The fight for modest attire has taken an ugly turn.
Exhausted from fighting short skirts and tube tops, parents are now being dragged onto yet another battlefield, the T-shirt with a message. Every sale circular, department store and mall corridor is teeming with teenage girls expressing their empowerment beneath their chins.
One tight T-shirt on a thirteen year old girl reads “Boy Scout.” Get it? Maybe her daddy didn’t and let her buy the shirt thinking it would assist her in getting across the street. No, the shirt means that she is boy crazy and that interested parties should approach and apply for her affections.
Another T-shirt is even more blunt. The fifteen year old girls graduate to the message “Bad Girl.” True boy scouts may not approach her, but any sex starved pubescent male will. Ladies used to complain rightly about wolf whistles and lewd comments, but now they invite them at the youngest ages through their abbreviated attire and perverse mottoes.
Britney Spears has fueled much of this redefinition of feminine empowerment. She parades her virginity about in the skimpiest costumes imaginable. As she prepares to release a third record this autumn, however, she now warns parents that she does not want to be a role model. Watch out! Those lyrics and costumes are about to ratchet up the steam.
I don’t want Britney to be a role model either, but, unfortunately, she is. It is not uncommon to hear preteen girls singing her suggestive lyrics, some not understanding what they mean and others having both full knowledge and wicked intentions. While we outlaw child pornography, we plunge our own children into a soft-core form that is just as dangerous through music, clothing and movies. They are robbed of their childhood and their innocence by ruthless marketers, looking to exploit them for profit and indulge their desire to seem more mature. It is sad but not unexpected that many of them lack the will to refuse what fashion magazines say they should wear, but the complicity of their parents in such purchases is practically criminal. Their folks are either asleep at the switch or completely AWOL.
When you send your daughter out dressed like a store window and with inviting slogans emblazoned across her chest, you are sowing the wind and you will likely reap the whirlwind. Her sexual purity is being treated like a joke or a cheap commodity. The bad boys are scouting for bad girls and you just made yours easier to identify.
Try to wear unchaste clothing or these message tops while abiding in God’s will in 1 Timothy 2:8-10. “I desire therefore … that the women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation … which is proper for women professing godliness, with good works.”
Professing godliness! Does the double-entendre “Boy Scout” shirt profess godliness or lust? Is the “Bad Girl” a good girl who is just putting us on?
Is the young lady in the miniskirt adorning herself with chastity or is she tempting every man’s eye and some of their hands? While she basks, he burns and it will only wax worse and worse. Jesus taught that “whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:28) and promised such men an eternity in hell fire. Now you come along, expressing yourself with your skin, and his soul is in danger of eternal damnation.
Ah, but that is his problem. He is the lustful one. If he can’t handle it, he must not be be very strong. Granted he is weak, but most men are and you know that, because you “Boy Scouts” are confessing the same kind of weakness. More importantly, however, you are gleefully making yourself his stumbling block and when he trips over your hemline and falls into sin, you become accountable, too. “But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matt. 18:6).
Some will respond that all this is no big deal, but only a head in the sand could miss the fact that such dress is symptomatic of the sexual devolution among teenagers that leads to broken homes, shattered dreams, disease and unwanted offspring. We are told that forms of sexual immorality short of actual intercourse have become very common since gaining notoriety in the Oval Office.
God punished the Israelites for sacrificing their children upon the fiery altar of Molech. What do you figure he thinks of us when we sacrifice their spirits and innocence upon the altar of the devil by winking at all of this sexually-charged garb upon their young frames? We’re killing them worse than the Israelites, because their innocent babies would still see heaven and we have allowed ours to be robbed of innocence through the flames.
Young ladies, adorn yourselves with godliness. Young man, put on the armor of light and walk properly, making no provision for the flesh (Romans 13:11-14). Your attire can incite lust just as easily as hers, so keep your shirt on in public and dress to befit godliness as well.
