Friday, January 14, 2005
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
I probably should send this to "New Oxford Review" since I can't resist responding to a letter in the January NOR. But they don't accept email, and I'm lazy. So here goes...
First the letter, since it isn't online:
HOW WOMEN CAN LOSE RESPECT
A New Oxford Note (Oct., pp.13-14) quotes and expands upon the contention of Bryce Christensen that most children now in effect have two fathers: the male one, and the female one who "now flexes her muscles" as co-breadwinner and mimics the male role to the detriment of traditional motherhood. I would like to add to that.
A woman's femininity is also lessened (and with this, her motherly and wifely aura) by her dressing like a man. This has become such a part of our culture that she gives no second thought to choosing slacks, jeans, and pantsuits over skirts and dresses. If a man is seen in a dress, we immediately recognize it as a perversion. I witnessed this on a public bus in this liberal city of Ann Arbor when a man stepped onboard wearing a summery, printed dress. The driver, a woman, gasped, as did many of the riders.
To some extent, immeasurable though it may be to our eyes (but not to God's), women who commonly wear pants have brought a change to the feelings of men toward women. Imitating men brings neither respect nor the softer feelings of gentlemanliness. This mimicking of men's wear can set her up as a competitor, and projects her as being hostile even to her own nature. It changes the dynamics of sexual attraction. A woman in a skirt presents herself as a mystery. In pants she is a crotch and buttocks. The first can suggest romance; the second, a cruder familiarity.
I would also claim that it affects the romance of a marriage. Am I unusual when I say I feel a tenderness toward my wife when I see her dressed expressly as a woman, much more than when she wears blue jeans or slacks? Every cell of our bodies proclaims us either male or female. We are different physically and psychologically. God made us that way for a purpose. We should enhance what we are, not hide it (I do not mean our physical nakedness, but our human sensitivities).
My plea to Christian women is this: Bring back your femininity by how you dress. Be distinctively women outwardly, as you are in the secret of your cells. By this return, you will again allow men their own distinctive outward identity, which has been muddied. And let us be done with the foolishness the feminists have foisted upon us. We are different. Find joy in our differentness (dare I say "diversity"?). Bring pleasing aesthetics back to your person, in color and contour and pleats and print. Bring back beauty, as only a woman can do.
Donald C. Wilcox
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Well--from my vantage point of sitting before my computer screen in blue jeans...
First of all - Jesus
In a dress.
Like Mary's.
(Ok. She has a veil. But still...)
Does wearing a man's garment make Mary less feminine? Less motherly? Less wifely? Or is it that Jesus is wearing a woman's garment, in which case Jesus is...?
Clothing is culturally conditioned. It's not a part of our DNA. You can look at my cells all day long under a microscope, and I guarantee you none of them are wearing dresses.
I checked with my husband--does wearing slacks and jeans make me less feminine? He just laughed and wanted to know where I got such a notion. After he read the letter, he wondered how a man could look at a young woman in hip huggers and a cropped top and find her masculine. (He had some other things to say, too, but I'd better not put them here!)
My husband did take note of the fact that ladies in dresses climbing stairs are much more appealing to men's vulgar instincts than are ladies doing the same thing in slacks. The letter writer, too, reveals those coarser instincts in his comment about "crotch and buttocks," indicating that the crotch "suggests romance." (Give me a break! There is no "romance" in the mind of a man gazing at that particular portion of a woman's anatomy!)
It would be interesting to get the writer's reaction to Indian clothing. Are these women less feminine because they are wearing pants?
Does this woman look masculine?
Skirts are no guarantee of femininity, though a Lei might be, but not always.
Pants have not always been male attire. Once they wore stockings instead. Today a lady wears stockings. Does that make her masculine?
Let's face it, pants are here to stay. When the little old ladies who grew up in skirts adopt a closet full of pants and shove the dresses out of the way, you know the trend isn't going anywhere soon. This culture has declared pants to be feminine when they appear on a female body, and the letter writer would do well to get used to it.
