Friday, June 29, 2012

My latest report from my mother is that she just had a good time with her stake young women president. "She is a very sweet sister." The time in my life when I most often applied the word "sweet sister" to any and all Church women I came across was in the young women from Beehive to Laurel and on through college, at BYU. Among LDS women, sweetness is the preferred unit of measurement. Sweetness is different from kindness, which is a preferred behavior in LDS men. Sweetness implies not only being slightly more considerate than the kind person, but also a level of docility and "innate" nurturing that is separate from kindness. "She has a sweet spirit" is sometimes code for "she's unattractive, but is on the nicer end of the Mormon woman sweetness spectrum." Sail away sweet sister, you are loved.