Modesty – Zelophehad's Daughters

Over a decade ago (have I really been blogging that long?), I wrote a couple of posts (2011, 2014) where I counted up articles in Church magazines that talked about modesty in dress. Briefly, I found that modesty rhetoric had really ramped up since the turn of the millennium, and not surprisingly, was aimed more at women and girls than at men and boys.

In this post, I’m updating my 2014 post to include ten more years of data. I used the same scoring method that I did in 2014. (The gist is that I used Google to search for articles from magazines on the Church website that used forms of the word modest, and then scored each article for roughly what fraction was about modesty in dress, and also whether it was targeted at women/girls, men/boys, or both.) This graph shows what I found.

The bottom line, like I said in the title, is that there’s been a dramatic decrease since about the time I wrote my last post. This has been particularly noticeable for teen girls, who as far as I can tell haven’t been talked to about modesty since before the pandemic. This trend seems consistent with the Church’s introduction in 2022 of a new For the Strength of Youth pamphlet that is generally less prescriptive and more principles-based. And I noticed in reading the articles that do talk about modesty that they seem much more matter-of-fact and less frantic than previous ones. For example, here’s a good one from the New Era in 2019.

Adult women, on the other hand, have seen a modest 😉 increase in rhetoric aimed at them in the past few years. This also seems consistent with increased focus from the Church on the importance of wearing temple garments, with for example J. Anette Dennis and Dallin H. Oaks talking about it in Conference last year. Of course this focus is mostly on women, as women’s garments are less compatible with commonly available women’s clothes than men’s are with men’s clothes, and in a patriarchal church like ours, women’s dress will always be seen as more of an issue than men’s.

So, two cheers for the results, for teen girls and children in general anyway. It’s definitely a positive step when we can back off body shaming young people who are often the most psychologically vulnerable among us. And for the adult women, I can hope that the new sleeveless-leaning ones will maybe reduce the friction between garments and typical clothing styles a little, and perhaps encourage GAs to worry about something more substantial in their Conference talks.

In Abortion, Modesty, Patriarchy

Modesty and Abortion

Ziff30 June 202222 Comments

With the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, leaving the question of abortion up to individual states, many American Mormons are celebrating the chance they have to live in a state that bans all (or nearly all) abortions. The Church’s official position allows for abortion under some circumstances, which makes it not consistent with such blanket bans. So why the inconsistency? Why, when the official position allows for some exceptions, are so many Church members excited to have all abortions banned?

A few years ago, I wrote a post where I asked this question and suggested an answer based on reviewing a bunch of Church rhetoric around abortion. I concluded that while GAs wrote the exceptions, their rhetoric constantly minimizes their occurrence, making them seem so rare as to be negligible.

Today I want to consider another line of explanation in addition: Church rhetoric on other issues—I’m taking modesty as an example—is based on a deeply patriarchal worldview that is straightforward to apply to abortion too. Note, just to be clear, that I’m not arguing that the Church’s stance on modesty causes its (or its members’) stance on abortion. I’m just saying that they’re both driven by the same underlying stance on women, so when GAs talk about one issue, it’s easy for members to understand the worldview and generalize it to another issue.

Image credit: National Photo Company, retrieved from Library of Congress PPOC

Here are some points of similarity I’m thinking of:

Men’s responsibility is ignored.

In Church modesty rhetoric, there is lots of discussion of women (and girls) needing to dress a particular way to avoid giving men (and boys) sexual thoughts or ideas about their sexual availability. There is no discussion of the need for men to stop themselves from objectifying women, regardless of how they’re dressed. (This is in contrast, of course, to Jesus’s famous admonition that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out . . .”)

It’s easy to see how this line of thinking lines up with abortion too. Nearly all pregnancies result from an act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but anti-abortion rhetoric focuses pretty much completely on women. Sex is something that just happens, and so is pregnancy. Men’s participation is ignored. It’s assumed that if women don’t want to be pregnant, it’s on them to prevent it from happening. The whole topic of abortion isn’t even brought up until there’s a pregnancy.

The same line of thinking plays out in the Church too. Men are never reminded not to pressure their partners into unwanted sex or into unwanted pregnancy. In fact, given that couples are told to work out their childbearing decisions between themselves and God, but husbands are also told they’re to preside over their families, it seems likely that the effect in many families is that husbands dictate to wives how many children they will be bearing. Also, needless to say given that even these topics aren’t discussed, men are certainly never told explicitly not to commit rape.

In Agency, Modesty, Sexuality

Modesty and Locus of Control

Ziff8 August 201812 Comments

The discussion over at the Exponent about the Utah woman who had her bishop and stake president refuse to renew her temple recommend because she refused to follow their counsel to cover herself while breastfeeding in church reminded me of a concept I remember discussing in psychology classes. That concept is locus of control. Here’s the first line of the Wikipedia article on the subject:

In personality psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control.

People are thought to fall along a continuum from having an internal locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by decisions they make–to an external locus of control–those who think that what happens to them is primarily caused by other people or other things outside themselves. You can read the full Wikipedia article or look up any of a big pile of academic papers talking about locus of control, but the level I’m thinking about it is as simple as this brief description.

I think it’s clear that Church teachings are heavily focused on pushing us to have an internal locus of control. For example, Lehi tells Jacob in 2 Nephi 2:27: Read More

In Modesty

A Correlated Excerpt from the Sermon on the Mount

Ziff12 September 20173 Comments

It has come to the attention of the Church Correlation Department that many parts of the Bible have not passed Correlation review prior to being included in the scriptural canon. Rather than go through a lengthy and complex process of decanonization, the Correlation Department has undertaken to simply rewrite the unreviewed parts to smooth off the rough edges. The resulting updated scriptures will preserve the gospel truths present in the original, but will remove the false philosophies of men that have been inserted by evil and conspiring scribes. The resulting version, when completed, will be called the Sacred Holy Inspired Translation.

Today’s updated scripture comes from Matthew 5.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

But I say unto you, That whatsoever woman causeth a man to look on her to lust after her by any means hath forced him to commit adultery already with her in his heart. And the blame for this adultery shall be on the woman for not covering herself: the man is blameless.

And if the right shoulder of a woman thou seest causeth thee to lust, cover it up: for it is profitable for thee that thy women should be covered, that thou lust not, that thou should not be cast into hell.

And if the right knee of a woman thou seest causeth thee to lust, cover it up also: for it is profitable for thee that thy women should be covered, that thou lust not, that thou should not be cast into hell.

(Previous entry in this series: The Correlated Story of Zelophehad’s Daughters)

In Modesty, Statistics

Modesty Rhetoric in Church Magazines

Ziff3 June 20147 June 201457 Comments

Has there been an increase in modesty rhetoric in the Church in the past few years, or are we just imagining things? I wrote a post a few years ago to try to answer this question by counting articles in Church magazines by year that used the word modesty in discussing dress. I found that yes, there had been an increase, particularly in the New Era and the Friend.

The question is one that I’ve seen come up a lot in the Mormon-themed Facebook groups where I participate, so the post still gets linked to now and again. I’ve wanted to update it, though, to make three changes: (1) add 3 more years of data, (2) improve my counting of mentions of modesty, and (3) count separately for modesty discussions aimed at women/YW/girls and men/YM/boys.

In Modesty

An Ethnographic Examination of the Representation of Women’s Bodies in a Religious Publication (Running Title: Boobs in the Ensign)

Beatrice18 February 201420 February 201436 Comments

In a conversation among some of the permabloggers, we started talking about modesty within LDS culture. Although I felt that everything that could be said about modesty has been said already, Ziff raised an interesting question of whether women with certain body types were more likely to be shown in the Ensign than women with other body types. Specifically, he posed the question of whether women with smaller breasts were more likely to be shown than women with larger breasts. Given that I like to code and analyze data almost as much as Ziff does (I mean, really, I doubt that anyone in the universe could love this as much as Ziff does), I decided to conduct an assessment of this very question. Read More

In Blind Spots, Modesty, Sexuality, Uncategorized

Blind spot: The assumption that all women can use their sexuality to influence others.

Beatrice25 May 201325 May 201327 Comments

I was recently listening to the awesome feminist mormon housewives podcast episode in which Lisa Butterworth talks to Brad Kramer about what it means to be a male feminist. I particularly liked his discussion about modesty and sexuality and how he wants to frame those issues for his children. There are many, many parts of this discussion that I wholeheartedly agree with. For example, I really like his discussion about how the current modesty rhetoric in the church reinforces the idea that girls and young women are primarily sexual instead of sexuality being only a part of who they are as a person overall.

That being said, there were a couple of statements within this discussion that brought me up short. Read More

In Feminism, Gender Issues, Interpretation, Modesty, Uncategorized

Critical Thinking and the Modesty Meme; or, Why We Need More English Majors

Melyngoch10 July 201223 July 201268 Comments

Likely everyone has come across the following internet/facebook meme, but just in case you’ve been backpacking in the Andes for the last two weeks with no wifi, or don’t have well-meaning conservative facebook friends, or have blocked all the well-meaning conservative facebook friends, or just aren’t on facebook precisely so you can avoid things like this, here you go:

In Modesty, Statistics

A Modest Bit of Data

Ziff27 July 2011102 Comments

Over at Doves and Serpents, Heather Olsen Beal recently blogged about a Friend article in which a four year old girl learns the importance of not wearing clothes that show her shoulders. The article was also discussed at fMh, and Heather, Erin Hill, and Chelsea Fife were guests on a Mormon Matters podcast, where they used the article as a jumping off point for discussing how modesty is taught (and could be taught better) in the Church.

In the discussion, following Heather’s post, she raised the question of whether this focus has changed over time, whether the practice of drilling even prepubescent children on modesty of dress is a new thing:

I think the rhetoric we were getting from church leaders and publications 20 years ago was much more sane and reasonable. I feel like it’s gotten ratcheted up to the nth degree. It’s no longer a modest position; it’s extreme.

That modesty is being pushed harder and with more detail now than it used to be is my impression too, but I wondered whether I could find any data that would support or refute this conclusion.

In Gender Issues, Modesty

Feminism’s Critique of Modesty

Seraphine10 April 200722 April 2008286 Comments

A recent post at Pandagon by Amanda Marcotte clarified some concerns I’ve had for awhile now about certain (but not all) discussions of modesty in our church discourse. Now, while I’m guessing that many of the readers of our blog would dismiss some of her stronger claims about modesty and “compulsory femininity,” I primarily wanted to highlight one passage:

Modesty exists mostly as a reason to obsess over what women are wearing and remind them non-stop that no matter what else they do with themselves, they’re just sex objects in the eyes of the patriarchy. The end result is women are given twin messages to be sexually appealing and not to be sexually appealing all at once, and that at any point in time they are in danger of being deemed sluttily or prudishly dressed.

Showing all posts in Modesty

Modesty rhetoric in Church magazines has declined since the mid-2010s