Men, Sex and Modesty

[Anonymous]

As Alice Walker said, I have seen the axe, and the handle is one of us. She said this in reference to why women would perpetuate female genital mutilation. Women who have been the most impacted by restrictions are eager for others to be similarly restricted.

[Anonymous]

Jealousy and envy play a role, as well.

It’s easy to understand why someone who doesn’t have a figure that can’t be hidden would want “a fair playing field” – even if it’s irrational and subconscious. It is deeply evolutionary and instinctual.

Most people who act like the mothers in the comment have never analyzed their reactions and don’t realize they are oversimplifying everything by lumping it all under a distorted modesty standard.

[Anonymous]

hawkgrrrl wrote:

Women who have been the most impacted by restrictions are eager for others to be similarly restricted.

Or, as you said somewhere else, misery loves company. I can find good things about our modesty culture, but it’s a very fragile, conditional “good.” And lately it doesn’t outweigh the bad. And as I step back from it I am so sad to see how women treat each other. I won’t be part of it.

[Anonymous]

Brown wrote:

Two: Nature plays a role here. It’s been proven that men are more visually stimulated by the opposite sex than women. It is the same reason pornography users are 97% male. We get turned on by simply looking at women and the more a women accentuates her body, the more we are drawn to look. Yes we can exercise self-control, and the vast majority of men do, but nature is nature.

I wonder how globally true this is. In “Western” culture, men are very visual and the appearance of women is accentuated by certain articles of clothing or items that will make a woman more visually desirable to men during the years that she is interested in this kind of attention. Other parts of the world (Central Africa, Islamic countries, possibly parts of China or other parts of Asia) are not necessarily so focused on the visual aspect in their search for a mate perhaps because it is not emphasized as much as it is in our culture. I haven’t seen studies pertaining to this, but I don’t think a blanket statement that “men” are visual in a sexual sense is a necessarily defensible statement. It is just what we see around us in the areas that we live in.

[Author]

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