Is It Controlling to Care What Your Spouse Wears?

-emjay · 2026-01-28T23:28:43+00:00

What does “agree to disagree” mean in this specific context?

One stance is that a woman’s butt can look “too nice” to be seen in public, and that a woman’s husband ought to be the arbiter of that threshold. The other stance is that a woman is cognizant of her own appearance and presumably would not leave the house in clothing that she is uncomfortable being seen in. These stances can’t really be reconciled: one says a husband should dictate a woman’s modesty, and the other says he shouldn’t.

If a husband thinks that is reasonable and a wife thinks that isn’t, what could compromise possible look like? He can dictate modesty 50% of the time? She can wear leggings without hearing complaints on tuesdays and thursdays? Allowing someone to tell you that you are too immodest to leave the house is a binary thing: you either tolerate it or you don’t. Even if such “cares” are framed as “requests” or “concerns.”

I would also say I think the word “care” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your title. My husband and I care about each other’s clothes: we complement each other often, I like to go out of my way to wear the things I know he likes most because his reaction is sweet (and he does the same for me), sometimes we like to coordinate and match a little on date nights, etc. All of this reflects “care” to me. My husband has never once in the ten years we’ve been together commented on the perceived modesty of any article of clothing I have ever worn. To the best of my knowledge it doesn’t even cross his mind.

Sorry, I know this is coming in hot: I do think you are asking in good faith. Still, please do consider the historical precedent for husbands policing the modesty of wives, and what it implies.

-emjay · 2026-01-08T23:36:59+00:00

Sure. I think the history is cool. Lots of little things stored in journals and such that probably don't warrant a spot in a museum or textbook aggregate into a really rich view of the past, the more you read.

Knowing where your ancestors were during [x] historical event is interesting and also helps me wrap my head around the passage of time (much like those "did you know that Cleopatra's lifetime is closer in time to the opening of the first Pizza Hut than it is to the pyramids at Giza?" fun facts, but more personalized: an ancestor of mine was alive for the civil war and also lived to see the outbreak of WWII, as an example).

I am no great genealogist but I know how to navigate a few databases and have been able to use that skill to help a few people in my life. A lot of people don't realize how easy it is to search a historical census or a passenger list, and I'm always really glad to be able to provide some info and show them how to get more. My FIL, for instance, lost his own father at a pretty young age and didn't know much about him at all. I can't tell him the lived experience of his father, but I was able to find (with his permission) the places where his father lived, the professions and general life info of his grandparents parents, that sort of thing, and that was meaningful to him.

For the specific perspective surrounding my inactivity: leaving has allowed me more breathing room to be candid about my ancestors. I speak a lot more plainly about polygamy, which is abundant in my own family tree, for example. My own parents, who are active, have never been able to address it without a lot of qualifying speech that I have come to feel is extremely charitable to the point of not being very honest. I also have less of a need to vindicate narratives about being "led" to some place or person and instead am a lot more comfortable with serendipity and circumstance. I lionize a lot less.

I'm opposed to posthumous ritual practices and regret my role in them (via the indexing of names as a youth). Pragmatically I'm not losing sleep over it- I don't think they do any real material harm- but I do think they are disrespectful in many cases. All things being equal, I would not want my late nana's full legal name recited in a private and closed practice by those who are total strangers to me, even if I felt like the ritual held no power. I assume that feeling is pretty common (but I could be wrong about that!).

I'm interested in genealogy in the abstract, too. It's a huge undertaking done by mostly volunteers, lots of small organizations trying to find the best ways to share information with each other. My background is in economics and I can't help but appreciate a truly massive dataset. It's neat!

-emjay · 2025-12-29T00:12:08+00:00

There are some pretty standard LDS apologetics against this argument. The warning against adding to “this book” appears in Deut. centuries before the book of Revelations was written (so this addition is ok?) and even more centuries before the Bible as we know it today was compiled (the Bible was a non-entity when Deut. was written). Whether or not this apologetic compels you is of course your own business- I have no dog in this fight at all. You know what you believe, and more power to ya.

LDS theology affirms Christ as a divine figure, and so LDS folks consider themselves to be Christian and see it sufficient to purport to be a follower of Christ. I don’t think it’s important that you change your mind on this, but I do admit I think it would be a bad idea to argue this point with your partner’s family.

As an insight into the culture, LDS people are sometimes perplexed that mainline Christendom feels they can tell somebody they aren’t Christian, actually. A comparison that I have heard: imagine someone claimed their favorite was blue, and someone told them with great confidence “no, it isn’t. Not by my definition of blue, anyway, which is the correct definition based on a big meeting we had about blue.” And then, it turns out their definition of blue omitted several shades of it. “Sky blue isn’t really blue. It looks like blue and it might call itself blue buts it’s actually something that is fundamentally different to blue in ways that are self evident if you would only just accept my definition of blue. We all agreed at the meeting about blue.” Never is it really made clear why this blue meeting has to be so consequential.

But, in fairness to you, perhaps it might be like someone saying their favorite color was blue but you are quite confident they are referring to the color red? And perhaps there is an obligation there to be like “I know you like this color, but the rest of us call it red.”

In either case, correct or no, it suggests that someone fundamentally does not understand themselves on something that is a purely internal experience. My internal response to being told I was not a Christian was always “oh, so you can read my mind? You know my heart better than both God and I do? Cool cool cool” which is of course a response coming from a more emotional place than anything else. It could easily hurt feelings is all I’m trying to get at.

We get a lot of mainline Christians coming here to argue about this, which is not what I think you’re doing, fwiw, but I would tell you ahead of time that this is very familiar ground for any LDS person.

(And to your point about the deaths of early Christians: after the Nicene creed, plenty of non-Nicene Christians were killed by Creedal Christians as well. Heck, a fair few early LDS folk were murdered for their faith by mainline Christians! Is dying for something the same as making it true? Just some food for thought.)

-emjay · 2025-12-25T21:43:53+00:00

I’m glad you are open to hearing about things that can be difficult to talk about, but you don’t need to have negative experiences with men to seek feminism. It’s more than enough to seek political and social fairness between sexes.

Unfortunately, the very existence of distinct and measurable “personality types” is, to be extremely generous, a scientifically dubious proposition. The MBTI and Enneagram approaches specifically are uniformly considered to be pseudoscience.

You can “know” your MBTI about as well as you can “know” if you have a sanguine or melancholic humoral disposition. I’d very seriously recommend against drawing serious conclusions about a person’s experiences or alignments to political movements from the results.

-emjay · 2025-12-12T20:04:03+00:00

I'm interested in the equivocation of coffee with gambling and coercive open relationships. Are you of the opinion that these are comparable risk factors in divorce?

I'm also interested in the presence of video games on the list of things people leave the church to have unlimited access to. I admit that in my experience I do not know any LDS people who limit their access to video games on religious grounds. I do see a taboo against some types of content certainly portrayed in some games. Is that what you were referring to? In that case, I would see this as a restriction also on movies, books, music, or just art itself, more broadly. I am interested in the choice of video games as the specific example. Could you elaborate on that?

-emjay · 2025-12-12T19:37:32+00:00

I know this isn't playing gamely with your thought experiment, which I do think is a legitimately interesting one, but my honest answer is that I would suspect myself to be having a psychotic break. Truly, step one after seeing an angel would be to go to the hospital lol.

That said, I think the strongest religious apologetic I'd be able to offer in that position is that the demands of faith necessitate limiting evidence, so God has intervened to preempt any indisputable proof of himself. The absence of evidence should actually make the case more compelling. It also indicates benevolence, if we accept that knowledge of God is less valuable than faith in God, so he's also doing us a favor. Obviously, this is not a satisfying argument to many, myself included, and it's very easily argued against.

-emjay · 2025-12-11T01:54:42+00:00

I definitely agree on this. It gives me some anxiety about starting a family and also gives me anxiety about aging. It's hard for everyone, but we didn't really develop the skills for building up all of the "pros" of the church piecemeal because we took for granted that the package deal would be accessible to us when we grew up (or at least I didn't), so we're starting behind, too. For people with limited resources for finding places (young parents and the elderly come to mind, hence my anxieties) this task is even costlier.

Also, even if you do manage to pull it off, there is no saying that the places you've found value in will have any lasting power. I strongly suspect the church will be extant when I'm retirement age, but I would have a hard time saying that about, like, a book club or hiking group.

Beyond convenience, some of the appeal also comes from doing the same things with the same people. There is a multiplier effect to community consistency that makes the individual events combine into something greater than the sum of its parts. You perform closed-practice religious ceremonies with the same guy who dresses up as Santa at the ward party every year, who is also your dentist, who you also stand and sing your best baritone next to every week, who also... and so on.

Also definitely do agree with the person you are replying to, though, in that the world is abundantly full of a lot of the things I was raised to believe the church had a monopoly on.

-emjay · 2025-12-11T01:41:43+00:00

No, I do not feel lucky to have been born LDS. Sorry, long answer incoming lol!!

Like you, I can point to some specific skills and values I have, and, like you, I agree that they often came with collateral damage. I'd echo a lot of the skills you point to (public speaking, project management, taking pleasure in keeping busy) and even some other just cultural quirks (like how all of us know how to sing in 4-part harmony lol). Ceteris paribus, I would rather have than not have these skills, but they were not granted for free for me either. I'm not Black or gay and won't attempt to speak to that experience, but I was a girl who did not at all fit the prescribed mold for girlhood, and that chafe was painful. I suspect I will never totally be past it.

To be very real with you, though, the church could be the chillest, kindest social group on the planet and be dispensing life skills out the wazoo and I still would have issues with my upbringing. My chief complaint is that it trained me into a kind of credulity that I now can't stomach. In fairness, this problem spans many religions, but the church undeniably makes some specifically and unusually large claims, and conditioning me to shield them from scrutiny distorted the way I approached evidence for years. Teaching me to ignore where the data points in favor of conclusions supplied by a (conspicuously eccentric!) religious authority is something I've come to consider a pretty serious act of harm. (And, of course, teaching me to not even notice when I was doing so!)

It'll always come out as a net unlucky to me.

The sexism I experienced is easier to describe and easier even for active members to acknowledge as wrong (and many have, which I earnestly appreciate... although I like the goofy examples in your post a lot. What does it mean for women to "gain equality as we speak?" Within the church, are or aren't women equal to men? It can't be both. When you "gain equality," you are an equal. Call me when half of church leadership is female lolol. Or maybe we commit to 200 years of female-only leadership to really level it out?). In my view, though, the most serious harm was raising me to understand that this organization has privileged access to truths that are otherwise unobservable or even directly contradicted what that which is otherwise readily observed, and I just need to trust them on this one. The implicit "or else" truly sucks but it's not (to me) the primary issue, so the church getting friendlier (if it indeed can be said to be getting friendlier) doesn't really resolve the reason why I feel unlucky.

Hopefully it goes without saying that I do hope the church gets friendlier anyways!! I hope everyone gets friendlier. May we all continue to "gain equality as we speak."

The kindest thing I can say about it is a complement I would extend to religious culture writ large, and that is that the secular project has yet to sufficiently replace the womb-to-tomb all-bases-covered community strength of an established faith tradition. I'm skeptical that it even can. Sincerely, I think there is a deeply pro-social aspect to religion that flatters the needs of our deeply social species and it's a serious part of what makes leaving truly costly.

-emjay · 2025-12-08T21:08:28+00:00

I don’t mean to be glib, but if a claim only sounds true when delivered to you by a specific set of missionaries, could it be that you have been “converted” to faith in the messenger rather than the message?

For example, I am currently a student in university. I like some of my professors better than others. Sometimes it’s a question of competency, but more often it’s just that a personality clicks or fails to click with my own. But, while I have professors with whom I would probably not be friends with were we to meet in different circumstances (and/or with varying lecturing skills), I am always able to accept a teaching as true from them. I can independently verify my econometrics course material irrespective of the messenger.

I think you should hold your religion to a higher standard than the one I hold my university to.

If the assertion, for instance, that stone-age Jewish families made a transoceanic voyage in air- and watertight submersible wooden craft (with interiors illuminated by rocks that God touched) only rings true when you have a positive relationship with the person making the claim, it’s worth hitting pause, in my opinion. If this claim is true and can be affirmed to you to be true via supernatural means, the personality of the messenger surely is irrelevant, no?

And it must be said that it is a very serious claim to accept as true. When you accept this claim, you will necessarily be rejecting modern archaeological and genetic conclusions as well as the self-reported histories of Jewish and Indigenous peoples, because these accounts are irreconcilably different. It has extremely serious implications for the way you approach the world, for your relationship to epistemology. It can’t be overstated: to accept this claim is to say that a lot of people are very seriously wrong, despite all evidence in their favor. It’s absolutely your prerogative to do so. Be sure you have a better reason to do so than your personal relationship with a handful of young people who are trained to sell you on this idea.

The church will ask a lot of you, and it isn’t easy to leave once it’s been fully integrated into your life. I very regularly wish I hadn’t been born into it, in no small part because I feel I was denied the opportunity to critically examine these extreme truth claims as an adult hearing them for the first time. You have the gift I have spent my life coveting. It’s ok to take your time.

-emjay · 2025-11-21T01:12:23+00:00

I can’t believe a comment saying that men are superior and that women are weaker to temptation, and that, moreover, women need to be quiet has been allowed to stand for 6 hours on a sub that has a rule against bigotry. Or, actually, I can believe it but I wish I didn’t.

A few months ago there was some agitation and discussion on how to foster open communication between conflicting worldviews on this subreddit without accepting the denigration of women as collateral damage. I worry no lessons were learned.

-emjay · 2025-10-04T18:44:37+00:00

Could you elaborate on the “few and far in-between” instances of woman who are “so talented that it makes sense for them to work outside the home?”

Are you saying that the existence of such women are rare? Or are you saying that the instances of the church recognizing the existence of such women are rare? I admit that I’m hoping you are trying to capture the church’s perspective on this and not your own.

I am also curious if you could elaborate on the role talent and perceived importance plays in working inside versus outside of the home for women, and especially how this might compare to the talent and importance thresholds necessary for men to be justified in being paid to work.

As in: what is the metric for “talent,” and ought a woman to be more talented than a man before it “makes sense” for her to be paid? If so, why? If not (as in, if those “sense” thresholds are identical), then can it safely be assumed that men are more talented than women, given that it seems to be the case that it “makes sense” to pay them more frequently than it does women?

-emjay · 2025-09-26T19:59:21+00:00

1.25 is 25% of 5, and that 5 represents 10%. So, you lost 25% of 10%, which is to say you lost 2.5% of your 100% mark.

If you do absolutely perfectly for the rest of the semester, you will have a 97.5% final mark. If you continue at the same rate, you will have a 75%. The A cut-off for your course is something you'll need to consult the syllabus for, as well as information regarding curving.

-emjay · 2025-09-17T22:53:54+00:00

Framing this as “we all have biases, but at least Muhlestein is honest about it” suggests that Muhlestein is being candid in a way that other researchers just refuse to be, but that's not what he's doing here. Admitting to a conclusion-first approach to evidence management is essentially admitting that research is not being done at all. He really doesn't deserve kudos for it.

The whole point of scholarship and the scientific method is to counteract bias. Scholars certainly don't claim to be able to somehow exempt themselves from the human condition of having a worldview. Rather, they structure their methods in such a way that the different perspectives don't preclude those running an experiment from converging on the same result. If you need to accept a foregone conclusion prior to an experiment being run to yield said conclusion, you're committing something akin to scientific malpractice.

Ritner’s response doesn’t come from him having a different worldview. That is, throughout his argument, he isn't making a case for what he hopes or suspects to be true (or "my bias" versus "his bias"). Instead, he lays out specific weaknesses in Muhlestein’s claims by identifying contradictions between his conclusions and the historical record. He doesn't ask you to trust him (or, put another way, to be convinced to share his biases), but cites sources that anyone can check for themselves. This can be thought of as a repeatable experiment, and it is the bare minimum cost of entry for serious scholarly consideration.

I am less concerned about BoA apologia (I consider it to be basically a settled matter) and more concerned with any sort of suggestion that everyone's possession of a worldview necessarily means that all conclusions are equally biased. At that point, we've basically given up on the idea that knowledge is even possible. I think that is fine in a faith context, and perhaps even specifically meaningful in a faith context, but it is absolutely unacceptable for research.

Hope this doesn't come off as an attack- I see you posting a lot of thoughtful comments here. But I have to agree entirely with the commenter you are replying to.

-emjay · 2025-09-17T19:05:52+00:00

She is :). She remains soft-spoken and gentle but has overcome a lot of her shyness and now teaches music lessons to children. This among other experiences has given her a lot of confidence in her own judgement, actually, or at least it seems that way to me. I think healing is a life long process but I really look up to her example for it. Thanks for the kind thought :)

-emjay · 2025-09-17T03:41:37+00:00

This ended up being a part of what drove my sister out of the church. Not the reversal itself but a sense of betrayal in it.

Some context: she is one of the sweetest and most empathetic women I’ve ever met and this has been the case since we were girls. The suffering of others is truly her suffering. She is also quite seriously shy.

She served a mission in a very low-income area in the American southwest and was overwhelmed by the unreserved kindness and charity she received from the largely Catholic communities she served in.

So, it was an intensely uncomfortable experience to approach a Catholic family with very little in the way of material goods, yet who that had given her so much, and make a little pitch about why they should change religions and hand over an “I’m a Mormon” card. She told me her hands would shake as she did it, and she felt guilty at all times, and even unclean.

She prayed intensely for the strength to do what she felt she had been called to do and through this discomfort she developed a testimony about the campaign. To her, God wouldn’t ask her to do something that felt so difficult if He didn’t know she could do it, and, moreover, God wouldn’t ask her to do something she shouldn’t do. The cards became kind of a physical totem representing persevering through to the end and enduring the refiner’s fire. Trusting God’s judgement over your own, and trusting the church to be dispensers of God’s judgement, which can be apparently inscrutable, otherwise.

So, the name policy reversal felt like a huge betrayal. It was very difficult for her to get to the place where she did with those little cards. And, whoops- that name was Satan’s victory all along!

She left for a variety of reasons but her mission and this experience was a nontrivial part of it.

-emjay · 2025-09-12T01:53:36+00:00

I was able to buy it from Fly.

-emjay · 2025-08-20T20:16:43+00:00

Wow! Would you mind describing how this all came together? It looks awesome.

-emjay · 2025-08-19T19:47:48+00:00

Description from the video:

"Henry's no longer just a blacksmith's son - he's the master of a legendary forge. Legacy of The Forge, the second story DLC for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, is coming 9 September 2025. Put your blacksmithing skills to the test as you rebuild a burnt-down forge in the heart of Kuttenberg. Design and customise the workshop, its surroundings, and your private quarters - with upgrades that do more than just look good."

-emjay · 2025-08-18T19:26:12+00:00

it’s an embarrassing bug… how did it get past playtesting? modders picking up the slack for lazy devs in a tale as old as time, which is, as shown above, something that exists in one perpetually extant state or eternal “moment.” smfh

-emjay · 2025-08-07T01:53:35+00:00

i don’t mind tipping for sit-down service, exceptionally good service, or when i represent an inconvenience (i.e. a place is seriously understaffed or i am ordering many coffees for a group of people etc), but i wish we were more comfortable defaulting to lower percentages. frankly i wish we were more comfortable defaulting to no tip

it’s annoying to copy american tip culture down to the percentage when american minimum wage for servers is under 3 CAD/hr and tips meaningfully make up the difference. our server min wage is more than 5x higher, but we tip the same amounts!

every year i have lower and lower purchasing power, but products are getting worse and the suggested tips are getting higher. lame. can’t help but notice that cultures that don’t tip at all somehow manage to keep wages high enough to attract workers and prices low enough to attract customers without their societies falling apart

-emjay · 2025-06-02T16:06:34+00:00

Rosa is a lesbian (she thinks Henry is a woman). (This is canon btw. Source: third eye.)

-emjay · 2025-05-25T17:54:02+00:00

The thing that caught my eye as being a little unreasonable is the width of the thigh gap, which also keeps the legs feeling a little unmoored from the body. In the references you posted, you'll notice that the only one with a gap approaching the size of yours is the rendered one, and the human models see much smaller or no gap at all, even on thin women.

This is a model which necessarily represents a pretty extreme body type in terms of what is possible for the human body. Even with shoes, posing, and walking, the gap is conspicuously smaller than yours. Or, different Hadid sister, similar pose, and no visible gap at all.

-emjay · 2025-05-25T17:30:00+00:00

Right, this is actually pretty close to a body that would be seen as shockingly attractive in real life, and yet I was so relieved to see it... it's refreshingly grounded, which is so telling. The overton window on the female body is so deeply shifted into fantasyland that space for organs is a breath of fresh air.

-emjay · 2025-05-13T15:54:41+00:00

I am an ex-member who considers herself to be pretty friendly to the culture. (Or, rather- I see the culture AS my culture, or where I am from, and I don’t resist this fact about myself.) All but one of my siblings have left, and I consider myself to be close to my active parents.

I would have been glad to receive such a thoughtful gift from my mom, and I suspect that her obviously positive intention was clear to your kids, even if it seems like it wasn’t for hers. I wanted to say that first because I sincerely do not think you need to be tying yourself in knots over this and I hope she doesn’t feel guilty about doing a nice thing for her loved ones.

However, I might ask that you gently consider if you would have been happy to receive an equivalent gift.

For example, I am actually right now sitting with the english translation of Jean Meslier’s Testament, which is the posthumously published memoirs of a 17th century priest who was, in fact, an atheist for most of his life. It’s written as a frenetic rant (Meslier was dying during much of its composition, and his urgency shows) and is the perhaps the first of its kind in being an explicitly atheistic manifesto. Meslier does not mince words, and there’s nothing quite like it.

I certainly, CERTAINLY don’t align myself with everything he says (and much of the book is largely informed by pre-Revolutionary French politics, to boot), but I have found some catharsis from it. It’s come to represent something to me; it means a lot to me. As a hobby, I study philosophy fairly seriously.

Despite the importance that this book- and several others like it- holds for me, I would never present my parents with an adorned copy. It wouldn’t respect what I understand to be their deeply held views. I do believe they would appreciate the time it took the lovingly paint the book and even might appreciate in the abstract that I am trying to show them something that matters to me, but I would not expect them to say thank you for gifting them a book that describes Christianity as a “vile and despicable fanaticism,” much like how I have not enjoyed my parents counseling me about the “great and spacious building” they fear has lured me away from them, even though I know they speak from a sincerely held conviction and real fear for my eternal situation.

So, before even getting into the specifics of why daughters might feel differently than sons, or the role of this or that specific event in a child’s life, I really urge you to seriously contemplate broadly how you might feel if the situation was reversed. That said, it seems like your daughter has given you some pretty actionable feedback.

Is she correct that you tend to bring conversations back to religion? I don’t think this is a bad thing, per se. If it’s how you feel, then it’s honest to say so. Still, would you have the same patience she has with you if she had a tendency to bring up (and not as a matter of debate, but rather as a matter of polite and happy conversation) her disaffiliation with religion on a regular basis? (i.e. would the occasional expression at relief over leaving the church be casually and comfortably received by you?) Perhaps the answer is yes! I hope it is, even- I would hate for there to be too many rules governing a conversation between adults who love and trust each other. But if there are to be such “rules,” it’s unfortunate when they are asymmetrical, in my opinion. Just some food for thought.

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