Thursday, September 15, 2011

Clean Up Your Room


One of the bright spots of having a lightly trafficked blog is that I can explore how the readers I do have got here. Yesterday I noticed that some hapless soul arrived at my post Modesty Forbids by googling the words "should Christian girls wear low-rise jeans". I suspect the Googler read only a few words before fleeing to a more congenial blog. Just for fun, I searched for "should Christian girls wear low-rise jeans" myself, and found this post, Should Your Teen Daughter Wear Thong Underwear?



As Christian modesty posts go, it really wasn't so bad. The writer considered the pros and cons of thong underwear, and concluded, "The answer is up to you", "you" in this case being the parent, not the daughter.

The post did, of course, contain the obligatory "But what about teh menz?" component. Christian modesty writers are the flip side of Cosmopolitan editors: they believe women's clothing decisions should be made chiefly on the basis of "What effect will this have on a man?" as opposed to, "What's the weather like today?" or "What do people wear to job interviews?" Until I had read this post, I thought that "whale tails" were those things I had seen above the waterline down in Antarctica.  The mom writing the underwear post is a firm believer, as am I, that underwear should remain under. Only in my case, it's because I believe no one needs to see grimy bra straps and fraying elastic, and in the writer's view it's because "seeing a thong . . . is sexual". And that thought lead to the prize sentence in the entire post,  

[M]any a guy has stumbled over a girl’s underwear.

So the moral of the story is, "Young ladies, get your room picked up before your boyfriend comes over to, uhm, study. Yeah, that's it, study. Because otherwise he might stumble over your underwear and fall on the bed."

Or maybe she meant, "Many a guy has stumbled over a girl’s underwear, and still not concluded that he should do the laundry."

I missed a lot not having a daughter of my own. I had several foreign exchange student daughters, two who stayed the full year each and one who opted to go to another home after a month, but I certainly never concerned myself with the kind of underwear they had on. I'm pretty sure that my son was buying his own underwear by the time he was in high school, so I expect if I had a daughter she would have been, also. I think I would have saved my firepower for more serious discussions, such as "how old do you need to be before you have your first bikini wax" or "you are so not getting a boob job for graduation". Not having been in that position, I shouldn't criticize women who have to deal with guiding their daughters to a positive view of their own sexuality in a world where people are willing to treat it as a commodity, a disgrace, or a little of both. 

But, really, "Many a guy has stumbled over a girl’s underwear"? What is she going to say when we get to the discussion of 4 inch platform heels?




2 comments:

  1. I think she might have really freaked out at the conversation on one of my homeschooling mom forums the other month in which it was revealed that a number of teens (and moms!) are just going commando in the lower cut pants because, hey, no panty lines AND no whale tail.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Isn't that uncomfortable, though? That center seam in a pair of jeans is pretty thick. I remember back in the day (late 60's) of hip hugger jeans we just wore them with bikini panties, but I don't think we wore cropped tops, either. I remember wearing "poor boy" sweaters, which had wide vertical ribs and hugged the body pretty tightly, with the hip huggers, but they were long enough to tuck in the jeans.

    ReplyDelete