An Issue of Modesty (Confessions of a Reformed Bikini Wearer Who Still Aspires to Be Fashionable)

First a disclaimer.  As suggested by the title of this post, the only thing that "qualifies" me to be blogging on this topic is the fact that I was once dismissive of the virtue of modesty, but have since examined my former thoughts and attitudes on the subject and found them wanting. 

A number of the online comments to my Op-Ed on The Tilted Kilt raised a great point:  what is the difference between patronizing the TK, where busty waitresses wear bikini tops, and going to the beach or pool, where lots of women wear bikinis? 

Well, I believe there are some differences.  Perhaps foremost among them is that businesses like the TK are capitalizing on consumers' sexual appetites and exploiting vulnerable young women who are in need of cash and might not fully recognize the extent to which they debase themselves by putting on the tawdry "costumes."  At the pool or beach, ladies are not paid to dress scantily, less material coverage serves an actual, practical purpose for the swimmer or sunbather, and a woman's (or girl's, in some cases) choice of attire is therefore more essentially her own.

And yet, I must in all honesty admit that I AM concerned about our culture's acceptance of a swimming dress code in which females are basically undressed.  We can talk about free choice all we want, but we can't ignore the external pressures and internal longings that influence those choices.

There is a battle raging in every woman's heart and mind as she embarks upon the dreaded "swimsuit shopping" trip.  As a woman who has endured countless such shopping trips with friends and family members, I can assure you that even the most beautiful women struggle with "body image."  We learn from television, movies, songs, magazines, books, friends, and from history, for goodness' sake, that men are drawn to beautiful women.  And I have never known a woman who didn't want to be considered beautiful by, well, everyone.  But most of all, she wants to be attractive to men.

In my experience, when a girl comes to understand that what most men want is a toned, tanned body in a skimpy bikini, she reacts in one of two ways:  she either covers up a body that she feels can never measure up, and carries around the conviction that she is simply not beautiful, or she arms herself in the suit she feels best displays her "assets," and settles in for a poolside race to the bottom.

The sad thing is, this is an arms race that can never be finally won.  Male attention won through a physical beauty contest is quickly lost to exciting new competitors.  And the inevitable aging process means that our winning attributes are fleeting. 

I have only given up my bikinis in the past several years (well, I haven't given them up entirely: I now reserve them for private hot tub use with my husband!).  My decision, initially, was a practical one.  Believe me, chasing after a toddler at the swimming pool whilst wearing a bikini is not ideal.   But once covering up was no longer a practical necessity, I began to reconsider my prior swimwear choices and the fearful, selfish, and impoverished thinking that led to them.

My thinking was fearful because it was, in part, based on my fears that in order to earn male attention and appreciation, I had to compete (as best I could) with the other body displays at the pool.  For me, then, wearing the bikini with whatever pride I could muster in my appearance was really a signal of deeper insecurities.

It was selfish because it did not consider the possibility that I may have been a source of temptation for some men, a source of discouragement for a young girl struggling with her own body image, or simply another gear in the machinery that perpetuates this communal undressing. 

But finally, my thinking was impoverished because it did not allow for the possibility that this was a competition I didn't need to win; that I am a unique, valuable, significant--and, yes, beautiful--person who is fully loved and understood.  It didn't allow for the possibility that poolside admiration by one and all was not something I had to have.  In this regard, my thinking was a failure to find my identity in Christ. 

Please hear this:  I am not advocating a Christian crack-down on bathing suits.  I am well aware that modesty in dress is one of those issues that can quickly turn into legalism, and that is a BAD thing for everyone.  But I do believe that every Christian, and Christian ladies in particular, should think through the issue of modesty very carefully.  When it comes to modesty, my belief is that it should not be about rules but about love.

To Betty Cook, et al.

If you read my last post about The Tilted Kilt, which was published by the Daily News Record, you won't be surprised that I've been receiving some online comments about it and about the interview I did with our local television station.  Now I am certainly no stranger to the feeding frenzy that is the online comment venue.  But I must say that I was a bit taken aback by some of the commentary on this particular issue.

Of course, many of the remarks stuck with the tried-and-true, unimaginative line of accusations that are trotted out as a matter of course against any person who dares to encourage societal evaluation of the morality of any law, business, or practice.  You've heard these ad nauseum, and they were certainly on parade last week:

• "I cannot believe the narrow minded, holier than thou attitudes of some [people]..." [This author goes on to suggest that I become amish because, after all, "it's not like they're working in the nude."  Um, no, they're working in their underwear...]
• "What a prude."
• "I think this lady just needs to get over he [sic] self and go join the Amish families because she is so worried about 'preserving' family values???"

Somewhat more interesting, or at least more telling about our society's attitude toward issues of morality, were the numerous comments of the "live and let live" variety.  "If you don't like it, don't go there." 

What's interesting about this is that it is precisely what I suggested in both my Op-Ed and my television interview.  I have not called for a government shut-down, police raid, or tighter zoning restrictions.  I have not even called for a picket (although I did consider that!).  I have merely suggested that members of this community refuse to patronize this business out of an awareness of the various harms that it will cause to people and relationships. 

So what is implicit in the outrage about my speaking out is that these commenters would have me be silent about my concerns.  In other words, "If you don't like it, don't go there, AND keep your opinions to yourself while you stay home." 

This viewpoint is troubling to me, in that it signals an utter lack of desire to engage in a genuine, meaningful debate about an issue.   A couple of commenters said things like, "I am a member of this community too, and Rita does not represent my values."  But they didn't say what their values are, as they relate to this issue.  Even Tony Williams, the manager of the establishment, stated that the Tilted Kilt is founded upon core values and principles.  But he neglected to mention what, exactly, those are. 

The most shocking line of comments (although not, ultimately, the most troubling) were the hateful personal attacks, led by a woman named Betty Cook.  Betty said, "This women [sic] is just upset because of her plain Jane look..."  Ouch!  Several other remarks of this ilk suggested that I was refused a job at Tilted Kilt, insulted my clothing, and chided me for being unable to "inspire lust with [my] ankle length garb." (I was wearing slacks and a sweater on the television interview). 

One commenter stated simply, "Rita Dunaway, I hope you fail!"  Yet, ironically, one person instructed me to "STOP HATING..."

Betty Cook et al., you got me.  I will never be anything more than a plain Jane to a Tilted Kilt manager.  Most women won't.  I probably couldn't get a job there if I tried.  Most women couldn't.

But to my Heavenly Father, I am beautiful, precious, and lovely.  I was created for real intimacy and meaningful relationship.  I am understood.  I have dignity, worth, and value.  I was designed, individually, for a purpose.  And the thing is, Betty, so were you.  So were they.

The Tilted Kilt is in business because so many hurting people have swallowed the lies of this world.  They have settled for the fleeting and the superficial.  They have settled for bondage.  But I have hope that we need not settle. We are created for MORE.  And I won't leave off reminding people of that.

The Tilted Kilt

I had never heard of The Tilted Kilt until I was copied on an email message being circulated by some concerned area residents. They were organizing a meeting with the managers of The Valley Mall to express concerns about the mall’s plans to install the restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Ruby Tuesday.

Thirty seconds at The Tilted Kilt’s website convinced me that these concerned citizens were right: This place is bad news for our community.

The site’s primary homepage photo reveals the business’ marketing strategy and much more —a trio of attractive, college-aged girls clad in too-small bikini tops and short skirts beckons the poor cads of America who are hungry to gratify their basest inclinations. For the right price, men can trot on down to The Tilted Kilt to fill both their bellies and their eyes.

But the website is more than tasteless advertising, inviting male consumers to go further in indulging their “hunger.” A tab on the website homepage lets viewers “meet” the “Featured Kilt Girl,” a bombshell pictured on a beach in a barely-there bikini, whose goal is “to graduate from college” and whose favorite restaurant meal is “The Devil’s Last Supper, because it’s so yummy!”

This establishment, whose website proudly proclaims that it originated in “Sin City,” seeks to metastasize in our community a cancer that has grown out of significant voids in the broader culture. It has grown out of our society’s persistent lack of genuine respect for women, its failure to appreciate real (but much more costly) intimacy, and its lack of concern for the well being of others.

By ensuring The Tilted Kilt’s ultimate failure in Harrisonburg, we can show the nation that as a community, we recognize our own shortcomings in these regards, and that we seek to overcome them rather than feed them.

Yes, I hope The Tilted Kilt fails. I hope it fails because our community refuses to patronize a business that preys on young girls in need of cash, capitalizes on male temptations, and lowers our standards for public decency.

I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the young, attractive girls in our city recognize that being employed at this kind of restaurant is a subtle form of prostitution; that they will refuse to set themselves up to become the objects of strangers’ sexual fantasies. I hope that they will assign too high a value to their bodies to accept the proposal that visual access be traded in a marketplace exchange.

I hope that they will think beyond the paycheck they can earn and the superficial admiration they can garner to consider the effect of their actions on others. I hope they will refuse to demean themselves and the rest of us by perpetuating the toxic notion that beautiful women are commodities.

I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the men of Harrisonburg care for and respect the women in their lives. Any man who thinks that his wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter or female friend is unaffected by watching him stare appreciatively at a half-naked woman needs to do a reality check.

Wives and girlfriends feel hurt, betrayed, and disrespected by this behavior. Sisters, daughters and friends are left with haunting questions: Is that what my husband/future husband wants? Can I be desirable if I don’t look like that? Must I expose myself to get the attention I crave? I hope the women of our city will refuse to passively accept the utter disrespect of men who would take them to such an establishment.

I hope The Tilted Kilt fails because the men in our city care about raising sons who are not slaves to their physical desires; sons who respect and honor women as people rather than bodies.

Ultimately, I hope that our city can prove itself to be one that honors the true, the good, and the beautiful. And despite what some may think, there is simply nothing “beautiful” about profiteers in “Sin City” paying a vulnerable young girl to expose her body while she waits on sex-hungry men.

A Call For Honesty and A Call For Resistance

I'm rarely surprised by what I read in the newspaper.  The blatant, inaccurate, one-sided propaganda faithfully reported by the media in countless articles about The Inalienable Right to Life Act (HB1) over the past few years have numbed my sense of outrage when the press not only gets its facts wrong, but then doesn't seem to care when you let them in on reality.  But I must admit that I did a double-take over a few sentences I read at the end of an article in Sunday's Washington Post.

In the feature piece, "5 Myths about abortion," author Rickie Solinger lists as the fifth "Myth" that "'Choice' guarantees woman [sic] the opportunity to decide whether to become a mother."  She goes on to explain that this is a myth because "[T]he Hyde Amendment - a rider attached to appropriations bills each year since 1976 - forbids the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, making the decision not to be a mother financially impossible for some women." 

First of all, let's be clear:  The Hyde Amendment contains exceptions, allowing federal Medicaid funds to be used for abortions where the mother's life is endangered or where the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.  This is important to the analysis of Solinger's claim because it means that she is saying that where the mother is pregnant as a result of consensual sex, a lack of federal funding for abortion "mak[es] the decision not to be a mother financially impossible for some women."

Of course, saying "no" to sex doesn't cost anything from a financial perspective.  So I see only two possibilities in assessing this outlandish assertion.  Either Solinger does not know the facts of life, or she believes that poor women are such slaves to their sexual impulses that they simply are not capable of exercising their "decision not to be a mother" through available means of personal responsibility:  by choosing not to engage in sex in the first instance, or by using contraceptive methods that are available through  Medicaid.

I believe the first possibility can be safely dismissed, based upon Solinger's education credentials and life experience.  That leaves us stuck with the more sinister, troubling, second conclusion, which should sound as a figurative call to arms to every thinking, breathing, caring woman who grasps the implications of it. 

Solinger may call herself a feminist (I don't know, in fact, whether she does so), but this line of thinking is the stuff of oppression.  Women--even those below the poverty line--are not pathetic victims who must depend upon government tax policies and welfare programs to shape their most intimate life choices. 

Barring the commission of an actual crime against our bodies by another person (which, again, is not a scenario encompassed by Solinger's reasoning), we do choose to engage in the acts that lead to motherhood, and we can also choose not to engage in them, or to engage in them after taking precautions to prevent pregnancy.  Solinger has not made any case for these alternatives' being financially impossible, but rather has dismissed them as alternatives altogether.  That is as insulting as it is dishonest.

The abortion activists in America may have already succeeded in redefining "choice" to mean the particular choice to end the life of another distinct human being.  I hope that we, as America's women, will refuse to allow Solinger and her ilk to convince us that the only way to "choose" not to become a mother is to choose abortion after having already become one.  

Abortion Clinic Safety Regulations

In case you missed it in the news, the Virginia Board of Health passed final health and safety regulations--including construction standards--for abortion clinics in a vote of 11-2 last Friday.  The regulations now go to the Attorney General's office and to the Governor for final certification.

Click here to read my Op-Ed on this, which was published today in the Richmond Times Dispatch.

160 Million Dead Girls - Part 1

I recently finished reading a book that rocked my world.  The author, Mara Hvistendahl, is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science and a supporter of a woman's "right" to abortion.  In her book, Unnatural Selection, she chronicles the epidemic of sex-selective abortion that has already swept certain Asian countries and India and is spreading.  She explores the practice's origins and effects, including the perspectives of demographers, parents, economists and others.  I wanted to share some of the factual high points, which are well-documented and discussed in fascinating detail in the book (and I encourage you to read it!).

Speaking from a technological/medical perspective, it was the combined availability of ultrasound and abortion that led to the annihilation of 160 million baby girls in the womb.  But before you shake your head in dismay at the idea that "other" societies could adopt "one-child" policies or embrace abortion as a routine part of family life, consider this:  it was all part of a plan hatched in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Fueled by concerns that unbounded population growth would strain world resources and exacerbate poverty in developing nations, American "population activists" collaborated to combat this perceived problem.  John D. Rockefeller III put together a "Conference on Population Problems" in Williamsburg, then went on to work with the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to "sell Asian nations on population control, primarily by spreading the logic that lower birth rates lead to richer people."

Of course, some "population activists" had more sinister motivations.  Hvistendahl posits that, privately, "Western donors worried less about poverty than they did about the global balance of power and specifically about what they believed to be one of poverty's effects:  communism."  Many American elites worried that rising birth rates in developing nations would make these regions more susceptible to communism and less likely to become American allies.

As these wealthy, Western organizations succeeded in selling developing nations on their "less is better" pitch, baby girls were the casualties.  Hvistendahl reports that parents in nearly all cultures prefer sons to daughters.

The impact of widespread sex selection is profoundly visible today, and Hvistendahl describes it well.  She visited Asian schools and playgrounds where the ratio of boys to girls is 2:1 or even 3:1.  Is it any wonder that demographers are concerned about the global impact of such imbalance?  That parents--even those who aborted baby girls so that their own one child would be a son--now worry that their precious son will not be able to find a wife?

But the problem doesn't end with parental worries.  Other unintended consequences of this deep gender imbalance include the rising trend of "bride buying," and, worse, the perfect fuel for human trafficking and other sex industries. 

Maybe playing "God" isn't such a good idea after all. 

Things I Love About Jesus (a partial list)

This morning I opened my Bible to read Chapter 4 of the Book of Luke.  I was led there because a friend of mine, Harvey Yoder, brought it up during a lunch we shared a couple of weeks ago.  We were talking about the need for Christians to be engaged  in serving their communities. 

Of course, the show-stopper in Luke 4 is found in verse 18.  Upon standing up to read from the book of Isaiah in the synagogue, Jesus chose to read the passage that says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the Gospel to the poor.  He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord."

I love that Jesus, in the same breath, cares about specific, personal needs and big picture "justice" issues.  He didn't limit his work to a lecture circuit, preaching virtue but expecting others to go out and do the (literally) dirty work.  He did both.  He taught plenty, but He was also personally involved with the sick, diseased, poor, and demon-possessed.  I want to be like Him.

I love that Jesus demonstrated obedience (unto death!), and that He honors efforts at obedience, even when paired with imperfect faith.  When Jesus told Simon (in Chapter 5 of Luke) to put down the fishing net, Simon Peter's response is so full of honest doubt.  "Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing, but I will do as You say and let down the nets." Jesus doesn't balk at the expression of reluctant doubt.  Rather, He rewards the willingness to simply obey by giving the fishermen a record catch and allowing Simon to become His follower. 

I love that Jesus challenged the notion of the "untouchable," and ignored the stigmas that resulted from cultural patterns of discrimination based on gender, occupation, poverty, religious sect and ethnicity.  There were no "outsiders" when it came to this Gospel.  He didn't shrink back even from notorious sinners, because he saw their need.

I love that Christ did not allow concern for His reputation or His standing in the community to interfere with doing His Father's work.  He cared more for the people who needed Him than for garnering support among the religious leaders of the day or winning their endorsement.  

And as I reflect on His ultimate fate from a human perspective--His death on the cross--I am amazed that He was not deterred from His calling (to the cross) by a desire to proclaim a more immediate "victory" over His enemies.  I love His perspective, that He could let go of the desire to be proven "right" to His opponents.  (I wonder how many times our simple acts of obedience are hailed as "victories" in Heaven even though they may appear as utter defeats here on Earth, even to us?)

How I long to be more like Jesus, and how far I am from the goal!  May I at least be like Simon Peter, then, and obey the Master in the midst of my doubts and fears.