Springtime Shows Skin and Sin

It’s time to resurrect the Legion of Decency.

By: Don Ravetta on May 7th, 2005 at 1:28 PM

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Spring is in the air at Cornell University, and with it more than a few glimpses of flesh. As the temperature rises, young women are finding an increasing need to bear arms, shoulders, chests, stomachs and legs to public view. Despite claims and popular belief to the contrary, these trends are not harmless. They are the fruits of an insidious immoral agenda promoted equally by feminists and thug rappers. More importantly, on this front of the culture war, we have been losing and losing badly.

In an atheistic culture that firmly embraces all of the various sins of the flesh, it seems reasonable that any pretense to modesty would be abandoned. But the extent to which fashion and lifestyle have been sexualized is almost unfathomable. Young teenagers, even preteens, parade about in low-cut, closely fitting jeans and skin-tight shirts designed to reveal as much of their torso as is physically possible.

Some clothing proclaims its purpose even more explicitly with slogans such as “Flirt” or “Sexy.” What parent could even conceive of allowing their children to dress in this way? Even if these parents cannot see how indecent such fashions are in themselves, you would at least expect them to be able to read—the mark of Satan is written upon them in the English language.

All too common is that view presented by feminists that there are only a few segments of fashion that induce women to be treated as objects – heels and makeup, for instance. However, they argue, the overwhelming majority of clothing can be freely chosen by any woman according to her “rights,” and to satisfy that supreme modernist goal: personal expression. The feminist insistence that makeup and high-heels serve to objectify women is surprisingly truthful.

Unfortunately, their condemnation of clothing applies only to those outfits that are physically uncomfortable to women. The wailing and gnashing of teeth that surrounds any discussion of long-gone corsets or foot-binding is never extended to co-eds splashing beer on their tank-tops at frat parties.

Since men have oppressed women from the beginning of time, the feminists whimper, how can we pass judgment on their actions today? Of course, the claim that Christian society has oppressed women for centuries is patently false. What is true is that women, especially college women, are now oppressing their male peers with their constant and unchecked immodesty and even flagrant indecency, flaunting their sexual wares as so many whores in a whorehouse.

If we are ever to face the omnipresent threat of immodest and indecent dress in all its forms and defeat it, we must encourage a love of modesty among our Christian peers. In the Catholic world, such encouragement has all but disappeared. Progressives in the Church hope that by ignoring any discussion of modesty, it will cease to be virtuous. Such ignorance and premeditated silence is deeply offensive, but not nearly as offensive as the false doctrines that have been introduced to counter proper Christian modesty.

For instance, some modernists suggest that young men and women must associate with each other in order to be properly prepared for the social demands of marriage. Or, in the same spirit, they declare that only by experiencing and (if they get lucky) defeating the whole range of temptations that modern secular life presents can Christians become more mature in their “spirituality.” What vile rubbish! What absolute arrogance!

One of the great condemnations of immodesty for all times was written by Saint John Chrysostom, a Doctor of the Church from the fourth century and perhaps the greatest Christian preacher since the days of the apostles:

“You carry your snare everywhere and spread your nets in all places. You allege that you never invited others to sin. You did not, indeed, by your words, but you have done so by your dress and your deportment. ... When you have made another sin in his heart, how can you be innocent? Tell me, whom does this world condemn? Whom do judges punish? Those who drink poison or those who prepare it and administer the fatal potion?”

“You have prepared the abominable cup, you have given the death dealing drink, and you are more criminal than are those who poison the body; you murder not the body but the soul. And it is not to enemies you do this, nor are you urged on by any imaginary necessity, nor provoked by injury, but out of foolish vanity and pride.”

I do not deny that these are sobering words for any and all of us who wish to call ourselves Christian. We cannot just assume on the basis of personal judgment that our fashion choices are harmless, or that the definition of immodesty can vary across time and culture. As Pius XII taught in his address to the Latin Union of High Fashion, to declare that standards of modesty can change according to custom is “one of the most insidious of sophisms.”

There is another practice concerning immodest fashion whose discussion is far more controversial, especially in the United States: the wearing of men’s clothing by women. Take a look around campus, and try to count the number of women who do not wear jeans. Then, consider that in the first part of the twentieth century any woman who dressed in trousers, even at godless Cornell, would have been laughed off campus.

I do not mean to suggest that trousers should never be worn by women. However, the mixing of male and female fashions is inextricably linked to the great feminist evil that rose to dominance in the 1960’s—that any “gender differences” must be destroyed in order to promote a radical egalitarianism of the sexes. Should there not be some concern when the women among us wear exclusively the uniform of the enemy?

So as not to discriminate (in that pleasant modern sense) against women, these same issues apply to men. Men, who go without sleeves, wear tightly-fitting clothing, or strip to the waste in public are just as guilty as immodest women. For now, we can thank God Almighty that society has yet to subject us to men in dresses in any considerable quantity. This is not to say that the homosexual lobbyists are not trying.

In a world that has nearly lost all sense of sin and has utterly condemned natural law, we must seek out the opinion of the most holy and morally sound of our peers for a practical prescription of modest dress. For instance, one might summon the teaching of Pius XI: “We recall that a dress cannot be called decent which is cut deeper than two fingers breadth under the pit of the throat, which does not cover the arms at least to the elbows, and scarcely reaches a bit beyond the knee. Furthermore, dresses of transparent material are improper.”

Fellow cultural warriors, in the name of our Lord’s unending love for all those who have fallen into ugly ways, it is time to break out the rulers.

 

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