Should probably stay away from this one. After all, if to look upon a woman with lust in one's heart is to commit adultery with her, then to spend an hour or so writing about looking upon a woman with lust in my heart must be adultery at one remove. But, save me Lord, I am weak and a sinner, and I cannot resist the temptation.
Local priest wrote a letter to his parishioners in the church bulletin pleading with them to practice a little modesty.
"Truthfully," he wrote, "I'm very embarrassed to address the subject .... My concern is the serious lapse in the virtue of modesty on the part of a significant number of women in our community. The V-neck dresses and blouses expose their breasts inappropriately, drawing attention to their bodies rather than to themselves as Christian women."
Drawing attention to yourself as a Christian woman can be another and more pernicious form of vanity, of course. The young women in his congregation wearing those V-neck dresses may be far more modest, that is lacking in spiritual vanity, than these women:
"It's ridiculous to walk around showing everything," said a choir member, who asked to remain anonymous. "Men and women must have modesty."
But why?
"I think we live in a society that has lost its sense of sexual morality," Valastro said. "People have lost that obligation to preserve their purity."
Minister Kim Jackson of New Hope Baptist Church in Newburgh agrees with the monsignor. "We, as women, know what we have," she said. "This is about respecting God."
"If I know that my cleavage hanging out offends you," said New Hope Deaconess Stephanie Cook, "the Christ in me should want to stop that."
<snip>
Décolletage is still distracting, said Valastro, and sinful. "The Lord did say, whoever looks on a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his mind. We are our brother's keeper," he said.
In other words, if a woman's miniskirt derails the ministerial motives of the man in the pew behind her, she could be, in theory, an accomplice to his sin.
Of course I don't know, because I don't know them, but I can imagine that at least three kinds of hypocrites might be talking there. The prudish old woman, the jealous younger scold with a figure as curvaceous as an ironing board, and the sexual temptress who hides her intentions, but not her own endowments, behind a pretense of modesty: I could show off my breasts too, if I was another sort of woman, and if that doesn't have you staring goggle-eyed at my 36 C's, you must be blind!
Actually, there might be a fourth sort of hypocrite. The article doesn't say that that member of the choir is a woman.
One of the most evil passages in the New Testament, and one I'm sure was sneaked into the gospels later by some follower of that body-hater Paul, is Matthew 5:28:
But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
Dedicated altar boy and Catholic school goody-goody earning straight A's in religion class that I was, I swear I never heard of that one until Jimmy Carter decided to confess to it to Playboy magazine, thereby selling an awful lot of copies of that issue to men who'd never ever bought Playboy before, even for the articles, and causing them to lust in their hearts over the future Mrs Jimmy Connors---and it didn't help their sons who found the magazine hidden under the front seat of the car along the pathway to heaven either---which shows you that even a good man like Jimmy Carter can be the agent of Satan and it's one more reason that one of my favorites of Jesus' teachings, one I'm sure is really his, and also from Matthew, is the one about shutting yourself up in your house when the religious fit comes over you.
On the face of it, Matthew 5:28 would seem to be saying to men, keep your eyes to yourself and your mind on your own business. Coupled with the passage about plucking out thine eye if it offends thee, you'd think there'd have been 2000 years of re-enactments of Hemingway's short story, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.
But what it's provided is another excuse for institutional misogyny and 2000 years of blaming young women for being pretty.
The passage implicitly assigns guilt to the woman as well as the man, as if she was complicit in the man's lusting after her. He's committed adultery with her.
Her fault! Not mine! I was just stading here, minding my own business, thinking nothing but the purest of pure thoughts, and all of sudden I'm staring down six inches of freckled cleavage and committing adultery in my heart like a house afire! The harlot!
But I don't think that's what this priest is doing here, and I'm not going to get into the Church's hypocrisy and general creepiness on the subject of sex or the self-defeating absurdity of a celibate priesthood.
Anyway, the reporter interviewed another priest on the subject and he said, "You know what's a bigger bug with me? Cell phones."
Some random thoughts first on my way to a point.
For 25 years or so now, from the rise of Madonna in the arms of a bevy gay male dancers to the decline into trailer park soap opera of Britney, people, mostly mothers who have to buy their clothes, have been complaining that the fashion for teenage girls has been some version of streetwalker.
Based on my observations, I'd say the fashion is tomboy, just that it looks like their t-shirts tend to shrink a lot in the wash.
Last week in the West Village, the streets were awash with beautiful young women in small dresses chosen to accentuate the positive and make virtues of the negative while on several street corners there were gangs of actual streetwalkers, some of whom may have been women, and based on a quick comparison, I'd say that streetwalkers do not actually dress to be sexy. They dress the way they do because they can't wear sandwich boards advertisings their prices.
We need a better definition of lust. Giving yourself whiplash as you snap your head around to watch a pair of shorts filled out as God and nature and Calvin Klein intended sway down the street is a markedly different thing than hatching schemes to turn yourself into Angelo in Measure for Measure.
The sin here isn't lusting in one's heart, it's taking one's eye off the road if one's trying to follow those shorts while driving.
The greatest advance in retail, as far as I'm concerned, the one that provided the greatest boon to humankind, was not Wal-Mart or Costco or ebay or Amazon.com. It was Victoria's Secret.
An appreciation for the charms of pretty women or pretty men is one of the joys of life. If it's lust in the heart and adultery to notice that a fellow human being would almost certainly look terrific naked, then I commit adultery 10 or 20 times a day and I'm not the least bit sorry for it. This is the time of year when the sight of a lovely woman in a summer outfit carrying her shoes is often the making of my day. Of my week!
If I'm going to hell for this, then God is a woman. A particular woman. Andrea Dworkin.
Adultery itself, whether in the heart or in a motel room, is underappreciated, but I'm not going there. And I'm not confessing anything either. I'm just saying.
There is such a thing as Platonic adultery. This can be a sin or it can be something good and wonderful. Depends on how much it interferes with your non-Platonic relationships.
I've had many five minute Platonic affairs with strangers. I think five minute affairs are quite common, although most people probably don't know that that's what just happened to them. You meet someone in the course of going about your otherwise innocent business, fall into what you think is an idle, friendly conversation out of politeness, and almost instantly you and that person understand each other and have as intimate a connection as any other couple in love. I think such friendships happen all the time. Some of my best friends are people I knew for only ten minutes. Think about it. You've probably had dozens of these friendships too. So I think there's no reason that some of these friendships can't blossom into affairs.
I once had an affair like this right under the nose of the blonde. The woman I was in love with for those five minutes was having her affair right in front of her husband and kids. We were all at Valley Forge on a blustery but pleasant fall day and our two families encountered each other and mingled at one of the encampments. The woman and I got to chatting and before we knew it we had wandered away from our spouses and children. We only had eyes for each other. Just a couple of friendly, middle-aged people having a pleasant conversation but somehow locked into each other as if we had known each other for years and years.
Then it was time to go and we said goodbye and that was it.
I expect sensible women will come along here and tell me my imagination and vanity were playing games with me. She was just being friendly. Shakespeare's Sister will point me to this post of hers about a study that shows that men are far, far, far more likley to read sexual chemistry into a casual, friendly encounter with a woman.
Young lout on the prowl: If she doesn't want to get hit on, why's she dressed like that? She asking for a guy to pay attention to her!
Wiser, older man who talks like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi: Yes, this may be true. But the guy whose attention she's looking for is probably not you.
Heading now for my point. America has become a nation of slobs. We don't bother. People show up at funerals dressed for the beach. At the 10 year old's spring concert, there were fathers there---fathers, not big brothers, thirty-something men---in shorts and sandals and t-shirts. It was not a hot day. There were three or four of them wearing baseball caps in the auditorium. Their sons on stage were dressed better. Dressed more like grown men.
The mothers were only slightly better dressed.
The older sisters, the high school girls come to see their little brothers and sisters perform, in their miniskirts and tight tops with plunging necklines could be described as dressing slutty, if you are a prude. To my eyes, they were the only ones in the audience who'd bothered to dress up for the occasion. They were the ones who knew what was appropriate.
By the way, if it is true that girls are outdistancing boys on the roads to successful adulthoods---a bigger if than most people assume---that's one of the reasons---girls bother. They are taught to bother. They learn what is appropriate.
They learn manners.
Good manners are more than mere politeness. They are a way of behaving like a civilized adult.
Maybe Madonna and Britney have done some accidental good. In having to police their daughters' closets, parents have been teaching them to at least think about how to make smart choices about what they wear on what occasion.
There are times when a short skirt and a plunging neckline are signs of a kind of modesty, a modesty that is social not sexual, a modesty that acknowledges that there are situations when one has to comport oneself like a grownup, a modesty that admits that there are occasions when just being oneself is rude.
The story in the newspaper doesn't do a good job of describing just what that priest is seeing from his pulpit. He may be looking out at pew after pew of Madonna and Britney wannabes, not a few of whom are well over thirty. Maybe all he's asking for is a little common decency.
But there are limits to how much of her attractions (or his attractions) a healthy youngish person can hide, no matter how demurely she dresses. From the pulpit the priest may find himself looking down many a teenager's plunging neckline. But from the middle pews where I tend to sit I find myself distracted from my hymnal and rosary by many lovely middle-aged rear ends in sensible slacks.
I'd still like to give the pastor the benefit of the doubt. Still, if I were him, I think I'd think the problem's slobbiness not sluttiness, even though they sometimes go together. Like these guys say, even though they believe they're talking about something else, on this score, men are as bad, if not worse:
A guy wearing muscle shirts or sagging jeans can do the same thing to women, said John Rosario, 15, who attends the Dubois Street Church of God, a Pentecostal Hispanic congregation in Newburgh. "You can dress like that on the side," he said. "It shouldn't be in here."
"When I first started coming to church, I was dressing street-wise," said pal Darryl Natal, 16. He said he wore baggy pants and T-shirts that hung almost to his knees. "Once I started changing my ways, I started getting more respect."
It could be that the young women in church wearing short summer dresses are the only ones who are dressing as if they know they are in God's house.
The other priest, the one who's more bugged by cell phones is just glad he isn't pastor of a church down on the Jersey Shore.
Down there, he says, parishoners come to mass on their way to the beach.
In their bathing suits.
Yeah,and of course in some cultures women going around sans top was the way it was while it would have been a disgrace to not be properly tattooed. As you know, it was also once unthinkable for a woman to enter a Catholic church without a head covering. I recollect times as a young child, before things changed, when my mother would be hunting all around the car for paper nakins left over from A&W so that we may enter the church properly covered, times when she impromptu wanted to drop in and light a candle.
If there's anything to be bugged about while sitting in the church pew, or standing at the pulpit, or before the altar (whether facing the congregation or away from) it's the Bull Romanus Pontificus of 1455 and the Bull Inter Caetera of 1493.
Posted by: Idyllopus | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 11:34 AM
I often wondered if the reason so many churches went to standing communion was due less to making it faster and more to sparing men of the cloth from having to look down those necklines of kneeling women. First of all, just having a woman kneeling in front of you could cause problems...
I had communion wine spilled down my dress when I was 17. I was wearing a 70's version of the Donna Reed shirtdress and although I was given ample blessings up top, they were covered... unless I was kneeling in front of a standing person which I really hadn't planned on doing in that dress. As my pastor went to put the communal wine to my lips, he oopsed on his trajectory and spilled it down my cleavage. I looked up to see his glassy stare and to hear my sister whisper, "Pervert!" I don't think he was a pervert per se. I just think he probably shouldn't have had women kneeling in front of him unless it was his wife... and I am guessing that is why in most churches I have been in over the past decade or two, you don't see people kneeling for communion anymore.
As for the 5 minute affair? I am a woman and I am proud to say I've had many wonderful ones! I believe I've also witnessed a few of my husband's.
Posted by: Jennifer | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 11:45 AM
America has become a nation of slobs. We don't bother. People show up at funerals dressed for the beach.
You, sir, are correct.
Case in point: I lived for a year down in Cabo San Lucas. We used to play a game called Spot the Gringo. It was easy because the way the Mexicans dressed, right down to the young people, was absolutely prudish compared to Americans visiting the area.
The Americans, though, fresh off the cruise ship, dressed in this manner: father, sunburned, wearing t-shirt, shorts, and sandals, followed by wife, also sunburned, wearing bikini with open skirt and sandals, maybe dragging a kid or two behind, who are dressed in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. All of which are headed into a five-star restaturant, dressed exactly as they were on the beach.
Times like that, I told everyone I knew that I was Canadian.
Posted by: SAP | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 11:51 AM
first, the lust-in-your-heart attitude is pure foolishness. if you want to say one thought is more sinful than another, than thinking about killing your neighbor is a lot worse than thinking about sexing his wife.
second, that type of attitude is the attempt of some christians at thought control. just like those freaking commies tried to do.
third, the guilt that can come from all that shows the impossibility of achieving the perfectionism some sort of christians want -- to be without sin, 100 percent pure. to quote wilson pickett, 99 and a half just won't do. after i've read jung, i realize that such things are the shadow, and if you repress them, they come out overpoweringly and are hard to control.
fourth, i want all readers of my comments to know this -- if you think my thoughts about sexing about half the women on the street are sinful -- if you think they're in the same ballpark as what kenneth lay did -- then i have no time for you, and i will not respond to your foolish/ignorant/stupid criticisms and condemnations.
fifth, don't forget st. augustine, lance. he was quite the skirt chaser until he reformed. and when he did, as it often happens, he went the opposite way. and iirc, some say st. paul was gay.
Posted by: harry near indy | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 12:43 PM
The older sisters, the high school girls come to see their little brothers and sisters perform, in their miniskirts and tight tops with plunging necklines could be described as dressing slutty, if you are a prude. To my eyes, they were the only ones in the audience who'd bothered to dress up for the occasion. They were the ones who knew what was appropriate.
Well, that's one way to look at it. Thing is, that's the way I see lots of girls dress whether for a concert or when they pop by my house to visit with my son.
So, next time they're sauntering through my kitchen and my husband whips me back into the mudroom, going...Can you believe this?!!
Instead of saying what I usually say, which is Stop looking! You dirty old man!! I'll just say, Stop being such a prude! They're just *trying.*
Oh! And...
If I'm going to hell for this, then God is a woman. A particular woman. Andrea Dworkin.
Good one!
Posted by: blue girl | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 01:01 PM
Excellent post!
Give me the address of this church.
I have something particularly low cut that I think the priest might like. ;-)
Oh wait...I am too old for him.
Posted by: gary | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 01:18 PM
I much prefer to take the tack of my brother, father of two, gorgeous teenage daughters. Let them dress the way they will and build their self esteem. They both dress a little more revealing than I would like (the older slightly less so than the younger) but they also both think french kissing is really gross and think nothing (at 15 and 18) of snuggling right up with mom, dad, grandpa or even an uncle they care a lot about while watching a movie.
Posted by: DuWayne | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 03:19 PM
There is a bit of difference between "hath committed" and "hath been caused by yon strumpet to committ," and interpolating the latter from the former to tell the ladies in the congregation to wear long sleeves is what one might call the homiletic fallacy. I.e., abjuring the many other things one might have written a sermon about that week.
Posted by: Rasselas | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 05:14 PM
Last week I read reviews in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about a new book called "Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up," in which the author, Christopher Noxon, extols the virtues of keeping a "child-like essence" well into old age.
He doesn't mean young at heart. He means childish. The author met his wife at an adult kickball game.
Right around the time I turned 40, three years ago, I started to think a lot more about what I wear. Shorts, sandals and especially T-shirts strike me as peurile. They're OK when you're puttering around the house or going to the beach. And I live in South Florida, so shorts are OK in quite a few situations, as long as I wear a belt and tuck in the shirt. A grown-up should dress like a grown-up.
I was annoyed at USA Today's uncritical story about "Rejuvenile" and complained to a friend who is American, but lived in Italy for a few years when he was a boy. He replied: "I don't mean to praise Europe unduly, but there still is great style and poise in manhood there. Great pride. Just take Italy ... men go out wearing jackets 90 percent of the time! I remember wearing shorts in Rome - this is when I was 15 years old! - and fellow 15 year old Roman kids were heckling me mercilessly. They thought it was totally moronic. Now, OK, it was summer and 100 degrees, so I think I had a point. But there point was a larger one, one I didn't understand at the time."
Exactly right. Why don't we raise children to long to be poised, debonair adults?
Posted by: Holden Lewis | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 09:05 PM
I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. You certainly offer a lively argument here, one which I'm sure many will take issue with, however! We tend, as individuals and as a society, to have rather narrow views on issues relating to morality or our definition of such.
Posted by: panasianbiz | Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 09:37 PM
Yes: Modes of dress. Important stuff to think about. I've had my gaffs but I do think about it.
Certainly, a great many of my countrymen should be doing the same. But aren't.
Posted by: Kevin Wolf | Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 11:26 AM
My impression at Catholic Masses was that the majority of priests preferred looking at, thinking about, planning futures for: handsome young men, very handsom, very young. This was well before I was aware of being sexually aware, though the Catholic Church, with its constant calls for sexual deprivation, forces children to get wise to sexual preoccupations much sooner than necessary. This is, even if they are not physically molested. In the parochial schools I attended the tape loop ran all day, every day: confess your impure thoughts. Don't know what impure thoughts are? Read about the virgin/martyr saints and prepare a standing report to the class on what's admitted and what is not.
And if you don't believe you have impure thoughts, you're probably lying. Tell your superiors. They want details.
Posted by: grasshopper | Wednesday, June 28, 2006 at 01:36 PM
You know, in my workplace (programmer) the slobbish dress is in many ways a reaction against the "empty suit" phenomenon. Look at me! I'm so talented that I can do very well even if I dress like a slob!
Actually, it's gotten to the point where I couldn't wear a tie to work, even if I wanted to (and I do - I look like an idiot in a T-shirt.) It'd be seen as, well, vanity. (Who's he trying to impress?)
Posted by: Charlie | Thursday, June 29, 2006 at 02:17 AM