Keep Sweet and Wear Your Sleeveless Garments (or Don’t)

ATHENA: Last week the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sort of accidentally on-purpose announced a change to the style of LDS temple garments – the sacred underwear that faithful Mormons are expected to don when they first attend the temple and then continue to wear throughout their lives.

This isn’t the first time the LDS church has changed the garment design. It’s not even the first time in my lifetime such changes have been made. But this change is an even bigger deal than other previous changes have been. In each prior instance, the changes have had the effect of making the garment less obvious, less obtrusive, less inconvenient to wear, relative to earlier versions. They’ve still been obvious, obtrusive, and inconvenient, though, even in their scaled-down iterations. This latest one is the “skimpiest” version yet. It’s – gasp – sleeveless! There’s even a version for women that appears to accommodate going commando in hot climates. (Sorry, fellas, you don’t get the commando option unless you want to wear the women’s “slip” or “slip skirt” version. That’s up to you. Don’t ask, don’t tell.)

The Church’s garment designs no longer affect me personally. I was PIMO (physically in/mentally out) for several years before I stopped wearing garments completely, and that was decades ago. I’m not going back to them now, sleeves or no sleeves. This new change is hitting so many people, especially women, so hard that I can’t help thinking about my own experience with garment-wearing.

Full disclosure: There was literally nothing good about wearing garments for me, from the first moment I put them on until the moment I took them off for the last time. If you don’t want to know the details, stop reading now, but my experience respresents recent history.

BRIEF HISTORY OF GARMENTS

First, a reminder: temple garments became a feature of Mormonism because the men in charge told the members that their god said endowed Mormons needed to use specific underwear to remind them of who they had sworn fealty to. With that in mind, here’s my back-story: I was married in the SLC temple in mid-1979. As was common at the time, I received my endowment the day before. This means the night before I was married I was trying to figure out how to comfortably wear the women’s version of what amounted to an ill-conceived one-piece union suit. It had seams and gathers in very inconvenient and uncomfortable places, and a gaping opening and vertical butt flaps to allow for personal hygiene activities (and – according to one obnoxious relative – to allow my husband easy access for quickie sex) without completely disrobing. The women’s version of garments also included itchy lace around the neckline, presumably to make me feel more feminine about wearing the ugliest underwear ever invented.

Despite what Google may have to say about it, at the time I was married, 2-piece garments were not available to your average Mormon in the pews. That was me – nobody special. My job was to wear the secret underwear and do as I was told. So I did. I wore the underwear.

The only option was the one-piece thing. Despite my best attempts to find a size that fit properly, there was no size that fit my body. My big boobs, small waist, long torso, and relatively short legs meant one body part or another would be over-exposed (cleavage), over-covered (legs/knees), or (the worst) short-sheeted (crotch).

I don’t remember exactly when the 2-piece option became available – it may have been late 1979, but it seems like it was a bit later – 1980ish – before they opened up sales to everyone after what apparently had been an enthusiastically successful test-market.

Nevertheless, the new ones weren’t great. The choices of fabrics and sizes were still sadly unaccommodating for anyone who had textile or allergy issues or unusual sizing needs,  but the new version was still an improvement. Yes, the previous version was that bad. It was so bad, in fact, that it didn’t even make it into this meme:

In this image, the hundred year gap from 1879 to 1979 should include a knee-length, short-sleeved, scoop-necked version of the one-piece suit, but honestly, I would have left it out, too.

Nevertheless, when the two-piece design came out, women throughout the Mormon Church rejoiced that the brethren had heard their prayers and offered an alternative to the horror story that was the one-piece women’s garment. The design change wasn’t heralded as a revelation, though. Not even the old men in the big red chairs had the brass to make that claim. As I recall, no specific information was offered other than something vague about “the changing needs of the church.” Interpret that however you’d like. At the time, I just accepted it. I was trying to be obedient and compliant and faithful and all of those other things good Mormon women are supposed to be.

Meanwhile, over the next several years, I discovered exactly how difficult it was to be a fully compliant garment wearer. My spouse didn’t have any serious difficulties wearing garments – the men’s versions (one-piece or two-piece) were clearly designed to suit men’s needs and preferences. He never had to make any special adjustments to make them fit or stay where they were supposed to go. The biggest issue he had was that the fabric would stain from perspiration, and, after awhile, it would absorb odors that simply wouldn’t come out. No problem. Just get new ones, right? It was tough on a newlywed student budget to replace our underwear so frequently, but we could usually count on getting new ones as gifts for Christmas and birthdays. What young married adult wouldn’t love getting underwear from their parents for Christmas?

If my spouse was hard on his garments, it was nothing compared to what was going on with me and mine. Remember – even the ones that fit best didn’t actually fit. I hadn’t been wearing them even a week when I got a heat rash literally all over my body, followed in quick order by a UTI and a yeast infection.  Those issues literally never let up in all the years I wore garments, regardless of whether they were one-piece or two-piece. I won’t go into detail about the unholy mess of wearing-garments-while-on-my-period. There was no solution that would ever not be awful. To say I was physically miserable every moment I wore garments would be a magnificent understatement.

And yet I persisted. I wore them because I promised I would. I felt ugly, smelly, and foul wearing them, and I felt enslaved. I had been told that if I stopped wearing them, my eternal soul was imperiled. That didn’t feel to me like free agency. It felt like coerced compliance: doing what I was commanded to avoid punishment. I didn’t want to make god angry, so I kept wearing them, and I kept getting UTIs and yeast infections and heat rashes. Apparently god didn’t care if I was sick all the time. I was also working for the Mormon Church, which meant I had to keep my membership in good standing. I couldn’t risk doing anything that might jeopardize my job. When you work every day with the same people who go to church with you on the weekend, there is absolutely no freedom of anything. No privacy. No independent thought or action. Not if you want to keep your job.

And then I got pregnant. After nine years and several miscarriages, I was finally able to carry and deliver a full-term healthy baby. That pregnancy took a toll on my body that I never anticipated and never really recovered from. I didn’t even know it was possible to ooze fluids from so many different places at once. Between hormone changes, trying to breastfeed a colicky baby, recovering from preeclampsia and labor and delivery, and every other postpartum thing, I was exhausted, depressed, and frustrated. Something had to give. I decided that thing was garments. They were an added layer of annoyance, infection, discomfort, and mess that I simply couldn’t deal with anymore. Wearing garments was a burden I was no longer willing to carry. I stopped wearing them.

I told myself it was just until I got my body under control again, but I think even then I knew I was done. I knew I wasn’t going back to my job any time soon, so that was no longer an issue. Eliminating that extra layer of interference in my most personal physical activities was the start of healing my spirit as well.

“Getting my postpartum body back under control” turned out to mean claiming my body as my own and deciding what kind of underwear to use based on what met my needs instead of what some old men in business suits thought I should wear. Asserting sovereignty over my body allowed me to become more open to the idea of claiming sovereignty over my spirit as well.

SOCIAL PRESSURE TO CONFORM

My spouse stopped wearing garments around the same time I did, so he didn’t care what I wore. But hoooboy, a lot of other people sure seemed to care, particularly my mother and my mother-in-law. My mother would regularly want to hug me, something she had only rarely done when I was growing up. I was pretty sure she was trying to determine through her hugs whether I was wearing garments. She never said anything, but she didn’t have to. Her altered behavior toward me made her concern clear.

My mother-in-law, though, didn’t hold back. She first detected a change in my personal attire when she noticed a panty line while I was bent over on the floor, changing my baby’s clothes during a family gathering. She blurted out, “You’re not wearing your garments!”

Of the half dozen people in the room, I was quite sure it was nobody else’s business what kind of underwear I had on. I was furious. I didn’t say a word. I picked up my baby, left the gathering, and spent the next two hours sequestered in a back bedroom, rage-crying about the insanity of people caring about my underwear choices.

Somewhere along the way, someone must have clued my mother-in-law in. She never said another word specifically about garments, but she started making inquiries about my level of devotion to the church. I’m sure she felt compelled to bring me back into the fold to try to save her son. She only stopped badgering me when he finally told her, much later, to butt out. She also never apologized. We managed to ignore that particular bump in the road over the years that followed, but I’ve never forgotten the insult, the attempt to shame me into repentance. I don’t hold it against her now – I know she was diligently doing what she had been taught to do – but it still serves as a stark reminder to me that in high demand religion, free agency for thee doesn’t necessarily mean free agency for me.

This was probably my first conscious awareness that my life was controlled by men, men who neither knew nor cared about me as an individual, as a female, as a person, at all. I was simply a cog in the machine that powered Mormon patriarchy. My willingness to wear the underwear was a signal to them that they had me exactly where they wanted me – in the pews on Sunday, and in the trenches the rest of the time – doing exactly whatever they, in their infinite apostolic wisdom, thought I should be doing with my one precious life.

Yes, these observations are all with the benefit of hindsight.

Yes, I played along to get along for way too long.

Yes, I feel terrible for all the time I wasted and all the ways I propped up patriarchy for the benefit of a powerful male elite, and for all the times I acted toward other people the same way my mother-in-law acted toward me. Patriarchy only gets away with this kind of nonsense because women enable it. As soon as we collectively act to prevent this abuse of power, patriarchy will crumble.

I’m still angry that I can’t get that time back. I can’t get back all the money I gave them. I can’t get back the beautiful healthy body I pledged to the church and to my utterly unappreciative (now ex) spouse so many years ago. I can’t get back my youthful naïveté, my belief that there was someone out there who loved and cared for me even more than I did myself. That’s all lost. In its place is this: I now love and protect myself as well as I am able. I now know that my choice of underwear or other clothing, along with a whole host of other things, is my business, my choice. I now understand that nobody has the right to pass judgment on my worth or worthiness, or to make me feel inferior or to consign me to whatever version of hell they’re peddling this week.

I understand all of this now because wearing garments was the beginning of the end for me. I wasted nearly ten years of my life wearing prescribed underwear to please a god who would never be pleased with me. When I finally connected with the god-ness that is an innate part of myself, I realized I could stop wearing garments and do what I needed to do to live a happy, healthy, healing life. So I chose to stop.

Part of that healing journey includes writing about my experiences so other women like me won’t feel they’re alone. Another part of that healing journey includes giving myself permission to be mad and stay mad about what the church stole from me. That anger fuels my efforts to raise awareness and support others who are trying to find a new path after breaking free from the constraints of authoritarian patriarchy. I’ve learned that the leaders of the church are afraid of angry women. That’s why they want us to smile, stay sweet, stay in our lane, and stay quiet. That’s why they tell us that contention is of the devil. That’s why they really don’t like it when women talk to each other or gather in groups that aren’t supervised by men. That’s why we’re discouraged from expressing even righteous indignation, lest we get used to feeling our feelings.

HEALING

I am going to live mad about all of that and let that anger propel me to action. I’m not talking about parades or protests or even a letter-writing campaign. The church will do whatever it wants to do regardless of those things. It is accountable to no one and acts only for its own benefit, its own bottom line. What I will do is continue to speak out in places where priesthood-holders do not dominate, to give individual members gentle permission to decide for themselves what works or doesn’t work for them.

This will take up much of the rest of this life and probably carry over into whatever I end up doing in my next life. On behalf of myself, my mother, my grandmothers, their mothers, their grandmothers, and their grandmothers and great-grandmothers before them, I’m calling you out, Brethren.

Yeah, I’m angry and I’m going to stay that way. It’s ok to be angry. Jesus showed us that, too. Actually, I’m going to die mad about it, and when I get to the other side, I’m going to go get Emma. We’ll call Joseph Smith and Brigham Young forward to repent sincerely and publicly for all the harm they’ve “inspired” over the past 200 years. The church may never apologize, but those two absolutely can. If I have anything to say about it, they will. If you’d like to bear witness, feel free to join us.

~~Athena~~

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