I think I have mentioned before my friend, Bridget, who is converting to be a believer of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism). She recently just finished the major part of her transition by being baptized in the faith and came up with her adopted LDS family to visit the giant Mormon Temple here in St. Louis. She messages me while they were driving up here and asked if I wanted to get together for a few hours while the other people she was traveling with finished up some things in the Temple (I promise this does relate to GPC!). I went and picked her up and we had lunch and over lunch we had a really interesting discussion about the role of women and the overall gendered nature of the church. I asked her about some of the things that our speaker had talked about when we learned about Twilight and got the perspective of someone who follows these things.
One thing that stood out so so so much to me was her statement that comes from the church's teachings and outlooks on modesty. She said "Modesty allows righteous men to be comfortable around you." I immediately had issues with that statement, a lot of which were in regard to the idea that it is a woman's responsibility to make men "comfortable" being around you or even standing next to you. I asked her if she thought that could be related to victim blaming and slut shaming and she looked at me like I was nuts to relate those two to her teaching. It was one of those moments where I was made fully aware how much difference the few women's and gender studies courses I've taken have made in the way I analyzed things. To me, this statement obviously had issues, but to her, it was perfectly normal and expected.
It was nice to be able to discuss these things in a rational manner and to have an intelligent debate about some of the issues we've talked about with the LDS church. I plan on continuing to talk to her about various issues to broaden both mine and her perspective on these things.
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