Modesty and a blog worth your time

Being confined to bed with my back out  has provided a good opportunity to check out Mrs.'s Parunak's blog, the one I linked to the other day.  It is well worth your time to read her writings.  All of them.  I've been blessed by every one that I've read, and I've been reading a lot since yesterday morning!  Her writing is clear and enjoyable and very thought-provoking, edgy but not in-your-face.  She covers topics like birth control, parenting, homemaking, homeschooling, hospitality, pornography and immodesty.  Although I have enjoyed everything so far (I want to link to all of it!) I have to say, I'm blown away by her thoughts on the latter two.  I'm so grateful for her frankness and her vision.  I'm excited to have a vision of my own now (Bobby's hip, too), a battle plan for teaching my sons and daughters not only about modesty and Yahweh's purpose for immodesty and how to guard ourselves against the harlot.  Here's some snippets:

Mrs. Parunak's posts on modesty

Let me be a little blunt, when men are staring at women, taking long looks and second looks, they are almost always doing it for that little floaty zing it makes them feel. And that is just old-fashioned lust. ...  And guess what? Any woman is powerless to hold onto a man who is in this state. Men who have given themselves over to lust are going to look at every pair of x chromosomes that walks by, hoping for a zing. We women often think that if we were just prettier, if we just dressed a little better, if we just lost a few more pounds and looked more like those girls on the magazine covers then we’d win the great beauty pageant of life and be crowned with a husband’s unswerving attention. It just isn’t so.
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(a quote of a quote)
For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn….
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It all reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,

Nothing spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.

If you want to appreciate fresh fish and potatoes, stay away from the Witch’s Turkish delight. If you want a steamy sex life, stay away from porn.
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...the reason we are modest out in the world is that immodesty is so beautiful, so special, and so powerful. It is a force that feeds our marriages, thrills our husbands, and helps ensure that we produce the godly seed that the Lord says He desires (Malachi 2:15). It is a force that applied in the wrong place can be deadly, destroying purity, feeding lust, and leaving broken relationships in its wake.

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If we raise pure daughters by making them prudes, then we’ve crippled them. We’ve helped them save themselves for marriage without teaching them how to give themselves away when the time comes. They are treasures in a chest with no key that will have to be hacked open slowly, painfully, with frustration and disappointment. Every woman who’s had to struggle through that awful feeling of internal conflict when something that was “bad” her whole life is supposedly transformed into something “good” in the course of one afternoon just because she put on a fancy dress and got a new piece of jewelry, every one of them wants something better for her daughters.
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We believe that we cannot afford to take the easy path of ensuring our daughters’ modesty by grossing them out. “Oh dear, that nasty woman over there is showing her cleavage. Ew! We certainly don’t do that in this family.” We tell even our young children that God made our bodies beautiful, and that looking at immodest bodies is exciting, but the reason God made it that way is to bless our marriages. When we look at people we’re not married to, who are showing off their bodies in immodest ways, we’re stealing from our future spouse. We tell our children to look away from immodesty, not because it’s “yucky,” but because they need to “save their eyes.” We encourage them to be modest, not because immodesty is so “shocking” or “embarassing,” but because immodesty is “only for your husband to enjoy, not everyone else.”
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Are we dressing in a showy or impressive way? Are we making a big deal out of our curves, being sure that no one could fail to notice how enticing we are? It has to do with us. The measure of our obedience is whether or not we are flaunting our assets, NOT whether some pervert with a religious fetish manages to lust after us.
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What that means is going to be different for every woman because every woman has different assets. What’s especially beautiful on one, may not be that striking on another. That’s why legalistic “guidelines” are not always terribly helpful. What’s modest for one woman may be showing off for someone else.