Stephanie Meyer and the New Mormon Anti-Feminism

Ah...the title of that already sounds like the rant of a leftist in the New Yorker doesn't it? Fret not, my friends...this is very good news.

So who knew that a Mormon housewife would be able to tap into the collective psyche of teenie-boppers girls world-wide? One might ask what makes them so gullible, so predictable, so prone to manipulation? But this, my friends, misses the point entirely.

The first common understanding we must reach is that the Twilight series is not only fundamentally anti-feminist but that it spits in the face of the feminist critique at every turn. The heroine is vulnerable and wildly susceptible to Edward's innate goodness. She's a tad erratic, always pushing Edward to go further than he wants to...upon which he, the level-headed priesthood holder that he is, always steadies the rudder and returns their impassioned love back to the boiling cauldron of teenage hormones.

So what would make girls scream over repressiveness? It seems downright puritanical when compared with even other relatively mild romances like Titanic or even your B+ grade chick flick. Never mind the relatively graphic battle scenes, scenes that should send your average girls back to watch Grey's Anatomy with her roommates, shuddering at how "scary" it all was. Instead, they scream with delight as Edward battles back evil. And no, you are not in the Twilight Zone...you're in the zone of piles of money based on seemingly ham-handed cinema that hardly rises above Dudley Do-right and his sniveling counterpart of a villain.

So what has happened to the fair daughters of Hannah-Montana America? Welcome to the next phase of American feminism, a backlash against a feminism that has been sucked dry of its femininity through the vampire of nihlism. The young women are simply exhausted with the feminist mantras. American feminism feels it will succeed when women can be as great of CEOs, presidents, doctors, and lawyers as men are. The success of Twilight shows a younger feminism bucking against women who have forgotten that being erratic can be charming, that being a clutz can be loveable, and that men can be something more than a super-tight "life partner."

Oh don't you worry...the old school 60s feminists rail against Twilight...Bella won't even get an abortion to save her life, after all!. But no matter to the adoring fans...Bella is loved. That's what matters.

Just as Harry Potter has defined a childhood, so too can Twilight define womanhood for the coming decade. Don't be surprised if in about 10 years, you see the now-young women expecting a little more from their male acquaintances if they want the time of day. When men get assertive, they might wonder why he's not like a better gentleman (as the name, "Edward" subconsciously rings through their mind). Meyer's popularity might just be enough to cause a slight tectonic shift in the gender dynamics in America.

Censorship by Candlelight

You remember those cheesy re-enactments your priesthood/young women’s leaders made you do as teenagers? (ok, so some think they’re cheesy, others get a buzz out of them, and others just want to prove to the ladies that they’re “pioneer material” *manly grunt*)? These events are rituals intended to reinforce our identity as a people...our indulgence in the sociocultural phenomenon the Maurice Halbwachs called “collective memory.” “Collective memory” is seen by scholars as something to be analyzed, pieced together, ripped apart, and even enjoyed. One thing you don’t do...above all else...is take it personally.

Yet as I was listening that brilliant musical by Stephen Sondheim, Company, I heard an interesting tune about a man who was ruminating on what married life was like. The song bespoke a confusion: “Sorry, grateful/ Regretful, happy.” Everything and nothing in his life is because of her. Why, he says, look for answers about what marriage does when none seem to materialize? He always wonders “what might have been” if he had not met his wife. Essentially, the singer tells us, he and his wife had no established narrative of how they got together. Sure, he could tell us the precise events...but there was no sense of inevitability. No sense of “one and only-ness.” It’s a common aphroism in LDS (and really, general lore) that you know you should marry someone not when you can imagine living with that person but when you can’t imagine living without them. Not exactly President Kimball’s “any two righteous people can marry if they’re willing to pay the price” line...

Therefore, my statement is less about the actuality of “one and only”-ness and more about how the Holy Ghost conveys revelation. I have come to truly believe that since the gospel will never be truly demonstrated through empirical methods, we have to access the knowledge through other means. Yet we are talking about historical claims here...events that happened at a place and time. We can’t exactly “faith” our way through these things...at least using the pop culture’s definition of faith. There must be another way of establishing knowledge about divine truths...not the least of which is eternal marriage.

Full disclosure: this argument is blatantly teleological. It’s an argument based on what is and not on what might have been. For a historian, being so focused on the present might get one accused of “presentism,” one of the nastiest insults a historian can level at you. The founding premise of history is that we might understand why things happened the way they happen; this often requires that we understand what did not happen.

But there’s a reason that historians aren’t marriage/family therapists. Imagine me telling my wife: “I could have married so-and-so, but because of timing issues, global warming, the economy, and the shift in cultural norms because of event X, I’m with you instead.” Ah, I can feel the glow of the candlelight dinner. So I suggest to you that healthy marriages are fundamentally a-historical. It creates a contrived history out of a chaos of knowledge. After all, from a strictly historical stand-point, a couple has no business saying that they were “meant to be together” out of the thousands of individuals they would probably never meet. A good marriage requires the massaging of one’s history towards the current relationship, self-censorship if you will. You don’t talk about the ex, certainly not with any adoration. If one does indulge in memories, those memories are funneled into the present circumstances, even if by all other accounts they should not be. Those that cannot fit into the present are sloughed off as irrelevant or becomes points of contention.

So I say unto my married friends...revel in censorship. It might make your candlelight dinners a little more pleasant.

Why I'm Proud of America

I didn't vote for Obama. I have many concerns about his policies and associations.

But I was proud of America last night. America is now the first Western nation to elect a minority as its President. Only 50 years ago, now-President Obama would have been staring attack dogs in the street of Montgomery. One hundred years ago, he could have been lynched as the white community looked on, considering his death to be a form of family entertainment. Now we've finally decided to get serious about breaking down the race barrier.

So here's to you, MLK Jr...

Villains in the Mormon Mind

Everyone loves a good villain…the bellowing laugh with hands thrown up in the air utter triumph. As a child, I found Dr. Claw of Inspector Gadget fame to be wildly amusing. The Joker has quickly reached pop-culture stardom as people would practice their Joker impressions of “Why So Serious?” Good cartoonish villainy makes for good parties.

Hadyn White maintains that every history, in spite of its claims to objectivity, is constructed in literary fashion with traditional literary tropes such as villains, comic reliefs, and heroes. Indeed, White would conclude, we see our very world as a story…and therefore, the job of a historian is to point out our way of making history more than the history itself. Hence, the title of his magnum opus, Metahistory.

So who gets under our collective skin? You know…the folks who have been able to get inside our heads and poke us where it hurts? As we will find (surprise, surprise), there is no one archetype for the Mormon villain. Each of these villains represents a strand of our thought our culture that has been particularly vulnerable. We will see the Benedict Arnolds, the political activists, the heretics, and the downright scoundrels. Some have even worn a denim jumper or two in their lifetime…

Some observations are in order:

A) Some of these individuals, I guarantee, will be seen as heroes by Mormon Matters readers. However, as I’m sure these readers recognize, these heroic efforts are generally those of a dissenter…and in order for a dissenter to become famous, s/he has to tick off the powers that be in large numbers. So alas…they make the list.

B) Most of these villains have varying degrees of admirable traits. We’re talking about perception and not reality. I, for one, would gladly eat lunch with most “villains” on this list.

So behold…

10. Emma Smith

Poor sister Emma…while she is beloved as a heroine in much of the contemporary Church (of course, we all have the resident Emma-hater), Emma was not always perceived as one. In the aftermath of the Exodus from Nauvoo, Emma not only stayed behind but also kept several of Joseph’s personal belongings that Brigham believed belonged to the Church. In addition, she offered some support to Joseph III in establishing the RLDS church. Her son, David, eventually went to a mental institution in the aftermath of learning of his father’s polygamy while he served an RLDS mission to Utah–thus blackening her name even further with the Utah leadership. Brigham Young even accused her of trying poison Joseph and called her a “child of hell.” Thankfully, we can appreciate Emma for her tremendous accomplishments now.

9. Sidney Rigdon

Sidney has, quite sadly, been classified among the “crazy uncles” category of Mormon history. Yet he served for nearly ten years as the Joseph Smith’s proverbial Aaron. Despite his impressive service and considerable contribution to the Church with his Campbellite congregation, he has something on record to annoy just about every faction of the Church–from “when the prophet has spoken the thinking is done” orthodoxy to the postmodern, “scripture is inspired fiction” free-wheelers. In the months leading up to the Missouri War, he proved his capacity to inflame when giving the famous Salt Sermon–which implied that the expulsion of prominent apostates such as W.W. Phelps and Oliver Cowdery would be forthcoming. He became the bete noire of the succession crisis as he attempted to convince the Latter-day Saints that Joseph Smith had appointed him to be the leader. In historical memory, Rigdon has not been painted in the darkest hues; his villainy is often viewed as delusions and nothing more–delusions that could easily be brushed off into the ash-bin of history

8. Albert Sydney Johnson

A significant figure in 19th-century American military history in his own right, it’s ironic indeed that his greatest legacy is outside scholarly circles is as a part of an anticlimactic military operation that saw no bonafide engagement of enemies: the Utah War. He led, in all, over 5,000 troops to put down a supposed rebellion of Utah against the federal government. Congress widely opposed the expedition (most notably Sam Houston), and eventually would deem it “Buchanan’s blunder.” However, Utah remained under military occupation (albeit limited) For modern Latter-day Saints, Johnson serves more as a symbol of the animosity between the pioneers and the federal government than as an actual executor

7. John D. Lee A looming figure in not only Mormon history, but in the history of the West, John D. Lee has been kicked around as the football in the hands of Mountain Meadows historians. Aside from the elephant in the room that is the MMM, John D. Lee was otherwise a hard-working LDS who contriubted significantly to his community.

Having Been depicted as everything from a loyal scapegoat and hack to a renegade, John D. Lee has borne much of the blame for the attacks. Juanita Brooks’ research demonstrated that Lee’s excommunication and execution was simply meant to relieve pressure from the federal authorities’ constant haranguing. Walker, et. al. has concluded that John D. Lee played a central role in the massacre in both planning and deed (the topic looms too large for extensive treatment in this, a rather superfluous article by comparison–see the book that needs no introduction, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, for more info). In either interpretation, Lee’s name is often one of the few names to be mentioned within popular discourse about the massacre, in spite of the dozens of Iron County militiamen participation. Lee has come to symbolize the violent streak–if there be one–within 19th-century Mormonism–the crazy uncle in the attic.

6. Fawn Brodie
Niece of President David O. McKay and husband of a famed of nuclear theorist, Bernard Brodie, who helped to craft Eisenhower-era nuclear deterrence strategy; Fawn Brodie made fame in both critical and liberal Mormon circles by publishing one of the first scholarly biographies of Joseph Smith to reach wide circulation, No Man Knows My History. Brodie was roundly denounced and excommunicated within a year of publication. Whether she deserved such denunciation or not (I’m intentionally avoiding that elephant in the room), Brodie’s name has come to symbolize the “pointy-headed intellectual” stock character for modern Mormons. One of my contacts has informed me that when Richard Bushman presented Rough Stone Rolling to Knopf, they initially hesitated. Bushman responded that they owed him one: “After all, you published Brodie.” The argument was persuasive.