“Guys always notice, and whether girls know it or not, they get put into a category of what type of girl they are based on how they dress.”
- Anonymous 23 year old man on Modesty
This summer I helped out with a teen program for a Catholic family camp, and while cleaning up after one of the camp weeks, I chanced upon a copy of a long list. Upon examination, I noticed that it was a very long list of modesty quotes from guys to girls. I started reading it, but got really confused as some of the answers conflicted with each other. I saw statements written down anywhere from “transparent sleeves are a stumbling block” to “it is okay to show cleavage when wearing a swimsuit”. I showed it to some of my fellow female co-workers, and we managed to confuse ourselves more and more as we read this list, until we convinced ourselves that we had two options: either modesty was overrated and guys just needed to get a grip, or we all needed to start wearing burkhas.
Fortunately for me, and all women for that matter, neither of these are the case! We took this list to dinner that night and read it off to the four well-grounded guys who worked with us, drilling them for answers. They proceeded to tell us the following:
1) That we don’t need to wear burkhas! (phew!) BUT guys are really visually stimulated, and actually, skin showing is the biggest distraction for a man. Although we don’t need to drape cloth over our entire bodies and hide them from complete view, it’s still important to make sure that we don’t have too much skin showing, especially in our midriff and legs.
2) Cleavage can shoot down a man’s purity very, very quickly. Not that we have to wear turtlenecks all the time (although the guys claimed that they did find these flattering), but we shouldn’t think that plunging necklines and bared cleavage is okay. There’s no right or wrong in how much chest above the cleavage should be shown, but invent your own rule and stick with it!
3) Guys do treat girls differently who dress differently. Most good, Christian men will subconsciously be drawn to a woman who is more modestly dressed than one who is immodestly dressed. On the other hand, a boy with different motives will treat a modest woman a lot differently than he would allow his eyes to wander with an immodest woman. It’s a win/win situation for a woman who dresses modestly!
4) A girl can dress as modestly as she wants to, and still act immodestly. It can be a problem for a guy when a woman walks a certain way or moves her body in a suggestive manner. Dancing is a HUGE issue, because no matter how much clothes we have on, we might still lead a man astray if we’re out there in the dance floor “shakin’ that thang”.
There were a lot of other things we talked about that day in regards to modesty, but these were some of the biggies. These are little things that any girl can follow fairly easily without going out of her way too much. These days, layers are in, and it’s actually not all that impossible to find attractive, flattering clothes that don’t show to much skin and aren’t too tight. It might take a couple extra minutes of sifting through the clothing racks to find something we like, but we have to ask ourselves if a few less minutes of shopping is worth the moments of sin we might cause our brothers to fall into.
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