How Do You Do It?

One of the things that makes Is This Modest? different from any other site that I’ve seen on modesty is the fact that we seek to illustrate for you just what is and what is not modest not only with words, but with photographs.

However, this presents specific challenges on multiple levels:

• We don’t want to offend people with grossly immodest photographs.
• We want to illustrate the borderline.
• It’s extremely helpful to have a guy doing some of these reviews, because girls do not see things like guys do.

When discussing this with a college friend, he said that the challenging part of our Quick Reviews feature is that we would want to make sure that we had a good balance of modest and immodest outfits—otherwise it wouldn’t be that helpful.

But how to find a source that would lend itself to that and would also not shock the reviewers?  That was one of the reasons I was glad to find the Baltimore Sun’s Glimpsed feature.  Here are people that are dressed to impress, but not dressed to flaunt.  Though there would be a wide variety of outfits on both sexes, there was little chance of ending up with the grossly immodest clothing that can be stumbled into on other sites.

I also created a group in Flickr, and have been looking through wedding and senior picture groups, believing these to be safe, and yet still show a good balance of clothing through the group.

But the question—which is a good one—still remains:

(How) Can you talk, write and see pictures about modesty without being tempted?

And my answer would be multi-part.

Talking and Writing are Easy

Though attraction is part mental, the conversation around skirt length, etc. is so clean that I don’t tend to see any reason to dwell on actually thinking about what it might actually look like.  So, I don’t see a temptation issue (at least for me personally) with talking or writing.

Seeing Pictures of Modesty Can Present Challenges

The fact of the matter is, we see immodestly all around us.  You can’t go to the local shopping mall without seeing things hang out, things that are too tight, or too much skin—and that’s just in the windows of some of the store displays!

So, I’ve had to put into practice some guidelines for myself, personally, to make sure that I control the temptation—that it doesn’t get the better of me.

1. Quick Reviews happen quickly. I take a quick look at the photo and I look for certain key things, and make my judgment call in a few seconds.
2. Quick Reviews in batches. I process a week’s worth of quick reviews in a short period of time, and I move through them and don’t see them again until they hit the site.
3. The Bounce. Like I’ve seen in other places, should I be walking around or driving and I see something immodest, I will consciously choose to look elsewhere.

Temptation

The point is that we can never truly escape it.  We can flee it.  We can try to protect ourselves against it.  There’s always an escape from it.  But we cannot control how other people dress, so we need to have good ideas in place to handle it when it happens.

What we need to be is prepared for what could happen, and to control the reaction.  That’s truly the best we can do for all circumstances.

I'm a 35 year old guy married to the most beautiful woman in the world (VirtuousBlonde) for 10 years, and has 4 mostly adorable children-- depending on whether they've had a nap, of course. I'm a software developer by trade, though I like to write on various topics. I got my start in blogging at MInTheGap in 2004 writing about culture, politics and got started talking about modesty on this site just 2 years ago.