For men only?
By Jana on Aug 25, 2006
During my 5+ years of participation in Sunstone, I’ve noticed that the magazine, the Symposium (and the blog) tend to be dominated by men. I’ve wondered why this is the case, because women are more marginalized by LDS institutions and I would think that they would be the most eager to participate in an alternate forum.
I suspect that men are more involved with Sunstone simply because they have the resources available to be involved—they have more discretionary time, money, and so forth. Or perhaps men are just more interested in the intellectual debates that occur in Sunstone venues?
When women are involved with Sunstone, they generally do so in a way that explicitly addresses and reinforces gender differences—e.g. Julie Hawker’s recent writing on women & envy, Emily Pearson’s writing about being the wife of a gay man, etc. This doesn’t seem to be the case with most articles written by men, which tend to discuss doctrinal or institutional issues that aren’t gender-related.
I am consciously aware that I am the only female blogger on this site. While I am quite attuned to “women’s issues” and I believe that gender inequity is an important topic for Sunstone to address, I’m not particularly comfortable being the token female voice in this forum (FWIW, I am aware that other women are being recruited as permabloggers).
So I guess my question is why women don’t gravitate towards Sunstone as often as men do? Does Sunstone need to work harder to reach out to women? And if so, what are those particularly female needs that aren’t being addressed in current Sunstone efforts?
When I first started joined the internet world — such as it was in 1992 (than as now, I am more likely to read than contribute). I noticed that there were essentially all men discussing any topic including Mormonism. At the time there were few outside of Academics and the real computer geeks that had access to the internet. My assessment is both that men are more likely to be early adopters of the technology and are much more likely to want to enter the theological debates. The motivation toward one-upmanship or “winning” debates is something that has no appeal to me whatsoever. Is this gender related?
Comment # 1 by Ronda Callister | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
I used to love email discussion groups, and blogging would seem to be a natural evolution. But I’ve been battered so many times by bickering-little-boys-in-the-sandbox who are more interested in winning a point than in learning anything or reaching a consensus — being around jerks online is no more attractive than hanging around them in person.
Few of the little boys who have shouted me down even realize that I’m a woman, so that part isn’t a gender thing. But because I don’t enjoy fighting and screaming and calling names, I leave.
I’ve tried several of the women’s groups, but none of them appeal to me. My interests are not especially gender-related.
In the last two weeks I’ve started taking some tentative steps back into cyberMormonism. We’ll see how it goes this time.
Comment # 2 by Ardis | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
We’re glad to see you back, Ardis!
Comment # 3 by Nick Literski | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
In the spirit of full disclosure I am male, but somewhat obsessed with feminst causes. The lack of involvement in Sunstone notwithstanding, you’d be hard pressed to find more interesting reads than Feminist Mormon Housewives or Mormon Mommy Wars…and of course I’m excessivly fond of my own wife’s blog. Perhaps there is somthing to be said for the different ways in which men and women use technology. I have read some recent research showing how women are using the internet and other new technologies in community building. For instance, my wife has considerably more experiance in HTML coding than I do, due to the fact that she’s been involved at a website called The Nest. She has figured it all herself in order to assemble a ‘bio’, kind of a personal website. There’s an enough for a graduate thesis in Anthropology on this site, including an entire vocabulary necessary to navigate the message boards. The lack of women involved in sunstone is perhaps not because they don’t have access to it, but because they are involved elsewhere. I know from my reading that some anthropologists have observed that women are gravitating towards female-created spaces on the internet. One reason for this has been a significant higher amount of sexually based harrasment directed towards female nicknames in general spaces like chat rooms. I know the women on the Nest activly go after men that make sexist and ignorant comments. Perhaps for the women that are involved on the Internet are heading more towards Exponent II and Feminist Mormon Housewives than Sunstone.
Comment # 4 by angrymormonliberal | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
Hmmm, my name is not necessarily gender specific so I will define that I am female.
I would note that being overtly intellectual is not really encouraged in Relief Society. I don’t want to offend too many men here but outside of academia, I found that a lot of men I interact with at church find my overt intellectualism to be threatening. This was different in the ward I attended in the city associated with the university (Norman, Oklahoma). There intellectualism among females was not threatening and was relatively normal. I thought that at least the professor-types liked engaging in discussions. I can’t say that all the young, single guys weren’t threatened but I just figured they had issues. That was less of an issue among guys that were working on advanced degrees (but there were very few of those that were single).
Once I moved out of Norman I couldn’t find anybody to engage in discussions and all the women had their heads buried in either child rearing or geneology. Men seemed highly uncomfortable getting into any kind of discussion.
Are we still sending messages to women that their place is in the home raising the children? I know that the church has done better about telling women to become educated but there always seems to be this hidden message that the education is to be used to be a better mother. I know that I always feel that when I mention I have an advanced degree in science, there is this little “oh” and they try to rack their brain trying to think of some way that would actually be useful in raising children. I guess I could come up with much more interesting experiments than mixing baking soda and vinegar…
I believe women have a much more tightly defined role of “acceptable” activity. Maybe it is inherent to being the priesthood leaders of the church that leads men to question and seek that leads them down the road to Sunstone? Like you, I was raised around Sunstone and Dialogue and the dividing line between men and women’s roles was very blurred.
Comment # 5 by Denae | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
I’ve been reading Wayne Booth’s autobiography “My Many Selves.” One little maxim that I liked was “Listen to others as you would have them listen unto you.”
The cool thing about blogs is that you have time to mull over your answers before you post them, rather than the immediate reply required in a face to face conversation. I often take at least an hour to formulate my ideas before replying to a post.
This dynamic, I think, can really unify the genders’ approach to conversation: we can have time to think about our respondents as people and couch our words well. We can have time to remember that we’re probably not in possession of absolute knowledge and that we could probably benefit from listening to what other people are saying and drawing their ideas out, building on them, rather than trying to take them down as wittily as possible.
Comment # 6 by stephencarter | Aug 25, 2006 | Reply
Jana, I didn’t really notice that men were more involved in Sunstone because more than half of the presentations I attended were by women. Yes, there were many devoted to feminist issues. And probably women’s interests vary significantly from men’s. But notice that Janice Allred has become quite involved in theological issues, the panel that Ronda Callister put together on marriage involved both men and women, Carol Lynn Pearson’s sessions were of great interest to men in particular, and Lavina Anderson continues to be a huge presence at Sunstone, roving around listening to the stories of both genders. I think Sunstone has a tremendous appeal to women. Perhaps the reason we may see a lack of younger women at the Conference is that a conference setting isn’t always very baby or child friendly, and the majority of women still have primary responsibility for their young children. For me in the past, with my 8 children, it simply would have been an impossibility to attend Sunstone for the full 4 days as I did this year.
I hope that we will see more of women discussing doctrinal issues. Perhaps we have lagged behind in this area because in the institutional Church we have little voice in defining doctrine. But at Sunstone, lack of a voice in the institutional Church doesn’t seem to have deterred men from discussing these issues.
I’m female, and I like to engage in the debates over the internet, so I’m not sure that’s gender related. But maybe I’m just obnoxious that way.
Comment # 7 by Bored in Vernal | Aug 26, 2006 | Reply
Stephen, I’m also readnig Booth’s autiobiography, and find it fascinating. One of the interesting things about his career is the turn towards gender politics that he made at Critical Inquiry in the 1980s. I like to think of him as a recovering patriarch (that’s Armand Mauss’s phrase actually).
It’s really a shame more women aren’t at Sunstone. But still, you’ll find a lot more women speaking at Sunstone than you will at FARMS or FAIR.
Comment # 8 by John Williams | Aug 26, 2006 | Reply
The women who are permabloggers over on the Big Mormon blogs do often talk about straight doctrinal subjects. Julie M. Smith’s posts on T&S about her Gospel Doctrine lessons was meaty stuff. Rosalynde Welch wrote an article about literary criticism that I didn’t read ’cause I’m not all smart like that. Kristine Haglund Harris wrote some wonderful music posts when she was on T&S. She also wrote an excellent and very interesting article about the history of Primary music that was published in Dialogue a couple of years ago.
Now that there are so many other venues for Mormon women to write seriously, I’m not surprised that they’re going there instead of writing for Sunstone. Unfortunately, Sunstone’s reputation for a loose alignment with orthodoxy probably keeps away faithful LDS women with interesting things to say. Twenty years ago, if you were a woman with interesting things to say, there were only two places to say them. Now, it’s a whole new ball game.
Comment # 9 by Ann | Aug 26, 2006 | Reply
Jana, excellent post and excellent topic.
I was really hit over the head with this problem at the recent symposium. The female respondent to my paper blew off my whole presentation as irrelevant and naive and then jumped into a lengthy feminist commentary. I was just wide-eyed wondering if she’d listed to my presentation at all. Her resonse had little to do with the topic and I felt almost like a response to any presentation would have steered that direction, regardless of its content.
It’s frustrating to me because I whole-heartedly want feminist issues to be discussed, especially at Sunstone. But if our female contributors can only discuss feminism and not anything else, they’re sort of boxing themselves in.
I don’t know how to change this—or, for that matter, the glaring gender imbalance in the Mormon church.
But I will say taht from what I’ve seen of the blogs that continue to pop up, many of them are very good….and leave me very hopeful.
Comment # 10 by Rick | Aug 28, 2006 | Reply
Janaremy, Sunstone is far more open to women than the LDS church will ever be. And yet you complain about Sunstone, I wonder if you’ve ever written to the LDS Church and complained about the patriarchy. They would laugh you to scorn.
Jana, life isn’t perfect, Sunstone can’t force women to attend. We have to make do with the imperfection.
If might have helped if you’d offered at least one solution to remedy the situation.
Comment # 11 by Hanna Hill | Aug 28, 2006 | Reply
Hanna, I really thought Jana was being positive and looking for solutions….I’m surprised how personally you seem to have taken it.
To further the conversation–sincerely—what suggestions would you have to help remedy the imbalance at both sunstone and in the church in general?
Thanks,
Rick
Comment # 12 by Rick | Aug 29, 2006 | Reply
Hanna,
I suppose that I haven’t written to the church to complain about patriarchy because it would end up being a one-way conversation between me and my bishop. Discussing this on sunstoneblog seems a much more productive exercise.
That said, I _am_ guilty of focusing on gender-related issues myself. About half of my presentations at Sunstone Symposia have been gender-related. Yet on SunstoneBlog, only one (this one) of my posts have been about feminism/women. So I feel like I can say that I am trying to remedy the situation with my efforts (FWIW, I’ve worked hard to do this in various church callings I’ve had, too). Also, when I co-chaired SunstoneWest, I asked women to give prayers and to chair sessions as often as I asked men. Most women agreed, and, IMO, the gender balance was refreshing.
I guess I was hoping that this post might encourage others to step outside of their comfort zones a bit, to have both male and female ’stoners reflect on why there aren’t as many women involved with Sunstone and to address why women tend to do ‘female’ topics. I hoped that my post might help women to recognize that Sunstone is a place for them and/or that this might inspire more women to submit proposals for presentations that step outside of the box of ‘women’s issues.’
Or perhaps I just wrote this post to provoke off-the-cuff responses from lurkers?
Comment # 13 by jana | Aug 29, 2006 | Reply
Hi Jana,
I have a few personal observations regarding writing to Sunstone whether it be as a blogger or a letter to the editor, and femme attendance at the SLC Symposium.
So many Sunstoners are intellectual PUBLISHED brainiacs. Hence, I am somewhat intimidated that my grammar will be correct, that I will write complete sentences and my comments will be somewhat intelligent. (Or at least seem like my brain is not nuclear waste).
Possibly some ladies don’t (or can’t) make the time in their day to formuate their ideas for an intelligent reply to post. (I am in awe of those that do–truly—Stephen Carter).
I think blogging can also be fun free expression –an instant response to an emotion. So whether we write a lengthy or short comment if we help everyone feel comfortable as you state–possibly more women will post. Sunstone is the safe place for acceptance–in all forms.
I took to heart Dan’s urging to get to know other people at the Symposium. How did they discover Sunstone? etc. I was fascinated to know why so many young married men (early 20’s) were in attendance without their wives. I started interviewing them on the sly, a gentle something to the effect, “Where is your wife? Is your wife at another lecture right now?” Their retort, “Oh, she doesn’t read Sunstone, no, she will not be coming to any of the lectures”.
I was shocked, what did these couples have of substance to discuss at home with each other? Was physical attraction the only component in their courtship? Someone clue me on that one…..
Maybe we female Stoners need to re-introduce our friends to Sunstone. I have seen a newer hip vibe to it—the look is great. And The Sugar Beet is the best. Plus this blog is great.
Comment # 14 by Tami K Horvath | Sep 1, 2006 | Reply
Tami–
I agree that those of us younger folks need to proselyte Sunstone–especially to young women!! They shouldn’t be intimidated by the Brainiac factor. Really. I have yet to meet anyone at Sunstone who dismissed a sincere thought or question, even when it wasn’t couched in academic language.
Please send your young friends to the Blog and send links to Symposium sessions that might be of interest to them, ok?
Comment # 15 by jana | Sep 5, 2006 | Reply
I think its just that women are so much busier that they don’t have as much time to look at sites and respond. You know, “a man’s work is from sun to sun, but a woman’s work is never done.” Also, my blogs are so private I don’t think I could bear for the public to see it, nevermind the fear of getting criticized for my very private thoughts. I do write essays and articles, because I’m a writer, but no online blogging for me.
Abluebirdy
Comment # 16 by Abluebirdy | Dec 31, 2006 | Reply
If attendance and participation is important to a woman, who happens to be a wife and a mother, then why can’t a man, who happens to be a husband and a father, step in and send mom off for 4 days of Sunstoneisms?
Comment # 17 by awalker | Feb 23, 2007 | Reply