We’re taking a brief trip outside the manosphere today to take a look at a little posting I found on Jesus-is-savior.com – which, as far as I can tell, is not a joke site — on the evils of women wearing pants.
No need to dilly dally around with jokes; let’s just get right into it:
One of the most controversial subjects in America’s churches today is pants on women; but there is NO controversy if you believe the Bible. 1st Timothy 2:9 clearly instructs women to dress MODESTLY, i.e., of good behavior. A woman’s clothing says MUCH about her character. I guarantee you that women who approve of abortion (i.e., murder) also see no problem with women wearing pants.
Except, one presumes, while they are getting these abortions.
At this point the author, one David J. Stewart, quotes disapprovingly from a song by rapper Chingy, also on the subject of pants, specifically jeans. I won’t bother to quote all of the lyrics; you can get the gist of Chingy’s thesis from this brief excerpt:
Damn Girl
How’d you get all that in
Dem Jeans
Dem Jeans
Here’s the video, if you wish to double-check this transcription.
Stewart continues:
Only a rebellious woman, who deliberately disobeys the Word of God, would wear pants. … Pants on women are adulterous in nature, and cause men to lust and sin. Jesus made this clear in Matthew 5:28, “But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” Women who wear pants deliberately cause men to lust, and commit the sin of adultery. …
The average person today scoffs at the idea that Rock-n-Roll, Satanism, and immoral sex go hand-in-hand, but they certainly do. When Rock-n-Roll came to America, so did pants on women become mainstream. Naturally, feminism, witchcraft, abortion, and homosexuality came as well. Rock-n-Roll is straight from the pits of Hell. ALL rock-n-roll women wear pants.
Ah, but it turns out we haven’t really wandered too far from the manosphere after all – and not just because of the mention of feminism. No, what strikes me about Stewart’s argument – aside from the fact that it is completely batshit – is that it is not really very different than the arguments advanced by the critics of the Slutwalks: that the “immodest” dress of women causes men to “lust and sin.”
One of the most common complaints I’ve seen in the writings of the antifeminist slutwalk critics is that women want to “do what they want to, and dress how they want to, without facing any consequences,” as if women who dress in ways these men find arousing have in fact committed some sort of sin that requires punishment from, if not God himself, then from the rapists of the world.
The slutwalk critics invariably insist they’re simply passing along useful advice to women – don’t dress slutty or you’ll get raped – but the talk of “consequences” (and the choice of that word) shows pretty clearly that the real impetus behind the strangely vehement attacks on the slutwalks is the desire to punish women for dressing, and more importantly, doing “what they want.”
Say what you will about the folks behind Jesus-is-Savior.com, but at least their position on the evils of pants is consistent with their overall fundamentalist ideology. The slutwalk critics don’t really have an excuse.
EDITED TO ADD: And, conveniently enough, here’s some douchebag on Reddit making this exact slut-shaming “argument.” Pro-tip: I don’t think “responsibility” means quite what you think it means, dude.
Thanls, ShitRedditSAys, for pointing me to this. And to MFingPterodactyl for the sensible response.
@kristinmh:
At least in the US, nearly the whole culture is Christianity. Original sin is the most absurd part, the idea that every single person is inherently “bad” in a way that they cannot control, and therefore must beg for forgiveness simply for existing. Somehow this has turned into “anything you do that distracts you from worship is bad,” and since a lot of things that feel good are forbidden (how or why is hard to say in general), eventually “anything that feels good is a sin.”
No masturbation, no pretty people (and since Christianity is patriarchal, no pretty women specifically), no sex unless you have to (to make babies)… A couple of the seven mortal sins are indulgences, like eating, sleeping, and sexing too much. And the whole concept of sin is made up in the first place, so you don’t have to justify why something is bad for you. It just is.
Erm… “affected by Christianity,” not “is Christianity.”
And also, that sounds like a terrible series…
Kristin: Not Masturbation, would that it were so simple as trying to restrain oneself from a healthy wank now and again.
The “Stumbling Block” is desire. Men are not supposed to desire anyone but their spouse,and that only after they are betrothed (they aren’t supposed to do anything about that desire until they are wed).
Speedlines/Kirby: Having been to nudist colonies/clothing optional events I have to say that seeing lots of naked people did not reduce my desire to see naked people.
Context, again, matters.
One of the things I did discover is that clothes are not what we think of them as being. Larger bodies look better undressed than smaller ones (as a rule).
The ways in which clothing is cut tends to magnify difference from the, “ideal”, and also serves to reflect well on the more ideal aspects of a person’s figure.
So someone who more than a standard deviation away (to be a little fast and loose with that term) tends to look much larger under their clothes than they do when nude.
Someone who is thinner than the ideal (which these days is saying a fair bit, but this applies to a slightly wider idea of ideal than Vogue would have us favor), is helped by the styles of the day.
@kirbywarp – funny, though, how they’ve turned one of the other mortal sins (greed) into a virtue.
@Seraph:
That actually led me to a funny little speculation. In the bible, a common thing was to take really rare and valuable stuff and “give it to God.” Livestock that provided people with a living was sacrificed, rare spices and incenses were burnt, and valuable gems, ores, etc. were used to build up great alters. It’s essentially a tribute to a king, back when stuff like that was more common.
So the speculation is that the Vatican is essentially one giant offering to God, a way of taking accumulated wealth and saying “I’m better off without it/God can take it.” Meaning that the reason none of that wealth isn’t spent on helping the poor is because it has been given away to a being that, for all we know, doesn’t exist (and certainly hasn’t done anything with it).
Kirby: (again, I wish I had my reference materials handy). It’s not Christianity, per se, which is the problem. Paul puts a level of equality into male/female relations which didn’t exist in the Graeco/Roman world.
And Lust isn’t having too much sex. Lust is related to Gluttony (which isn’t actually eating too much, but caring too much about what one eats. The Moralising Nutritional Obsessive is a Glutton just as much as the gourmand who sits down to a dish of hummingbirds tongues in truffle honey every night, but I digress).
Lust, as a sin, is a pre-occupation with sexual things, to the point one forgets the rest of the world exists. One of the signs of a person who has Lust as a spiritual problem is the objectification of his/her objects of desire. The thing about sex (and I am coming from a predominantly R. Catholic view) is that it’s a shared things between two people. Fornicating is a venal sin. Simple penance, and the awareness one is likely to do it again; not damning; in, and of, itself.
Seduction (which is a mortal sin, go directly to Hell, do not stop in Purgatory, collect umpty-bump lashes) is the act of convincing someone to engage in fornication under false pretenses (and in the medieval Church this was a sin pretty much only men could commit; which was a function of patriarchy; because a woman’s chastity wasn’t really compromised if she slept with someone she expected to marry; so saying you would marry her than they leaving… was a big deal, because of the weight given to one’s husband being the only person a woman ever had sex with).
Come to the England, and let the Puritans get ahold of it, and the doctrine gets perverse, and only the entire thing about better to marry than to burn, but better to not fuck at all (but one has to be fruitful and multiply, so just close your eyes and do it for Jesus), takes over.
Since almost no one is completely asexual, this is a recipe for failure, which is a great racket for the preachers, since they know most of the congregation will feel guilty when they are presented with a sermon about the evils of Lust.
And even at that it’s not until the Victorians that it gets out of hand. I recall, doing some research for a paper on attitudes toward virginity, reading of a couple in Mass. which were fined (6 Shillings, as I recall) for having their first child five months after the wedding. It seemed the congregation took the old saying, “a new bride can do in six months what takes a cow, or countess, nine”.
He was later fined for “playing rude games in the woods” (probably a drinking game, such as, “thumbnails” where one has to drain a tankard at a draught, and then empty the drops onto one’s thumb, if it overflows, a forfeit of some sort is surrendered. Had it been homosexual [there were four others fined with him], the sentence would have been either hanging, or lashes/pillory).
After that he was fined again, for, “Masturbating against the Church wall on a Sunday”.
Two years later he was named Town Constable. I don’t know if they decided it was better set the fox on the hens, or they just didn’t care so much.
Oh, I’m not even thinking of the Vatican (though that’s a good example). I’m thinking closer to home, with the Prosperity Gospel, and where people sneer at the poor, complain about their tax dollars going to the lazy and undeserving (as part of insisting that they should pay fewer taxes). I imagine Jesus, if he was real and anything remotely like he was portrayed in the Gospels, would have some problems with them calling themselves his followers.
Re: the “modesty survey,” how much do you want to bet that some of those items never crossed the majority of respondents’ minds before they read it in the survey? I can’t imagine that the average dude, even a severely repressed Christian, bothers to notice how a woman wears her purse unless prompted.
Now I want to make one up with a bunch of severely leading joke questions:
Do you find that a woman in a nun’s habit makes you think about being spanked?
Isn’t it a stumbling block when a girl sits in a hot room and gets all sweaty?
Isn’t it a stumbling block when a girl sits in a cold room and her nipples stick out?
Etc.
@Pecunium:
I do respect your knowledge of what Christianity and Catholicism actually is. My view is my impression growing up in a household where I didn’t study the doctrine, simply what I picked up from people around me. I think there’s a huge disconnect between what the religion actually is and what people think it is (I don’t many Christians would believe you about lust or gluttony at first, it’s just not the dialogue that makes it to their ears).
I’m more concerned with what people take away from the doctrine, not what the doctrine is. It’s the first that informs their actions.
@Karalora:
XD
The survey has to end with the following:
“Are the questions in this survey a stumbling block?”
If a woman were to pick her nose while wearing a short skirt (or heaven forbid, pants), would that cancel out the whole lust-inducing factor? Can we save our brethren from stumbling by making armpit noises any time we go out in a tank top?
Inquiring minds want to know.
@Amnesia,
I think, like the story of the burqa, we’d just find a whole group of men with a brand new set of… interesting… fetishes.
Oh, yeah, I can see it now.
“Any woman who passes gas in public is just asking to be raped.”
Kirby: I understand where you are coming from, but it’s (to my mind) related to the problems of misogyny. Jackoffasaur doesn’t believe what he believes because it’s true, but because the cultural narrative tells him so.
Lets look at a parallel to this problem:
VAWA isn’t what NWO believes it to be, but he won’t listen to the people who actually know. He has his interpretation of what it means, and no amount of reasoned explanation by people versed in the language, and practice of the law (be they professionals, or skilled amateurs, willing to study the intricacies of legal logic, and language).
Transfer this to the more problematic area of religion; and one which is as insistent that it, and it alone is right; and must be shared with the world; that all may be saved from eternal damnation, as Christianity has become (which is largely the result of Paul and Luke, but again, I digress).
Post Elizabeth, and esp. post-Cromwell, the English Protestant world has had a strain of essentialism, combined with the idea that anyone who reads the Bible, can understand and interpret it. Never mind that the languages in which it was written (Biblical Hebrew, and Koine Greek) are opaque to almost everyone who has ever spoken English. Never mind that the people who translated it into English were either working from the Vulgate (Wyckliffe and Tyndal) or attempting to make a new translation from the canonic source materials (with their own corruptions, leading to new exigesis), and not being possessed of the strongest grasp n those two languages which weren’t Latin.
Which translation (the King James) becomes it’s own canonic source, and suffers from linguistic drift… (quick, what’s the difference between kill, and slay?, what does suffer mean, in the phrase, “suffer the children,”?). So the culture has a wide strain of slavish devotion to an archaic text, and a belief that this archaic text is in plain language. They combine this with a rabid antipathy to any sort of persistent authority (e.g. the doctrine of the RC, or Greek Orthodox churches) and every single one of them is able to set up as an expert; and point to an irrefutable text to support them.
Never mind that wildly divergent interpretations can be, and are often, made from the same texts.
So I happen to believe religions are, in and of themselves; like baseball bats, and firearms, mostly benign. It’s what the people who follow them do which matters. American, “mainstream” (by which I mean the most vocal sects, the one’s the media go to for comment on, “values issues”) is toxic. It has tapped into the repressive zeitgeist of the worst aspects of the conservative mindset: the reactionary ones.
It’s coupled them to a dominionist approach of forcing themselves onto everyone.
I think pointing out that this isn’t the requirements of Christianity (Love thy neighbor as thyself, forgive those who wrong you, take care of the poor and the helpless) is important.
/soapbox
“safeword”
See? Beware of “friends” whose only gift is fear.
Addendum: I make these points, in part to work on the people who are Christian, and tend to that style of thinking.
What one does matters as more than what one professes, and that’s right there in the bloody text.
And Antz show a lack of clarity on the concept of safeword.
Antz: “safeword”
See? Beware of “friends” whose only gift is fear
You can’t be serious. Are you serious?
Never mind. Pecunium got it.
My most commonly used (as in established) safeword is, “falling”, which I use when on belay, esp. when rappelling.
Nice to know that when the shit drops in the pot there is someone backing me up in case my braking fails.
That’s the concept, everywhere safewords are in use.
Seraph:
I think you have it exactly right about stumbling blocks. There’s good sense in of the “don’t be a dick” sort in trying not to lead other people into wrongdoing (even if you don’t personally agree with them–like trying to trick a vegetarian into eating meat), but it’s still a personal responsibility: your responsibility not to mislead people. It’s not a way to absolve yourself of responsibility by passing the blame off on the person who misled you.
After that he was fined again, for, “Masturbating against the Church wall on a Sunday”.
That’s an original sin!
“Pants on women are adulterous in nature, and cause men to lust and sin.”
If anything, pants would be more sinful on men, since they have that extra appendage that sometimes makes itself known through a pair of denim trousers. And since when does a woman wearing pants cause a man to “lust” after her? I thought guys liked mini-skirts and cute sundresses, not pants. Some even complain about how *un-sexy* pants are, like when women in power wear business suits instead of skirts/dresses.
Yet more woman-blaming from misogynistic, Bible-thumping dumb-asses. No matter what we ladies do, the men will always lust after us, and thus, it will always be our fault. Go figure.
Oooo… I have that one. The pages are all stuck together, though…
When you’re carrying something large so you can’t see your feet, and a girl in a miniskirt lies down right in front of you like a speedbump and you trip over her tight little ass, is that a stumbling block?
The anti-masturbation book is all naked pictures of your parents.