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:
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.
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.
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.
An apology for being shallow to start but I really can't resist: yes, great hair, great ankles! As for me, I have no idea how to work a clutch purse, reminding me of an adage about Ginger Rogers: she danced as well as Fred Astaire did, but had to do so backwards and in high heels (not that I would invite a comparison to Fred Astaire, though we do have the same widow's peak).
Which actually does work as a transition to a more serious point. In my own work, I rely on an analytical framework that emphasizes the ways in which the limits of the possible, the horizons of our capacities and needs and desires, are shaped by historical forces. But there is one set of issues that, while they don't exactly negate this framework, do stretch it: the persistence of the social need to control women. I've recently picked up a book on the persecution of witches -- it's Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. I have not read it yet so I can't possibly do it justice now, but she writes the history of this "war against women" in Europe against the backdrop of the need to get control over the production of people, that is, all of the activities we associate today with biological and social reproduction and which ultimately amount to unpaid labour. So all of the knowledge especially about the body that women held, and that helped them regulate their pregnancies and gave them power over other health needs, had to be repressed and replaced with other forms of authority -- the Church, for example, and its prohibition on any kind of practices that might help control pregnancy, or later on medicine as a profession.
But it wasn't just a matter of producing and reproducing compliant workers: women had also been important leaders in their communities, which had been resistant to the enclosures or to ending the right to "glean" on the part of widows and others, and other means of denying people access to the ability to subsist without being dependent on external political and economic masters. Smart women were a political threat to the emergence of the state and capital, and thus had to be burned at the stake.
I don't really know how to explain the fear that some men evidently feel when faced with your outspokenness and low threshhold for bullshit. It's not like keeping women down has liberated my sex; we're equally prisoners of patriarchy, even though we may feel like we enjoy some kind of power in the household or when we put women "in their place." I think you express quite well the method -- if you're smart, you must be a hussy. But why do we persist in this? Why are the habits so hard to break, especially when breaking them would be so healthy?
Anyway, I'll certainly keep reading your blog and I sure hope that anytime I'm full of shit, you'll find it worthwhile to point it out to me.
Ah, thanks, Spike. I really appreciate your reading my blog, and I appreciate this comment here.
And I plan to look for this book you mention.
These photos are touching. I see a lovely and bright young woman whose parents gave her a lot but who were afraid to let her live. Am I making this up?
Thanks, Hattie. I like to think you've got it right.
Wow! 16th century equation of the tongue and the penis right here in our own century. That's kinda depressing.
Of course I now understand why the 12 1/2 year-old "elders" who appeared at my door a few years ago were confounded by the fact that I thanked them for doing what they felt was good, but still would not accept the materials they offered.
A debate ensued wherein these boys tried to convince me that I should be: 1) interested, 2) respectful of them as elders, and 3) that women weren't treated badly in the church at all. I was not interested, but I tried to be polite about it at first. In hindsight, probably a bad plan with all door-to-door salesmen. We had a slight linguistic problem, too, I think. These children thought I should respect them as "elders" and I was amazed they were sassing me when I was so clearly older than they. They were absolutely disgusted that I knew a woman who had been kicked out of the church, and sided with her rather than the church. And when I told them that she had been excommunicated for divorcing an abusive husband, they gave me the line I hadn't believed from her when she told me the advice she was given. "She was probably not an obedient enough wife." At this point I told them that I would most likely physically assault them if they didn't remove themselves from my property.
Heocwaeth, your interaction with the elders was pretty much my experience with the entire church in a nutshell, though I stuck around the official organization for 26 years and have talked to people on the fringe on and off for 16 more. The little boys (even the 30-year-old little boys) always want you to respect them as "elders," no matter how much they might be ignorant of both the world and the church's theology, disrespectful of you personally and women in general, and downright immature. It's just maddening, and even politeness doesn't accomplish anything but confusing them, since "mere" politeness falls short of the veneration they feel they deserve. I've learned that over and over, and one of these days the lesson will stick.
Wow. I came here via The Happy Feminist.
I have the perfect answer for LDS missionaries, whenever they`ve knocked on my door. "No, thanks -- I`m Catholic." For some reason, this is all it takes to get them to move on.
I`m a "cafeteria Catholic" myself, but I guess the LDS church is still a sit-down dinner.
Great post.
What a great and poignant post!
I can’t help but pluck out the following because it reminds me of my recent discussion about “politeness” and girls’ behavior in the classroom:
“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.”
Yes! I think this is why so many young girls don’t speak up in class. Any assertive behavior may be translated as “hussy.”
(Just a brief time-out to shout: What a Glam Gal you were! And the house of books - very impressive.)
You write so well about the punishment women receive on a personal and public level for expressing opinions and being strong-minded. We see women vilified all the time for being “sluts” and it may not even be a reference to their sexual behavior! As you say, we use sexual terms to denigrate women’s non-sexual behavior.
Do we ever call men whores? Do we ever castigate them for having sexual dalliances? I think only gay men get referred to as promiscuous – for the obvious homophobic reasons.
Well, when I was young, I was very much like you in terms of “virginal and uptight.” I stuck to my guns, demanding a man who would respect my mind. Well, at the time, that really seemed to remove a lot of options from the playing field - ;) And my dad told me frequently that I was “too picky.” Ugh.
Holly! You're so pretty. You look just like Jerry Hall (only younger). Take care, love.
Excellent post. I want those bookshelves in the one photo!
Thanks to everyone who has dropped by to comment. A few more comments from me, with regards to this from Frankengirl:
Yes! I think this is why so many young girls don’t speak up in class. Any assertive behavior may be translated as “hussy.”
It's translated as hussy IF the girl is at all attractive. If she is unattractive, it's because she's something else: shrew, or harpy, or hag, or harridan, or, biddy, or battle-ax.
One reason I posted the photos was because I knew that if I didn't, someone would come along and read my criticisms of the church and say, "Hhmmph! She's critical because she's unhappy and bitter, and she's unhappy and bitter because she's not attractive enough to get a date."
Here's something else a 19-year-old elder once said to me when I was talking about problems within the Mormon church: "But you're pretty! Pretty girls don't usually have a problem with the church."
So there it is. Ugly girls are unhappy with patriarchy because they can't get what they want from men; pretty girls usually don't have a problem with it. And if they do have a problem, well, it must be because something is wrong with them as women--they're vocarious sluts, for instance--because ain't nothing seriously wrong with the patriarchy!
You write so well about the punishment women receive on a personal and public level for expressing opinions and being strong-minded. We see women vilified all the time for being “sluts” and it may not even be a reference to their sexual behavior! As you say, we use sexual terms to denigrate women’s non-sexual behavior.
I've mentioned that I'm writing a paper on sexuality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And one of the things that has been interesting to me is to see how often Cordelia is called a slut and a ho. We know she likes to date wealthy guys, but we have no evidence that she's promiscuous (or even that she's not a virgin), only that she likes making out with Xander, who is "dating a skanky ho," but not a "skanky ho" himself.
Do we ever call men whores? Do we ever castigate them for having sexual dalliances? I think only gay men get referred to as promiscuous – for the obvious homophobic reasons.
I asked my students this once. They said, "If you call a straight guy a slut, it's a compliment."
I have thought to myself several times since this particular event happened how much I doubt X would have done the same thing to a man: mined his blog for information about his sexual history, then used it to denigrate both him and his statements. I can't prove it, of course, because I can't reproduce the situation and see what X does. But that's my sense of it.
Hi, Holly!
“It's translated as hussy IF the girl is at all attractive. If she is unattractive, it's because she's something else: shrew, or harpy, or hag, or harridan, or, biddy, or battle-ax.”
Yes! Excellent distinction. Loud-mouthed and “ugly” are mocked in a very different manner.
“So there it is. Ugly girls are unhappy with patriarchy because they can't get what they want from men; pretty girls usually don't have a problem with it. And if they do have a problem, well, it must be because something is wrong with them as women--they're voracious sluts, for instance--because ain't nothing seriously wrong with the patriarchy!”
I remember when I didn’t want to date certain men, some would stare at me like I was crazy. But I’m a God—they seemed to suggest—so therefore, you must be a lesbian, if you’re rejecting me. Or you must hate ALL men.
“I've mentioned that I'm writing a paper on sexuality in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And one of the things that has been interesting to me is to see how often Cordelia is called a slut and a ho.”
Wow! This is so enlightening. Cordelia’s biggest flaw, as far I can recall, is her superficiality and materialism. But you shed light on the fact that – once again - SLUT which has obvious sexual connotations is used against a woman (who is a virgin – I think Cordy was?).
“I have thought to myself several times since this particular event happened how much I doubt X would have done the same thing to a man: mined his blog for information about his sexual history, then used it to denigrate both him and his statements.”
Do you think homophobia prevents a man from showing too much interest in another man’s sexual history? Or is it just that women are easy targets when it comes to sex? As you say, men are proud of their conquests, but women are put to shame. This injustice is staggering.
Hi Frankengirl--
Cordy is interesting because we don't find out when she loses her virginity--unlike Xander, Willow and Buffy.
I could say a lot more about Cordelia's sexuality--and I debated whether or not to say even the tiny bit that I shared here. We academics, after all, are secretive people and don't like spilling our big ideas until we've presented them in papers so we get credit for thinking them up. But don't worry, once I present the paper, I'll be back with more to say about Cordy. In the meantime, I'll just add that she has become a much more sympathetic and complex character to me. That's what happens, I guess, when you watch three seasons' worth of episodes of a show in order and take notes: you notice stuff. And I still have four seasons of Buffy and all of Angel to go....
I would guess that homophobia is probably part of it.... And perhaps some sort of...respect for male experience at best and some sort of icky brotherhood at worst? As in (not so gross version), "Dude, you used to be WAY screwed up when it came to how you treated women, but you're wiser now, and I respect you for not being a dog any more"--the emphasis being on what he is now rather than what he used to be: in other words, men can recover from past "indiscretions"--after all, that's just part of sowing their wild oats (how I've always loathed that phrase!)--while women are irrevocably tainted by illicit sexual activity.
That's the best-case scenario of this tacit forgiveness I'm trying to describe; a worse (but probably not worst--I don't want to think about what the WORST version might entail) version would be a fratboy attitude of "Hey, I'll help you get whatever you want and protect you when you do!" You know, the gross closing of ranks we're seeing in the rape case at Duke.
Holly I really enjoyed the article. Cheers and good for you telling that self-righteous elder off. I am so proud you are finding out who you are and comfort in your own skin. As for me I resigned from the lds "organization" last week and will find my own way as an ex priesthood RM and all that other organizational crap. So I toast your efforts and toast your good fortune with my St. Chappelle (including anti-oxidents).
Hi Al--thanks for reading. Always glad to welcome a fellow traveler on the journey out of Mormondom, so I hope you'll stop by again.
I was raised in the church, and though, I have not had all of the experiences you discuss here, I do relate to them. I was denied a mission because I was "an attractive girl and should get married". I found that even to think, consider, and question was blasphemy. I "left" the church after a Sunday School discussion on the churches stance on homosexuality, and how we could not sympathize with "them", it was the last straw for me, I had had trouble getting my temple recommend based not on my behavior, but on my thoughts and opinions for some time before this. They have toned this down a bit, in the written propaganda, but it seems to be getting worse again with CA proposition. I find the stance on secret organizations very laughable, as they are really the bigest one ever! I feel very alienated from my family. Do you have issues with this? Have you been sucsesfull in staying close with your family, but leaving the church? How?
Well hope you will forgive, my lack of writing skills. This is not well written, as I have no love or skill with writing. I feel like I haven't really represented well....
I too thought you looked like Jerry only, not harsh.
Hi sirema--thanks for stopping by. I'm sorry to know that all this happened to you, and happy that I'm not the only one. It really is to bad that the church has such a problem with smart women.
As for how I get along with my family.... well, sometimes it's better than others. Believe it or not, we have more problems with politics than with religion: they're all die-hard republicans. The last big fight I had with anyone in my family was over Sarah Palin, not the church.