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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

How "Modesty" Teachings Hurt Men Too



Someone posted this article today on Facebook, from a famous Christian author and blogger:

If Only She Knew ~ Thoughts On Modesty

I read this against my better judgment and honestly, I'm sitting here furious. I have said for years that boys in conservative Christian homes are conditioned to struggle with "modesty" and everyday normal things regarding female bodies. That they are programmed to see non-erotic body parts as erotic. This article is the perfect example of that. This poor boy, and every boy like him have been set up by their parents for a lifetime of failure and shame. Then they have the audacity to blame all the women in the world for their terrible parenting. I'm just so angry at this type of spiritual abuse and bondage!

Here's how the article starts out:

"Avert your eyes, Son. His dad started saying it to him from the youngest age - when he was only a little boy. Might have been an alluring commercial while watching the ballgame. Or a billboard while driving down the highway. A pop-up on the computer screen. As parents, we had purposed to teach him purity from the beginning.  
Temptation can be found anywhere. Even in Target. Target? Yeah, I know. That's what I thought too. Until one day we popped in to pick up some flip-flops for the summer and I remarked how he kept bumping into things. What is your problem, Son?? "I'm just looking down, Mom," And with a nod, he indicated the ads placed strategically above us. Billboards for the lingerie department. Yikes. I'd not seen them. "

I've written about how modesty teachings enslave women, well this is the perfect example of how they enslave men too. The first few sentences infuriated and shocked me. They CREATED their son's struggles! They conditioned and brain-washed him to think there was something wrong with seeing females in clothing they didn't approve of. That looking at a woman is somehow shameful. They DID THAT TO THEIR SON and they are patting themselves on the back for it. They didn't teach him "purity", they taught him shame and objectification of women.  They taught him that natural attraction is something to feel guilty about and be avoided at all costs. They should be ashamed of themselves. They have set their son up for failure, and now he is going to be under such a heavy burden his entire life for things that are not wrong. He's going to struggle with "sins" that aren't sins but that he's been brainwashed to think are "impurity". The sight of normal American women all around him is going to send him into such a frenzy of natural emotion and arousal that he's not going to know how to function in the real world. This poor boy!!! I cannot imagine doing anything that unhealthy to my sons.

Oh, but it gets worse:

"It was a hot July day and we all packed up and headed out for fun and fellowship with a bunch of other believers. Picnic blankets, cold watermelon, and squirt guns. It was promising to be a great day. 
So I was surprised to see our oldest son hanging back from the festivities. He's an outgoing guy and usually one of the first out there mixing it up. Except not this time. He stayed close to our small spot and played with his little brothers instead. What is your problem, Son?? 
He hesitated for a moment. Then answered, "Mom, I don't know what to do. Dad's taught me to 'avert my eyes', but there doesn't seem anywhere I can turn here."

Nowhere he can safely look. Because women in swimsuits and summer clothes are everywhere and he's had it drilled into him from a tender young age that women in swimsuits are off-limits, tantalizing, and "impure". This poor boy cannot even go swimming or play outside because of his parent's brain-washing. HOW is this "purity"?! It isn't. It's heaping guilt and legalism on a child's head and causing untold confusion. This isn't healthy. This is so very toxic. He's just a little boy. Yet his innocence is being trampled into the ground.

My cousin Matt said this when he read this article:

"He [the boy in the story] wouldn't have a problem with it if his parents didn't make it a big deal. If they approached sexual attraction as a normal thing, and taught him how to control his actions, he wouldn't have to live in fear of seeing bare skin. Now, it seems like he is afraid to even go out in public, because of all the eye snares around him. Its almost as if he - or his mother, at least - expect girls to cover up for her son's sake, as if the world revolved around him. 

If he was in the real world, you know, the one that inhabits the spaces around his stifling mother and father, then he would find that real men really don't worry about bare skin. Those of us who control our desires know it is not wrong to look or enjoy the sight of a beautiful woman. We also don't expect them to serve us because we know they aren't the temptresses this mother is insinuating that they are. 

What he needs is for the walls of his little world to come crashing down. People like his parents think they are helping him walk in victory, but it isn't victory when you are afraid of the world around you. It isn't victory when you demonize something God created: beauty in a woman. It trivializes His creation. It makes it seem as if women are there to set you up for failure. 

What's wrong is not the world around him, but the world in which he lives. Open your eyes, son, look up. Nothing says you have to look at the lingerie ad, but you won't go to hell for lingering a second longer on it. Look at it and move on. It is part of the world around you. Your urges are part of your world. Your desires are part of your world. They aren't your whole world, as your mother seems to emphasize." 

In essence, these parents are crippling their son. There's no way around that. And this mother is encouraging other mothers to cripple their son and to see all women as objects of temptation.  Not to mention using emotionalism and spiritual-sounding language to urge all women to cater to her dysfunction. This is a glaring example of spiritual and psychological abuse.

I'm not going to post the rest. It's an appeal to emotion that ends up blaming all the women in the world for this boy's and every good boy's "struggles"; blaming women for toxic, spiritually abusive parenting they have inflicted on their son. You can read it but be warned, it's painful.

This is a real, serious problem, but I've never seen it outlined so perfectly as this post does. Making normal, non-erotic body parts erotic does a grave disservice to boys and men. And this is a wide-spread problem among conservative Christians and homeschoolers.

Here's what my friend Katie had to say in a conversation we were having on this topic:

"I believe the ultra conservative teaching many of us grew up under modesty-wise, has hurt men as well as women. Men who grow up so sheltered that they find a cap sleeve enticing and whose moms cover their eyes if a woman with cleavage walks past, never learn how to deal with normal American dress. It is no wonder they experience such trouble at a beach or a pool. Regardless of how you personally believe God would have you to dress, you have no right to control the rest of culture. Your husbands, brothers, sons, etc. will be exposed to cleavage, shorts, bikini's, mini skirts, etc. We do boys no favors when we raise them so strictly that such normal clothing is hyper erotic to them. Instead of sheltering them we end up hyper sexualizing them. I feel sorry for guys raised that way that struggle thru normal daily life like going to the grocery store.

I hope our generation will do better than our parents at teaching our children (boys and girls alike) how to view the opposite sex. Lust is not a sin that only effects men. Women can struggle with it as well. Part of the problem is that we call sin things that are not sin thereby heaping guilt on men and women for simple biological hormonal reactions.

It is not sin to find a person attractive. It is not even sin to feel turned on by them as they walk past you. That is just a basic function of biology and hormones. It is a sin, to dwell there and savor the moment, to go back to it time and again, or continue to fantasize about that other person (ie undressing them in your mind or worse). We need to teach our children the difference between a hormonal reaction that is biological, and choosing to expand or camp in that reaction and indulge in lust. We need to practice personal responsibility in our handling of situations that are struggles for us personally, and we need to teach our children personal responsibility for their own reactions to others around them. Men and women alike need to dress in ways that do not violate their conscience, but they also need to realize that they can never control anyone but themselves and master their own thought lives."

Fear, shame, guilt, rules, "temptation is everywhere"....a little boy whose innocence was taken by the very people supposed to protect him. And all in the name of "purity". My heart is breaking. I may be a woman, and I experienced these lies from a woman's perspective, but I saw what they did to the men in my life. To the boys programmed with shame. I continue to see the effects of such teachings as the boys I grew up with are now men. Men who have sexual addictions; teenage boys from homeschooling families that ended up as pedophiles; men who have sexual hang-ups in their marriages; conservative Christian men who ended up rapists; good men who struggle with normal life because they still can't see a woman in a pair of jeans and not think about the voices that told them this was "immodest" and "a temptation". An entire generation of men who were raised with shame and fear, like this little boy, have grown up and their stories are enough to keep the tears flowing and the hearts breaking. I have two little boys of my own. And I cannot imagine raising them to fear the world, women, and themselves as the parents of  the boy in this story are doing. I hope they see what they are doing to their son before it is too late to undo it.


(Warning: I would suggest that if the above sickens or triggers you, don't read the comments on the post I linked. Some of them are worse by far than anything in the post and completely disgusting.)

31 comments:

  1. I totally agree that a lot of times 'popular' teachings in the Christian world end up exaggerating so many situations until we've succeeded in making them worse than they really are. I think right now modesty is DEFINITELY one of those things, along with the Christian dating scene - which is horrendously confused. Really glad to read your piece, it is encouraging to know that I'm not the only Christian who is frustrated with many popular Christian teachings!

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  2. Great post! oh my gosh- read the original article, and some of the comments. Wow. Also- since when are men more visual??? I'd love to know who started that rumor. And I find the hypersexualization incredibly creepy, sad, and revolting, too. I have three little guys, and they think that modest means ” not bragging about stuff.” May that always be their reflexive association.

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    1. Stuck in the Denver airport for 8 hours, I wandered into the news stand and saw a rack labeled, "Mens Interest". The top two shelves were all skin mags like Playboy and Penthouse. Curious, I looked for a rack labeled, "Womens interest" and found it. The titles of the mags on the top two shelves all had some form of one of two words: "bride" or "wedding".

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    2. Lol that's Denver Airport for you! They have the reputation for being pretty odd...

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  3. Very well done. I can absolutely confirm the (often criminal) sexual problems that result from this vile teaching.

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  4. Notice that in each case, the boy didn't say "I'm having trouble because I can't stop from fantasizing about that girl." What he actually said was "I'm having trouble because DAD TOLD ME not to look at that so I have to avoid it."

    This mother had made no comment, whatsoever, on how turned on (or not) her son was. How do we know he was even feeling lust at all at that picnic? He may just have identified those "types" of clothes as something he wasn't supposed to look at. It may not even have got to the biological reaction yet, who knows!

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  5. You know, this sounds so lame, but I just realized TODAY (after 13 years of being away from that movement) that the modesty scriptures NEVER mention men. One of the main arguments for "modest" dress is so that women don't make men stumble, and yet that is not even a thing in scripture.

    Did you read Rachel Held Evans' article on modesty today? In "Q" or something? She points out that in the verse about lust it doesn't say, "If you lust after a woman you've already committed adultery in your heart, so women, cover up!" but "If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out!"

    I know this extreme modesty teaching has been around for a long time, but this summer seems to have seen an explosion in discussion about it. I had one woman tell me yesterday that she was going to wear skirts *in case* it pleased God more, and when I mentioned that the sideshow aspect of dressing in a way so foreign to our culture actually detracts from people seeing Christ in us because they are so focused on the strangeness of appearance, she responded that she didn't care because she was dressing for God, not man. I was dumbfounded thought I shouldn't have been. That was me once.

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    1. I did read Rachel's post. It was very good. Modesty and lust are never spoken of together or in the same context in the Bible. Ever.

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    2. In re your friend who wears only skirts: I would have said "Don't say you're doing something for God if you know the thing you're doing will actively hurt your witness to the world, because why would God ask you to do that?"

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    3. I agree that it is significant--very--that Scripture does NOT connect immodesty w/ lust. I'm sure that is a side effect, but we need to dress to please GOD. I've been having some of these conversations, and women quote the thing about men's lusting or being "considerate" and sometimes never seem to actually HEAR what I am saying. Sometimes the consideration is just because no one wants to see that. :) If I flatter myself that I will "stumble" everyone in the room, then that's just silly.

      But may I add that there are darling, stylish skirts, whether shorter (as in skirt suits) or longer (as in the flowing...maybe flower girl? kind). So if someone does feel compelled to wear skirts, can't she wear those that look nice, NOT frumpy, so as not to draw undue attention to herself (which looking terrible DOES)?

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  6. One of the problems I see in the whole modesty discussion is that the ultra-conservative side has a few select scriptures they use to support their view, and the moderate to liberal side use next to no scripture. What this means is that the Bible rarely enters the discussion and it becomes a heated battle of "that tempts me!" "Well, it shouldn't!" "But it does!" This gets us nowhere.

    There are three major views "supporting" the ultra-conservative view. 1) The Nakedness Argument; 2) The Lust Argument; and 3) The Modesty Passages themselves.

    The nakedness argument centers on Genesis 3, where God gave Adam and Eve clothes; Exodus 20:26; 28:42 where God told the priests not to show their nakedness before His altar; Isa. 47:2-3 where women are supposedly naked when their thighs show; John 21:7 where Peter was "naked" while fishing; and a myriad of other passages supposedly condemning nakedness.

    Now, nakedness is consistently viewed in the Bible as shameful. Adam and Eve's nakedness was not a good nakedness and needed to be covered up. Personally, I feel it is a valid point to make that the loin coverings they made for themselves were not adequate to remove their shame or cover their nakedness, and so we certainly need to be covered with more clothing than that to avoid that kind of nakedness. However, the question is "how much more clothing?" This is the question that the Bible does not answer. Leviticus 18 certainly condemns exposing genitalia. But other than that the Bible never gives a set standard for what is naked and what is not. It is certainly presumptuous to suggest that the "minimum standard of modesty" are the tunics that God made for Adam and Eve. First, as much as some may protest, we do not know the length nor the cut of those tunics. Tunics were not all "shoulder to thigh" garments. Many bared shoulders, and others did not reach completely to the knees. Not only that, while covering the first couple's nakedness was part of the purpose for those tunics, there were other purposes as well, at least one of which was protection from the harsh conditions of the world they would now face outside the garden. Since we do not know all that motivated God to give them those particular garments, we CANNOT say that "shoulder to the knee" is the set standard from Genesis 3. The most we can legitimately say is that loin coverings are probably not sufficient.

    As for Exodus 20, 28, and Isa. 47, the interpretation of these passages suffer from severely bad definition of terms and understanding of the language used. Folks assume that exposing thighs is evil because as a priest went up steps to an altar the tunic might "crawl up his leg," but that is not stated there, nor does it fit with the use of the term nakedness in the rest of the Law of Moses which is "genitalia" in Lev. 18; poop in Deut. 23:14 (translated 'indecent'); and indecency between a husband and a wife in Deut. 24:1. Of these possible options, it seems safe to assume that the nakedness referred to in Ex. 20 is the genitalia...not the thigh. In Ex. 28:42 the priestly underwear was to reach from the waist "to the thigh." I'm not sure why so many assume that this means that it had to cover the thigh. If I tell someone to put on a pair of shorts that reaches from the waist to the knees, they do not assume the knee has to be completely covered...just that it extends to that body part. What these priests wore were not shorts...they were at most short boxer briefs!

    (Continued below)

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  7. Isa. 47:2-3 is badly misinterpreted. The word "thigh" there never refers to a human thigh...it actually refers to the lower leg of a person. So the "shoulders to the knees" folks better go back to ankle-length dresses if they want to obey that one! But the exposing of the leg in this passage is not what makes one naked, any more than "removing the veil" of the previous line does. It is the "stripping off of the skirt" that makes these women naked. That is much more consistent with the way nakedness it typically referred to in the OT than this idea that exposing the lower leg, or even the thigh, could ever be.

    As for Peter, let me make this point. It is interesting to me that in Genesis 3, Exodus 20, Exodus 28, and John 21 all deal with nakedness in God's presence, and not nakedness around other people. That is not to say that we need to flaunt our most private parts around other people, or that we should not have a sense of modesty and decorum, but it does mean that these passages deal much more with the respect we should have in approaching God, and not so much about the way we should dress around our fellow man. Not all Israelites were required to wear the priestly underwear, even though they, also, might be going up steps at certain times. And Peter is not reprimanded at all for dressing that way around the guys on a boat away from shore. It is much more likely that this is mentioned to demonstrate his respect for the Lord, or as a way to contrast the way he approached Jesus from the way Adam and Eve hid from God than it is to give some sort of commentary on the fact that men cannot take off their shirts at the beach.

    The other nakedness of the OT show that one can be naked while still having clothes on, but we need to understand that this is a SOCIAL nakedness and not some Biblically sinful nakedness. In Job 24:10; Ezk. 18:7; and even Mt. 25:36 those described as naked were clothed in something. However, their disgrace did not come from sinfulness. It came from the fact that they were not dressed to society's standards. We need to realize that when the OT condemns nakedness it is always talking about exposing the most private of body parts. When it speaks of SOCIAL nakedness, the shame is simply that the person is not dressed to a level that would keep out the cold, or deem the person honorable in society. NOWHERE is one condemned for not dressing "shoulder to knee," nor is this pattern ever taught in the Bible. The passages used to defend this doctrine do not teach it, and have to be stretched to the utter limits of reason to be made to say what people want them to say.

    As for the Lust Argument, I'll say this. Has anyone noticed that those passages are ALWAYS directed at the looker and never at the one wearing the clothes? Mt. 5:28 and Job 31:1 both address a person keeping their own thoughts in check, but they say nothing about how a person is to dress. I find it troubling that when many read these passages their first thought is "ladies, better cover up!" That is NOT where Jesus put the emphasis! He placed it squarely on the one who has the potential heart problem, and not upon the ones wearing the clothes. This means that we need to be teaching our men (and women) how to think about the opposite sex under any circumstances, and not teaching them that the real problem lies with the 'hussies' out there who dress to drive them to distraction. Also, Mt. 5:28 does NOT say, "He who looks on a woman has already committed adultery..." It says "He who looks on a woman WITH LUST FOR HER..." The sin is clearly not in the looking, but in the lusting. How can we teach respect for all people, no matter how sinfully they might dress, if we instill in our children that they can't even look at those sinners on the beach?

    (Continued Below)

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  8. Someone might incorporate Romans 14 or 1 Corinthians 8 at this point, and say that we need to "think of the weaker brother." This is true, and we certainly need to avoid flaunting questionable clothing around those who we know struggle with lust problems. That is not loving. However, neither Romans 14 nor 1 Corinthians 8 condemn the things that were causing the weaker brother the problems. In order to condemn a practice we must have some passage outside of these chapters that expressly condemns the item in question. We need to make sure that our arguments condemning something have more weight than, "It MIGHT cause someone to lust." In those passages the foods, days, meats, and drinks DID cause people problems, and they knew exactly who would be negatively affected. This is usually not the case in the modesty issue - it is much more subjective than that - and as you pointed out so well, so much of it comes, not from the clothing itself, but from a lie that has been pounded and ingrained in people's minds that is not taught in Scripture.

    What this leaves us, then, are the Modesty Passages - 1 Tim. 2:9-10, and 1 Pet. 3:3-4. We need to be modesty, discreet, chaste, and pure in our clothing, but God did not draw those lines for us here. He left that up to us and our best efforts. We should dress in a way that reveals our godly character, and that might mean "shoulders to knees," but then again, it might not. It might mean no modern swimwear, but then again, it might not. All we can concern ourselves with doing, though, is teaching the godly attitudes that will result in our brethren taking the way they dress seriously from a spiritual point of view, and making sure that we do not violate our own consciences by how we dress ourselves. If we do this, and respect the well-thought-out decisions our brethren make - whether we agree with them or not - we will be able to personally please God and function well spiritually in a world that undoubtedly is too exposed.

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    1. Wow, you are very thorough. :D

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    2. Ha ha. I've had to be. It was very hard for me to change my beliefs on this, and I needed to KNOW that the Bible truly did not teach it.

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    3. Sheesh, and I thought that I was thorough with my comments :D

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  9. Darcy, as a sister of two boys who were seriously, seriously screwed up by these teachings, and one brother who is not as damaged, all I have to say is: PREACH IT SISTER!

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  10. my understanding is that kids don't experience sexual attraction (curiosity, lust, whatever it is) until they hit puberty ... to address these things as issues for children is creating sexual awareness before their bodies are even aware ... I think it a form of sexual abuse to be quite honest.

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    1. Thank you, Ripley! These people are creating the very hypersexualized environment of which they're accusing the rest of the world. A child doesn't look at a woman in a swimsuit and think of sex. It's the parents who are making that connection!

      It's sexual abuse of a child to show pornography to a child, so it makes sense to me that it would be sexual abuse of a child to make everything the child see into something pornographic.

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  11. Excellent article. I tweeted the link to Violet Blue just now because she has written articles about all sorts of unusual sex over the years and it seems to me like these "modesty" people have one of the most extreme "kinks" of all in the way that they extremely fetishize bare skin that is considered perfectly normal to wear in American public places, and in teaching their kids to fear their normal sexual attractions and thoughts so much and programming them to feel extreme guilt over seeing bare midriffs and over "giving away" some tiny amount of sexual attraction to someone (even in a harmless fantasy) who isn't going to be their "one true and only partner in marriage".

    As a single guy myself, I'm confused how anyone could possibly hope to find that one true partner without at least some thoughts of imagining what it might be like to be with a whole range of partners. Shouldn't that also include trying to figure out to what extent you might be sexually compatible with a potential partner as well?

    I've read too much from ex-P/QF bloggers on how easy it is to get pushed into an early marriage with someone they discovered in horror, on the wedding night in a lot of cases, they were completely sexually incompatible with. What a nightmare! This idea that any "lustful" thought about someone who might not be your future husband/wife is sinning against God can not be healthy.

    As long as you don't creep out someone by leering at her or him, I just can't imagine that God would punish someone for fleeting sexual thoughts that never came close to turning into action. Instead, they get so repressed that their sexual energies turn in criminal directions, like any man who decides pedophilia with a minor girl is less of a crime than, e.g. masturbation to pornography of adults at home. I know some believe in "porn addiction" from a religious perspective, but from society's perspective, I'd much rather have the second guy privately relieving his urges (whether married or single) by himself than going out and being a sexual predator because of some twisted Biblical calculus.

    The comments on the original article are also quite strange. Most seem to be in agreement with the concept and it's amazing how they tie themselves in knots with contradictions in who to "blame" and why. And patting themselves on the back for being so prudish and instilling such guilt in their kids. Even the most uptight Catholics aren't putting as much guilt over sex into their kids as these people.

    One of the later comments also pointed out just how U.S. centric these people are compared to parts of the world where nudity is considered more natural and nonsexual. I have a friend who was raised Catholic in a rural Cajun part of Texas and he said they had an extremely laid back view of nudity and about sex in general, compared to American Catholicism in the more Anglo parts of the country. But these people are *extreme* and it's really sad.

    You're completely correct about how harmful these kids are being programmed psychologically. But they won't take advice from anyone "secular" so it's good if you can at least try to get to them from a Christian perspective that these beliefs are not natural from a common sense perspective, whether Biblical or just based on what secular child psychology says about healthy sexual development.

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  12. P.S. I'm curious where your cousin Matt first heard the term "eye snares" for a woman in clothing that's too revealing for the person to handle. I've heard the euphemism "stumbling block" before for what I think is the same basic idea, and I knew from context exactly what he meant, but Google seems to indicate your blog post is the first time the term "eye snare" has been used on the Internet for this, so I'm curious where he heard it from.

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    1. Hey, Jake, for some reason I just found this comment in the spam folder. Sorry about that.

      Anyway, the term is actually "eye trap", and it's a Gothard/ATI term, used in the Basic and Advanced Seminars. Matt's family was in ATI for a while. Google that one, or search for it on the website, "Recovering Grace" and you'll find more than you ever wanted to know. ;)

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  13. One other thought on the subject. I don't mean to excuse his guilt if it turns out, as seems fairly likely to me, that Michael Jackson was guilty of the various accusations of child molestation against him over the years (and the boys and parents all seemed extremely credible in all the court transcripts and depositions that I read during the early cases against him).

    But it's interesting to note that M.J. was raised in an extremely strict Jehovah's Witness culture and to all accounts was utterly petrified of sex and of the various female groupies who threw themselves at him during his early tours and how he would rather read the Bible to them than anything else. So he might be the most famous example of one criminal direction that a person's sexuality can go when it's utterly repressed by extreme fundamentalism.

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  14. I'm not a christian, but I think this was a fantastic blog post, and I agreed with 99% of it. The 'parenting' this blogger displayed in the post you talk about is definitely doing her children a major disservice.

    It's toxic and abusive behaviour.

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  15. She has closed the comments on the blog, though she apparently contributes to another blog where you can still comment. I feel so, so sad for her boy, he will probably struggle his whole life. I feel sad for him , but God keep my daughters from boys who have been brought up this way.

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    1. Your last sentence really struck me. That's how I feel. I did not marry a man raised this way and God knew what I needed. I couldn't stand any of the boys raised like this, like I was, with these warped teachings. My husband has been the one who has shown me over the years how real men are....the good, bad, and ugly. I needed to see the good so desperately. I hope my daughters, who are growing up with his example, will see what a healthy man with a healthy view of sexuality is and stay far away from men like the boy in this story. So much baggage.......

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  16. I so appreciate this discussion.

    I feel very moved to comment on one aspect that came up a few times; homeschoolers. I believe the homeschoolers you are referring to could actually be considered part of the conservative Christians you mention. I am a Christian and a homeschooler. We do not however homeschool because we are Christian. The homeschooling community, while definitely growing, is still a minority and we face many prejudices and assumptions without well-meaning people adding to that.

    Again, love the article and the discussions it has inspired.

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    1. I, too, was a homeschooler, raised in the very conservative homeschool subculture. I realize the face of homeschooling is changing, and that is wonderful. But you all have a long battle getting rid of the stigma and proving that not all homeschoolers are like the ones we were and grew up with. When I write about homeschoolers, I am writing about the religious homeschooling movement, which is very much alive and influential today. I hope that people like you and my many friends I have who are homeschooling their kids, can help prove that homeschooling today doesn't have to be what it was....a dominionist religious movement.....but instead is a really great education option, utilized by many people from all religious and non-religious backgrounds.

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  17. Hey, just to let you know I posted a link to this awesome post on my blog. Thank you for being you and writing such a necessary post. Thank you.

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  18. Don't you think your spouse would like you to be hyper sexually turned on? I feel like getting too used to naked bodies may be taking away from how our society can enjoy it in marriage. If we're all so used to nakedness then sex appeal losses it's appeal. There''s a balance. There's a time to be sexually atractive, like when dancing or swimming. There's a time for it, but not to abuse our freedom of it. I look at their faces if I have a problem and praise God if they have the faith to enjoy looking like a beautiful naked flower. Don't blame me for appreciating them. I enjoy seeing beauty just as much as any guy or girl, and I think it's sweet when a girl reveals her humility by dressing in a pleasing way to those special around her. Isn't that modesty? To be clothed in humility as the bible says.

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    1. If that were true, then we'd all get bored with our spouses bodies after a few years.

      Hint: it's not true.

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