There's been a lot of high profile controversy lately about modesty in Mormon culture and particularly at Church schools. BYU-I and BYU both had incidents in recent months of young women being singled out for some manner of harassment over their state of dress being considered improper: first by boot cut jeans being confused for skinny jeans, and second by... I'm actually not certain. I think these incidents are an embarrassment to our people, frankly. Remember last year when a prominent player got taken off the BYU basketball team for breaking the Honor Code by sleeping with his girlfriend? People thought it was weird, but many also respected that BYU was a campus that would hopefully be sexually safe for their children Yeah, I don't think anyone would look at the pictures of the two girls and go "My daughter will have to dress more modestly than that to avoid sexual harassment?" The mixed messages do not help our case in the eyes of outsiders. Or insiders.
Sorry, I digress. To be clear before I proceed, I don't have a problem with modesty in general. I have a problem with the way it is discussed and taught as a woman-centric problem, and how that turns women into objects: sacred objects, but objects nonetheless because it has little to do with our wants or desires as human beings.
When we talk about modesty in the Church, the emphasis has less to do with respecting one's body and the power and holiness thereof, and more with the idea that men seeing women's skin means men will lust after women. Rarely do we talk about women lusting after men, and modesty as an element of behavior or attitude toward God suffers from a functional silence. Discussion of modesty is almost always about how much skin is or is not showing; the tightness of clothing might also be mentioned. There is tremendous concern about virtue and modesty expressed from the top of the Church but these topics are taught and talked about in a manner that horribly disempowers both sexes. Telling Mormon girls over and over to cover up does nothing about what Mormon boys see at school, around town, at events, and in the media. I have heard numerous young men, from the age of 12 and up, say how much they appreciate it when girls at church dress modestly and how they can't respect girls out in the world in the same way, but I'm not aware of an addendum to the teaching that they should "give proper respect to women, girls, and children," excluding those who bare their arms, midriff, back, or legs.
There was a video running around my Facebook a few months ago, "Should Christian women wear bikinis?" [here] in which the man (<--) presenting to an auditorium of teenage women (<--) cites and reads from a recent Princeton study on men's brain activity. He points out that when viewing men and women in various states of dress, images of a)women b)in bikinis c)with their heads/faces cropped out of the photo were not only the most memorable but also lit up the part of the brain linked to tool use, and turned off the part of the brain related to empathy and consideration. He then goes on to argue that if girls want to be seen as full human beings, then they need to dress modestly, so men don't look at them like objects and in turn take them seriously. While I do think there's some validity to that, I'd like to suggest that men have been carefully trained over the past several decades to see women this way. "Woman=object/property/incubator" has been around for thousands of years, but the experience of "See Jane. See Jane be sexy. See sexy Jane sell you something. Sell, Jane, sell." becoming absolutely pervasive is relatively recent, within the past couple generations. It's insulting to men to claim that this is a biological absolute; that when they see a woman with less than 66% of her body covered, they see that body solely as a procreative and/or recreational tool for their sexual fulfillment, one with diminished humanity, feelings, or intelligence.
If the Church is concerned about keeping men's brains out of the gutter and making sure women are respected, why not put more effort into media literacy? It's a good and necessary skill to have these days anyway, but wouldn't it help with wading through the mire of soft porn that constitutes many media offerings? The media is largely what teaches boys that the most desirable experience in life is intimate (and often dominant) contact with a female body, or an experience like it, whether through cars, alcohol, cigarettes... or a cheeseburger.
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| I'm lookin' at you two. |
So why aren't we teaching our young women and men to see through the smoke and mirrors? Imagine the impact if, on a Sunday or a Mutual night when they walk into their meeting and after opening exercises, they hear something along the lines of,
"Our media literacy lesson today is about the use of objectification, infantilization, and sexism, and how it affects men and women's views of themselves and each other. After that, we'll discuss how to resist those effects personally, and how to combat them publicly."Ideally such lessons would taught in age-appropriate, engaging ways throughout the school years. Even more ideally, parents would also be having similar lessons and being given resources based on the best current science available in order to integrate this knowledge at home.
This is as much a spiritual matter as secular. This applies in a Church context. I appreciate the relative level of hands-off-edness that has come along in recent years with telling the membership to exercise their judgment on what is and isn't appropriate media, rather that outright prohibitions. However, there has been very little solid guidance on how to differentiate between healthy messages and morals, and destructive messages and morals. By making it part of the curriculum we could educate our people and put them on the alert to police themselves and to advocate against the gross--yet widely accepted--misrepresentation and objectification of women that plagues our society far more than any excess of visible skin. Such education empowers men and women alike not to simply be the victims of whatever runs across their field of vision. It begins to teach them how to respect a woman and see her as a human being, rather than an object, no matter what she is or is not wearing because that is what they will need to do out in the world in their everyday lives, whether they go on a mission, get a job, go to school, or pursue any other endeavor that involves interesting with women.
Hopefully. In theory. They're still out in the world, inundated by these messages, but as with anything taught in the Church or at home, we hope that an ounce of prevention will equal a pound of cure.
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| Thanks to Katie for her glorious outdoor BF pic, and Jhavia for the fabulous belly dancer. Please feel free to download and share this image. |
