From the Catholic Educator's Resource, a bit on the lost virtue of modesty.
The teenage years are always difficult, but I think being a teenager is more difficult today than it was for me on account of the overall culture in which teenagers are forced to grow up. Let me explain. Hedonism is the philosophical school of thought that regards the pursuit of pleasure and the minimization of discomfort as the principal purpose and sole meaning of human life. One could always find individuals throughout history who were devotees of hedonism within a larger non hedonistic culture. But today, the culture itself is hedonistic. Consequently, no longer can teenagers rely on the current culture to teach and impart even the basic outline of what constitutes noble character, or the basic principles of morality. ... The teenage girl who is neither sexually promiscuous nor so emotionally insecure as to need to be the object of male desire, will not want her attire to express a disposition to the contrary. As students are wont to say with respect to all that adorns them, "This is who I am." And so, as the saying goes, "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands." Similarly, if one looks, walks and sounds like a tart, ... ... What you have to ask yourself is whom it is you wish to attract: those with eyes for real beauty? Or, those in the majority who have eyes only for the erotic? A modestly dressed woman is not attractive to the sordid gaze of the intemperate man, and an immodestly dressed woman is not attractive to the morally beautiful. Virtue does not demand that you dress like the spinster aunt from Moose Jaw, but if your bellybutton is showing, or if your shorts are cut so short so as to expose a portion of your buttocks, or if your pants are so tight that you have trouble walking and your chest looks like fruit tightly wrapped in cellophane, you may find yourself dating someone who will be a source of constant headache and frustration down the road, in short, a loser. There are plenty of them around today. If you haven't noticed, our culture has become very adept at producing them large scale.It drvies me crazy to see our public schools selling jogging pants with words and logos printed on the buttocks. One has to ask - one simply must ask - how can an institution that sees nothing wrong with directing the eyes of strange men towards the sexual parts of young women be trusted to look after the interests of those women? The answer is that they can't. Public schools in Canada have so watered down their standards, in the name of multiculturalim, or so-called feminism, or what have you, that they can no longer claim to stand for anything. Not even the safety of the kids.
Comments