(Wikimedia CC photo by Mark Dunne; click to enlarge)
Okay. I get the point. And I’m not altogether unsympathetic:
I confess that I haven’t noticed any supposed “epidemic” of “slut-shaming” in Mormonism. However, I pay little or no attention to the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, People Magazine, the National Enquirer, and the Kardashians, and I don’t read blogs that focus on them. So maybe I’ve missed it.
That, though, isn’t my major complaint here:
I think some of what Jana Riess says in this piece is profoundly — profoundly — unfair.
Elder Callister was absolutely not saying that women are completely responsible for the thoughts, behavior, and virtue of men.
He was, I think, simply recognizing the indisputable fact that men can be, and often are, affected by what women wear. (If that’s not true, it’s difficult to see a lot of sense in many “men’s magazines,” in much female fashion, in a great deal of advertising, and so forth. “Sex sells,” goes the familiar adage. But what women wear makes no difference? Seriously? What on earth is Cosmopolitan about, in that case?)
Surely there’s a very large and reasonable middle ground between the manifestly absurd claim that what women wear and how they behave has no impact whatever on men, on the one hand, and, on the other, the equally ridiculous notion — advanced by nobody of whom I’m aware, including Elder Callister — that women bear complete responsibility for how men think and act.
Yes, males have agency, and they’re responsible for how they think and act. But we humans interact with each other. We affect each other. And it’s folly, and sometimes ideologically-driven folly, to pretend that we don’t, or to fault those who point that we do.
I’m frankly impatient with transparently unjust and unreasonable accusations that, for instance, people who prudently suggest that intoxicated single women probably shouldn’t walk down deserted urban alleys in rough neighborhoods at 2 AM are chauvinistically denying women the right to move about freely like men or are blaming rape victims for being assaulted.
The thief who stole the thousand-dollar bill that you left sitting overnight on the roof of your car is, indisputably, guilty of theft and morally responsible for his action. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that leaving thousand-dollar bills out in public spaces overnight isn’t especially wise.
Come on. This shouldn’t be difficult or controversial.
Posted from Victor, New York
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