{"id":47035,"date":"2024-04-24T05:12:39","date_gmt":"2024-04-24T11:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=47035"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:22:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T02:22:48","slug":"my-mansplaining-about-modesty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2024\/04\/my-mansplaining-about-modesty\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mansplaining About Modesty"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are few issues in the Church as touchy as modesty. Every society has their lines for what is considered in poor taste on the revealing side or conversely too demure in the other direction, while the Church is consistently a few clicks to one direction on that continuum, making this one of those issues that puts us at slight tension with the background environment, even though the tension here is minor compared to, say, our exotic family forms of yore.\u00a0<\/span>A common response about our slightly more restrictive norms is to smirk about the difference between the Church and broader society. “Oh, those silly uptight conservatives.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ironically, this attitude is a mirror image of the conservatives that think that modesty lines are eternally drawn by God across time and space. However, in this case instead of acknowledging, respecting and contextualizing cultural differences like one would if they were, say, in an Amish community or a Muslim holy site, the sort of chiding about Latter-day Saint differences (typically by members themselves) ironically kind of presupposes that the metaphysical ideal written in the sky for the balance between too little and too much modesty happens to be right where 2024 America is. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cAppropriateness\u201d is by definition relative. Virtually all non-hunter gatherer cultures would find somebody walking down the street completely naked a little jarring (even if legal), and unless you\u2019re fine with that then you too have your lines in the sand, it\u2019s just a matter of where.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m fine with the Church exhibiting some additional distinctiveness by being a few degrees to the conservative side of the broader society on the modesty continuum. People love to have fun with early Church manuals and talks that place modesty lines at places that would be considered extreme today, but the fact is that our norms are anchored to society at large, and while we\u2019ve been changing, so too has society. Joseph Fielding Smith wasn’t operating in a vacuum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not that modesty is all about sexuality, but it’s not completely orthogonal either, and much of what is considered sexual is also relative. If you are in a community where women do not show their natural hair in public, then for a husband to find it titillating when his wife takes off her head covering at the end of the day or shows her ankle doesn\u2019t mean he has a weird fetish (although I\u2019m surprised at how much fetish-shaming happens from supposed liberals when the target is conservatives; see C.S. Lewis\u2019 youthful BDSM for exhibit A), but it\u2019s simply a natural consequence of being in a society where that is the part reserved for the close family members, and to smirk at that, or to sort of imply that the husband is sexually unwell for his response, as if he should only be sexually responsive to the level of graphic sexuality we’ve become accustomed to in the developed, secular world, is precisely the kind of line-drawing absolutism that the conservatives are often accused of. And maybe society being so saturated with graphic sexuality that nothing stuns, where there is no such spousal response at the end of the day, isn’t the ideal. Maybe it’s okay for a culture\/community to keep things in reserve and manage boundaries as long they aren’t totalitarian about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand I\u2019m not a complete relativist. Of course comfort is important, and there are often gender rights issues at play (as a speedo-wearing high school competitive swimmer I was bemused at the fact that speedos are the one item where the gendered double standard went in the other direction, with something seen as weird and inappropriate for men viewed as appropriate for women). On a meta-level I think that men and women\u2019s fashion should be functional wherever one\u2019s culture falls on that modesty continuum, but I also think, again on a meta-level, that there should be things reserved for one\u2019s intimate partner, locker rooms, and such. It\u2019s not a false dichotomy between nude beaches or burkas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, another complexity at play here is that in the Latter-day Saint case modesty is largely institutionally mandated via garment design, making it easy for people to frame this as the proverbial hegemonic conservative church telling people what to do, whereas in (some) other traditions the additional modesty requirements are more opt-in, leading to, for example, <\/span>Jewish Orthodox <\/span><\/a>or <\/span>Trad Catholic<\/span><\/a> influencers that paradoxically make the idea of modesty more punk-rock. (One <\/span>online vendor of lace mantillas<\/span><\/a> that conservative Catholics wear to Mass stated that \u201cthe veil is meant to be an external sign of a woman\u2019s interior desire.\u201d Sounds familiar. Also, word on the street is that there is a niche in the wedding dressmaking industry that serves both Orthodox Jewish and Latter-day Saint clientele).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, the point of the OP isn’t to argue for a particular line here or there, but rather to point out that recognizing that modesty is relative is a sword that cuts both ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are few issues in the Church as touchy as modesty. Every society has their lines for what is considered in poor taste on the revealing side or conversely too demure in the other direction, while the Church is consistently a few clicks to one direction on that continuum, making this one of those issues that puts us at slight tension with the background environment, even though the tension here is minor compared to, say, our exotic family forms of yore.\u00a0A common response about our slightly more restrictive norms is to smirk about the difference between the Church and broader society. “Oh, those silly uptight conservatives.”\u00a0 Ironically, this attitude is a mirror image of the conservatives that think that modesty lines are eternally drawn by God across time and space. However, in this case instead of acknowledging, respecting and contextualizing cultural differences like one would if they were, say, in an Amish community or a Muslim holy site, the sort of chiding about Latter-day Saint differences (typically by members themselves) ironically kind of presupposes that the metaphysical ideal written in the sky for the balance between too little and too much modesty happens to be right where 2024 America is. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sexuality"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/GTY_obamas_vatican_sr_140326_16x9_992.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47035"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50245,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47035\/revisions\/50245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}