..::Praised Be Jesus Christ::..

Women of the world, please cover yourself.


These days almost no one will tell the Christian woman that it is her duty to dress modestly. But that should not surprise us. Religious instructors barely teach the basics of Christian morality, and sexual confusion is the chiefest error of the day in the field of natural reason.

I've said for about as long as I can remember (15 years or more now?) that it makes no sense for a woman to become embarrassed when she is seen in her underwear, if she goes outdoors in swimwear which is exactly as revealing, if not more so.

And again: modern swimwear's level of undress is functionally equivalent to nudity in the mind of any male except those in a persistent vegetative state. While men are called to have custody of their eyes, it is an objective sin to exhibit oneself and place all moral demands on those who share a public space with you. The masculine obligation to chastity does not translate into feminine carte blanche for immodesty.

To be even clearer: No Christian woman should wear a bikini. A generous one-piece with skirt is about rock-bottom in terms of basic modesty and self-respect. Or, as my wife will recommend: a one-piece with a large T-shirt worn over it.

Surely some indoctrinated woman will parrot the feminist come-back to my position: "What's next? The burqa?" But the real perspective is this: The burqa and the bikini are polar extremes of the same fundamental error. Both styles of clothing deny the human dignity of the wearer. Virtue is a mean between the extremes. The modest woman, the woman with self-respect, wears neither the ostentatious bikini nor the humiliating burqa. Both the bikini and the burqa deny our Christian belief in the equal spiritual dignity of man and woman. Both manners of dress encourage onlookers to view the woman as subordinate to men in one way or another.

The burqa denies the Christian belief in the equal spiritual dignity of a woman because it obscures her face, which is the gateway to the heart and to the mind. A woman in a burqa is not permitted to publicly manifest the visible features most proper to her nature as a rational and emotive being -- features which are the most proper to her as a human being. (Aristotle, for example, says that no animal has a prosopon, lit., a countenance, but only a man or a woman.)

The bikini likewise denies her equal spiritual dignity because it places primary emphasis on her body, and in such a way that it encourages others to objectify her body as a sexual plaything, not as a temple of Holy Spirit or as a magnificent creature of goodly design. Yes, I really mean a plaything. How so? Everyone who wants to, gets to enjoy it, regardless of their number, often in public, with no more personal involvement than the private satisfaction of one's own frivolous desire. That's a plaything. Indeed, some playthings are more jealously guarded.

So no, the burqa isn't next. It is already irrelevant. If a woman walks around barely clad, showing everyone the size of her breasts, half of her rear, and the muscle tone of her abs, she doesn't need to put a bag over her head in order to insure that no man will ever take her seriously. I hasten to add: changing one's attire back to "smart business casual" on Monday morning does little to remove the previous image from the mind. (Would you look at Bill Blass-suited Linda in the same way if you saw her in a full burqa last weekend? Again, the logic is the same. I am surprised how few women grasp that sexual "liberation" leads to misogyny, even though chauvinism and machismo evolved contemporaneously with it in the 1970s.)


The woman with an eye for history or with a traditionalist inclination should grasp this point even more clearly. Women dressed modestly while swimming and sunning themselves earlier in the century. This is not Victorian primness. This is common sense. You can still do it.

A casual example: Zorak and I were walking through the New Haven train station one afternoon and saw on the wall vintage photos from turn-of-the-century New Haven and in particular Long Wharf and the beaches along the Connecticut coast. (For those in New Haven: by the escalators when you come up from the underground walkways.) The decade was probably 1910s, maybe 1920s? Whenever I see such photos, I observe to Catholic women that the lady swimmers are frolicking around in swimwear that covers them from the knees to the shoulders. This was considered normal only 80 years ago. In the intervening half-century, we've gone from that modest dress to the spaghetti-string bikini, i.e., virtual nudity.

While you're reminding yourself "it was not that long ago," remember what else was socially forbidden "not that long ago": contraception until the 1960s and abortion until 1973. It was not that long ago. And they are all related.

And to Catholics, I further observe: Along with their virginity, their modesty and their unconditional commitment to their children, women were told to abandon this as well, and in this latter departure they were even encouraged by their clergy.

I point this out just to note: we have radically underestimated just one aspect of the traditional Catholic practice of wearing the chapel veil: Just as keeping a cross in your pocket reminds you not to spend money on something you ought not, wearing a small piece of cloth on your head in church serves as a permanent reminder to cover yourself in modesty as a daughter of God. Now, wedding gown pretenses aside, not a single veil of innocence remains unlifted. Just something to consider.

I conclude by noting that this same casuistry applies to casual dress. The skirt lengths on women in DC during the summer is unfathomable. The prostitutes nowadays have to distinguish themselves by actually wearing skirts which do not cover the bottom of their rear, or, if a recent drive down K street is any example, just a thong.

I leave you with two further reading resources:

CatholicModesty.com and the Angelic Doctor, "Whether the adornment of women is devoid of mortal sin?", ST, II-II, Q 169 A2.

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