Mormon Young Women, Modesty, and the Porn-Addled Youth of Today

You’ll want to read this dispatch from the front lines, by the father of a young teen-age LDS woman. It gets what modesty is about.

Our stake just got back from a youth handcart trek. On the last full day, uniformed reenactors rode up and recruited all the men and young men for the Mormon Battallion. We left our girls about a half mile from the base of a high ridge and via a circuitous route got to a point about 2/3 of the way up the ridge. Our instructions were to way till our girls came abreast of us, at which we could leap out and help them finish the hill.

When the women came in sight on the hill, red-faced, gasping, and so on, some of our young men started to cry. Others looked angry.

At the end of the trek to a man they said waiting on that hill was the hardest part. Some were still emotional about it.

It occurs to me that men very much want to be men, not just people, and interact with women as women, not just as people (and, of course, the other way around). In the past, I’ve argued that women’s clothing and behavior can be womanly in two ways–it can be womanly on the purely physical level, emphasizing tits and vaginas, which is what we call immodest clothing. Or it can be womanly by taking advantage of cultural conventions for female dress–long hair, dresses, feminine colors and cuts, etc. Ideally, this is what modest dress should be–not just not revealing, but also distinctly feminine and therefore alluring.

But Geoff J.’s dispatch from the front lines has made me broaden my concept of how modesty interacts with the man-woman dynamic. He talks about the Lord of the Flies/I Am Charlotte Simmons atmosphere at his daughter’s school and then observes that

the Mormon boys are much less likely to be involved in the groping and various sexual harassment. Plus they tend to play the role of defenders/protectors to the Mormon girls.

While men have a strong need for sex as an expression of their manhood, I believe they also have a strong need to be protective of women as an expression of their manhood. Modest dress and modest action welcomes that protection and allows young men to be men in a more positive way. Being a knight requires a lady.