Category Archives: Feminism

The Feminist Mormon Housewives

While everyone is obsessing with mommy bloggers who cook organic roasted squash for their babies, I’m over here watching and reading (for years now), the Feminist Mormon Housewives. I don’t remember where I first heard of them, but I joined their secret Facebook group and slowly started learning that they were just like me, except they decided to stay in the church and change it from the inside. For this, I applaud them. They are a brave group of women. Many of their experiences with doctrine have been similar to mine and their questions have been similar to the ones I raised.

“Why do we have modesty doctrines and guidelines?”

“What if a woman doesn’t want to raise children? Is she less of a woman?”

“Is a woman’s only role to bear children? Why not?”

“What is this patriarchal world we’re all living in and how did it get this controlling?”

As a young woman, I was drawn to Mormonism. Quite a few times, I almost made the leap and converted, but something held me back. Perhaps it was my parents’ voice saying, “No, they’re a cult.” (I don’t consider them a cult anymore than I would consider Evangelical Christianity as a whole a cult. Mainstream Mormonism is vastly different than Fundamentalist Mormonism, which is the most restrictive, and I’ll be honest, cult is a harsh term. Patriarchal religion is maybe the safest term for Mormonism and Evangelical Christianity, though it might not capture the complexities quite as well as a term like cult. And yes, both movements do have cult-like traits.)

Despite my parents not wanting me to join the Mormon church, I went to every Mormon dance I could in high school with my Mormon friends. I went to “Seminary” with them on a weekday before school. I sang with my Honor Choir in a Mormon church. I even dated young Mormon boys.

When I first entered Master’s Commission the appeal was simple: they based Master’s Commission’s rules on the Mormon missionary movement. No dating, limited communication with family and friends from back home, strict dress code, and a focus on purity, relationship with Christ, and evangelizing. Okay, okay…maybe Mormon missionaries do cult-like rituals when they sign up for the mission field.

Regardless, the new Mormon feminism is fascinating. There are thousands of women who are questioning the oppressive traditions of their church, wearing pants to church, and thinking like, well…feminists. I can’t explain how complex it all is without giving away some very private conversations and people’s identities, so for now I’ll let you explore if you’re interested.

Here’s their new campaign, called I’m a Mormon feminist where they feature stories of women: http://mormonfeminist.org/

Here’s their blog, which began in 2004. You can learn quite a bit about them here: http://www.feministmormonhousewives.org/

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FeministMormonHousewives

Or read this piece in the Boston Globe: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/05/women-hope-for-mormon-spring/kSchzSqQDRRKAQtvfi8hhL/story.html

Here in Salon magazine: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/20/the_rise_of_the_mormon_feminist_housewife/

Lighten Up, Everyone

My friend wrote this article about Daniel Tosh/Rape Jokes/Feminists who can’t laugh. I feel I should link it here because a) I’m quoted it in it (yay!) and b) I got a bit critical of feminism over the past few weeks and found that people were assholes about it.

Here’s my official statement about the whole issue:

There’s been a LOT of communication breakdown between myself and the feminists who reside as my ‘friends’ on Facebook and many of them have become very reactionary and angry when I started
questioning parts of the feminist movement/ideology. Please understand some things: If feminism, like any other theory or ideology, can’t be critiqued by feminists or non-feminists or the logic or illogic of our weaker arguments can’t be sliced and diced and torn apart so they can become stronger, then I will continue my critiques. Being critical of parts of feminism doesn’t make one a “neo-con”, or unsupportive. To reject women like me and others is to tragically bring truth to the argument that we are exclusionary or irrational or angry.

I do remain “feminist” but some of you have questioned that, which oddly, feels like the fundamentalist Christians response to people who call themselves Christian. “You are only Christian if you do X, or believe in X.” Please recognize that theories and movements have a long line of historical criticism behind them-critics who have bashed arguments and theories and sometimes new theories emerge. I’m a humanities major and we spent years studying theories are arguing them. This is how you learn, but it’s also how you become a critical thinker. For those of you who don’t KNOW my background, I was in a fundamentalist Christian cult for seven years. To say that critical thinking (or the ability to think for myself) and rejecting lumped ideology is important to me would be a gross understatement. Part of my habit is to dissect that which I find weak or unsupportable or flawed. It’s important to me-because no one can take away your ability to think for yourself. YOU give it up. You relinquish it.

Also “random” commented on the Street Carnage article above and I liked what they had to say:

“Good article. This is really all a result of people taking certain academic theories about language too seriously. No one but the bloggers actually believe this shit.”

Except…unfortunately people do take this shit way too seriously–not just bloggers. Let’s lighten up.

The Feminist Yawn-A More Heartfelt Response

I wrote The Feminist Yawn and received enough responses to realize I’d offended some of the feminist community, but what I didn’t expect was my broad generalizations would hurt someone I’d grown close with while collaborating for months on feminist projects. And for that, I’m sorry.

The response I wrote to feminism was mainly over two issues: UniteWomen.org and Daniel Tosh. When I blogged, “I’d been a moderator on one of the larger groups on Facebook for women’s rights (and enjoyed it) and had been involved in a growing women’s group, which I later found to be full of growing scandal/greed,” the latter part of that statement is directed at UniteWomen.org. I’d read a really powerful response by a woman of color who attended the UniteWomen rally and left disappointed. Although her post had to do explicitly with race, I felt utterly disappointed by UniteWomen, as well. For months, I felt women had so much momentum politically and UW came in and dismantled it all with their desire to be the lead group for the moment. They wanted to build a grass-roots movement and be the front-runner, and they did. However, they immediately proved to be utterly disorganized, to make excuses for not uniting women, and they treated individual state groups with disrespect. I became infuriated with UniteWomen and how they had selfishly redirected all of the energy some of us had worked so hard in gaining within the movement toward their personal agendas.

I know this because I was collaborating for months with women doing our own grass-roots movement online. I’d gotten a lot of friends politically charged and we were all moving forward. I’m not quite sure what happened to me, but I felt I needed to take a back seat, despite enjoying the work. There were too many other groups who needed help and wanted me to join in a leadership position and to be honest, I was getting pulled by a few of them very strongly. I’d enjoyed working with my friend J. and we’d become very close, but I had a difficult time saying no to other groups and requests for my leadership skills. I became overwhelmed.

I joined a UniteWomen group in Southern California before UW started pissing me off. The stateside leadership was wonderful but were not directly related to UW. I loved working with them and they transitioned away from UW and into their own group–a group I like very much. They are hard-working women who put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.

And then another group came along around the same time to ask me to be on leadership, which I don’t want to get into personally before speaking with the leader of the group; however, I was a bit taken aback by the personal agenda that steamrolled this group into the mainstream. I was also kind of offended, because I take pride in not using my platform for instances like that, although I could. I don’t believe in exploiting the masses and with UniteWomen’s ability to do that, I was wary of any new group. I was also protective, like an angry mother protecting her brood. I felt like some of us had worked so hard at uniting women and a few opportunists, who hadn’t lifted a finger the whole time, wanted to come scoop them up for their own agendas. That’s NOT why we worked so hard and I felt very frustrated.

My second issue with the feminist community was how quickly we attacked Daniel Tosh. Women writers I respect immediately took to their platform. I was confused over the fact that I personally didn’t agree with Roxanne, because I usually really like her writing. However, I’d been feeling a bit of a disconnect from some of the academic community, and her response seemed very high-tower academic instead of human. The human in me was upset at Roxanne’s response because I felt that she was taking a stance for all of us and leading the feminist community into an army of Tosh.0 haters-as if he were a rapist. Years before this incident, Daniel Tosh had been one of the many comedians I would watch weekly, in my attempt to re-enter the world of pop culture after being isolated from it when I lived in a cult. However base my taste is, I felt personally insulted at everyone’s attacks. Objectivity and rational thinking seemed to go out the window after Roxanne’s article went up and feminists I knew started personally attacking me over my taste in Daniel Tosh’s comedy.

All of a sudden, the community I’d been part of for so many months turned their back on me and attacked me. It wasn’t a good feeling. I suppose that’s when I realized how fickle mobs can be. One minute they love you. The next minute they’re stoning you.

For what it’s worth, I’m still feminist. I’m not feminist in the way my friend Marty is feminist, though. When we were discussing his post, he shared why he was a feminist: “I consider myself a feminist, but that’s just part of being a humanist. It’s okay to be seen as a feminist in my eyes. Just not hysterical, or ranty or attention seeking…”

I’m not a feminist because I’m atheist or humanist nor do I feel it’s fair or accurate to call the feminist community “hysterical” or ranty or attention seeking.

I hope that I represent one feminist well, but I also hope to be seen as an individual. As a former cult member it’s very important for me to have freedom to have my own opinions and taste, even if that means I’m not “part of the group.” I do also hope we can all work together on being objective when we need to be and to think critically instead of jumping onto a bandwagon because it’s popular. Despite our differences of opinion (of which I’m sure there are many), there are a great number of people within the feminist community I admire and enjoy working with. Thanks to one in particular who helped me see that.

The Feminist Yawn

For the past few years I’ve been a self-proclaimed radical feminist. I’ve read Bitch magazine, Ms. magazine, Jessica Valenti books and I’ve drawn pictures of pussies eating pussies.

It all started with the introduction to Mary Daly’s book “Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation” where I first heard this: “If God is male, then male is God” and it blew my mind. I’d just left a fundamentalist Christian cult where I’d been a reverend for seven years, but my entire role there was based on when and who I was going to marry and how quickly. So, of course, realizing that the male God was the centralized issue wrong with the world sort of blew my mind. She essentially summed up what I’d been thinking was wrong with the church for years.

After blogging about the loss of my faith and my feminist views, some women I knew looked up to me as a leader in the feminist community. I have written articles about reproductive health and religion and been asked to take leadership roles in state and nationwide feminist groups. Some of these groups, honestly, seemed to be driving one woman’s agenda or attempting to enlarge one or two people’s reputation not an overall goal of liberating oppressed people or increasing diversity within the movement, so I wasn’t interested in feeding that. The feminist circle just wasn’t doing it for me lately. I’d been a moderator on one of the larger groups on Facebook for women’s rights (and enjoyed it) and had been involved in a growing women’s group, which I later found to be full of growing scandal/greed. Some women had already written some powerful critiques of the movement, and as I read threads online, I realized this group and feminist leadership/followers were far from enlightened and wouldn’t change. In fact, most of the movement seemed to be ran by materially privileged white women and none of them listened to the women from other cultures. It seemed like the same old disunity of race, class and privileged that feminism had been fighting over for years…and still, no one was listening.

This is the feminism I see today.

It was time for me to start moving away because as I saw it, the amplified voices were only pushing their personal and political agendas.

I’ve recently identified myself as post-human, which I would explain quite simply as a theory based on sci-fi/futurology in which a person admits they are in disunity within him or herself (thus why humans act hypocritical, and why even my writing this is “disunified” or hypocritical) but continues to pursue intellectual knowledge and maintains objectivity as much as possible.
Our feminist dialogue isn’t objective and it’s not intellectually rigorous. (More on this later by a friend of mine who is doing fantastic research on the bias within feminist journalism.)

This has been illustrated by the internet gang bang that occurred recently with the Daniel Tosh he said/she said fiasco which erupted into a full scale tirade against men everywhere. bell hooks criticized “rape culture” and ample information can be found online that the rape culture is over exaggerated by misused or wrong statistics. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Rape culture may be exaggerated…

Although I do not condone rape, no one was raped by Daniel Tosh…’s joke. End of argument for me. I like Tosh.0.

Some people, though, are very unhappy with my post-feminist rants. They think I should feel their disappointment. To which I say, fuck off.

The Internet is Angry Spice

Look, it’s been a very rough few months for me, although if you’re my friend on Facebook, you’d probably never know it. I’m not what you’d call vulnerable, not in detail anyway. I like to make a few jokes in the morning on FB and get through my day at the office by chatting with Frogtown or doing some “whatnot” online. The fact is–I’d been in some extremely serious negotiations for my life story and I’m rather exhausted. [Yes, you read that right. Yes, that means things have been super, mega important in my life lately.]

And I’ve been VERY political the past several months. My politics have also gone hand in hand with my anger, which has been a separate issue, but they’ve joined together nicely. To be quite honest, I’ve become the raging lunatics my parents are, except on the opposite side of the fence. They’re FOX news junkies. I was the Femininst Agenda girl. Both lunatics. Both biased. Both Angry Spice.

So, I’ll admit it, Angry wasn’t my best look. But, there it was in all it’s glory, like Britney’s vagina spread open for ALL the world to see.

But I’ll break it down to you, before the Facebook drama (which 5 of you saw happen)…I had a terrible, shitty, downright sucky attack on my “great” family vacation in Alaska. I was sitting in Nome, in the parents house, and you know…FOX news was getting to me after several days in a row. My dad knows I HATE that shit (and literally have hated politics ALL my fucking life, Thanks Dad!) and he still has to narrate a play by play to me about the “liberal agendas” every move like it’s the fucking NFL playoffs.

It’s not the NFL playoffs. Those make me sleepy. At least I can nap during those.

FOX news doesn’t do much for me, typically, but there was one off handed remark that was made and you know I’m not going to repeat it online because I’m afraid the FBI will track my father down and do the hunt for red october over what he said. However, it was both racist and a terrible thing to say about any president. I’ll leave it at that.

What happened in the next few minutes, after I called him on his racist bullshit is that this launched a full on family fued.

In 2.5 seconds, my mom came running out to my dads defense and so did my brother. My brother even through in the choice words “fat whale” AND “fat cunt” in the same 5 minutes. It was getting classier by the minute and it was all directed at me, the enemy, the liberal, the atheist. [I'm glad they don't know I'm bisexual. I might have been strung up outside and hanged.]

My family was insulted that I’d called my dad racist, yet he says racist things about President Obama constantly, and about immigrants (although, the family as a whole is getting better about that last one). It makes me cringe to be in the room with them for more than five minutes anymore because they can’t shut the fuck about their “views”.

And then I realized this is probably how I’ve become on Facebook, and although I think I’m “right” I’m pretty sure I’ve become more of an extremist than I originally intended on being. The ability to move from one extreme (Christian fundamentalism) to another (radical feminist, liberal atheist) is quite simple, and to be honest, I don’t have any theories or any books for you to read to back that up. It’s just an observation I’ve made.

My brother compared me to someone he and I both know–a brainless twat–who’s a liberal. He probably did it to piss me off, but he did it to illustrate a point. I’m just as bad as they are about politics, just on the other side of the fence, which doesn’t make me any less poisonous about it. It just makes my point of view different.

The fight escalated into various other issues like Why are you an atheist? Why do you hate ALL pastors? Why can’t you be exactly like us? and other things my family is well-known for saying when they’re upset. But the bottom line is, I think I had a wakeup call that I’d been needing for awhile.

Not that I needed to change who I was–I didn’t. And that isn’t the point–actually quite the opposite. I’d been slowly changing to a more moderate viewpoint for months prior to my fight. In fact, I’d backed off from a few roles as moderator on some great political sites I’d been working with and had stepped back to be an observer and nothing more in both the feminist and the atheist worlds. I wanted to be objective and I’d been feeling the need for objectivism for awhile.

I guess my point is that whether I’m constantly evolving because of my radical behavior for years or just because I’m a dynamic sort of person, I’d like to continue to do so. I enjoy changing and growing. It’s exciting in a very dull sort of world. But more than that, for me, it shows an intellectual growth–stepping back and observing rather than fighting over the carcass of some already picked over argument. [Also, meditation is supposed to be good for anxiety, and I don't think you can be angry and keep meditating. I'll keep you posted on that one.]

Back to the aforementioned Facebook fight, over Daniel Tosh. Apparently, I became an open “disappointment” to my “feminist” friends. Or at least 4 of them who openly raged at me. One who blocked me and the other who I blocked because she harrassed me all day via message and statuses about me while I was at work, dragging other people into the argument. The others who tried to start fights….the others probably just internalized their rage. To be honest, I didn’t stick around for the drama. I went back to work.

What’s weird about the internet and Facebook, and I hope to get some more time to expand on this a bit more later this week, is that this whole Tosh.O situation became an internet gang bang where rape victims everywhere cried about…comedy. Bottom. Fucking. Line. Call it a difference in perspective, or call it me being insensitive, but I didn’t see the need to go so wild over the circumstances. And because I didn’t want to take it any further than what it was–a joke, and because I wanted to defend a comic I’ve LOVED for years, people talked shit about me to my face and behind my back. I just really don’t see how this is helping make progress in “rape culture” or being dignified human beings. Because nothing says “I’m a dignified feminist” like putting another woman down for having a contrary opinion or wanting to double check rape statistics.

Maybe we don’t have the same taste in a comedian, but if you think that YOU are such a NOBLE representation of women and the values of FREEDOM and honor, then by all means, go for it. Be our leader.

But my recommendation to you, in all sincerity, is to go join a fundamentalist church, where your condescention will be fully welcome:

Bravo, Assholes of the week. You’re Angry Spice.

The Making of an Activist

Sometimes you get involved in something sort of by accident. My involvement in feminist activism and advocacy for spiritual abuse victims has been quite organic, evolving with time after seeing things happen all around me that I couldn’t sit by and watch.

I recently started researching Mercy Ministries after being prompted by a reader here. Subsequently, I’ve posted a page with information on Mercy Ministries and links to survivors websites. Groups like Mercy are incredibly destructive and harmful, but it’s often difficult for any abuse victims to speak against their abuser. Many abusers are well-liked and charasmatic and Mercy’s founder, Nancy Alcorn is very popular with the Evangelical crowd.

Feminist activism is a tough pill for some to swallow. Being a feminist is equivelant to being an ugly, raging man-hater. Most women have feminist tendencies, as I’ve noticed lately with the birth control battle and war on women that’s raging. Or as I like to call it, The Republican Witch Hunt.

If you are a feminist, or a feminist in the making, I’d like to leave you with a little Robin Morgan. Morgan and others founded WITCH: Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. If you have time, watch “Sustaining the Activism.”

Feminism is Changing

During my college years (which are almost over!), I met a variety of feminist men and women. Coming from a religious background, I never thought I’d meet a man who was feminist. The men in my religious community were loyal to patriarchy and the strictly traditional gender roles. As my life outside of religion began evolving, I began meeting new types of people. I was surprised to meet men who weren’t macho or the supposed leaders of everything they did.

My dating life improved tremendously as I started meeting men who were feminist. It became sort of an unwritten requirement for dating: feminist, atheist and not macho.

The more feminist a guy was the more often he may have deviated from traditional masculinity–at least in a few distinct ways. I’ve dated men who were nervous about approaching women, men who liked sewing and cleaning, and men who ranted about equality for women as much as I did. In meeting these men who weren’t hyper-masculine, I’d finally reached a point where I was truly happy with the types of people I was dating. In part, that was because I’d begun to find myself outside of religious definitions and was becoming happier as a result. But that wasn’t the only reason. I’d grown up knowing one type of man, the hyper masculine, adventurous man; yet, I knew I didn’t want to settle down with that type of man. I’d finally begun meeting men who I could see myself with for life, rather than men who would fit the “role” of what I should look for in a husband–a provider, a protector, etc.

So those men who love to cook and clean and sew need our support as much as women who despise cooking and cleaning and sewing and feel oppressed by such duties and resent them. The world around us tells males they should be interested in certain activities and not interested in others that are “girly.” And they get attacked for diverting from hyper masculine activities.

Feminism is changing; maybe just in my eyes and maybe because I was confined to patriarchy for years and missed some of the major changes that occurred while I was “gone.” Regardless, this isn’t your mother’s feminism. This is your feminism and your boyfriend’s feminism. And as much as feminism still does and should fight the oppression of females, it fights the oppressive gender roles for women and men.

Witchcraft as Heresy Against the Church

“The idea of witchcraft-as-heresy remained an element of Puritan belief for most of the century. However limited, it evidently had some impact on popular belief, since opposition to the established church was mentioned in witchcraft testimony against twenty-eight women…Their witchcraft is best understood in terms of the centuries-long tendency of Christian authorities to see their adversaries–especially their female adversaries–as witches…It was their perceived dissatisfaction with the religious system–and by extension with the religiously defined social system-that linked them to their sister witches.”

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England by Carol F. Karlsen

Although this book discusses Colonial New England and the witchcraft trials, the thing that remains the same today is that Christian authorities still view their adversaries as performing witchcraft. They may not have the authority to hand us over to the police to be burned at the stake, but they do perceive our criticism of the church as walking with Satan, or working with him hand in hand.

My Religious Guilty Pleasures

Yesterday I magically found something called the Feminist Mormon Housewives Society which is a group of progressive Mormon housewives whose mission is to provide: “A safe place to be feminist and faithful.”

This isn’t a joke. These women are Mormon housewives who are feminist and progressive. They’re rethinking the way their Church talks about women and women’s roles in the home and the world.

I’ve only observed their discussions for a day and talked to a few of them, but they struggle with the same things that any mom’s and housewives struggle with. For example, one mom was feeling resentful over all the housework, cooking, and chauffeuring she had to do. The other wives (and a husband or two) chimed in and most of them had incredibly progressive ideas about what she could do to solve her problems. They were all thinking critically about what their Church told them, versus what worked and didn’t work.

I’m so intrigued by the community here. I’m also so intrigued because I know many Mormons and some of them hold very tightly to traditional gender roles. I even dated a Mormon who explained to me that I’d need to convert to Mormonism in order to marry him and I’d need to give up writing about sex, religion, and well, virtually everything I write about.

These fMh women are questioning gender roles and they’re encouraging their church to be more progressive. One woman posted a link to an LDS Basic Manual for Women: Developing Employment Skills. The woman said that the church needed to step up and become more progressive–this isn’t the 50′s. I completely agree with her. It was intriguing to hear her say that.

I think what’s fascinating about the Internet is that it provides for many of us a community we may never have had living in our own cities, working at our jobs or going to school. The reason fMh Lisa started this community was because she didn’t have anyone she could talk to about certain issues. She was more liberal and progressive than many of the people she knew, so she turned to Google and typed in “liberal Mormon.” She then found a few blogs and after awhile decided to form a community specific to her own needs.

Blogging has done that for me–helped me form a community that’s specifically met my needs (and hopefully the needs of some of you). We’re a more progressive, liberal crowd here which is different from many of those who are recovering from Spiritual Abuse. Sometimes those other communities got too “Jesus-y” for me and I needed a place to be open and honest and candid without being judged or reprimanded. I’m interested in being me first and foremost and I don’t like a lot of the spiritual talk. And I hate being told what to do or what to think.

So cheers to Feminist Mormon Housewives! You’ve made my week. <3