, he compared attending his grandfather's Buddhist funeral in Japan to helping with his father-in-law's Mormon funeral in the US.

I talked a little about Buddhism in my comments, mentioned how I was intrigued by the Buddhist concept of detachment. I stated,

The idea is that when we become too attached to people, objects, institutions or ways of doing things–-even the best people, the best objects, the best institutions and the best ways of doing things–-we sacrifice something of ourselves, some of our spiritual freedom, our intellectual clarity and our ability to live appropriately in the world. "What can I let go of?" I now ask myself. "How can I be less invested in things that don't really matter?" I myself am someone who can form emotional attachments to something as grand as the entire planet--and it seems obvious that one would, but I am amazed and outraged when I encounter people who say it doesn't matter that our current environmental practices are rendering the planet uninhabitable, because the world will be destroyed in the Second Coming anyway--and I can likewise become emotionally attached to things most people discard easily, like plastic bags (my current favorite being one from the gift shop of the British Library), so these are important questions for me.

This was one of the things John and I bonded over, because he also has a plastic bag fetish. In an email message he told me that his current favorite plastic bag was one from the Getty museum that he used "to carry books, lunch, exercise gear, and other spillover items that don't fit into his bursting-at-the-seams backpack."

The following summer, he and his family went to Paris. When he got back, he sent me a package, which included some very swanky tea samples from a Parisian tea shop, a poster of Shiva (my favorite deity), an antique postcard of Sacre Couer (which I display on the door of my office on campus) and a whole array of very cool plastic bags! There was one from a French grocery store and one from the UC Irvine bookstore and one really elaborate, fancy bag that once contained some Mac computer product. (I admit I am saving that last bag not out of product loyalty but just because it is so very fancy and cool.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that I really dig John. I've asked him to be on a panel every year since then and he always says such intelligent, insightful things. And when I heard him make that single, solitary, understated comment about the role sex played in Mormon men's relation to feminism, I thought, This is what is missing from this discussion.

Continued in Mormons, Male Feminists, and Sex.

Posted by holly at 5:43 AM | Comments (0)

September 13, 2005

Going to the Movies

In the late 1980s, I maintained subscriptions to two film series at the University of Arizona. The first met on Mondays and showed classic American films, and is where I acquired my Gary Cooper festish, after seeing Pride of the Yankees, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Morocco--especially Morocco, where he and Marlene Dietrich are just so freakin' HOT. Friday at 5:30 was the foreign film series, which is where I first saw The Seventh Seal.... I loved Max Von Sydow; I loved the chess game with death; I related to the end, where the girl is just so glad life is over. (It was not a happy time in my life.) The Friday series was also where I first encountered those bizarre movies done by Ealing Studios in the 1950s and 1960s: things like The Knack and I'm All Right Jack–-something about their resolute, eccentric Britishness made them seem more foreign than Bergman.

The art house theater in Tucson was the called the Loft, and was housed in a tiny white building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and.... Fremont, I think.... In any event, it was almost entirely swallowed by the UofA campus and has since been torn down. It had been a porno theater for a while, and well before that it was the first Mormon church in Tucson, attended by my great-grandparents and their children. I went there a lot in its art house days, and I also hit a lot of dollar theaters.

I did this partly because I really liked movies and partly because I was lonely and bored. By 1987 I was in the weird liminal state, preparing to leave the Mormon church but not yet out of it. I was too clearly dissatisfied with the church to be attractive company to many people in it, and I was too clearly obsessed with the church to be attractive company to many people outside it.

Mormons have this stupid thing about movie ratings: they're not supposed to see any R-rated movie. They can watch the most inane, offensive crap as long as it's PG (or even PG-13); furthermore, something that would earn an R rating if it was a movie is OK as long as it's in some other format--Rent, for instance, which is full of profanity and sex, is beloved by a decent number of Mormon women, and that's OK because right now it's merely a play. But its Mormon fans will be expected to relinquish their affection for it when the film version comes out November 11, slapped as it no doubt will be with an R that pushes it beyond the pale.

I never paid any attention to that. Uptight and prissy in many ways, when it came to movies, I figured a good movie was a good movie and if I had to sit through a graphic sex scene or two and hear a few swear words in order to watch a compelling story unfold, well, it was a small price to pay. I saw my first R-rated movie as a junior in high school, with my mother's permission: The Jerk, which I liked well enough. In 1984, again with my mother's approval, I took my 12-year-old brother to his first R-rated movie, The Terminator, which of course we both loved because it's a great movie.

Not only that, but at the end of my freshman year in college, in May 1982, I went to an X-rated movie, by myself. Admittedly, the X-rating has since been changed to an R, and the movie is tame by today's standards. But still, Midnight Cowboy really upset me. I just didn't know human lives could spiral so far out of control. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of Jon Voight's character, but Ratso Rizzo, the character played by Dustin Hoffmann, is not a name you soon forget. That final scene, on the bus, where JV's character realizes Ratso Rizzo is dead, and the bus driver just says, "Yeah, he's dead, but we'll have to wait til we get to Florida to do anything about it...." At least, that's how I remember it (it's been 23 years, so I might be wrong)--but whatever happened, it wasn't a happy ending, I know that much. I went home to an empty apartment--my roommates had all gone out of town--but I didn't dare go to bed, because I had somehow become afraid of the dark again. I left all the lights on and stayed awake until sunrise.

The first movie I went to see as a college freshman (I dragged my unsuspecting roommate along) was A Clockwork Orange. I lasted through the first rape scene before I turned to her and said, "Wanna go?" I later dated a guy whose favorite movie was A Clockwork Orange, and he insisted I watch it, but I think I might write about that later.... In any event, whenever I mention that one of my very favorite movies is Singin' in the Rain, and someone responds by saying something about A Clockwork Orange, I know that person is not someone I want to be close to.

I went to so many movies! I went to them. I saw amazing movies on very big screens: I saw Lawrence of Arabia on the biggest screen in Tucson, and it was a life-changing experience. But I rarely go to movies any more. The only movie I'm dying to see in a theater is the Keira Knightley-Matthew MacFadyen version of Pride and Prejudice, due out November 18. (Though I admit I don't see how it will be very good, since it's only two hours long and since, if the preview I watched online is a good indication, they added a bunch of stupid dialogue that's just not as good as what Austen herself actually wrote.) I haven't been to a movie since I saw The Aviator in Mesa with Wayne over Christmas break. I've seen dozens and dozens of movies since then, but I've watched them on dvd.

Which is another reason I need to talk about Netflix.

Posted by holly at 7:25 AM | Comments (0)

September 9, 2005

A Happy Marriage with a Good Man

Here's something from "Confessions of a Mormon Boy: An Autobiographical One-Man Play Written, Created and Performed by Steven Fales" (SUNSTONE December 2003). After serving a mission for the Mormon Church, Mr. Fales told his female best friend he was gay, then proposed. She accepted; they married, and stayed married for six years, until his "same sex attraction," to use the Mormon term, put too great a strain on the marriage.

As the divorce got closer, I got confused and scared. I didn't know how to be alone, and I didn't want to give up "hugging time." Emily and I shared a tradition her parents had started. You know how early kids wake up? Well, we would try to sleep in--trying to put off their needs as long as we could. Then, when we couldn't put it off any longer, we'd yet out, "HUGGING TIME!" In our two children would run and jump on the bed. We would then hug and kiss and snuggle--all warm and safe and happy. How many gay men get to experience that? Let alone watch their children being born. Couldn't I give it all up for the sake of hugging time? I was going to fight for hugging time!

I turned it all on Emily. It was her fault! She never wore lingerie! [Never mind that Mormonism has its own ugly underwear faithful members are required to wear.] She wouldn't watch the better-sex videos I ordered from the back of GQ. Emily knew going into this marriage it might come to this. And now that I've finally cracked, she's going to just throw me out?! How dare she watch Will & Grace and laugh when I was trying to change! She had failed me!

He goes on to acknowledge that of course his wife was not responsible for his homosexuality. But that didn't stop him from blaming her for it in the first place.

In Ron Schow's response to Ben Christensen in the recent Dialogue issue, Schow quotes a Mormon man who spent eight years in a temple marriage:

It was only after I came out to my wife that I realized how much she had suffered and endured over the years in asking questions like why didn't I find her desirable or why our sexual relationship never seemed satisfying. Was it a failure on her part? she wondered. She had sadness about feeling alone, confused and hurt in ways that were nearly impossible to articulate.

Having left the church myself (which is very often a part of coming out of the closet) and having watched a score of Mormon men come out of the closet, I am certain it is excruciatingly traumatic and painful. But COME ON! Let's consider the other side of the equation as well: how self-obsessed and blind do you have to be to live with someone for EIGHT YEARS and not notice that you're making her miserable and isolated?

The essay continues:

This young man emphasized the falsity of a prevalent myth: "I saw my struggle with (and against) homosexuality as my own cross to bear. I felt I was the one who was suffering, struggling, trying to make things right. What I failed to recognize was that my wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information."

My wife was also part of the struggle even though she lacked basic information.

I HATE IT when people withhold "basic information" from someone else. Someone recently did that to me. It had nothing to do with his being gay, but it did have to do with the situation he was in--and his sense that he could invite me to be intimately involved in his life without making sure I was clear about all the details of his "struggle." I kept issuing general requests for more information, growing more and more ridiculous and more and more desperate the more it was withheld. Finally I hit upon precisely the right question to ask, and he was honest enough to give me a direct answer. It made all the difference in the world to know exactly what I was dealing with.

Mormon women are stupidly hopeful and will do all kinds of things to achieve a "happy marriage" with a "good man," whatever those things mean. I did not marry a gay Mormon man, but I did become engaged to one, Matthew, in 1988, after we both fell in love at first sight. The story has a reasonably happy ending: he had enough integrity and wisdom that he simply could not permit himself to marry me, knowing that however much he loved me, he would never lose his attraction to men. But it took four years of my wheedling and prodding and begging to extract that confession from him; before that, he kept insisting that his refusal to marry me had nothing to do with sexual orientation, that it was because I wasn't the right woman for him. Given how much I loved him, the whole thing was absolutely torture for me.

But somehow we worked through it. And still Matthew and I love each other deeply and will until we die, if not beyond that, and we remain committed, devoted friends. And I believe that one reason we are still friends is because he would not marry me; he would not permit himself to disrupt my life with what he knew in his heart was essentially a selfish act.

I don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the church victimizes gay men, on whom there is intense pressure to marry and father children. But I also don't want to minimize or ignore the cruel and vicious ways in which the men who uphold and benefit from patriarchy--and as long as men wield the priesthood in the Mormon church they do benefit from patriarchy, even when they're gay--victimize women, not only politically but personally, inside the arena of relationships and sex.

Sex sex sex! That's going to be one of the dominant topics for the next few weeks. The discussions of sex will probably be frequent and full. I just can't promise they'll be the least bit titillating, given that they'll always involve Mormons.

Posted by holly at 6:33 AM | Comments (0)

September 8, 2005

Mormon Social Taboos

Tuesday evening I got home from work and found a load of mail, including two cd's of original (and spectacularly good) music from Wayne, and the Fall 2005 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This is one of the primary publications of liberal Mormonism, and I've subscribed (and published in it) for years. I sat down to my dinner and watched part of a movie, took care of some teaching stuff, had a bath. Then I picked up the issue of Dialogue and checked the table of contents, and found this:

GETTING OUT/STAYING IN: ONE MORMON STRAIGHT/GAY MARRIAGE

Getting Out by Ben Christensen 121

Homosexual Attraction and LDS Marriage Decisions by Ron Schow 133

Thoughts of a Therapist by Marybeth Raynes 143

Staying In by Ben Christensen 148

I gave the section a cursory scan--that was about all I could bear--then went to bed. I fell asleep quickly, stayed asleep for an hour, got up and read Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun for a class I'm teaching on war literature (because after the Dialogue thing, I needed something cheerful and lighthearted), tried to medicate myself into oblivion, eventually succeeded.

Wednesday morning I got up and reread the whole section carefully.

Here is what Ben Christensen, a 24-year-old gay Mormon married to a woman by whom he has fathered a nine-month-old daughter, has to say about the fact that he can't mention to his friends that he "can't stop thinking about this guy in religion class":" "It ticks me off that Mormon social taboos force me to lie about who I am."

Mormon social taboos.

That's what's to blame for the fact that he can't discuss his same sex attraction: Mormon social taboos.

Not Mormon doctrine. Mormon social taboos.

Nothing wrong with the doctrine--which says that homosexual behavior is a sin; no, it's just Mormon social taboos.

If you're not Mormon, you have no idea how big this issue is. Many religions venerate celibacy; many other religions tolerate it. Not Mormonism. Celibacy is unnatural; sex before marriage is, according to some leaders in the church (and one of my friends from college, one of the very few people whom I will never again speak to), a sin akin to MURDER (that's right: sex before marriage is the moral equivalent of killing someone in cold blood); and the entire reason we are sent to earth is to get bodies, have sex, and create children. So there's some room in many other religions for reconciling religious faith and homosexuality by choosing celibacy, but almost none in Mormonism--at least, not if you want to be respectable and happy.

Christensen writes of his engagement to Jessie, who knows about his attraction to men, that

Difficulties arose fairly quickly.... It bothered Jessie that she was usually more interested in kissing than I was. This bothered me too, but I didn't know what to do about it. I definitely loved her, and out of that love an attraction was growing, but to be honest it was nothing compared to the strong desire I had for men. But then it's not accurate to even compare the two feelings. My attraction to Jessie, the drive that made me want to hold her in my arms and feel her body next to mine, came entirely from my heart. On the other hand, the drive that made me want to feel a man's body next to mine was purely a libido thing. I've never allowed a physical attraction to a man to become any more than just that. Apples and oranges.

He marries Jessie for a variety of reasons, one of which is that "God told [him] to." Another is that he feels his only two alternatives are a conventional, monogamous straight Mormon marriage on the one hand and "[running] off to San Francisco and [embracing] a rampant life of unrestrained queerness" on the other.

A year later, at the ripe old age of 25, he is able to critique his earlier essay and the responses to it, by writing

Critiquing my essay, a friend asked, "Can you really separate love and sex so easily? I can't." I discarded his concern, believing I had a deeper understanding of love and sex. After all, he writes novels about missionaries who fornicate and teenaged boys who make out with cow udders. For me, the distinction between love and sex was clear. As I've become more honest with myself, though, I see that Marybeth states my dilemma more accurately when she says that people in my situation choose "between a deep love and erotic attachment plus love." This choice is a good deal more difficult than the over-simplified choice I thought I was making. By choosing heterosexual marriage, I've denied myself the experience of loving someone I am naturally attracted to and my wife the experience of loving someone who is naturally attracted to her.

Glad he figured that out eventually.

Aside from a few lines of dialogue in which Jessie reassures the author that she still wants to marry him despite the fact that he is gay, we never get to hear from her.

Ron Schow and Marybeth Raynes, the two respondents, are very respectful of the deliberate choices Ben Christensen is making at the same time they underscore the challenges and difficulties he is setting himself up for. Perhaps I might respect those choices more myself if I hadn't heard it all before, some of it almost verbatim. I'll never forget being told by the love of my life, "Look, I'm not really gay, and I still want to marry a woman. It's just that I prefer sex with men to sex with women." I could think of no response to that statement.

I'm grateful for my two closest friends on earth, both of whom are gay (formerly Mormon) men, and I'm also grateful that neither of them married me.

I'm not done.

Posted by holly at 8:08 AM | Comments (2)

September 2, 2005

I'm Curious

Sometimes people complain to me that they find it difficult to have "important and meaningful conversations" as part of their normal, daily interactions with people. This often surprises me. I feel I manage to have important and meaningful conversations with Tom's five-year-old daughter (whom I'll call Princess, because she wants to be one), though they're of a very different nature from my conversations with Tom, which of course are among the most important and meaningful--not to mention entertaining and enlightened--conversations ANYONE could have.

Sure, there are conversations that bore me. I don't give a shit about football, for instance. I can talk about Barbies (I had plenty as a little girl) but I can't play them any more, not with my nieces, not with Princess–I can't become the consciousness that animates and moves a Barbie, which is what playing Barbies involves; I just can't make myself do it. And I don't pay much attention to the details of most people's jobs, since they're usually not interesting. Once I was talking to my mom about one of my oldest and dearest friends, and she asked what he did for a living. "He works in a bank," I said.

"Doing what?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, shrugging in impatience. "Something with money."

Except for people who work in academia in the humanities or social sciences, so that I have a pretty clear grasp of what their jobs are like, I can't be bothered to remember most people's job descriptions, unless they're easy like "doctor" or "high school biology teacher," and even then I get sketchy on the details. But ask me about a traumatic breakup someone endured, or what religion they were raised and how they feel about it, or what their dietary quirks and preferences are, or when their birthday is and what their sun sign is, and chances are good I know.

I'm curious about what it feels like to be other people, and how we make sense of the workings of our minds. I ask what could be considered snoopy questions, but it's because I'm interested in the answers. And for whatever reason, people are usually pretty good about responding. They tell me stuff. I'm not just sitting at my computer blogging because I'm self-obsessed (though certainly that's part of it) but because I am interested in how we manage to communicate what it means to be US, our unique, individual, common, collective, human selves.

And it's one reason I love nonfiction. What does it feel like to be captured by Narragansett Indians and dragged around the vast and howling wilderness of a seventeenth-century New England winter, as we learn Mary Rowlandson was in Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson? What does it feel like to be a 21-year-old Marine private in the front lines of combat in the Pacific during World War II, a story E.B. Sledge relates in With the Old Breed? What does it feel like to be a Black Boy in the south in the 20s and 30s, as Richard Wright describes in his stunning memoir? What does it feel like to lose a third of your jaw to bone cancer when you're nine years old and spend the rest of your life dealing with profound questions of ugliness, shame and beauty, the story Lucy Grealy tells in Autobiography of a Face?

And what does it mean for the rest of us that these things are part of human experience? How do we make sense of the suffering, the joy, the humanity and the inhumanity of others?

Since I walk around thinking about these things a good deal of the time, I end up talking about these things a good deal of the time.

But the conversations that make me craziest, that I most want to avoid having ever again in my life, are arguments about religion. I love discussing religion; I HATE arguing about it. Almost nothing in the world interests me more than the question of how we rise above the defeats, defects and disappointments of our early religious training, to remain engaged in a search for the numinous, the transcendent, the divine, and committed to a quest for a spiritually inspired ethos of compassion and love.

But almost nothing in the world interests me less than trying to convince someone to join or leave a particular church. Having done my stint as a missionary, I cannot bear to listen to that kind of proselytizing, though somehow I got sucked into doing it again recently--"sucked" being the operative word, because that's what it did: IT SUCKED.

You can't bludgeon people--including yourself--into enlightenment, though god knows I've tried.

A few years ago I had a conversation with my mother that went like this:

Me: "I think the Mormon church is evil."

Mom: "It's not evil."

Me: "I think it is."

Mom: "It's not evil."

Me: "Mom, do you see how we're kind of at an impasse here? I'm not asking you to accept that it IS evil; I'm merely asking you to accept that I think it is."

Mom: "It's not evil."

This conversation reminded me that a frontal attack someone's most beloved institution is not particularly persuasive. I mean, yeah, I think that ultimately, the Mormon church sucks, and I'll be happy to provide anyone who asks with an entire catalogue of reasons as to why. But chances are, that won't be an especially meaningful or important conversation, because psychologically it's like kicking a miserable, skinny dog I've got chained up in some corner of my psyche; and politically it's like shooting rubber bands at an elephant's ass from a distance of 200 yards; and spiritually–-spiritually it's like drinking half a liter of Jack Daniels after someone really, really hurts you instead of just going to bed, so that you compound your original misery with a day or two of alcohol poisoning. (And yes, I've done that.)

I'd rather explore the range of possibilities I've got now that I've left the church. What gifts did the church give me? (And it did give me plenty, including an understanding of the art of exegesis and an ability to keep my cool in front of a very large audience.) How do I deal with the limitations it imposed on me? (There are plenty of those too.) How do I find compassion if not respect for those who are still dealing with those limitations--who, in fact, don't find them limiting at all?

That's a meaningful and important conversation I want to have both with myself and with other people. And I manage to have it, because I insist on it. If the people I'm talking to don't want to address questions like that, I leave them to discuss whatever they want, and I go talk to someone else.

Posted by holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

Simon Schama and the Pod People

Check out this article in the Independent UK, about Simon Schama, an amazing historian at Columbia whose 15-hour series A History of Britain was one of the best things Netflix ever sent me. He has written a new book on the role of black slaves in the American revolution--particularly on the fact that many of them left their American masters and went to fight on the side of King George. The article is long and interesting, and I was fascinated by all of it, but I admit I clapped my hands and laughed aloud in delight when I read this paragraph:

Well, [Schama] did think that going to lecture to Mormon students in Utah would prove his Old European otherness, but he loved their company and their discussion. "And I came back and Ginny, my wife, said 'You're wearing that smile. They've got you' -- because her sister is a Mormon. 'You've been captured by the pod people'."

Posted by holly at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

One of the Boys

Right now, I'm kind of one of the boys. My two best friends here are Tom, who is married, and SBJ, who is not, but as I said, my affectionate mocking of him is tinged with the fond feelings of a slightly snotty big sister.

By a significant margin, most of my colleagues are male. I do have some fabulous female colleagues, but most of them are married with small children. These are women with PhDs, diverse research interests, cool husbands, and very busy schedules. For various reasons, it is harder for these women to socialize than it is for the guys I work with. Although I manage to meet these women occasionally for lunch or coffee, a more common event in my social life is to find myself the solitary woman at a table with three or four or five guys, drinking a round of Arrogant Bastards (a local brew), talking about poetry and tattoos and bowel disorders and gross medical procedures and how the fact that SBJ likes neither Pink Floyd nor Led Zeppelin is one more thing that makes him odd.

I'm sort of not complaining, and I sort of am. I'm not really used to this "hanging out with the guys" business. I'm the second of five children: four daughters followed by a son everyone expected to be another girl. My mother has a very strong personality; my father clearly loved us very much but was never good at showing affection; my grandfathers were downright distant; plus I had all those sisters and no brother until I was almost nine; so I was very female-identified as a child. Then there was the fact that I grew up Mormon, and saw very early that a lot of men were power-hungry bastards. It's not that I never found good men--I found plenty--but I was always very wary of them, until they demonstrated that they deserved my trust.

I was and am straight, which was complicated by the messages I got from the church, particularly when I went on a mission. Men in the Church, I was told often enough, were in authority over me; I should not try to be on an equal level with them. But exerting the authority of the priesthood seemed to render men not larger and stronger, but stunted and misshapen. Consequently that's how I saw them: distorted, disjointed creatures, some of whom one could be romantically attracted to, some of whom one must try to obey despite their failings; none of whom could demand from me the mutual respect and understanding I felt ought to exist between me and other women, who were my equals. The good relationships I achieved with men occurred when they sought to minimize their authority, not when they sought to enlarge it, as so many of them often did.

It got easier to see men as complex, complete human beings when I left the church, but anyone who thinks the sexes are equal, that men don't have opportunities and freedoms that women lack, just isn't paying attention. Patriarchy is strange. The guys I hang out with are good guys, and I value and enjoy their friendship. But it's still weird to spend so much of my time with a large group of men, none of whom are or ever will be a romantic partner.

I'm going to have more to say about this, about gender roles in general and my own gender performance--actually, I've already started saying things here about my own gender performance--but I'm planning on saying even more. It's something I've been thinking about for a very long time, given the fact that I was a feminist by the time I was twelve and that my boyfriend from kindergarten, my date to the prom, and my ex-fiancé all grew up to be gay Mormon returned missionaries. Then there is my dear friend Wayne, who, according to his myspace.com profile, was "Formerly a bed-wetting, drug-addicted, Mormon Drag Queen."

Yeah. This is a topic where I have something to say.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2005

Answering My Own Question

The church's approach to homosexuality is to "hate sin but love the sinner." For a long time that was my approach to the church: I hated the sexism, the racism, the homophobia of the church; I hated its smug certainty, its foolish and self-defeating attempts to stifle creativity and questioning; I hated its more illogical and vicious doctrines; I hated and I still hate the Book of Mormon, which lacks the linguistic beauty, the human diversity and the spiritual complexity of the Bible. But I told myself that I loved the church: Loved the community, loved the heritage of sacrifice and striving, loved the hymns, loved the habits of discipline and self-control I was taught to cultivate. The problem, I eventually had to acknowledge, was that the church simply would not let me love the sinner while hating the sin: I had to love the sin as well; in fact, I had to convince myself that the sins were not sins at all, but were instead God's righteous decrees, and that by not loving them, I was the sinner.

And trips to Utah are traumatic because there, I encounter people who want--oh so generously, oh so magnanimously!--to help me see how I've sinned against God's righteous decrees, and bring me back to a fold I cannot survive in.

I am never able to attend all the sessions I want to attend at Sunstone, but there are so many I just want to run from. No--I don't want to run from them, because that implies genuine horror and fear, whereas what I feel is mostly heartsick fatigue. It's fine that other people want to continue to debate the historicity of the Book of Mormon; I just don't want anywhere near such a discussion. It's fine that others want to plumb the depths of Joseph Smith's psyche, but I don't give a shit about the guy! I feel about such discussions the way Catherine Morland, heroine of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, feels about history:

I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilence on every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all; it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and designs; the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.

For one of the panels I was on this year, I needed the text of Boyd K. Packer's "Talk to the All-Church Coordinating Council" in May, 1993, in which he discusses the dangers posed by "the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals." I admit this was the first time I bothered to track down the actual text of the infamous talk, and I was vexed and wearied by his glib trivialization of the feminist movement as "relatively new," given that one of the most important feminist texts ever written, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft, was published in 1792, almost 40 years before the Book of Mormon; that the Seneca Falls convention on women's rights was held in 1848, two years before Utah was organized as a territory; that the women's rights movement was referred to as the "feminist movement" in newspapers worldwide in the 1890s; and that women were finally given the right to vote in this country in 1920, not because it simply occurred to Congress that it was a good thing to do, but because many women agitated and demonstrated tirelessly, demanding this fundamental right.

Instead of talking about what should actually be done to improve the lives of women in the church and in the world, Mormons have to pretend that feminism is a new and therefore illegitimate phenomenon, simply because Mr. Packer assumed its existence could not predate by much his notice of it. How very vexing. How very wearying.

And I don't want to deal with that, but I still have to, simply as part of doing my research for presentations on what I do want to deal with: discussions of the NOW, of how Mormonism made me into the person I am today. I don't love the sinner any more: I don't love the church. But I also don't hate it. I simply accept that it has affected my life in on-going ways, not all of them negative, despite my conviction that so many of the church's doctrines and practices are profoundly immoral.

The contribution to Sunstone I'm proudest of was a panel I organized for the 2004 symposium, entitled "Mormonism as Praxis" (reprinted in SUNSTONE December 2004), inspired by Karen Armstrong's discussion in The Spiral Staircase of the difference between orthopraxy (right behavior) and orthodoxy (right thought). Armstrong convincingly cites the argument that in many religions, orthodoxy and doctrine are of little significance--what matters is behaving rightly, cultivating behaviors that change us for the better, regardless of what we believe. This argument was so revolutionary and astonishing to me when I encountered it in March 2004 that I needed to explore it further.

Remarkably, once I abandoned the idea that orthodoxy--that troublesome, unswallowable bone in my throat--mattered at all, I felt more at liberty to celebrate and embrace those practices inherited from Mormonism that truly have enriched my spiritual life. The five panelists, including me, considered the special benefits offered by cultivating religious habits and behaviors either unique to Mormonism or approached in a uniquely Mormon manner. (I talked about keeping a journal.) The panel was what I hoped it would be: a positive and validating experience for any audience. Active Mormons were able to affirm those practices that reinforce their faith, while people who were no longer active or believing Mormons could acknowledge and remember what was valuable about their training as Mormons. The idea was to celebrate the ways in which Mormonism inculcates and encourages behaviors that truly do make us better people, regardless of belief.

That's what I want to do at Sunstone--and I keep going because I'm able to. But I still have to confront all the people who are horrified by and angry at me because I reject orthodoxy, and who resist my self-definition: people in Utah always want to call me an ex-Mormon. But I refuse that label. I'm not an ex. I'm a post-Mormon or a cultural Mormon.

And all of that really is a kind of psychic assault, and dealing with it wearies and vexes me, and makes me heartsick, and tired.

Perhaps I should be pleased that it takes me only a month to recover from that, instead of three or four.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

August 11, 2005

The Matrix of Mormonism

I'm WAY fucked up.

I feel like someone has punched me, well below the belt, and left his fist there.

My colleague Tom is one of my best friends here in the Northwest corner of Pennsylvania where I've ended up. The other day he stopped by my office to see me and I asked, "Do you speak New Age?"

"A little," he said.

"If I start talking about my root chakra, are you going to know what I mean?"

"Not really," he said. So I explained: in various schools of eastern physiology and philosophy, you have seven energy centers running along the center of your body, from the base of your spine to the crown of your head. The lowest chakra (Sanskrit for wheel), the one at the base of your spine, relates to issues of physical safety and of the unit that provides you with that safety--in other words, your tribe, especially the one you were born into.

My birth tribe is the Mormons, and I recently returned from a week in Utah, and my first chakra got a heavy dose of weird, weird energy, some of it good, and some of it not. That's the fist I can feel gouging into my intestines.

Before I go any further, I must hasten to add that I am NOT from Utah--I am from southern Arizona, thank you very much, a fourth-generation native, which is something not many white people can say. Three of my four grandparents were born in Arizona before it became a state. While I was in Utah at the end of July, I met a po-Mo (post-Mormon) who asked me, "So, did you never live in Utah?"

"Not unless you count the nine weeks I was at the Missionary Training Center," I said. I never even went to BYU. My alma mater for my first two degrees is the University of Arizona--go Cats!

But since 2001 I've been going to Sunstone, this symposium on Mormonism held every summer in Salt Lake City, and every summer it has been a really good experience: I connect with old friends and meet some new ones; I stay with my sister and her family in Bountiful a few extra days and play with my niece and nephews, tickling them, reading to them, picking them up by their ankles and swinging them around; I present several papers that I can list on my curriculum vitae.

And every year when I get home, my insomnia is out of control and other stuff is screwed up too. This year I cannot eat. I have this constant, low-grade nausea right now. Eating doesn't make me feel better and not eating doesn't make me feel better. The only upside is that I'm losing a lot of weight, something I have vaguely and remotely intended to do for the past few years.

Fifty-one weeks out of the year, the only practicing Mormons I talk to with any frequency are the members of my immediate family. I know Hinckley is still president, but I have no idea who his councilors are and I don't really want to know. I don't want to keep up with what's going on in the church these days, because I don't care: I only care about the church insofar as it affects the lives of my family, and insofar as it is among the primary institutions that shaped me.

But that "insofar" goes a long way: I truly believe that "an unexamined life is not worth living," so if the church somehow lost all its members tomorrow and existed only as a historical relic, I would still be concerned with scrutinizing and puzzling out how my present life has been shaped by my past, including the 26 years I spent as a devout Mormon, obeying the commandments, participating in the culture and passionately studying the doctrines of the Church.

And one of the things I want to know is this: why is it so traumatic to go to Salt Lake City, to march through the matrix of Mormondom? Why does it so screw up my system? Why does it take me a month to recover from Sunstone when I really enjoy the conference while I'm there, and why has this trip been extra bad?

The Matrix of Mormonism. Yeah. Right now I feel sort of like Neo before he takes the pill. Funny thing was, I thought I already swallowed it.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (3)

August 10, 2005

The Ultimate MF

Yesterday on campus I told my colleague Tom that one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to share with the world my recent insight that the Mormon god is the ultimate motherf***er: he's up there in the celestial kingdom, having sex with all those mothers in heaven.

Tom wanted some elaboration. I said, "According to Mormon doctrine, we are supposedly all the literal spiritual offspring of a father and mother in heaven. Our spirits were conceived by the sexual intercourse of God with one of his wives--according to Joseph Smith, he might have plenty--that's the whole polygamy thing."

"So this is real sex," Tom said. "It's not just some spiritual thing, or is it? Does it involve actual body parts?"

"Absolutely," I said. "God has a body, parts and passions. It's a basic tenet of Mormon doctrine." I told him about being a teenager and being shepherded into the cultural hall with all the other young men and women, where a high councilman told us in no uncertain terms what was at stake in the phrase "families are forever": only in the celestial kingdom, the highest level of Mormon heaven, would people allowed to be sexually active; everywhere else--and this is a quote I remember almost 30 years later--"You'll all be just steers and heifers." In other words, the promise of an eternity of sex in the next life was why we better not have any until we were married in this life.

"Huh," said Tom, who is the son of a Baptist minister. "Heavenly sex."

"But it's all about reproduction, not fun, which means eternal PMS and endless celestial pregnancies for some of us," I cried.

"I like it," he said. "It's a metaphor for something. I just don't know what."

But I, on the rag, heavily drugged by the muscle relaxant ibuprofen and aware throughout the conversation of the blood gushing from my body, doubled over in horror and buried my face in my hands.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (0)