It’s always very humbling to me when people are touched by “the little purple book”. Below is a Blog posting I found very moving. Thanks for your thoughtful insights, Brooke!
Original blog post here.
As women, we all know how much power we wield over men. Whether we use that power for good or for bad, we know that we have it. It’s been my experience that many women (even Christian women) have adopted our current culture’s mentality of, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” and “If he lusts after you, it’s his problem not yours!” Seriously? How selfish and immature have we allowed ourselves to become?
One of my recently-read books is Colleen Hammond’s Dressing with Dignity. Overall, I pretty much knew what she was going to write about (i.e. how women should guard their bodies, their innate feminine value, etc.), but there were some things in particular that stood out to me that I’d like to share here.
The first thing I found immensely interesting was her review of fashion history. I had a vague idea of some things, but I really never stopped to think about how drastic the changes of the last century have been. 100 years ago, we were 95% covered! I would recommend this book for that section alone.
Another thing that caught my eye (because, alright, it convicted me just a little bit) was a brief reference to how casually we treat our attire when going out for just a quick something or other. Guilty as charged. “Gas station run? PJ’s is okay.” No, Brooke, it’s not, lol.
Here are some quotes that I’d like to share.
“… just as it is wrong for a man to use his physical strength to lord it over a woman, so it is wrong for a woman to use the feminine characteristics of her physical body to dominate a man.”
“A woman who uses her feminine charms to get what she wants from a man isn’t showing any respect for the personal dignity of that man…”
“Using newly developed technology, they tracked the path that a man’s eyes take when looking at a woman in pants. They found that when a man looked at a woman in pants from the back, he looked directly at her bottom. When he looked at a woman wearing pants from the front, advertisers found that his eyes dropped directly to a woman’s most private and intimate area. Not her face! Not her chest!”
And some related quotes from Alice von Hildebrand’s The Privilege of Being a Woman:
“The fearful sexual decadence that we have witnessed in the course of the last forty years can be traced back, at least in part, to the fashion world’s systematic attempt to eradicate in girls that “holy bashfulness” which is the proper response that women should give to what is personal, intimate, and calls for veiling.”
“When women are pure, men will respect, nay, venerate them; they will also hear the call challenging them to chastity.”
“Perceiving women’s modesty, [men] would take their cue and, in return, approach the female sex with reverence, instead of with today’s brutal irreverence which unleashes lust and impurity.”
This only further convinces me of the need in my own life to dress in a distinctly feminine and modest way. I would recommend both of these books for any woman, especially those with daughters. The women of a culture decide where it will go, whether they realize it or not. I think our great misfortune as women today is that we do realize the power we have over men through our looks, but instead of using that to secure their chivalry and purity, we use it to indulge our own vanity. Shame on us.
