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The Real Stumbling Block: Movement

Jill

Amanda and Kyso both link to this blog, which offers its male readers a “modesty survey” in order to evaluate just how much the idea of a real live girl scares the bejeesus out of them*. While many of the questions revolved around traditional conservative aesthetics (halter tops are a no-no, but floor-length denim skirts are tre chic), and others are simply ridiculous (baggy sweatshirts with anything on the front, for example, draw too much attention to the chest — just check out these hoes as an example), quite a few of the modesty issues are less about what’s acceptable for women to wear (pretty much nothing, as far as I can tell) and more about how best to keep women from moving or doing anything. For example:

#1 A girl’s physical posture and/or position can be a stumbling block.
#2 It is a stumbling block for a girl wearing pants to sit cross-legged (i.e. Indian style).
#3 It is a stumbling block for a girl to sit with her legs spread apart.
#4 It is a stumbling block to see a girl lying down, even if she’s just hanging out on the floor or on a couch with her friends.
#5 The way a girl walks can be a stumbling block.
#6 A girl bending over and exposing her lower back is a stumbling block.
#7 It is a stumbling block for a girl to bend over with her backside towards you.
#8 Seeing a girl stretching (e.g. arching the back, reaching the arms back, and sticking out the chest) is a stumbling block.
#9 Lifting a long skirt any higher than the knee in order to step over something is a stumbling block.
#10 Seeing a girl’s chest bounce when she is walking or running is a stumbling block.

By “physical posture,” they could ostensibly mean good posture (which means you might be able to tell that there are some boobies there) or really bad posture (which is still guaranteed to have something wrong with it, but at least it’s physically harmful). You can’t lie down, sit cross-legged on the floor, or sit with your knees apart (that’s only for the dudes, apparently — check out how wide guys spread their legs when they sit, and ask yourself if it regularly causes you uncontrollable lust). Now, sitting with your legs crossed isn’t necessarily much better, but they don’t mention it on the list, so perhaps it’s ok. If you walk, you’re distracting the boys. If you bend over to pick something up, you’re distracting them. If you sit down, you’re distracting them. Stretching entices them. Walking, running, or jogging entices them. Sitting still entices them. Laying down entices them.

But clearly, it’s women’s behavior that should change, so that we quit tempting the boys.

Read Amanda and Kyso. They say exactly what needs to be said.

*And leaves them crying in the fetal position, sheets sticky, unsure of what just happened.

55 thoughts on The Real Stumbling Block: Movement

  1. It’s probably not very useful to query teenage boys about what they find arousing. As I understand it, a teenage boy can find a change in wind direction to be suddenly and embarrassingly arousing.

  2. when I was in college, every spring, like an annual anti-fertility ritual, one of the pre-seminary boys would write an editorital in the school paper “exhorting” his “sisters in Christ” to guard their modesty, because, God forbid, we might make him think about tits and then he wouldn’t want to be a priest anymore.

    The next day, I always broke out the halter top.

    God created naked people, let them romp in the buff around a garden, and then, if my Bible serves me well, he looked down and said “it was good”. Peace to that. I was always under the impression that “clothing” was a sign of sinfullness and shame and nakedness a sign of purity and redemption….or could that have something to do with why the Christianists always want wimmin totally covered? We are somehow insturments of sin to them; threats to their male virtue. Femaleness = sin, temptation, irrationality, impurity, incomplete humanity Maleness = virtue, integrity, rationality, “headship”, perfect humanity. Women need to be covered and controlled. Women need to stay out of the Sanctuaries. Actually, while we’re at it, women should not even touch the extra-pure men (preists) who enter the sanctuaries.

    This is how these people think.

    I cannot believe that it is what the God that made us all “good” intends.

  3. This is a brilliant, witty, and very incisive post, Lauren. Are you going to start writing here again? If so, you’re picking up again in excellent form.

  4. I’d be interested to see what the actual results of the survey are – what you posted are just the questions in the survey that guys are supposed to indicated they agree with/don’t agree with.

    Many of the guys taking the survey likely think the questions are as silly as we do. The questions, by the way, were submitted by girls, according to the website.

  5. I’m sorry, but they say “stumbling block,” and I see “HOT!”

    #1 A girl’s physical posture and/or position can be hot.
    #2 It is hot for a girl wearing pants to sit cross-legged (i.e. Indian style).
    #3 It is hot for a girl to sit with her legs spread apart.
    #4 It is hot to see a girl lying down, even if she’s just hanging out on the floor or on a couch with her friends.
    #5 The way a girl walks can be hot.
    #6 A girl bending over and exposing her lower back is extra hot.
    #7 It is hot for a girl to bend over with her backside towards you.
    #8 Seeing a girl stretching (e.g. arching the back, reaching the arms back, and sticking out the chest) is really, really hot.
    #9 Lifting a long skirt any higher than the knee in order to step over something is hot.
    #10 Seeing a girl’s chest bounce when she is walking or running is hot.

    Is the whole rest of the survey like this?

    K

  6. The very word “stumbling block” evokes the sense of passive-aggressive immaturity and weakness which I have often encountered in my dealings with some elements of the evangelical community. Perhaps it is latent anti-Protestant bigotry on my part, surviving my lapsed Catholic status from my experiences growing up in Catholic schools, where they did definitely teach modesty, but taught men to act (dare I say it on a feminist blog) like f&&&&ng men when dealing with their moral lives. Perhaps it is the holdover of the concept of sin as an act of defiance, rather than Sin (TM) as a pervasive, Malevolent Force.

    Seems to me that the better effort would be not providing these sinful, wayward men a list of horrible, forbidden fruit (aghast, a thigh!) but rather advise them on how to be, in the in the words of the Jesuit order, men for others.

  7. ditto on what dd said. i’ll be interested to see what the results are. i wonder how much transformation occurred between the questions posted by the girls and the survey team’s re-wording.

    also, did any one else look at the pictures they used as examples? 99% of it was incredibly modest. most of the skirts were ankle length, the prom dresses covered everything but their arms (and looked like hideous cupcakes, but that’s another matter). which makes me wonder, if that’s immodest, what the hell is modest dress?

  8. The more I hear about this, the more I’m convinced that this is really just some underhanded attempt to get us all arrested for running about starkers.

  9. Question #7 from the “Layering” category:

    Immodest clothing is not a problem when a girl in your own family wears it.

    eek!

  10. Did you see the link for high heels though? They were all stripper shoes! Clear lucite platform 5″ heels and black lacy things. Okay I WOULD wear the platforms to work. But, I mean typically they aren’t shoes I see walking around the city at lunch time.

  12. Look out, I’m one of them… Anyway, I wanted to point out that none of the statements you listed represent the survey results. You’re looking at the statement equivalents of the questions girls asked. In other words, you can keep sitting cross-legged in pants. I really don’t mind.

  14. Mmm interesting LiberalCatholicGirl. I am in agreement with you!

    I grew up in a protestant church and got ‘a talking to’ about my inappropriate clothing all the time. They told me, when I was 13, “You’re just as pretty as the other girls, you don’t need to dress that way to get a boy’s attention.” First of all, I was NOT as pretty as the other girls, and I knew it, making that bit extra insulting, and “that way” was a tank top w/ cartigan + jeans ensemble – very ordinary at my casual church. But I’d developed early as a child, thus making my completely innocuous outfit “slutgear.”

    So then when that particular youth pastor ever caught me in a shirt that revealed my breasts were 3-dimensional, she would say “You’re beautiful” and wink at me, which was my cue to put on a huge jacket. ARGH! The popular girls around me who had not yet developed wore the exact same type of clothes as me. But they didn’t require the ‘beautiful’ talk for some reason. (Neither did the body-shamed heavier set girls, who knew better than to stray from tent-like clothing).

    Way to remind me that my body is dirty!

  15. I couldn’t help it…all through that thing, I just kept picturing all these dudes just stumbling around, near to fainting. I’m sure my laughing was highly immodest.

  16. God created naked people, let them romp in the buff around a garden, and then, if my Bible serves me well, he looked down and said “it was good”.

    Not to mention that, after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they themselves were the ones who decided to cover up. It was their sudden shame at their nakedness that tipped God off to their disobedience.

    So, basically, God wants us all to be nudists. 😉

  19. This is a brilliant, witty, and very incisive post, Lauren. Are you going to start writing here again? If so, you’re picking up again in excellent form.

    Ah shit. The post was mine. I was logged in as Lauren to clean up some of the comment spam. I’ll fix it!

  20. Now, I would get how it might be halfway worthwhile to mention that a girl lying on a couch or sitting cross-legged could conceivably remind one of sex if all this stumbling block nonsense were going in the direction of young men who want to retain their purity helping each other to identify and overcome their responses to triggers of that distracting lust thing – like an Integrity Pledge support group. But the implication that girls bear the responsibility for making sure that no one is ever attracted to them is yet another example of how, well, it’s not us feminists who don’t give men enough credit.

  23. The very word “stumbling block” evokes the sense of passive-aggressive immaturity and weakness which I have often encountered in my dealings with some elements of the evangelical community. – Bruce/Crablaw

    Actually, the use of the word “stumbling block” I presume comes from the commandment “do not place a stumbling block before the blind”, which is usually interpreted to mean “don’t entrap someone into comitting a sin or subborn a sin”. In general, this is a good moral principle of which the right needs to be more, rather than less aware (I would argue, based on this principle, that encouraging oaths invoking God in courts, etc., violates this principle because atheists might take those oaths — they don’t believe in God, so those oaths would be vain invocations, in which they’ve broken one of the 10 commandments … yet it was the person administering the oath that subborned the vanity and hence that person who is really responsible).

    But given the subject matter of this list (visual stimulation of men by seeing hawt young women), don’t you think that the use of this allusion is, er, somewhat ironic?

  24. Look out, I’m one of them… Anyway, I wanted to point out that none of the statements you listed represent the survey results. You’re looking at the statement equivalents of the questions girls asked. In other words, you can keep sitting cross-legged in pants. I really don’t mind.

    Maybe they are just questions, but there’s something truly creepy in how the questions are phrased. That whole, “It is a stumbling block when a girl does this,” format creates the impression that it’s all about how the girl acts, and that if a guy gets excited to see a girl lying down on a couch or stretching her neck, then it’s the girl who caused the stumbling block.

    These aren’t all things done to cause sexual attention. Girls don’t always calculate which way their backside is facing before bending over. Even suggesting that the girl’s behavior at issue here is implying that women have a duty to guard against everything that could possibly accidentally make a teenage boy think of sex, but that men don’t have a duty to avert their eyes if they get dirty thoughts staring at the cross-legged girl. The whole thing’s rigged from the start.

  25. Jill, the Lauren login had me fooled, too; mostly because of this:

    *And leaves them crying in the fetal position, sheets sticky, unsure of what just happened.

    Now, that there is a Laurenesque visual. Well done.

  28. Hey, doesn’t the military have that stealth cloak thing? Just whip up a burqa out of that stuff, and voila! You’re now literally a “stumbling block” to any male who doesn’t notice and steer clear of the vague shimmer.

  29. Yes, let them wear burqas!
    Of course that particular fashion comes from the Evil Islamic Terrorist part of the world, so I guess we’ll have to call them “Freedom Tents” instead.

  30. Das writes:

    Actually, the use of the word “stumbling block” I presume comes from the commandment “do not place a stumbling block before the blind”, which is usually interpreted to mean “don’t entrap someone into comitting a sin or subborn a sin”

    Perhaps, or it could be from either Paul in Corinthians

    …whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God— even as I try to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.

    That’s a reference to dietary laws.

    Or Matthew 18, when Jesus is talking about small children:

    If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were drowned in the depths of the sea.

    But ain’t nothing no how in Scripture about women’s bodies causing men to stumble. Lots about men making covenants with their eyes, nothing about shaming the women for the lust men feel for them.

    People be needin’ to read the bible. Really read it. Don’t they teach good hermeneutics in high school anymore?

  32. You don’t think the vague shimmer would be enticing?

    I’m with the folks above who pointed out the disturbing next step of rape apologists. “She was asking for it, your honor, with her jeans and baggy sweatshirt and her bending over to tie her shoe.”

    Can we mandate that people have to continue fucking with contraception until they’re comfortable with it (“it” being TEH SEX, of course), then they get the option of procreating? All these sexually stunted individuals having kids every time they get it on is really screwing with the mental health average.

  33. And by “fucking with contraception” I mean, of course, having sex while using birth control, not waving their fingers at a box of condoms and yelling “I’m not touching you!” over and over again.

  34. Can we just talk for a second that the name of their site is a new made-up word that combines “rebellion” and “revolution” into one new, even more rebelovutionary word? This made me laugh until I started to cry. I was trying to figure out why you would combine two words that already mean almost the same thing, to make it extra-strength or something? But they explain it in a post from a few months ago — apparently they’re rebelling against revolutions! Or maybe it’s a revolution against rebellion, I’m not sure. Either way, you’re supposed to listen to Father.

  35. This post has more information on the survey, as well as some pretty creepy comments from girls eagerly anticipating the results. So they’ll know what items to remove from their wardrobe.

    I hate the idea of being “a stumbling block.” Fuck you, buddy, I’m trying to go about my business and I like wearing clothes that actually fit my body. If you have a problem with that, avert your oh-so-sanctified eyes.

  37. What the hell is wrong with taking the boys aside, pointing out to them that they get horny at zero provocation, and telling them to grow a pair to go with their dicks?

    So what, you’re horny. Deal with it and move on, and in the meantime, leave everyone else out of it unless they specifically ask to be included. It’s just reality.

    Nothing wrong with pointing out the the girls that the same thing happens, and no need to deliberately provoke it (as in, that would be cruel, because we all expect the boys to behave themselves, don’t deliberately make it tougher.)

    I know, fantasy world. But sorry, during MY “can’t be expected to control himself” years, I was in the closet and wasn’t even allowed to hint that I was EVER horny, much less act on it. I lack sympathy for the poor dolts.

    Why is this so damn hard to change?

  38. …I have heard of your paintings well enough, you jig you amble, you lisp, you nick-name God’s creatures and make your wantonness your ignorance….I’ll have no more on it, it hath made me mad…

    Oh yeah good character study – a young man either a) batshit insane or b) convincingly feigning batshit insanity as part of a cunning plan – but either way, the chick’s to blame what with wearing make up and calling rabbits bunnies and whatever, so she’ll be badgered into floating downstream in a hour and a half….

    One lone commenter over there with this to say:

    There also seem to be other aspects of dress that North American Christians should be considering. Is it right for us to have several closets-full of clothes? Should we wear clothing with brand names? Should we wear clothing made in sweatshops? Just some more food for thought…

    No one’s responded to her so far.

  39. And by “fucking with contraception” I mean, of course, having sex while using birth control, not waving their fingers at a box of condoms and yelling “I’m not touching you!” over and over again.

    You mean I’ve been doing it wrong?

    Damn! There goes my weekend.

  41. Hugo:

    Don’t they teach good hermeneutics in high school anymore?

    No, Hugo, they mostly teach that anyone using a word like “hermeneutics” obviously hates the Bible anyway.

  43. Well, the men at my local naturist (nudist) club don’t seem to find my total nakedness a ‘stumbling block’. Now, that could be a factor of my increasingly advanced age, but they also appear totally unfazed by the nudity of the younger, more attractive women.

    I’ve often thought that feminists ought to join forces with naturists/nudists, as the best possible way to put an end to this patriarchal ‘feminine modesty’ codswallop once and for all.

  44. The whole thing strikes me as weirdly ironic.

    A woman who’s constantly thinking about sex, her sexuality, and how men around her react to it probably wouldn’t fit the idea of innocence that they were going for here. But this kind of focus encourages girls to constantly think about their breasts, their genitals, the genitals of boys around them, what’s exposed, how things are positioned, and if the guys could possibly be aroused by girls doing this or that. A girl who can’t sit cross-legged, lie down on the couch, or wear a shirt with anything printed across the chest without thinking of the male lust she might inspire, is way more sexually obsessed than a girl who wears a tank top because the weather’s hot. If they wanted kids to not think about sex, they wouldn’t fixate on that so much.

    Which suggests they’re more worried about the technicalities of “purity” than any kind of emotional or spiritual health.

    Although I’m not a Christian. Does God tell you that you should obsess on sex at all times, but only to feel bad about it? I didn’t think that was considered the proper Christian attitude to sex.

  45. Shelbi Says:
    December 4th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
    What a wonderful idea. I’m glad to see this discussed in a challenging, yet positive way. s need to take action, but they also need some basic guidelines. In truth, we often don’t realize that some of the things we wear can cause men to stumble. It is so hard for s to know what to wear and how to be attractive without being immodest. I am so glad to see you tackling a topic that is for many people a difficult and controversial subject, but one that desperately needs to be addressed.

    Shelbi says:
    December 4th, 2006 at 4:33pm

    Oops, looks like my internet filter is working a little too well, as both instances of “girls” written by me in the above comment were deleted. Sorry about that. 🙂

    …The internet filter flags the word “girl.” WTF?

  46. In other words, you can keep sitting cross-legged in pants. I really don’t mind.

    Wow, thanks! I’m so glad that I have your permission.

  47. Come, people, no more burka jokes. My mother wore a burka in college in Pakistan, and she says that she still got heckled and stared at all the time. Men gather around the gates of womens’ colleges to make comments when they come out. People there just consider it normal, and sometimes there’s even back and forth flirtation, but in my opinion, the men only there to remind the women that even though they’re going to college, they’re still only women and exist to submit to men. But I’ve been drinking the feminist koolaid. 😉

    I’ve also heard a few guys comment that burkas just make them more curious as to what’s underneath. I have a friend who works with a woman who wears a burka, and he’s mildly obsessed with how beautiful her eyes are.

    The point is, I feel really sorry for these girls. They’re in their teens, and uncomfortable with male attention. (That’s ok, even if it motivated by fundamentalism and they might not care otherwise.) So they’re asking the boys what they can wear, but they don’t realise that it doesn’t MATTER what they wear, because teenage boys are horny and will stare at them regardless. Even if they’re wearing a burka.

  48. Basically, anything a ‘girl’ or woman does is a stumbling block to these types of males, and also male-identified girls and women. The more I read over the excerpted list, the more disturbed I get because this so denies the humanity of girls and women. And, it also illustrates that it’s not even a possibility (nor a desire goal, in fact) to see girls and women as equals…just as objects that they only want to see in certain ways. And, they thought they were nice Christian males. Pretty sick, when you think of it. And, as others mention, this ultimately reinforces rape culture, and also the loss of women’s rights and visibility (e.g., to go into public spaces), because it reinforces that (a) there are things that girls and women do that they shouldn’t and (b) boys can’t control themselves when they encounter these “stumbling blocks” (i.e., people living their lives). Ugh.

  49. It occurs to me that these are teenagers, a species wired to obsess about sex, and these particular ones have no permissible outlet for that except to nitpick the minutiae of God’s Purity Rules. Other kids get to work through puberty with the help of pop culture, the internet and its porn, Are You There God It’s Me Margaret, and usually at least some parental chat about the birds and the bees. It seems like the normal, awkward milestones of adolescence are warped by the mindset these kids have been raised with: the boys get a boner, and the only way they’ve been taught to react to that is to seek out and scapegoat a source for their “sin;” the girls see a more developed body in the locker room, and channel their insecurity into sanctimoniousness, etc. It’s the parent’s fault for indoctrinating their children this way, and hopefully at least some of the kids will grow out of it (as several people on this board seem to have done), but for the time being I think that we can probably read this survey and its amount of detail as sadly misdirected expressions of normal teenage horniness.

  50. So they’re asking the boys what they can wear, but they don’t realise that it doesn’t MATTER what they wear, because teenage boys are horny and will stare at them regardless. Even if they’re wearing a burka.

    Prairielily, if I had a cigar, you would have just won it.

  51. I suggest they stop staring at women all day. Seriously. That list basically boils down to “women are lustworthy when they are breathing.”

    Why not just raise the sexes separately? You see a girl for the first time when you’re marrying her. That would be less tiring for the female population at least, since when boys are around they have to precalculate their every move, lest someone pop a boner.

    People are so stupid sometimes.

  52. My mother wore a burka in college in Pakistan, and she says that she still got heckled and stared at all the time. Men gather around the gates of womens’ colleges to make comments when they come out.

    Interesting how that works, isn’t it? I spent my first year at college in a small, women-only dorm, and we were CONSTANTLY harassed. The doors had to be locked 24/7 because guys would otherwise let themselves in, they’d hang out at night and try to grab people, etc. None of this ever happened at the unlocked, co-ed dorm I moved to later.

  53. Prairielily, if I had a cigar, you would have just won it.

    In honor of that comment, an old vaudeville routine:

    Comic: I’m a very good speller
    Straight Man: You are?
    C: Yes. I am.
    SM: I bet you can’t even spell needle.
    C: I bet I can.
    SM: OK, you’re on. To be fair, we’ll let the band leader, George, judge. So spell needle.
    C: N*E*D*L
    SM: Is that right George?
    G: Of course, not.
    SM: Do you smoke?
    G: You know I do.
    SM: Well, here’s a cigar.
    C: Let me try again. I just made one mistake. It’s N*I*E*D*L, isn’t it?
    SM: Is that right George?
    G: Of course, not.
    SM: Do you smoke?
    G: You know I do. You just asked.
    SM: Well, here’s a cigar.
    C: I know — it’s N*I*E*D*E*L
    SM: Is that —
    C: Let me ask this time.
    SM: OK, ask away
    C: Is that right George?
    G: I guess so.
    C: Do you smoke?
    G: Yes, I just told your friend twice that I did.
    C: OK, here’s a match!

    So, following up on Mnemosyne’s comment, Prairielily … if I had a match, you would just have won it! 😉

  54. Stumbling blocks. How lame is that? Doesn’t a teenage boy have any moral status of his own? Doesn’t he have any ownership of his body and his actions? Is the accountability for so much of he thinks and does to be put down to the fact that sometimes girls of his own age walk, stretch, and sweat, such that once in a while he can actually see them doing it? Are boys and men really that pathetic? If they are, then why the heck should they still be running things? “My moral foundation trembles on its bearings, because every so often I get a good gape at the girl-next-door’s exposed lower back.” What crap. Bugs that live in floorboards have more self-determination than this. My Cowflop Detector clangs with a wild clamor; this rubbish would have made my conservative/Republican dad gag (tho’ possibly this would have been a reaction conditioned on the circumstance that he had two daughters and no sons).

  55. What I find the most offensive is that the survey says that “tights, leotards, and tutus” worn in dance and theatrical performances are a stumbling block. As someone who dances recreationally, I just want to scream, “Well, goddamn, how can I do a friggin pirouette in a burka?!?!” Those leotards and tights are the tools of our trade, and no in my dance classes finds them the least provocative, even my *gasp* MALE tap teacher.
    Maybe those boys shouldn’t ever attend the ballet, lest they broaden their minds beyond their fundie-ism.
    Girls have bodies, and nothing will hide that fact.

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