On Unlearning Old Dogmas

I needed a little black dress for a bachelorette party I’m attending (In Montana in less than a week! YAY). It was sheer luck that I actually found one that fit me right away. The following conversation about took place between me and Alex:

Me: It shows my cleavage a bit though.
Alex: So?
Me: That doesn’t bother you?
Alex: Does it bother you?
Me: Nooo… I just want to make sure you’re okay with me wearing it. You’re sure?
Alex: Of course, I trust you, it’s not like you’re going to go try and get a bunch of random dudes’ attention with it while you’re out partying. If you’re comfortable with it I am.

It was a weird feeling. Because while I knew I didn’t think it was wrong, and obviously Alex didn’t care, I still felt a little guilty buying it, like I was doing something wrong.

I didn’t think much more on it, until I was surfing Facebook a few days later and stumbled upon a group of my old high school GenJ friends talking about modesty conferences and the notorious Rebolution poll. If you were fortunate enough not to grow up with the poll, let me fill you in. The Rebolution was a big thing in Christian homeschool circles, coming with the book Do Hard Things, about how it doesn’t matter what age you are, you can accomplish great stuff. It was a message that a lot of me and my change-the-world mindset friends embraced. But at some point the movement decided to take a poll. What behaviors do women have that can be triggering to our Christian brothers and cause them to sin? And you know what we found? EVERYTHING. Every gosh darn thing a women does can be harmful to the men around us. Skinny jeans? Bad. Laying on the floor? That just shows off your butt and/or boobs, can’t do that. Applying lip balm? Someone could be struggling with lust if you do that in public. Of course, the poll didn’t ask how men could keep from letting their minds be triggered by every little thing, but instead just left the results at the feet of the women, as if saying “Look at all these ways you’re causing your brother to stumble!“.

Looking at the Facebook post, I realized that damage had been caused to me and others. These women and myself had had to work hard to overcome the guilt and shame of doing or wearing totally normal and acceptable things. And I know for me how easily it also turned judgmental of other women who did have a healthy view of their body and interactions with men.

Well, now I own a dress that shows some cleavage. And I own skinny jeans (Which I wear because, yes, they’re flattering and I like to look attractive). And I have worn a bikini to the pool. And I’m sure so many more things that younger me would think terribly immodest.

I wish one poll was the extent of the information I have had to work at moving past, (It’s not even the only source of extreme modesty that I swallowed as a kid) but the more I’ve dwelt on this idea the last week the more I see how I’ve had to make decisions to move on from the things I was taught.

I remember a book I was given to read, about a princess who saves her first kiss for prince charming, and even then only once they were married. This and other lessons were trying to make a first kiss into some amazing thing that you can never get back once it’s gone. And like so many of those lessons, it gives the idea that if it is given away the women is somehow less worthy, less whole (OVER A FREAKING KISS! And why is it always only the women getting these lessons? Though to be fair, I think Christian was forced to read the book, too).

Well, my husband did end up being my first kiss, though it happened before I even said I loved him. I knew when I kissed him that our relationship was young and I might not marry him, and that was okay, I wasn’t less of a woman for it. And you know what? I know I wasn’t his first kiss, and I certainly don’t think I was cheated because of it.

I’m not sure I had ever bought into the How I Kissed Dating Goodbye courtship craze that caught on in the same community. I think I even avoided reading the book. (What is it with the Harris brothers and their movements tainting so many of my generation?). But I still had to navigate moving past that. Indeed, I even had Alex talk to Dad before committing to being in a relationship, but honestly it wasn’t because I thought he should. I think I was just avoiding the drama I was afraid would come if I started rebelling against the system I’d been taught and not wanting a bad impression of Alex to be tied up in it if I did. And I started to regret it as I spent the next three months struggling with feeling outside control try to involve itself in our relationship where I thought it had no right to be.

Even before my first and only relationship, I still broke out of the Courtship mindset by going on dates, enjoying being set up, and experiencing the fun of meeting new people and seeing if we clicked.

I won’t even go into the Patriarchy movement, mainly because it’s probably the one area I’m still figuring out just how much I don’t agree with it. But it deserves a mention.

I remember my parents rushing to turn off trailers of Harry Potter if they came on, because they didn’t want any form of witchcraft in the house. One of my favorite shirts now is a Hufflepuff t-shirt. I play a version of Dungeons and Dragons called Pathfinder, which I’m sure my Mother always viewed with some suspicion of Satanism (Spoiler: It doesn’t involve Satanism). I have been known to smoke a pipe on rare occasion. I have gone from a household where men refuse to dig around in a woman’s purse because of “privacy,” to being comfortable talking about my period symptoms or making jokes about sex even with my male in-laws.

So I’ve changed a lot over the years, thank goodness.

Some of these strict and pharisaical ideas came from my parents (Though it should be said that I believe they, too, have moved on from many of them). Some just permeated my life because they were so abundant in a lot of the circles I floated around in (Which is probably what happened with my parents a bit, too). I daresay some of it just stuck so well because I was a VERY black and white child, and strict ideas of right and wrong were much easier for me to accept than shades of gray and unknowns. And there are good thoughts behind some of these rules. I’m glad I took every potential relationship seriously and didn’t just casually date men I wasn’t interested in eventually marrying, I just don’t think doing so means throwing in a thousand hoops to jump through. I’m glad I was taught to think critically about media, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t watch something or play a game with a bit of magic in it.

I think what ultimately helped me the most to grow away from these ideas is that I got some friends who showed me what healthy attitudes to modesty, relationships, etc. looked like. People who showed me that Christians do not have to live life governed by a bunch of extra-biblical rules. People who showed me that it was okay to be confident in my body and not worry every second about what that meant for the random men around me. People who showed me that physical affection is okay between two people who are getting to know each other. And simultaneously, a lot of the friends who I made in my teens were also figuring things out and moving on from the same dogmas, and we could talk and discuss them all together as we went from just believing what we’d been taught to figuring out what we really believe.

Maybe it’s just a part of growing up. I daresay most people go through some sort of sorting out what they were taught and what they actually hold to, though maybe not to the same extremes. Some of it happened so gradually that I look back now 12 years later and it’s hard to see how it happened; I just know I’m a much different person now that I used to be.

Anyway, it’s just been something that’s been on my mind recently, that I felt the need to sort it all out in my head by writing it out. And for some reason, I feel better now that I have.