NOM

I am asking this question for a 17-year-old girl who is new to the ward. She was directed to a Sunday School class for boys ages 12-14 and all the young women combined. The boys over age 14 were sent to the Mission Prep Class. She was told it was for boys only. What's the scoop with this discrimination?

I hope the answer to this question is not sacred and secret because I would really like to know whether this class should actually be open to young women wishing to pursue a mission. Is it a church-wide policy to exclude mission bound girls?

Several years ago, I think after the new mission age announcement, my then 16 or 17 year old son was invited to go to a mission prep class. It was going to be held on Sunday evenings, like 2 or 3 times a month. Girls were invited to particpate also, so this is something new or a result of extreme sexist leadership in your ward/stake.

Not totally related, but I was really upset about this additional Sunday night meeting away from family when my son was also attending early morning seminary, young men, etc. So I wrote a letter to the stake presidency asking why they couldn't hold these prep classes during seminary a few times a month or Sunday School, and stated that my son didn't need to be taken away from our family by church any more than he already was. (I posted the letter on the old board.) They responded that they couldn't interrupt the oh-so-important curriculum. I talked my son out of attending, I think he went once.

You expect YM to concentrate on mission prep with a nubile temptress in the room?

No, that's pretty sexist and wrong. I'd call someone out on this. For as much as I think my SP is a bit of a self-adulating buffoon, he's fairly sensitive to issues like this, and this would not happen in the stake I'm in. If it did, I would say something. I don't know the statistics, but I'm pretty confident sister missionaries now make up a sizeable portion of the missionary force, and it's pretty stupid to exclude them.

This class is offered during the Sunday School portion of the service. The 17-year-old would rather have attended the missionary prep class than being in the young women's group where the next oldest girl was 14.

Found a website talking about the mission prep class that displayed a picture of both boys and girls in that class. My initial impression was that this was due to some local misogynistic interpretation of who should attend, but I am wondering if having the class in place of regular Sunday School requires this discrimination to assert religious male-female roles.

In my ward it's open to all HS Seniors, young adults, and senior citizens considering serving.

Preventing girls from attending is wrong and would annoy me.

However I am equally disturbed by the trend I am seeing that girls are pretty much assuming that they should go. Is this happening everywhere?

Personally I think neither gender should feel forced to go and I am left wondering when it became a requirement for boys to go and whether the lowering of the age for girls was a deliberate attempt at making girls think they need to go too?

I think it shows that some leaders don't consider that girls can be "real' missionaries. After all, they don't have the magic power.

LostGirl wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2017 12:12 am Personally I think neither gender should feel forced to go and I am left wondering when it became a requirement for boys to go and whether the lowering of the age for girls was a deliberate attempt at making girls think they need to go too?

Spencer W. Kimball: "Every worthy young man should fill a mission." I'm not sure when it happened, but in my family, it was pretty much a commandment, and my siblings started fulfilling said "commandment" in the late 70's.

I'm not sure they were smart enough to forecast that the age change would make more young ladies think they "should fill a mission" too, but it has definitely turned out that way...

LostGirl wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2017 12:12 am Preventing girls from attending is wrong and would annoy me.

However I am equally disturbed by the trend I am seeing that girls are pretty much assuming that they should go. Is this happening everywhere?

Personally I think neither gender should feel forced to go and I am left wondering when it became a requirement for boys to go and whether the lowering of the age for girls was a deliberate attempt at making girls think they need to go too?

There is a part of me that feels a bit of schadenfreude over the idea young women are feeling pressured to serve, with the idea that's what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Objectively though I realize that's not entirely fair, ideally both sexes would be spared the abuses of missions and mission expectations rather than both being subjected too them.

Hagoth wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2017 6:41 am I think it shows that some leaders don't consider that girls can be "real' missionaries. After all, they don't have the magic power.

It's not just leaders, my mission was only a decade or so ago and the mission culture was pretty sexist against Sister missionaries going all the way down into the trenches. A fair amount of that can be attributed to the mission leadership, but Elders came in predisposed to gobble up sexist even if they didn't enter the field with the ideas already firmly entrenched.

One of the arguably good results of lowering the mission ages was removing the stigma on sister missionaries that they had failed to get married by age 21 leaving a mission as the consolation prize at age 21 for a faithful LDS woman (insert "sad trombone" sound). Many female high school graduates can make plans to head out on a mission within months of graduation without feeling the LDS cultural expectation of marriage at 19. I am fairly confident that my wife would have taken advantage of this option had this been available to her.

This discussion makes me wonder how the demographics have changed since lowering mission ages in 2012. There were usually 15 to 20 sister missionaries and 150 to 170 elders. Having two sister companionships in a district was unusual. Having no sisters in a district was common enough.

But surely those ratios have changed by now. Does anyone have any data on this? The optimistic projections of the total number of missionaries never showed the breakdown by age or gender, at least that I recall. Young men are regularly encouraged to attend and early Sunday morning mission prep class in my stake. We had a general authority on Stake Conference weekend recently and it was just short of mandatory for all members of the Priest quorum to attend since a member of the Seventy would be there.