After asking about specific aspects of wearing garments, I felt that I wanted to get a very general idea of the day-to-day impact of garments on LDS women. This question was asked so that I could very simply categorize women's experiences as generally positive, generally negative, or neutral. Many women report that there are both positive and negative aspects of wearing garments, but this question is to see how women view the overall experience. The results from this question should be very significant to anyone who is interested in women's experiences and what is happening in LDS culture.
This first image is from the entire surveyed group, including Ex-Mormons. I'll reiterate something I've written about before, that a large majority of Ex-Mormon women lose any positive meaning behind garments when they deconstruct their beliefs, so they tend to view garments as part of a system of control. Many Ex-Mormon women also cite garments as one of the initial struggles they faced in the church which led to their faith transition. In short, there is not a lot of love lost between Ex-Mormon women and their garments.
This next image shows the results from women who are active in the church. As you can see, the percentages shift when we look at active, believing women with both positive and neutral experience going up, and negative experience going down by 20%. While the number of women reporting a negative experience drops, 43% of active women having a generally poor experience with their garments should not be downplayed.
I also think it's worth noting that there is a very small percentage, in each group, that report an overall positive experience with garments. In the survey results, there were thousands of women who feel that the good of garments outweighs the bad, and there were many people in the survey comments that adamantly defended garments, however many of those individuals are still not reporting a overall positive experience.
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