Young Woman's Personal Progress

Posted by: Andee / Category: , , ,


The Church has unveiled a new video on lds.org telling the Young Women about the brand new Personal Progress books and website... and they are PINK! Ooooh, that will get girls to pay attention. Pink! Please watch the video. Please. You won't be disappointed.

Okay, see what I mean about the word Pink? Hilarious, isn't it? It's PINK!

Anyway, I would love to go into detail about this video and how disturbingly bad and wrong it is, and so I'm going to do it. You have been warned.

First of all, what ever happened to people being real? The women in this video are in la-la land, smiling that spirit-driven smile, glancing at one another as if they are in the Brady Bunch opening. Look how proud they are of their new pink handbook! The one they had nothing to do with! The one men wrote and gave to them!

They look like they are so drugged up on Prozac that they can't even focus on the camera. They are so sweet... but not a good sweet. Too sweet. So sweet that the sugar in my bloodstream as caused me to go into church-shock. Give me a break ladies... be who you are. Not who the church wants you to be.


But that is the main problem with the whole personal progress thing anyway...

It teaches young women who the church wants them to be, and doesn't give them any room to be themselves. It's a shame really.

The personal progress book taught me that God wanted me to be feminine, a mother, a wife, a temple-attending-tithing-paying robot like the rest of my Mormon friends... but I knew that wouldn't make me happy. I knew it in my head and in my heart... and when I told my leaders about this, I was told to pray more. To fast... and then I wasn't being sincere with my prayers because their advice didn't work. I didn't fit their mold and it was because I wasn't good enough.

There was a lot of talk about my "divine role" when I was a teenager. They make it sound so wonderful, don't they? A role that God himself wanted me to fulfill?

Why do this to young women?

I'll tell you why.

To keep the machine moving.

I have read on forums that baptisms are down, people are leaving the church and taking their entire families with them. The internet has made it difficult to keep the hard-to-believe doctrine away from potential converts and interested members.

The main way to keep the church growing is to tell the young men and women at an early age that they must follow God's plan to marry in the temple, have lots of babies, and raise them in the church. That way, there are tons of small children ready for their brainwashing as soon as they can say "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam."


Let's get back to the review...

Look! There is a picture of the temple on the front of the progress book. Wow, thats something. Isn't it? I mean, heaven knows a young woman can't have enough pictures of the temple, right? You see, that is to remind them, as often as possible, what their goals SHOULD be. Temple marriage and children.

They promise that there are plenty of blessings that come with getting married in the temple, or just attending the temple in general... but everyone I have ever talked to about this can't really say they were more blessed than someone else. It's just a promise that can't be delivered.

Parents who were married in the temple have just as many problems, accidents, sicknesses, and random acts of anything than the rest of us.


What blessings are they talking about? The afterlife? Thats funny... because no one knows what happens in the afterlife, and they are drilling these things into the heads of young ladies that the only way they will be happy is following their directions. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Now, they tell the young women that they will learn new things, study the scriptures and pray every single day. These are things the young women are probably already doing in most TBM households. The new things they learn? How to sew, cook, clean and organize a home, how to care for babies and children, how to be a helpmeet to your priesthood holding husband who is the head of the family... you get the idea.

They offer pretty ribbons and necklaces as gifts for completing the lessons. This is amazing when you see it from the other side. What young woman doesn't want to earn those pretty ribbons? Those necklaces? What young woman (especially in a Mormon Community) doesn't want to show her friends how well she's doing and how many ribbons she has earned?

A tip for young women seeking truth? Go to JoAnn's and buy some ribbons. Give me a break.


Oh, yes... the young women are going through so many changes in their lives. Of course people notice. Especially the church. The church wont let them forget. The separate them from the boys, and constantly feed them "girl stuff" (for lack of a better explanation). What harm could come from teaching men and women the same thing about scriptures and church doctrine in the same class?

The entire video is just... fake. It's sad how they talk to the young women as though they are 5 years old and can't possibly comprehend anything without the super-sweet baby talk.

I'm so glad I'm out.

Andee


5 comments:

  1. Rachel Says:

    Watched it. Cringed. Personal Progress is all about keeping women in their place... Thomas S Monson (before he was church president of course) said once that the 3 threats to mormonism were: (in all seriousness here) Homosexuality, Intellectualism, and FEMINISM. I personally know women who were femenists and excommunicated for... wait for it... WITCHCRAFT. NO JOKE. The biggest threat is that a woman won't get married when she is 19 to a return missionary, and wait to finish school before popping out babies. I had a seminary teacher once say that he and his wife wanted to have more kids "but she's not 19 anymore!" THIS is reason numero uno out of about 1000 that I had to get out. I just wish I couldv'e taken all the other women with me.

    It definately takes more than a leap of faith and some sacrafice to 'submit' to your husband, and pretend that an afterlife of polygamy is AOK. Asked my Mormon sister (who is at a point in her life where she is questioning it all, but too scared to get out, she's just 'playing hooky') if she was OK with having to be a polygamist baby-maker in the afterlife, her response was: More people to help me with the housework!

    Talk about committing crimes in the name of religion and recieving 99 virgins. This is about it.

  1. The Original Anonymous Says:

    The woman in the orange shirt seemed to be in pain. Her smile was forced, more so than the others to the point that it was visible.

    Concerning the loss of mass within the LDS church, is this why there are more missionaries here in Utah... more than usual?

    Like, the other day on USU's campus, they had two sets of male missionaries in the SAME AREA of sidewalk. It was excessive! They've broken out the female missionaries as well. It's shocking and increasingly annoying having to dodge these fellows constantly as I go back and forth from my home.

    I'm glad they are losing numbers, and hopefully these reactions of theirs are showing their weakness.

  1. TGD Says:

    Andee,
    If I weren't such a gay boy I would ask you out on a date or something.

    Every time I go back and look at all of the drivel the church puts out or has put out in the past, I literately git knocked over at the sappy emotional manipulations that are used.

    When I was a missionary, back in the day, I used to love the videos that we would show to potential investigators. My favorite at the time was the one about the Book of Mormon being discovered by some young priest in Europe called "How Rare a Possession". I can't sit through it anymore with out having fits of utter disbelief that I used to think this shit was all for real. Not that I question the truthfulness of the man's story as it was portrayed in the film, I don't have a reason to believe they were lying. But what I disbelieve is how completely sucked in I was that I actually felt that watching that film with an investigator would actually cause the room to fill with the spirit of god and that the emotional, tear jerking scenes would be faith promoting.

    The reality to me now is that it all looks and feels dishonest and trite. Just like the three ladies in that "OMG IT'S PINK!" video. And I'm not being cynical either. I'm a very spiritual and emotional person. (The two terms are mutually exclusive in the sane world.) It's just now that I'm more present with what is actually going on around me and with other people. More conscious.

    It's interesting the things I can now notice and are quite obvious to me that I never saw before, especialy in other people.
    These woman, deep down, don't actually believe in what they say. Their body language betrays their words. And it's no wonder some people, more enlightened than I was at the time as a missionary, could pick up on that in me and not be convinced by my testimony of "truth". Yeah, I was a terrible lair and deep down I knew I was lying too. I wasn't able to completely push it out of my conscious mind. It was a trigger for a shit load of depression while I was a missionary too.

    But like so many of us who were lost in that mind fuck of a religion, we stuffed that doubt deep into our unconscious mind and pretended life was wonderful. Our words can lie, our thoughts can lie but our bodies can always give us away. That is what I see coming from MOST of the church members I meet and see on TeeVee. The self deception manifests itself in the way people carry themselves.

  1. Andee Says:

    Andee,
    If I weren't such a gay boy I would ask you out on a date or something.

    You have no idea how much that made me smile. Thanks. lol

    I agree with your entire post. Not shocking, but true. We usually agree with each other.

    The people doing the manipulating are not aware they are doing the manipulating. It's leaders, it's local leadership and it's family members.

    Scary looking back at it, isn't it?

  1. Lynne Harter Says:

    Welcome to Stepford Planet. *blergh*