Modesty: A Man’s Perspective

For guys as well girls, the blurring of lines, cues, and echoes between the entertainment and pornography industries are no longer ignorable either. You have to think about what you put in. If you watch porn, the mindset that every woman you see you are able to sexually dominate will start to follow; that women aren’t people with feelings and thoughts and a will of their own; they are, instead, sex-hungry animals that need to be sated. It would seem, too, that the modesty movement would begin to think of men as the latter and in need of strict regimens of clothed chastity to quell their vulgar urges. The question then forms rather quickly: who or whom is modesty actually for?

From “Modesty: I Don’t Think it Means What You Think it means,” Rachel Held Evans, 6/14/2014

While I don’t always agree with Mrs. Evans work, I admire her drilling down and bringing up this word, Kosmios. It’s root word, the deeper Komizo, means to care for, take care of, provide for. So modesty isn’t about clothes. Modesty is about a state of mind, ordered, as it would seem, by Christ. Men should think modestly of women, and their fellow men; women should think modestly of men and their fellow women.

Modesty, then, seems to be for all people, and it will have a cultural context. In recent news, a supermodel was called on the carpet for a magazine cover where she was breastfeeding her child. It’s right there in the name, ladies and gentleman: Breast. Feeding. I’m not a pusher for exposed breasts in public nor am I asking the systematic devaluation of a woman’s body via repeated exposure. It’s a part of God’s cycle of life. It’s a part of the order that God created, the beauty and mystery of God’s plan for us to be fruitful and multiply. Not to call this woman a whore or a slut.

Culturally speaking, the church has gotten modesty wrong. We get fearful of sin so we try to shield those we love. Again, as I said before, it comes from a good place, a place of good intentions. It may also come from a very foolish and reckless place, of not wanting to face the lack of training or experience or opportunities to talk about our own shortcomings and errors when it comes to sexuality. God made sex and sexuality; His desire was for us to have it be in our lives. Has it been trampled and abused by society? Absolutely. Does that mean that we can wall it up and say it’s off limits because we “don’t want to deal with that.” By all means, no.