Don’t Read This Post
Women want it both ways. They want to look good. They want attention. They just don’t want attention from certain people!
The prime example is the bride. She goes all out for her wedding day:
- She may spend weeks on a diet or working out to get in shape.
- She may visit a beach or go tanning1.
- She may buy a dress with a corset built in, and cinch it up to augment her figure.
- She will get her hair done in ways that she never had before (and may never have since).
- She may choose a dress that will show more of her body than she’d normally feel comfortable sharing.
Why does she do all this?
The Motivation of the Bride
She’s getting herself beautiful with a single focus—and an audience of one: her future husband. She’s consumed with looking her best for him. She wants him to think that she is the most beautiful one in the world. She wants him to want her. And this is a great desire, don’t get me wrong.
A bride does not think “I really want that guy that didn’t shave and smells like he hasn’t showered in days that’s sitting in the back row of the wedding to lust after her. She’s not caring what anyone but what her husband thinks.
The problem is, you can’t control who sees you.
Just Don’t Look
Some women would say, “It’s not my problem, I’m not dressing for you, I’m dressing for him. Just don’t look at me.”
But if you’re reading this you know how hard it is to follow direction! The fact is that it is human nature to look. It’s human nature to do that which they shouldn’t. The question is, will you be an enabler or not.
And while it’s bad when we know we shouldn’t look, it’s worse when we’re told not to look—because our rebellious “who is he to tell me what to do” nature kicks in and wants to do it just because we don’t want people to believe they can boss us around.
What’s Your Motivation?
When you get dressed in the morning, who are you dressing for? The better question, do you know who else might see you?
You’re in PJs and the postman has a package that you have to go to the door for. You wore something for your husband, and he wants to go right out for dinner. You decided to go to the mall dressed with something a little flirty, not realizing that it’s not just the boy that you’re dating that will think you look great—it’s the sleezy guy sitting in the corner of the restaurant you’re visiting.
Modesty gives you the ability to not have to concern yourself about who sees you or might see you. It means that you can dress to show off who you are, and not what you are.
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- Though tanning in a tanning bed is like microwaving your organs, and we’re not at all suggesting that you do such! [↩]
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This is a good post because it is so true about brides. We tend to throw out a little bit of our modesty for that special day – it just seems so easy to have an excuse when it comes to a wedding dress. For example, do you think wearing a strapless shirt is immodest? I do. Yet I wore a strapless wedding gown…and so many other women I know do too. I think we are trying to please our future husbands, but if we really want to honor them, we need to be hold on to our modesty convictions when choosing a wedding dress.
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AMEN to this post and to [name redacted]!!!!!!
This is ridiculous. Should a woman go crazy thinking about every single man who may be looking at her? Moreover modesty is relative. No matter how much she’s wearing there will always be the sleazy guy who hasn’t shaved ogling her. Let’s reduce the amount of women with anxiety disorders and tell them to dress in a way that makes them feel respectable, not in a way that garners respect from the bazillions of other people who may see them (pressuring much?).
I’m with you to some extent Daezy. Certainly our desire is not to stress or pressure someone into feeling they have to wear something, but hopefully encouraging women that they can feel less stressed by wearing something modest. Since there’s less skin exposed, there’s less chance of ogling, though that can still happen.
Isn’t kind of misogynistic to expect women to constantly be on guard about her outward appearance in case she ‘tempts’ a man?
Isn’t it objectifying women to say that their bodies are such precious ‘objects’ that they need to be protected?
Stop judging people so much for their outward appearances. Keep your eyes in your skull. Stop worrying about other peoples’ ‘holiness’. Let women wear what they want to wear, especially on their WEDDING DAY. And don’t invite dirty, unshaven, lustful, men to your wedding ceremony.
If you read more than one post on this site you see that we discuss the idea that it’s impossible to dress in such a way that no one will ever look at you. Our society has taken especially those things that are supposed to be chaste (nuns, school girls, etc) and sexualized them. The Internet is the worst, with "Rule 34" which basically means that everything has been sexualized. That being the case, the best we can do is to help women focus attention to their person, rather than just their form. As for judging, it’s nice to say "[s]top judging people so much for their outward appearances" but as we just saw a week or so ago, a man will judge what he thinks about a woman by her face in a split second. Men, especially, are wired to "judge" how a girl looks. To think otherwise is to deny biology.
Amen! :)
Hiding something/telling them not to look, just makes us want to see it more. We want to know what it is that we’re not supposed to look at. We think it must be interesting.
#Feb2011NCARating