Well said.

I find your thoughts to be insightful and remarkably cogent, especially when compared to some of the thoughts already expressed on this thread, e.g. #s 18, 20, and 29.

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Ass. jur. Christina Palm
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It was never even suggested in all my years in YW that girls could masturbate, with the pleasant result that I kept doing it guilt free for years. I’m pretty sure I would never have confessed to the bishop, even if I had realized what I was doing was wrong.

I think when we take that into consideration we may not know how many women actually struggle with these issues.

Hoish-LOL-at least you have an excuse to use…you were made that way!!!!

I just think that when you do so it is important to acknowledge that there are individual as well as group differences in order to avoid overgeneralzations.

I agree.

I guess in this area I don’t really see the value of pointing this out all the time.

Neither do I.

But with different criteria, we can get a different result. For instance, if righteousness is defined as the readiness to risk one’s life or physical well-being for a stranger (surely we can agree that is a Christ-like attribute), males are superior.

I agree.

For instance, how many of the petty disputes and interpersonal squabbles you were called upon to referee among the members of your ward involved females only, beginning with the beehives? My guess would be at least 75%.

Closer to 95%. And it involved all ages.

I’ve been present multiple times in temple sealings where the officiator sternly informs the prospective groom that his wife is a better person than he and he should treat her accordingly, and nobody even raises an eyebrow. I find that horrifying.

I agree. Let me clarify my observations. There are more active women than men. And there are more women members than men. But in the case where both the man and the woman are faithful members of the church, and both are temple-worthy, my observation is that the spirituality is roughly comparable. And there are many cases where I would consider the man to be more spiritual than his wife. So while as a group, there are reasons why women may be considered more spiritual than men, my personal opinion is that the generalizations do NOT hold true in individual cases.

I see great danger to the church if we continue with this approach. Just as I believe our well-meant social policies over the past 60 years have inflicted damage on the black family by rendering the father superfluous, I’m afraid we will pay a price for our continued diminuation of Mormon men in comparison to their wives. In the last 100 years we have gone from a church rhetoric which unabashedly praised men at the expense of women to the opposite pole, where to even question the superiority of women or the baseness of men is mildly heretical.

Good point.

I have always been very frustrated at leaders implying men are spiriutal idiots. Not only does it keep men from wanting to come to church, but it also offers an excuse for men not to live up to their spirituality.

Once again, I agree. But then we non-spiritual types will look for any way to rationalize our transgressions.

Regarding issues like porn and masturbation, which are largely considered male problems, I wonder how women feel who do commit such sins (and everyone agrees the number is not zero). Are they guiltier than men committing the same sins, and should they be more ashamed than men, not just for sinning, but for transgressing gender expectations?

In the individual cases I dealt with, I never saw that the women felt any worse than the men. It was pretty consistent embarassment and guilt between the genders.

Does that make women inherently better? I argue that it does not.

I’m not so sure about your use of the word “better.” What I’ve heard church leaders say is that women have a proclivity or disposition for doing good. I don’t think that is the same as “better.”

If this study corrected for that I’d be very curious to see how they did so.

Those issues are discussed in the section entitled “men and women” in this interview written for a non-technical audience.

The research with mice is particularly compelling to me, because social pressure is not such a factor in rodents, and because experimenters were able to do tests and then change the hormonal makeup by means such as castrating the specimens or hormonal injections, and the subsequent test results were influenced by current hormonal status. And the different pathways that have been mapped in male and female rodents.

As background, in the US it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that federally funded studies or trials for new drugs to be approved by the FDA had to include women. Prior to that, researchers thought their menstrual cycles would make women unreliable subjects, so they weren’t included in clinical trials of most pain-killing drugs; there was just the assumption that if it worked in men, it would work with women (which kind of seems outrageous when you read Mogil’s ideas on pink and blue versions of pills). So the first big studies were funded in the late 1990s and published in the early- to mid-2000s and we’re just starting to see translational research, bridging the gap between basic science and clinical practice.