Browsing Tag

modesty

Feminism

guarding your heart and victim blaming

[trigger warning for abuse and rape]

guard heart

Her.meneutics recently ran an article titled “Guard your Heart” doesn’t mean Christians can’t date. It was interesting, and I think worth reading. Didn’t say a whole lot that was particularly new to me, but it made me moderately happy to see thoughts like these running on a “mainstream” discussion outlet.

What really caught my attention was in the comments. The amazing Dianna Anderson pointed out a few statements in the article that had left me with a bad aftertaste I couldn’t identify, but tasted familiar. There are moments when I read something, and it just… feels off somehow, but I don’t know what it is. Dianna hit the nail on the head, beginning by quoting the statements that had just not felt right to me:

“‘A number of my female friends learned to guard their hearts from a parent after years of emotional abuse. Until they did so, they were wracked with shame and insecurity. Their wellsprings were not life giving, but toxic.‘ That’s pretty victim-blamey. So’s this: “Unwise dating relationships can have a similar effect. When a woman gives her heart too freely to men who might abuse it, she endangers the wellspring of her soul.” A woman being vulnerable is not the reason she gets hurt by other people. A woman gets hurt by other people BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE CHOOSE TO HURT HER. End of.”

Two thumbs up to Dianna. I couldn’t have said it better. But, then there was this response, from Sharon Miller, the author of the article:

“Dianna, I am curious about how and where you locate personal agency. “Victim” is not an identity we should ever use to label a person’s identity. Even when a person is totally victimized by another, they have agency in how they respond to the victimization. Labeling women as complete and utter victims, to my mind, is the most agency-robbing thing we can do. What’s more, it leaves no space for acknowledging personal folly or sin. While some women are victimized due to no fault of their own, being hurt by a man does not, by definition, make a woman a victim.” [emphasis added]

Oy vey.

My reaction to Sharon’s comment was visceral, and immediate. I could instantly feel myself recoiling, and even now, as I’m writing this, I’m having to fight back nausea. A headache is fluttering around the edges of my vision. I don’t want to write about this– I don’t want to touch this with a ten-foot pole, but I have to. Not just for me, but for every woman I’ve ever known who has been damaged by teachings like this one.

First, let me start out by acknowledging that there can be power, for some, in adopting a “victory over the victim mentality.” I know, because it helped my mother who experienced a lifetime of abuse. Throwing off the “victim label,” as she puts it, allowed her to begin the healing process. She refused to be defined by what had happened to her, or limited by it. She didn’t want to see herself as a victim, because, to her, that gave her abuser more power over her, even though he was gone.  She was done with letting him control her thoughts and her actions, her emotions and her responses. She wanted no more of it.  Claiming “victory” allowed her to do that.

But, for me, being instructed by pastors and teachers and professors and counselors that I needed to take responsibility for my “personal folly and sin” left me broken, damaged, lost, and confused for three long years after my abusive relationship ended. I desperately wanted– and “desperate” isn’t a strong enough word, here– to do the right thing. I wanted to be the kind of girl I had been taught to be. I needed to acknowledge responsibility for my own actions, repent for my own sin. Of course, John* had sinned against me, he had abused me–but that didn’t mean that I was a perfect person. There were still things that I could have done better, lessons that I could learn from my mistakes.

That mentality nearly destroyed me.

For the first month after John had broken our engagement, I was determined that I could change. I could make myself a better person– someone more worthy of him. He was right — I hadn’t been submissive enough. I’d been stubborn. I’d had the sheer arrogance to tell him what he could and couldn’t do (like he couldn’t call me a “God damn fucking bitch,” or like telling him it would be a bad idea for him to quit his job, my trust fund isn’t supposed to pay for his college education). I was determined to mold myself into the woman he needed me to be– to take responsibility for what I had done wrong, to own it.

After it became clear to me that getting back with him would be a horrendously bad idea, I still tried to take responsibility for what I had done wrong. To this day, thinking back to some of the situations that I “allowed” myself to be in, that I spent three years “taking responsibility for” make me sick. I have literally vomited when I thought back to some of the things “I had done.” I can’t speak about some of these incidents without bordering on hysteria and panic, the shame is so powerful and overwhelming. Some of them, I will never be able to talk about without anyone. I . . . can’t. Reliving some of those memories are painful enough that they leave me feeling violated and crippled all over again. The mental gymnastics I go through to never have to think about those moments can be exhausting.

Two memories, in particular, are so horrific to me that they created a deep phobia I’d never had before the abuse. They happened in two different bathrooms, so to this day I have a deep-seated need to have an utterly immaculate, bleached from top-to-bottom, scrubbed-within-an-inch-of-my-life bathroom. If it’s not clean, it’s like an itch, or a weight dragging me down. Not having a clean bathroom creates an insidious feeling inside of me that I’m the dirty one.

Eventually I began having mild to severe panic attacks, more and more things were triggering me, and it took me a long time to see it but I was depressed– nearly suicidal, at several points. I couldn’t tell which way was up, and “owning my mistakes” and “taking responsibility for my sin and folly” were tearing me apart.

It was my husband, then my boyfriend, that first helped me see the truth. It was the first time he had ever seen me triggered. I’d told him, very briefly, that my ex had been abusive and had raped me. But I didn’t tell him the things I was struggling with, so the first time I was triggered and ended up in the middle of a full-blown panic attack, I expected him to abandon me. I expected him to see me for the broken, damaged woman I saw myself as and run away screaming.

Instead, he held me, smoothed my hair, let me shake and cry and rock until the panic subsided, and he was quiet. He didn’t say anything, just touched me and comforted me. When the panic attack was over, I started trying to explain what had happened, and I was using the only words I knew how to communicate– the words of victim-shaming. The words that placed fifty percent of the blame solidly on my shoulders. The words that took responsibility for my sin, that tried to do what I’d been taught was the “Christian” thing.

He would have none of it. He stopped me in the middle of a sentence, made me look him square in the eye, and he said these words:

This was not your fault.

I protested. I denied it. I told him, well, of course, not everything was my fault, but there was still things that happened that I was to blame. He stopped me– again, gently taking my chin in his hand and wiping my tears away.

No. This is Not. Your. Fault. You have nothing to be ashamed of. 

I couldn’t accept the truth in that. I couldn’t see it– I had been so completely blinded by the Christian rhetoric of victim-shaming that I was trapped into a mentality that told me it was sin, that I was a sinner and therefore culpable. But my husband took me into his arms and told me, simply, that I was not responsible for what had happened to me. That John had taken some of my strongest qualities– my loyalty, my stubbornness, my dedication, my commitment, my inability to surrender or give up– he had taken all of those things and used them against me.

John had sought to control, dominate, and abuse– and the abuse kept me living in fear. The choices I had made were not really choices at all– telling myself that I should have kept fighting, even after John had torn a gash in my knee with his watch and put his hand over my throat, that it was a choice to submit to him– ignored the very real threat I was under. He had me so mentally twisted and living in so much fear that doing something out of self-preservation was not a “choice” I made. It was not “folly.”

My healing began when I realized that I was a victim of abuse. That there was absolutely nothing that I needed to “take responsibility for.” That I, in fact, did NOT have the “agency in how I responded” to the abuse.

The abuse I suffered was not some perverted form of heavenly punishment for my sin. The shame and guilt were not the result of my conscience, or the “pricking of the Holy Spirit”– they were caused by damaging indoctrination I’d been put through that told me from ever single angle– from modesty and purity teachings down the line to complementarian rhetoric— that being a woman makes me responsible for any abuse directed toward me.

It was not my fault, and it’s not your fault either.

Theology

my body is good: Christianity’s problem with dualsim

When I was still at my fundamentalist college, one of my girlfriends wanted me to go the library with her, because she wanted to “show me something.” I agreed to go with her, all the while wondering what in the world she found so fascinating in the library. She pulled me into the art history section, and pulled out a coffee-table-sized tome on Michelangelo. She flipped it open to what was obviously not a particular page and pointed to the picture of David.

“Look!”

I looked. “What?”

Her facial expression was priceless. Her mouth dropped open, and her eyebrows disappeared into her corkscrew-curly hairline. “What do you mean, what?!” She pointed again, more vigorously, to his privates, which had been very carefully marked over with a black sharpie. Someone had drawn boxer-briefs on David.

I shrugged. “They do that to all the art books.”

She flipped a few pages over, to a rendering of the Sistine Chapel– all the men wore boxers, and all the women had been covered over with what looked like knee-length wetsuits. “Why would they do this to art? It’s Michelangelo, for Pete’s sake!”

“I dunno, I guess the administration thinks some guys could look at it like it’s soft porn.”

She almost started sputtering in what I’m sure a writer would call righteous indignation. “This is not porn, Samantha. Whoever looks at this and sees “porn” has got something wrong in the head.”

“Well, let me ask you this: after Adam and Eve sinned, what was the first thing that happened? They hid because they were naked– and God made coats for them. [like every good KJV-only girl, I used the proper “coats” term, and not “aprons” or “garments.” Coats are obviously more modest than aprons, and “garments” is ambiguous, silly translators, trying to cloud meaning everywhere] So, don’t you think that means that we’re not supposed to go around looking at nakedness all the time?”

She looked at me cross-ways, frowning slightly. “I don’t think that’s what that means.”

I think I patted her on the shoulder, quite consoling, at this point. “What else could it?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There have been an abundance of fantastic articles connecting the dots in fundamentalism’s and Christian Patriarchy’s emphasis on modesty. Writers have talked about how an over-emphasis on feminine modesty can lead to the “she was asking for it” mentality of rape culture, and how this emphasis can be equally damaging to men, as it paints them as base animals. There have even been articles suggesting that an over-emphasis on modesty is, in itself, a form of “soft porn.” One of my close friends once commented that her pastor constantly focusing on “modesty” only made it harder for the boys to not think about sex.

All of that is true, and all of that is a real, and very serious problem.

But there’s also an undercurrent that affected the words that came out of my mouth in that story. It’s one of the reasons why I can’t really get on board the Buddhist, Gnostic, or neo-Platonic bandwagons– they all seem to treat the physical, and therefore our physical bodies, as inherently bad– as something we are to endeavor to escape. This idea is encapsulated in statements like “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” [which, by the way, is often incorrectly attributed to C. S. Lewis.] All of these views share dualistic traits– they have underpinnings that treat the mind-body-spirit unity as a problem.

Fundamentalists are told from nearly every corner that their body is bad. That their body is shameful. That our flesh is weak, and our emotions are not to be trusted. A phrase I heard very often growing up was “I trust you– but I don’t trust your flesh.” Our flesh–our body–is what drives us to sin. Our body, not our mind or our spirit, is what is vulnerable to temptation. We are trained to “bring the flesh under subjection.”

So, we dissociate. We disconnect. Our bodies are not really us— they are only things, and things we are supposed to think of as our opposition. Our body becomes our enemy, and only the most rigorous self-discipline will keep us from going astray. A Sunday school teacher once encouraged the gathered group of girls that if we ever got home one day, and our feet were dying to get out of our shoes, that we shouldn’t. Instead, we should leave our shoes on and not sit down for another thirty minutes, at least– so we can make our bodies “submit” to us.

While I’ve heard fundamentalists decry the “works-based Salvation” that they associate with things like asceticism and self-flagellation, the teachings I heard all my life were not that different. I was taught that fasting was not to bring us closer to God– fasting was meant to deny ourselves, to crucify ourselves on our cross. Paul’s declaration of “I die daily” was taken as literally as it could possibly be taken.

This mentality can be so damaging. It resulted in eating disorders by many of the women I knew in college. It created a derision and dismissal for anything earthly, anything physical, in our existence. “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through,” becomes a mantra that results in never recognizing all the goodness that exists here, in our physical reality. It ignores that God called his creation “Good,” in the fullest, most wonderful sense of the term. Good, as in both morally perfect and absolutely beautiful. This view of physical as our enemy forbids us from truly witnessing the beauty of a moment, or to appreciate our senses. Food becomes utilitarian, instead of the joy it could be. Music, because it cannot help but demand a response from our bodies, becomes a perversion. We lose the ability to be moved and transformed by art, and fundamentalists reduce it to kitsch.

But Jesus came to earth as a man, fully human. He was in all points tempted as we are– he hungered and thirsted. He mourned. He celebrated. His miracles, except for casting out demons, had nothing to do with the spirit and everything to do with our bodies. He made sure his followers were fed– and fed well. He sheltered them and protected them. He healed their bodies.

I’ve learned to cling to the wholeness of my self. That I am a mind, a spirit, and a body, and that these things are meant to work in conjunction with each other, not against. My body is not my enemy– and I can revel and delight. I can be sensuous. I can enjoy the feeling of my husband’s hands, I can sigh in wonder at a sunset, I can enjoy every single last bite of the chocolate cake that’s going to be in the oven soon. I take showers until I’ve used up every single drop of scalding hot water. I pull my blankets tighter on a lazy Saturday morning and refuse to get out of bed.

La dolce vita or carpe diem don’t have to be ‘heresies’ regulated to the decadent, the worldly– they can be a mantra I claim for myself.

Photo by Jay
Feminism

how purity culture taught me to be abused

[warning: I am going to be talking about sensitive, sex-related issues today, including rape and sexual assault. ]

First, let me share my rationale for talking about this. When I started this blog, my intention was to leave a lot of what I’m about to say unsaid. I wanted to discuss, mainly, more of the philosophies and ideologies entrenched in the IFB movement and conservative evangelicalism at large, instead of some of my personal hang-ups.

But, I’ve been doing an incredible amount of reading recently, and her.menutics at Christianity Today has announced they’re going to be talking about some of these things, and they have been under heavy discussion by many writers, including Dianna Anderson and Sarah Moon. However, there is one area of this discussion that I’ve noticed is missing, and that’s what I’m going to be contributing today.

Essentially, I will be arguing that the modesty/purity/virginity culture, especially in more conservative areas, is one of the main reasons why Christian young women stay in abusive relationships.

Many writers have already made the connection between the purity culture and the rape culture, and they have done a much better job establishing that than I ever could. I encourage you to read their arguments. You can find more links on my “other dragon fighters” page. What these men and woman are arguing for is incredibly valuable, and they’re establishing a healthy, productive rhetoric; what I’m offering here is merely a subset to that discussion.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was fourteen, I went to a month-long summer camp at the college I would later attend. Like most Christian summer camps, this one involved going to a chapel service twice a day. Most of the time they were fun, lighthearted– until one evening they split up the girls and the boys. Great, I remember thinking, because I knew exactly what was coming. Segregation can only mean one thing– they were going to talk about sex. I sighed when they made the announcement. Again? I thought wearily.

That evening, when the camp counselors had shooed all the men and boys out of the building, the speaker got up to the podium. She didn’t even beat around the bush, but launched right into her object lesson. Holding up a king-size Snickers bar, she asked if anyone in the audience wanted it. It’s a room full of girls– who doesn’t want chocolate? A hundred hands shot up. She picked a girl close to the front that wouldn’t have to climb over too many people and brought her up to the stage. Very slowly, she unwrapped the Snickers bar, splitting the package like a banana peel. She handed it to the young woman, and asked her, very clearly, to lick the chocolate bar all over. Just lick it.

Giggling, the young lady started licking the chocolate bar, making a little bit of a show of it. At fourteen, I had no idea what a blow job was, so I missed the connection that had a lot of girls in the room snorting and hooting. The young lady finished and handed it back to the speaker. As she was sitting down, the speaker very carefully wrapped the package around the candy bar, making it look like the unopened package as possible.

Then she asked if anyone else in the room wanted a go.

No one raised her hand.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My sophomore year in college, another speaker shared a similar object lesson– ironically, in the exact same room, also filled exclusively with women. She got up to the podium carrying a single rose bud. At this point I was more familiar with sexual imagery, and I knew that the rose had frequently been treated as a symbol for the vagina in literature and poetry– so, again, I knew what was coming.

This speaker asked us to pass the rose around the room, and encouraged us to enjoy touching it. “Caress the petals,” she told us. “Feel the velvet.” By the time the rose came to me, it was destroyed. Most of the petals were gone, the ones that were still feebly clinging to the stem were bruised and torn. The leaves were missing, and someone had ripped away the thorns, leaving gash marks down the side.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I could go on. I imagine many of you have heard similar object lessons. These “object lessons” aren’t isolated to evangelical culture, either– Ariel Levy writes about one she saw involving packing tape in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs.

However, all of these object lessons contribute to one message: your identity and value as a woman is tied to your sexual purity. If you surrender your virginity, you are worthless. Disgusting. Repulsive. Broken. Unwanted.

My generation has gotten that message loud and clear. Our virginity is the “greatest gift a woman can give her husband.” My own father, who was a virgin when he met my mother, on repeated occasions has told me that my mother having sex when she was in highschool bothers him — to this day, and they’ve been married twenty-six years. Mark Driscoll, in his new marriage-advice book, tells his readers that if he had known of a single sexual encounter his wife had at nineteen, he would not have married her. Finding out about it, over a dozen years into their marriage, sent him into a self-admitted emotional tailspin (however, we’re supposed to completely ignore the fact that he had sex, too).

There are so many other examples I could cite, both factual and fictional. The ultimate message is that if we give up our virginity, or even our “emotional purity,” which I’ll get to in a minute, makes us completely repulsive to “good Christian boys.”

I know a young man who told me, point-blank, that finding out his ex-girlfriend had sex made her unattractive to him, and that he would no longer consider “getting back” with her, even though until that point he had been relentlessly pursuing her.

He is not a virgin.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But what if your sexual purity, or your virginity, is stolen? What if you are sexually abused, or raped?

The answer, terrifyingly, is the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I met “John” at the tail-end of my sophomore year. He was handsome, charismatic, an excellent musician, talented, popular, and respected. He was running for student council president, was a part of the “in,” crowd, and… I was not. That had never particularly bothered me. Growing up IFB kinda means you get used to being a weird outsider. But, I could still appreciate those qualities. The night we met, he basically ignored me, which, I assume you can imagine, felt pretty typical.

My junior year, though, we were both percussionists in my college’s symphony orchestra, and the conductor asked us to be a part of the school’s major production that semester– The Pirates of Penzance. Rehearsals were four nights a week, from 6 pm to 1 or 2 am. As percussionists, we didn’t have a whole lot to do, except occasionally whack the cassa bass or the triangle. That left a lot of time for bonding… and, by the end, we were “talking,” the evangelical intermediary between “acquaintance” and “monogamous relationship.” We were official by February, and he proposed in August.

For my own emotional stability, I will be brief. The relationship was emotionally, verbally, physically, and sexually abusive. Like countless other stories, the abuse slowly escalated– I had no idea what was happening until it was too late.

Women in, or who have recently escaped from, violent relationships typically get asked “why do/did you stay?” Very frequently, they don’t have a solid answer to that question. There are a host of common reasons– daddy issues, economic stability, shame.

I know exactly why I stayed. I was crippled, paralyzed, and overwhelmed by fear. Fear that he would abandon me. Fear that, if he left, I would no longer have any value. John had literally ruined me, in my mind, for anyone else.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Long story short: he did leave me, breaking our engagement two months before the wedding. His reasoning: I was not “submissive” enough. One month before he broke it off, I had cut off anything sexual. I would no longer participate in the degrading phone sex where he referred to me exclusively as “bitch” and “whore.” I shied away from his touch. And I had the audacity to tell him that he couldn’t call me a “God damn fucking bitch” anymore. Yup. Definitely not submissive-wife material. I was certainly not Created to be his Helpmeet.

It’s been three years since then, and I’m now married to the most amazing, loving, gentle, tender man I couldn’t have even dreamed to ask for. But, I’m still healing from a lot of the abuse, and there are a few things I still violently struggle with, mainly that:

my internalized “purity” narrative tells me that what John did was not rape.

The first “sexual” thing John ever did was to put his hand, facing palm-up, on my percussionist’s stool. I was standing to turn the page, and when I sat down, he grabbed my ass. I found this titillating, exciting. I didn’t protest, I didn’t correct him. I coyly asked him what he was doing, and he said “oops.”

I wore v-neck sweaters that just barely showed off my cleavage, because he liked it. I wore a skirt that showed off my ass– because he liked it.

By the time he had become fully abusive, these behaviors continued, largely because I was terrified of what he would do if I didn’t. At one point our relationship was long distance, and he bought me a webcam. The first time he told me to take my shirt off, I told him no. I even shut my laptop. He spent the next two hours screaming obscenities at me, and he was violent the next time he saw me in person. The first time he raped me, I fought him– for one brief second, until he dug the band of his watch into my knee– leaving a cut so deep I have a long, puffy scar. It was a warning.

I have to constantly fight against the oppressive lie that an outsider looking in would think that I had consented. Geez, just because you never had an orgasm doesn’t mean he violated you. C’mon. You’re just frigid. 

I have to constantly fight that lie that because I didn’t “fight enough,” because I didn’t choose to immediately leave the relationship, that it meant that I deserved what happened to me.

I have to constantly fight against the lie that says because I wasn’t pure enough, that because I had “dressed provocatively,” because I had allowed myself to be alone with him, that I invited it. That I had allowed it to happen.

I have to fight the lie that says that maybe I’m making all of this “rape” stuff up to make myself feel better about allowing it to happen.

He didn’t actually rape you, you’re just saying that because you’re blaming him. You didn’t keep yourself pure, that’s all. You just know that if you really allowed yourself to face the facts, you’d see the truth. You’re a disgusting piece of shit. You’re worthless.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That last one is why the modesty/purity culture can be so incredibly damaging. Many girls and women I’ve talked to have it so deeply ingrained into them that it’s virtually inescapable. When it comes between choosing what’s worse– staying in abusive relationship, or facing the “reality” that you’ve “surrendered your purity,” guess which one we choose?

Photo by Al Tassano
Feminism

on how wearing pants didn’t turn me into a hooker

The first time I ever bought myself a pair of jeans is a vivid memory, complete with distinct recollections of every pair of jeans I tried on (six different stores, a grand total of twenty-one jeans). You might think this is odd. How old was I, twelve?

I was twenty.

I wore pants when I was a kid, up until I was nine. I was a military brat, and it never occurred to me to think of pants as I would later come to view them– as immodest, as unfeminine, as wordly, and frankly, when hip-huggers + thongs became a popular thing when I was teenager, as slutty. Interestingly enough, when I was eight and a Sparky in AWANAS, my mother mandated that I must wear pants to the activities, since we played active, flamboyant games and she’d caught a seven-year-old boy peeking up the girls’ skirts.

But, when I was nine, we moved to northwest Florida, to a town that was roughly twenty minutes away from the Alabama border, and we started attending an Independent Fundamental, hellfire-and-brimstone-preaching Baptist Church (IFB). And there went my pants. Mom didn’t even bother to donate them to the rescue mission. She cut them up and Dad used them for rags.

So, as a sophomore in college, I hadn’t worn pants in eleven years– certainly not after I’d sprouted “child-bearing” hips and an ass when I was fourteen. However, my family had finally left the IFB church and been excommunicated and shunned, and we were doing all kinds of crazy things like going to movie theaters and exercising in public. My mother even (gasp) cut her hair. One of my best friends decided it was high time that I own a pair of jeans.

To the mall we went.

We went to JCPenney’s first, back when they were uncool, and my friend outright forbade me from buying mom-jeans. But how, I thought glumly to myself, am I going to find jeans that are modest?

She dragged me, forcibly, to Aeropostale, the sluttiest of slutty teen stores at our mall. At least, in my opinion. At the time. I had no idea that things like the Body Shop, Wet Seal, and 5-7-9 existed. The day I determined to buy a “little black dress” and I went into a Body Shop is a whole ‘nother tale.  She threw me into a changing booth with a pair of jeans and told me to put them on.

Five minutes later, I still hadn’t emerged from the changing room.

“Well?” Her tone was bordering on the impatient.

“I can’t come out!”

“Why the hell not?” (My friend had a ‘potty mouth.’ It was invigorating.)

I practically whimpered. “You can see my butt.”

She laughed. Uproariously. “I think that’s kinda the point, dearie.” (My friend also had pet names for me.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I eventually bought a size-too-large pair of boyfriend-style jeans from the GAP. Now, five years later, I’m a jeans-and-hoodie girl. I even bought skinny jeans… last year. Took me a while to catch on to the whole “pants are not the devil” idea.

What took me almost just as long to realize is that the over-emphasis on modesty is a (one of many) false-front on a huge ideological problem: that women are nothing more than sexual objects. It’s laughable to me that the IFB movement spends so much time preaching against the over-sexualization of our girls when the very same preachers are guilty of the exact same crime against “womanhood” and “femininity.” I once heard a preacher claim  that wearing any item of clothing with a zipper in the front was immodest. Bizarrely, he said that a woman placing anything in front of her ahem “maidenly parts” called a man’s attention to her hoo-ha.

Because we all know that a woman’s ankles will force a man to lust after her in his heart, after all. Men have no self-control whatsoever, no sir. They see a collarbone and tip over from all the blood in their head rushing away. Women must guard men’s minds, you see. They’re base animals, nothing more than horndogs.

Which begs an interesting question… if men are all incapable of acting responsibly, why do they spend so much time talking about vaginas in church?

Photo by Francisco Osorio