As boys and girls become teens and then young ladies and men, there are subtle changes in the way they react to each other.  The physical attraction is still there, and the pressure is still very real, but the relationships that a person goes through and their life experiences can help discipline them or cause them to get on a crash course to certain doom.

Well, perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but I think you’ll understand what I’m saying in a minute.

A Healthy Desire

God made men and women to desire companionship—and that companionship is on many levels, one of them being physical.

The physical desire is strong in men—and it starts with sight and works its way throughout his being.  He needs female companionship to complete him in all sorts of ways.  He craves it—and that’s part of what feeds his curiosity and his longings to the point of lust.

The desire is healthy, and it’s supposed to reach it’s fulfillment in marriage, but it’s often easy for it to degenerate into lust.

We Weren’t Wired to Wait

Seriously, I know it’s a topic for another time, but the more I read, ponder, and look at marriage historically, the more I’m under the impression that men and women were never meant to wait until their twenties or thirties to marry.  I mean, Adam and Eve were married when they were two days old!

The problem is that there is a lot of pent up sexual desire and no morally acceptable outlet but marriage.  So, the young man struggles with the war going on inside him: wanting, desiring, feels like needing, to have a woman to love—emotionally and physically.

They say that girls can be guilted into sexual relations—I believe that guys can be manipulated as well by the same tactic.  It all depends on who has more discipline in this area.

Discipline

That’s right, self discipline is the key.  The guy exercises it by not being alone with a girl, by making sure to keep his eyes away from things he might be tempted to lust after, and by watching his viewing habits.  He needs to keep his mind focused on other things, or he will find a way to feed that desire and his curiosity.

The godly/modest woman helps him here by not making it easy for him to stumble when looking at her.  It helps him focus on who she is instead of what she is.

Logic would say that all women are equipped pretty much the same as far as having certain body parts.  Except this isn’t logical—men see differences, they compare, and they contrast.

The Gradual Increase of Lust

Lust has a way of growing, it gets fed by an action that requires more.  As a guy sees a part of a girl, it no longer satisfies him—no longer feeds his curiosity or his craving to see that any more.  He must see more.

A guy can lust looking through a J.C. Penny magazine.  He can fill his mind with sex by reading books around the house.

But the modest girl isn’t giving him anything to look at.  She’s not feeding his desire to see more—whereas he might see more with someone else.

So, discipline is key—the guy at this age is looking for a life-long mate, and yet has to be restrained.  Take this with you in your relationships.  If you better understand what he’s thinking and going through you’ll better be able to anticipate where he might have difficulty.

© MInTheGap for Is This Modest?, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Kids and Teens, marriage, purity, Relationships, Sexual intercourse, Sexuality, The Male Mind

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I bet that surprised some of you.

Physical changes occur in both boys and girls—I believe girls start to change first—and it is about this time that boys will start to recognize that girls are different and they will react differently to that realization.

It’s also at this time that a boy will start to notice the physical characteristics of girls in general.

As we’ve seen, up until now there hasn’t been that much a boy will notice about a girl—as far as differences, but now he’s starting to see (and focus) on different areas of her body and he’s starting to think about them as more of a companion than competition or a playmate.

His Two Reactions

There are two typical reactions to this change in perception.

The Player/Romancer

This boy realizes that there are differences, and he starts to try to form relationships with the opposite sex.  It is these guys that are the ones that you want your girl to stay away from, for both sexes are trying to figure out the change, and this “young man” has basically one thing on his mind.

The Withdrawer

This was me.  I withdrew—even going so far as to tell people “I don’t like girls.”  I didn’t date a girl until my Senior year of high school—though I was close friends with more than a few.

Both of these reactions are an attempt to deal with feelings and thoughts that he’s now having that he’s never had before.

Inside His Mind

The mind of a pre-teen and teenage boy is a weird place indeed.  Along with trying to figure out why there are zits on your face and how to manage different classes in school, your body is going through changes you don’t fully comprehend, and things that never really stuck in your mind are hard not to think about.

Before this stage, a girl was pretty or cute, but you didn’t really care.  You may have even thought you’d marry someone, but that was probably based on how fun they were to be with.  During this phase of development, though, most guys start to notice the distinctly feminine features.

Women are starting to develop, and the boys notice.  In fact, if I had to try to bring back memories of this kind from my past, I remember seeing that girls were developing breasts and that their legs attracted me in short skirts.

I knew when girls were dressing for attention, and there was plenty of talk around school when a specific girl had more the morals of an alley-cat than a lady.

Ignorance Can Be a Pain

Innocence can be a great thing.  It’s a whole lot easier to refuse something that you’ve never done—you don’t know what you’re missing.  However, ignorance also can feed curiosity.

If I had to use one word to describe boys at this stage, it’d be curious.

• That girl that they grew up with now has a pair of breasts.
• She makes my heart patter as she walks by.
• She attracts me in the clothes she wears.
• I wonder what she looks like in her underwear.
• I wonder what she looks like in less.

Regardless of whether they’ve seen their mom breastfeed or their sister—he still wonders.  And this feeds his desire to find out more.

So, his mind wanders, and so do his eyes.  They glance through the button-down shirt to see if they can catch a glimpse—and even a bra may turn them on.

Even if they know it’s wrong, they look at a girl’s body and wonder—and this is where modesty comes into play.

If your clothing does not attract a boy to your body, he will be looking at who you are.  To this day, I think that one of the most “attractive” outfits I saw on a girl in high school—that I thought was pretty—was a colored turtleneck with a button-down shirt overtop.  Modest, and yet cute.

I can also tell you about a few other memorable outfits that are memorable for the wrong reasons.  The question is, how do you want to be seen and remembered?

© MInTheGap for Is This Modest?, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clothing, High school, Kids and Teens, purity, The Male Mind

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At some stage of development—there’s no hard and fast rule—girls and boys begin to realize that there are, indeed, differences between them.  Boys want to play athletic activities and video games.  Girls play house and with dolls.  Battle lines are drawn, and at summer camps everywhere one sex starts to tease or mock the other about which one is better.

At this stage of the game, I believe that both sexes are finding that they actually might have some feelings for one another—something beyond the norm—and not know how to cope with these feelings, they decide to attempt to establish superiority.

Boys Rule, Girls Drool

It’s at this stage that the person you believed you understood totally because all that was different was hair length has evolved into someone you could never possibly understand.  She went from being your best friend to being someone that wants to play house with you—more.  She wants to kiss you, you notice that she’s softer than you are, and that she’s not always interested in the things you are.

You also notice that she wants to control you—already. :)

It’s at this stage that I don’t believe there’s a big problem with modesty in that these boys really don’t know enough about marital relations to look at girls as an object of lust—and yet at the same time they have emotions and mixed desires that they don’t fully know how to process.

This is also a time where you have to watch out for those children that “know more” than others—because they will love to express their knowledge of things that will ruin your child’s innocence, and really confuse them.

The other thing that can happen here is for children to want to “play doctor”, which may entail dropping of drawers to pretend to do an exam.  To me, this is something that should be avoided.

But for the most part, a boy is getting feelings at this stage, but is not—usually—looking at a girl much differently than at the previous stage:

• She’s different.
• She may be “pretty.”
• He may or may not believe he will marry his friend.
• He may avoid girls or say that he hates them if they express emotion at him.

Maintaining purity here means in keeping innocent.  It’s also advisable to encourage boys and girls at this age to not be so harsh to each other and realize what they have to contribute to one another—instead of fueling the fires of animosity toward one another.

© MInTheGap for Is This Modest?, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Kids and Teens, purity, Summer camp, The Male Mind

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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.

© MInTheGap for Is This Modest?, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Baltimore Sun, Bounce, Chicago Tribune, clothing, Kids and Teens, modesty, Shopping mall, Tribune Company, vision, writers

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With that in mind, some would suggest that with repeated exposure to immodest clothing, the human mind could be trained not to be attracted to that clothing.  To some degree I’ve found this to be true.

If you compare cultures, you see that there are varying degrees of what is considered normal dress.  In Africa, it is not uncommon to see many men and women in just a loin cloth.  Some ladies in Asia may work topless.  Europe is know for its nude beaches.  The Middle East is know for burquas and hijabs.  America is known for bikinis on the beach, and exposed skin in its formal wear.

If you transplanted a person from the Middle East to other places, everything would be immodest, and vice versa.  This is part of this effect—the effect of having a baseline expectation for modesty.  Which leads to today’s question:

Some people reason, if you “used” to see woman immodest after a while you don’t notice it anymore or don’t care, your mind is not “spinning” anymore & you aren’t tempted. Is this just a good excuse or truth?

Is This True?

I believe, that to some degree, you can alter your perception of modesty, and train your mind to not be physically aroused to something that you see that may have previously aroused you.

Here at Is This Modest, we started our web life with a border that had multiple different takes—some liked it as fashionable, some thought it immodest.  There was disagreement, and I’m sure that some of it had to do with the background of the viewer.  And I attribute this partly to the fact that different people have been exposed to different things and have different tolerances like the above.

So, it’s true that you can alter your perceptions by what you spend your time looking at.

Is This Absolute?

And yet there is a line that is morally correct.  By that, I mean that if you take the argument to the logical extreme we should all be nudists and that would get rid of the problem.  If we all just looked at nudity all day, we could callous ourselves to sexuality and we’d be fine, right?

Well, on the one hand there’s something about clothing and the hidden that helps to excite—I’ve actually read things where a nudist believed that he was still attracted to clothed women, even though he’s been around naked ones.

And on the other hand, sin at the fall made us feel shame—and shame is not wrong when it comes to sin and nakedness.  In fact, we all naturally feel shame, and we often have to train ourselves, or our kids, out of it.  Just think about every time you go to look for a swimsuit.  Even if you have a terrific body, you still fuss over which one will hide the “bad areas”, etc.

Is This Desirable?

And the flip side of the coin is that that it may not be desirable to go through the desensitization process.  Why?  Because the more you have seen, the less likely you will be easily aroused by your marriage partner.  The more you’ve seen, the more critical you will be of those around you, and the more calloused you’ll be when it comes to relating to the person that you’ve chosen to be intimate with.

Indeed, just like having kissed many people, or having sex with multiple people prior to marriage will not make it as easy to bond with your marriage partner, for a guy to be constantly taking in sexy images, or staring at girls in immodest attire can weaken the relationship that they have with their wife.

I’m not talking here about putting on blinders, but consciously making the decision that if a sexy individual comes walking that way, that you turn and look the other direction.

Conclusion

No, it’s not a good excuse.  It’s not a good practice.  And it is detrimental to good and healthy relationships.

© MInTheGap for Is This Modest?, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Africa, Asia, clothing, conscience, Europe, Kids and Teens, Middle East

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