AOYWTOEYWB – Week Five
Posted by Vanity of Vanities! on October 25, 2009
If you were paying very close attention, you may have noticed that I didn’t post anything about Every Young Woman’s Battle last week. That’s because, due to a youth function, we did not have our regular meeting. But, we’re up and running again tonight, and I have a few things to share with you about what struck me from chapters nine and ten.
Chapter nine was all about women and girls pursuing guys and using their sexuality as manipulation. Ladies, we now live in a post-sexual-revolution society. We have rights; we have equality. Apparently along with those things came the tendency to behave like animals. While I do agree that it’s male chauvinistic to call a girl a slut while slapping her sexual partner on the back, it’s not okay that women so embraced sexual “freedom” that they became as piggish as the men they so despised.
It’s ironic to me, because I thought one of the major points of the Woman Movement was to get men to take us seriously; to see us as more than just tools for sexual pleasure and baby-making. So, now women openly display their goods to every passerby. They share their bodies with multiple men — sometimes men they met only hours before. And then what happens? The men play and walk away, with no commitment required or desired. And well, our bodies are still built to conceive. We’ve gone from hopeless homemakers trapped in a marriage to stressed, single mothers desperately seeking a “real man” who will make a commitment to a family he didn’t create. And this is better, how?
Well, I went off on a tangent that the book didn’t go on. That’s okay, because I didn’t highlight much from the chapter. It wasn’t a bad chapter, it was just geared toward teenagers. I took it to the next level because I’m getting old, I guess.
Chapter ten was all about dressing appropriately. It’s hard to do in this society, to be sure. But it’s not impossible. And it’s certainly not unimportant. The way you dress says a lot about you. You want to dress to impress, of course. But what kind of impression do you want to make?
You teach people how to treat you. Either you teach them to treat you with respect or you teach them to treat you with disrespect. Whether you intend to or not, the way you dress…sends others a message. (p. 89)
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that many young girls simply don’t realize the effect their clothing choices have on others. I know I didn’t. It really didn’t occur to me that wearing revealing clothing could lead someone into sin. If it had occurred to me, I don’t know that I would have felt responsible anyway. But, I encourage you ladies, young, old, and in between, to assess your closets. Is what you’re wearing communicating your love for Christ above all else? Is it even communicating respect for yourself and others?
Amanda said
“It’s ironic to me…”
I love this paragraph. It’s well-written, and you’ve hit the nail on the head with a hammer the size of Oklahoma.
As for the part about modesty, I always find it interesting when I hear from Christian women who at some point in their lives didn’t understand that their clothing choices could lead others into temptation. I find it interesting, because I personally can’t remember a time in my life when I was unaware of the importance of modesty. When I was in about the 2nd or 3rd grade, my brother made me promise on my life that I would never wear a two-piece bathing suit. As in, even when I was an adult, married woman, I could not wear one. I made the vow, and I’ve still never worn one and never plan to wear one (nobody wants to see my post-baby tummy anyway). Anyway…
Obviously, we grew up in very different households, but when you started going to church as a teenager, did they not cover modesty in your youth group? I’m just curious, because I heard about it all the freaking time at church (to the point that I think their plan backfired and their obsession with talking about all of it started giving the girls ideas for how to dress and behave in ways that would be provocative).
Vanity of Vanities! said
Well, I mostly remember them telling us to wear t-shirts over our bathing suits at camp. And no spaghetti straps were allowed. Neither of those were a problem for me. I was (and still am) very self-conscious about my legs, so I didn’t run around in bathing suits if boys were nearby. And I didn’t wear spaghetti straps because I was afraid of strapless bras, and I thought it was way tacky to have your bra straps showing.
They did sometimes talk about keeping covered up, but they never really communicated it in a way that made me see it as part of my responsibility to other people. I just got the message, “If you don’t want guys to think you’re a slut, then don’t dress like one.” Because I got my standard of “slutty” from the world, I never saw a problem in how I dressed. I sometimes wore low-cut tops, and midriffs in the late 90s were par for the course. I just never thought about it that way, I guess. All us girls had the attitude that it was the guys’ problem anyway — like, they shouldn’t be looking. I just didn’t know.