I got my hair cut this morning by a woman who was raped while growing up in Utah and never reported it because of the shamefulness of it all. Can you imagine if something like that happened to you and it was harder for you to report it than to not report it?
I think there are huge problems with the way women are treated in Mormon doctrine and culture that lead to horrible outcomes like that. That lead to women feeling voiceless. Powerless. Abused.
What do Mormon women get? They get to disappear. Yeah, they might nurture children here on Earth, but then what? If we have a Heavenly Mother, she disappeared. Men become the nurturers. God, Jesus, all the highest callings in the church and even in the theology, all men.
Women are given nothing godly to aspire to except to be a background fixture (one of many wives possibly given that plural marriage is still allowed in temples) to their husband's glory.
In the temple, women have to bow their heads and say yes in agreement with the covenant to hearken to their husbands (this is a link to a video of the section of the endowment ceremony where women make this promise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VrsFEiTpsQ&feature=youtu.be&t=1749). They promise to become priestesses to their husbands while the husband is a priest to God.
This is not a church that helps women grow. It does not value women outside of their reproductive abilities and tells them that if they lose "purity" in that area that they would be better off dead (see Moroni 9:9, which teaches that chastity and virtue are more important than life itself). It does not give them a voice of their own.
It does not treat them with the dignity that human beings deserve and then covers up this horrible lack of respect by putting the voiceless, powerless women on a pedestal of flowery, empty, rhetoric.
I love how the person in this video puts it:
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