Hello friends!
Thank you so much for joining into the conversation on “Girls, Modesty, and the Christian Community.” I was so honored to receive so many stories—here on Substack, Facebook, and many sent privately as the sting of the shame associated with the story was still a bit too raw to put on a public forum. I was struck by how many stories there were. Of women of all ages being approached by near strangers to have their clothing and figures assessed. I was particularly struck by the oft’ repeated stories of women in ministry who finally gave up on attempting business clothes in the pulpit because whatever they wore drew comments on their figures, their legs, and/or how distracting their appearance was in the pulpit. Likely my favorite line was “I finally started wearing a robe so that people would start talking about my sermon instead of my body.”
In the podcast you’re about to listen to we got to a number of these topics. I think we’ll have to schedule another to get to what I think is the core of the problem here—a society that thinks women’s bodies are designed for public consumption. A society that, on one hand, tells all of our girls via every means of communication available that the only way to be “pretty” is to be “sexy,” and then vilifies those same girls for believing that message. In sum, the constant commodification of a girls’ bodies and the constant communication of shame.
As you will hear, this discussion will not circle around WHAT dress codes should occupy our lives—we all readily admit that life and work demand certain attire in certain spaces—it will instead circle around what women are experiencing regarding the public scrutiny of their appearance and why. Some topics covered:
What is modesty (1 Tim 2:9-10; 1 Peter 3:3-5)
Who is responsible when lust happens (Mat 5:27-28). One therapist said: “From a spiritual formation perspective, a man’s management of lust becomes externalized as the women’s issue to solve, instead of being viewed as a formation invitation.”
What should be some of the guidelines when we put together a dress code for our community?
How should we go about communicating dress codes once we’ve got them?
Who should be talking to an underage girl about her body? Who should be talking to an adult woman about her body?
Let us know what you think!
Would have loved more of a deeper conversation on what is modesty and how does culture play into that as well.
Also talking about how this is a never ending subject for women - the whole silver fox vs old crone part. Women who are told they are to old to be on stage to lead, etc.
What struck me in this conversation is how much of the discussion may belong not only to purity culture, but to a broader modern habit of learning to see the body from the outside.
Twentieth-century America brought together several developments that had previously existed more separately: mass entertainment, advertising, consumer capitalism, aesthetic medicine, photography, and eventually television. Hollywood became extraordinarily powerful in constructing and distributing images of what a desirable life - and a desirable body - should look like. At the same time, advances in plastic and reconstructive surgery increasingly made the body itself alterable. Jacques Joseph, for example, was one of the early pioneers of modern rhinoplasty and facial aesthetic surgery. By the middle of the century, appearance could increasingly be photographed, compared, marketed, and medically modified.
Immigration is part of that history as well. Many of the founders of the Hollywood studio system were immigrants or children of immigrants, including a remarkable number of Ashkenazi Jewish entrepreneurs such as Mayer, Zukor, Laemmle, Fox, Cohn, Goldwyn, and the Warner brothers. Their prominence is historically important, but I do not think the story is fundamentally about Jewishness. It is about outsiders helping build one of the most powerful image-making industries the world had ever seen, in a society already deeply invested in reinvention.
America did not invent beauty, vanity, or body modification. What it did unusually well was bring medicine, commerce, entertainment, and the promise of self-reinvention together.
Change your name. Change your class. Change your clothes. Change your teeth, your hair, your nose, your breasts, your weight, your body.
Norma Jeane could become Marilyn Monroe. Later television amplified increasingly curated images of youth, sexuality, wealth, fitness, and beauty. By the era of Baywatch, the California body itself had become an internationally recognizable product. Social media then placed many of the same mechanisms into ordinary life, where appearance could be photographed, edited, posted, compared, and evaluated continuously.
Psychology has a useful framework for what can follow. Fredrickson and Roberts called it objectification theory: girls and women can internalize an observer’s perspective toward their own bodies and begin engaging in habitual body surveillance. Instead of simply inhabiting the body, part of the mind is continually asking: How do I look? What are people seeing? Am I attractive enough? Am I too sexual? Am I thin enough? Am I aging?
The original objectification literature associated this kind of monitoring with shame, anxiety, reduced awareness of internal bodily states, and interference with flow or peak experience. Later research on social media has found consistent associations among appearance comparison, social media use, and body-image concerns, although those studies do not establish that social media alone causes them.
Listening to this conversation made me wonder whether some forms of evangelical purity culture can unintentionally add another layer to the same external gaze.
Secular culture may say, “Be desirable.”
Purity culture may say, “Be careful not to be too desirable.”
The messages sound opposite, but both can leave a woman monitoring herself through someone else’s eyes.
Recent studies of purity culture and sexual shame seem relevant here as well. A 2026 study by Gray and Klement found an association between purity-culture exposure and greater sexual shame, particularly among women who no longer endorsed those beliefs. Coates and Meston likewise reported relationships between purity-culture beliefs and sexual shame in people with and without histories of nonconsensual sexual experiences. These findings are associative rather than proof of causation, but they make the psychological question difficult to dismiss.
What interests me most is that the alternative may need to go deeper than body positivity. Replacing “my body is ugly” with “my body is beautiful” changes the judgment, but the body is still being observed and evaluated.
I have been thinking instead about the difference between the curated body and the inhabited body.
To inhabit the body is to experience breath, movement, strength, fatigue, touch, warmth, water, hunger, rest, pleasure, and physical presence before asking how the body appears to someone else. It is a movement from surveillance back toward embodiment.
That is part of why Genesis 2:25 interests me: “They were both naked … and were not ashamed.”
I am not suggesting that Genesis is teaching modern psychology or making an argument about nudity. I am interested in the image of embodied human beings who are visible to another person without yet learning to hide, monitor, or stand outside themselves in judgment.
My own background probably affects how I hear this. I am Iranian and left Iran before the revolution. My mother became a physician, my aunt founded one of the leading schools in Iran, and the women I grew up around were strong, educated, capable women. They were certainly shaped by culture, as all of us are, but they were not nearly as preoccupied with defining themselves through their bodies or through prescribed gender roles as some of what I later encountered in American culture and American evangelicalism.
That has also shaped the way I have tried to raise my daughters. I want them to have room to think, question, and arrive at their own understanding of faith, womanhood, and their bodies without having either secular American culture or American evangelical culture dictate the answer for them.
Every culture has its distortions, but they are not necessarily distributed in the same way. America has been extraordinarily successful at exporting its own visual culture, consumer ideals, and ways of evaluating the body around the world.
Perhaps the deepest opposite of bodily shame is not, “I am beautiful.”
Perhaps it is simply, “I am here.”
References:
Fredrickson BL, Roberts TA. Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly. 1997.
Fardouly J, Vartanian LR. Social Media and Body Image Concerns: Current Research and Future Directions. Current Opinion in Psychology. 2016.
Gray & Klement. Purity Culture and Sexual Shame. Journal of Counseling Sexology & Sexual Wellness. 2026.
Coates & Meston. Being Pure and Being Ashamed. Journal of Sex Research. 2026.