I’ve been wanting to revisit & expand on my three essays about our current ignoring of Hashem’s wisdom. Here, for a refresher at your convenience:
Ignoring Hashem’s Wisdom – Part 1
Ignoring Hashem’s Wisdom – Part 2
Ignoring Hashem’s Wisdom – Part 3
In the above I discuss things including abstinence before marriage, fidelity, porn use, and an addiction to THE ORGASM as the end-all, be-all of life… but I’ve seen enough to want to add to that tripartite body of work.
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MODESTY: FELT BY ITS ABSENCE
OK, I’m male. And, as I used to joke with people, if I don’t at least peripherally notice an attractive woman in passing – especially with a rather, ahem, revealing outfit – first check my vision, then my pulse. As a married friend once said, I’m married, not buried. I’m not advocating overt ogling or worse, vocalized statements or catcalls, or imaging that woman when you’re with your wife, but neither am I advocating shrouds (a la “Handmaiden’s Tale”), or Islamic gear for women of any sort; one doesn’t have to have oodles of shown skin to be attractive… or even a little sexy/titillating. Again, I don’t try to ogle – that’s not good either. But simple looking does happen. I need new sunglasses! 😉
Two rules that I’ve gleaned about women’s outfits over many years are:
One: A hint of something is often more exciting than the full view of it. One doesn’t need a plunging-to-the-waist neckline or skin-tight outfit to appreciate that a woman has a nice top; nor is there a need to have a miniskirt with less fiber than an aspirin bottle cotton ball to demonstrate nice legs; a modest dress can still convey a shapely figure. The same also applies for men. And while men are not my particular orientation or interest, I’ve seen men in full-cover, but well tailored, outfits that clearly could attract without looking like they’re about to head to a meat-market bar. (Contrast with a former boss, married with several children, who dressed at work precisely like the latter which I thought was tremendously unprofessional. Very fit and objectively handsome, he always wore a tight and fitted shirt open well past his exposed chest – NOT the sort of thing for an office!)
Two: Especially for women, and I learned this from reading about the making of Star Trek: The Original Series, a great deal of excitement and attention can be generated by how accident-prone an outfit appears to be. Is there an indication that a wrong move might let something slip out or be exposed? Even if the outfit itself is rather middle-of-the-road, the appearance of the possibility of an accidental slip excites – that’s where double-sided tape comes in, ladies! 🙂 . (That’s one way Star Trek: TOS had such cutting-edge costumes; objectively modest given the standards of the day but attention-grabbing nonetheless. The below was, apparently, quite scandalous at the time – but now would seem quite tame. Note no exposed navel; that was, apparently, a no-no since the 30’s.)
So here’s a serendipitously-found article, which I’ve abstracted into my journal for my kids:
Modesty Empowers Women…and 4 Reasons Nudity Doesn’t (deeprootsathome.com)
And I agree for the most part but want to build on the fourth point in that article in particular. Imagine your first date shows up like this: NSFW warning… but oboy (compare the above image to the link and you can grasp how things have changed)? Where’s your attention going to be on a date? On her character and sparkling personality? On learning about her background and values, or her education and intellect and knowledge? Or… elsewhere? (Mentally insert a “My eyes are up here” thought.) Because those emotional & hormonal reactions and visual stimuli short-circuit learning about and then mentally weighing of what’s really important in a long-term – lifelong? – relationship. (Aside: I remember going to lunch with one very attractive coworker at the café some years ago – my intentions to talk shop on a project I had and get her input, as well as just getting to know one of my fellow coworkers as I was fairly new there; brilliant mind, incredible education, enormously competent, but also stunningly attractive – and with her shirt being open a fair way down it was… difficult… focusing on her face during that conversation. I hadn’t realized it was as open as far as it was when I said “Hey ,want to catch lunch”? Remember this level of distraction was when she was at work and I can only imagine if we’d been on a date and she’d wanted to entice.)
Compare and contrast the linked-only outfit for a first date with this one, below. Completely different impressions of the woman, no?
Where will your visual focus on this outfit? And what is Hashem’s wisdom on this? Though this link just below has a mix of OT and NT citations (a handful of OT ones extracted below), the theme is the same: modesty in dress.
25 Major Bible Verses About Modesty (Dress, Motives, Purity) (biblereasons.com)
Proverbs 11:22 “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.”
1 Samuel 16:7 “But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The LORD does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”
Ezekiel 16:30 “What a sick heart you have, says the Sovereign LORD, to do such things as these, acting like a shameless prostitute.”
Isaiah 3:16-19 “The LORD says, “The women of Zion are haughty, walking along with outstretched necks, flirting with their eyes, strutting along with swaying hips, with ornaments jingling on their ankles.
I appreciate looking good, but taken to excess there’s Satan’s Favorite Sin. And too much titillation and we’re also into LUST territory too. Two of the seven so far. I like this one excerpt from the modesty article in particular:
“Dear girls, Dressing immodestly is like rolling around in manure. Yes you will get attention, but ALL of it will be from pigs.”
Sincerely, Real Men
And, likely, pigs more interested in physical access to your body than access to who you are as a person.
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SWIPING RIGHT (OR LEFT)
Too many people are online on dating apps, looking at pics and profiles and making gut-feel choices based on those mostly-visual impressions. Not like how it used to be in Ye Olde Tymes where, through religious and other social interactions or introductions (matchmaking!), you got to know people over time, and they got to know you. In Judaism, match-making is an unofficial calling of most women in Synagogues! 🙂
Based on my own life experience, a solid marriage relies on any number of things (not an exhaustive list, of course):
Shared Values: Do you and your prospective partner value the same things in life? More and more I’m finding that shared faith is important. How do you learn about those shared values? Not by staring at another person’s body part (or more than staring), but by talking with them earnestly and with interest. Interest in THEM, not their exposed skin. Plus, over time, seeing them in action. Do they walk the talk? (I try to be kind, to people and to animals – e.g., the other day I rescued a trapped dragonfly from the window the local Market Basket – aside: over the years I’ve noticed it’s always one species of dragonfly! I wonder what it, in particular, is attracted to in there.)
Shared Goals: Do you and your partner want the same things in life? Travel or homebody, children and if yes few or many, owning a home: rural/urban, the list is endless, and understanding tradeoffs is key too. What do you agree on in terms of goals in a year, five, or more… and further… into a whole life together? As a meme I saw a long time ago said, it’s not about looking at each other in life, but holding hands and walking together on a shared journey to an agreed-on destination. And how do you learn about that vision? Not by being obsessed about a view down a woman’s loose blouse, or a woman looking at the man’s tight jeans and trying to gauge the bulge seen there or admiring his pecs and arms. Or, as one video I saw a few months ago of a single attractive woman saying she’s not ready to settle down but wants all sorts of <described by her but omitted here> sexual experiences before she chooses to settle down with one guy. As though – realistically – one guy could then satisfy her given her experience set across multiple partners.
Enough Shared Interests to Build On: Nobody with any maturity wants to date an intellectual clone, but by the same token you need to have commonalities. Not just common values, not just common goals, but common interests on which to build activities, having time to talk, and so on. And on the flip side, an open enough mind to see that the other is passionate about X, and taking an interest in it too. At the most, you may find it grows on you, and at the least they’ll appreciate your interest in their interest. And again, how do you learn about these things? Over time, talking and sharing activities, not hopping into bed.
A Sense of Their Real Character: How do you learn about someone’s character? Observing what they do over time, in multiple situations, with multiple stressors. How do they behave under pressure? In shared activities that both have an interest in, and in how they react to an interest of yours that’s new to them (and vice versa) – doesn’t mean you have to adopt their interest as your own, but it’s something you can live with. Again, you don’t see their character when you’re wondering about what’s under their clothing that you’re seeing hints of. Nor do you learn their character when your prime goal is intimate relations.
An aside: My son asked, when he was old enough, where he should go to find a wife. I told him that regardless of wife-searching, join a Synagogue as strict as you can tolerate (shared faith and values), attend regularly and for not-just-wife-searching reasons, i.e., genuine belief. Be active and attend regularly, volunteer, and pretty soon people will figure out you’re single and start to match-make based on the knowledge of you they’ve gained from repeated interactions and watching you. As said above, this is an unofficial job description of every woman who attends Shul… though, of course, it happens a lot elsewhere too.
The race for the physical-first action short-circuits all of those things above that tend to make relationships last. In particular for men, when physical gratification is on the menu early, the adage from Robin Williams definitely comes to mind:
God gave man a p*nis and a brain. And only enough blood to run one at a time.
And what can happen is that by the time blood starts going to the proper head again, you could actually be engaged, or even married with a pregnant wife. There’s also a phenomenon called “sex bombing” where a woman can make everything so glorious sexually that the big head never does wake up until it’s way, way, way too late. Apparently narcissistic women have this as a very common tactic to distract you from possibly noticing her narcissism – again, until you’re trapped.
All that, of course, is why getting to know the other over time and in different settings – for both male and female – before the physical starts is so important.
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GRASS IS GREENER
This is a fascinating 32 page PDF. And while I agree with it in general, here’s an interesting take on the “grass is greener” syndrome, written generally:
This is one of the enormous downsides of an even moderately-promiscuous past, whether male or female: you start to compare the present one with past ones. X was better in bed. Y had a nicer car. Z was more wealthy. Fancier vacations, bigger home / nicer location, career, etc. But you’ll likely never find all those things in one person. Tradeoffs, again. The more partners you have, the more the person you’re with now fades and become just another in a collection..
There is some truth in the idea that, sometimes, too much information to use in comparisons is not necessarily good.
A trivial example. Many years ago, living in Texas, the head of the department I was in flew in for our (stage whisper “Christmas Party”) and we went to a very swanky place. He saw Dom Perignon on the menu and ordered it for the entire party of somewhere around 15 people. Having had that culinary experience, I compare / contrast with what I can afford to buy when champagne is required. Regular champagne doesn’t come close – wow. I still like affordable bubbly on occasion but each time I think about that Dom and how good it was.
It also doesn’t have to be personal experience. I’m running into a mass of videos now where women left their husbands of 15, 20, even 25 years because they’re booooored and they weren’t getting the romance or bangin’ sex or passion they “deserved” – an ache created and fueled by social media and clucking friend groups and women’s magazines – only to find a year or so down the road that they’re desperately unhappy, much poorer, and many of these tiktoks are them asking for advice on how to get their husbands back. The surrounding culture affects perceptions too. And, of course, the same applies for men – hot younger women, SM, and porn addition can also create envy and desire to break off to chase that.
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GETTING PHYSICAL FAST
Today’s instant-gratification world has no place for such time investments. Indeed, there’s even an advocacy of actual intimate relations on the very first date. Presented in many of the links as a good thing. Orgasm-focused much?
Speaking of access to the woman’s body, this is from 2017 but applies today evergreen:
‘Cheap sex’ is making men give up on marriage (nypost.com)
As is, from many videos I’m seeing, a high “body count”. Consider this:
video
I remember a few years ago, IIRC it was an essay by Michelle Malkin but I don’t recall, a movement to have “20 by 20”, i.e., 20 partners by the time your 20. Real? Not sure. But in the light of the video above, I think it’s at least a credible thing.
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FAMILY LIFE
Over two decades ago I had just moved intra-company to a new plant, where one of the women at the new place was quite pregnant. Not long after I joined she vanished to give birth… but was back at work about two months in. Inquiring very discreetly, I learned that she and her husband had an enormous “McMansion”, three (!) SUVs on lease, and she HAD TO come back to work for financial reasons.
The relationship between daycare and stress
In order to measure the amount of stress children, especially babies and toddlers, experience in daycare, researchers have measured cortisol levels in these children. Cortisol is the body’s main stress hormone, a “built-in alarm system” of sorts. The results have shown that children in daycare experience much higher stress levels compared to children who stay at home, which results in long-term damage to the mental well-being of these children.
A child’s natural place is at home.
Source: Harriet J. Vermeer, Marinus H. van IJzendoorn,
Children’s elevated cortisol levels at daycare: A review and meta-analysis
🔘@DegeneraC_watch
“Modern Feminism” has declared to women – brainwashed them – that they can have it all. Love, family, career, everything. Yet… Thomas Sowell’s wisdom applies:
Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives.
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CONCLUDING
In the lead-in I had an image about banning sex before marriage. To my knowledge virtually every long-lasting culture in history has at least put negative connotations about infidelity if not outright banned it. Of course, we humans are a randy bunch and that gets broken all the time. We’re not perfect. But in the main, that prohibition holds. Certainly it is a Pole Star for orientation of direction and behavior.
But whether from Hashem, or merely from experience across time, a la Sowell, cultural norms like abstinence, fidelity, monogamy, modesty, taking time to get to know each other, all developed because they worked to create the best possible odds for the nuclear family:
Or, perhaps… Hashem guided these experiments across time to get people to learn – through experience – what His wisdom and plan is.
People learn best when they come to a conclusion on their own. Perhaps those millions facing similar situations, and countless experiments to see what worked, was His way of directing humanity to His wisdom in the best way possible for us to truly assimilate and value it.
Something to ponder, definitely.
