The books he cited at the beginning of his talk were not books by LDS feminists, and he didn’t see in these books a claim that women don’t need men. These were sources he was drawing on to mark the changing social structure of the West, without wager value judgments. The point of citing the statistics about jobs, degrees, etc., was not to say that men need to get more competitive and take over the public sphere; the point was to emphasize the fact—and it’s an important one—that one response men have had to the call for gender equality is to begin to retreat from the public sphere. And isn’t it a bit unfair to ask whether we need women men can trust in response to his talk? To whom would he have addressed that sort of statement? And wouldn’t you have been frustrated to hear him tell the men that, since it would imply it was their responsibility to produce women worthy of trust? And I think you entirely missed the point of the story about the young man in India. Elder Christofferson was careful to note that his situation was awful. The point was that the guy actually did something about it, instead of giving up. I too would have liked to hear a statement about how we ought to overturn such situations, but it would have been a tangential point, and he can’t be faulted for not making it in that context (and, anyway, I think he did gesture toward it). Are there worse things than unemployment? Sure. But if you were to tell that to Elder Christofferson, I think he’d be baffled by anyone having a concern about him having said what he said. I don’t think he was trying to establish a universal, timeless hierarchy of awful experiences.

Can we listen with a bit more charity? Can we figure out what can be learned from a talk, even when some of it doesn’t seem to work for us? Can we lose the paternalistic spirit when we listen to someone we’ve sustained as a prophet, a seer, and a revelator? I’m not saying the Brethren are perfect, nor am I saying that I fall down to worship every word that’s said in General Conference. But I don’t see why we should feel the need to criticize and nit-pick instead of finding what’s worth celebrating and promoting here.

It was not remotely anti-feminist. It was however, addressing what it means to be a man when that role seems to be unnecessary and underappreciated in modern culture, except for the few guys already on top.