Over Achievers with Low Self-Esteem If you read the most-emailed article in the New York Times at the end of last week ("To All the Girls I've Rejected"), then you know that some college admission offices are holding female applicants to a higher standard than their male counterparts in hopes of achieving a greater gender balance on campus. That's because women's enrollment in college is dramatically outpacing men's. By the 2009-2010 school year, according to the Business Roundtable, women will earn 142 bachelor's degrees and 173 associate degrees for every 100 awarded to men in these categories. American girls, meanwhile, are not only advancing in the classroom but on playing fields as well. One in three high school girls now plays a sport, compared to one in 27 before Title IX (an act that called for more college scholarships for women to ensure parity with male athletes in 1972). The cultural landscape has shifted accordingly, offering up highly empowered female heroines both real and fictional, including Mia Hamm, Lisa Leslie and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." But for all the undisputed advances made by young women, evidence suggests there is more to this story, a dark side that has long been acknowledged but seems all the more baffling in this era of increasingly accomplished girls. Foremost, a young woman's body is still a battleground -- the relentless focus of the porn industry, the celebrity and the weight-loss industries. Advocates in the field of eating disorders remind us that these illnesses have doubled their reach in the last 30 years, that they are fatal in 10 percent of cases, and that they are affecting younger and more ethnically diverse girls. And it's not just about food and other forms of bodily self-abuse such as cutting. In a 2001 Harvard study, one in five teen girls reported being hit or being forced into sex by their partners. Depression is another pervasive affliction among college women, despite their groundbreaking achievements and presumably bright economic prospects. The hazards that young women face on the way to adulthood are real -- as real as ever. The problem is how to understand them in light of girl power, Buffy and the WNBA. Given these introductions, the stories that inevitably followed -- clogging the shower drain with vomit or being kicked and taunted publicly by a boyfriend, or fantasizing about the best method of suicide -- seemed all the more unlikely. As the group's founder, Brie Henry, put it, "You wouldn't expect these problems from these girls." The improbable combination of strength and frailty on display that night raises tough questions. Shouldn't the educated, physically empowered and ambitious young women of today be less susceptible to disorders of self-esteem than the girls before them? And how do you maintain a balance between potent self-confidence, on one hand, and crushing self-doubt, on the other, without eventually losing your grounding? The striking thing about Achieving You is how clearly its members represented the very combination of empowerment and victimization that is so perplexing among American young women today. These and other young women embody a sort of schizophrenia in which they surge ahead in academics and athletics while at the same time adopt behaviors that compromise them. The obvious question is why. My interviews and observation suggest one possible explanation: That the girls' self-destructive anxieties and compulsions arose, at least in part, to meet a powerful need. That need was to maintain a check on their own forcefulness, that is, to dilute their otherwise formidable strength. "A girl worries about being too smart, too successful, too intimidating, too blond, too promiscuous," says Erin Lenger, 23…. -By Amy DePaul wiretapmag.org For the entire article, go to: http://wiretapmag.org/stories/34116/

modesty… the new feminism

Questions like, “’why does this keep happening to me?’ and ‘when will this end?’ bespeak women who keep falling short, discovering how unlike men we are. Modesty acknowledged this special vulnerability, and protected it. It made women equal to men as women. Encouraged to act immodestly, a woman exposes her vulnerability and she then becomes, in fact, the weaker sex. A woman can argue that she is exactly the same as a man, she may deny having any special vulnerability, and act accordingly, but I cannot help noticing that she usually ends up exhibiting her feminine nature anyway, only this time in victimhood, not in strength.” -Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty (p. 108)

“If vulgarity is a game that begins by excluding women, but ultimately excludes men from themselves, modesty is the game both can play. It begins as a women’s game – one, interestingly, where she appears to lose, ‘to be missing out’ – but really she invites a man to relate to her in a way that is both uniquely human and ultimately more erotic. So modesty may superficially seem to be just a woman’s game because it is one that she must begin, but in playing it she invites men to relate to her in a different way, a way that ultimately means that the men win, too, because they are no longer cut off from adult masculinity.” -Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty (p. 120)

“Modesty is not first an issue of clothing. It is primarily an issue of the heart. And if the heart is right with God, it will govern itself in purity coupled with humility and will express itself modestly…Christian modesty is the inner self-government, rooted in a proper understanding of one’s self before God, which outwardly displays itself in humility and purity from a genuine love for Jesus Christ, rather than in self-glorification or self-advertisement.” -Jeff Pollard, Christian Modesty and the Undressing of America

The article, More Than A Parody by Patrick Goldstein can be found at http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0705030275may04,1,966821.story?track=rss

You are worth dying for. Your worth does not come from your body, your mind, your work, what you produce, what you put out, how much money you make. Your worth does not come from whether or not you have a man. Your worth does not come from whether or not men notice you. You have inestimable worth that comes from your Creator. You will continue to be tempted in a thousand different ways not to believe this. The temptation will be to go searching for your worth and validity form places other than your Creator. Especially from men. But you don’t have to give yourself away to earn a man’s love. You’re better than that. You’re already loved. When you give too much of yourself away too quickly, when you show too much skin, you’re not being true to yourself. When you dress to show us everything, then in some sense we all shared in it, or at least been exposed to it. There is a mystery to you, infinite depth and endless complexity. As the woman says in Song of Songs, “My own vineyard is mine to give.” In the ancient Near East, a vineyard was a euphemism for sexuality. She is saying that she doesn’t give herself to just anyone. She is fully in control of herself, and she is not cheap and she is not easy. Your strength is a beautiful thing. And when you live in it, when you carry yourself with the honor and dignity that are yours, it forces the men around you to relate to you on more that just a flesh level. You are worthy dying for. - Rob Bell, Sex God (p. 124)

1 Peter 3:3-5 Don’t be concerned about the outward beauty offancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God. This is how the holy women of old made themselves beautiful. Questions for women: o What are you trying to accomplish with what you wear, how you talk and what you do with your body? o Is it about drawing attention to you and meeting your needs? o Or is it about drawing attention to the Jesus that you follow and finding all your needs met in Him?

“In essence, a culture that respects a specifically female type of modesty is one that regulates and informs the relation between the sexes in a nuanced – not, significantly, in a legislated [legalistic] – way. Women who dress and act ‘modestly’ conduct themselves in ways that shroud their sexuality in mystery. They live in a way that makes womanliness more a transcendent, implicit quality than a crude, explicit quality. When Peter urged Christian wives to reject the current fashion of the world around the, he didn’t tell them to be ugly. Instead he enjoined them to take on a more eternal kind of beauty: ‘Do not adorn yourself outwardly by plaiting your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing: rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight.’ More recently, the Sunday Gazette Mail reports that ‘women appear to be relying on the power within rather than powerful dressing without.’ It is a respect for this ‘power within’ that once made it impossible for men to view women merely as sexual objects. Rather, women became something deeper, more elemental: possessors of a deep and wondrous secret that is revealed only to the one who proves himself deserving of her. The tie between this notion of male obligation and profound respect for female modesty is no accident, nor was it confined to post-Elizabethan England. German legend tells us the ‘eternal feminine’ gives women the enduring power to spiritualize mankind, while the classic siren leads men to their destruction. These images point to a very real and important truth; what women will and will not permit does have a profound way of influencing the behavior of an entire society. This influence is felt not simply because a woman has traditionally inculcated – or failed to inculcate – the mores in her children and thereby those of the next generation. A woman’s sexual modesty puts her, significantly, in a position to be the ultimate worldly arbiter of a man’s worth – ‘Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,’ as the temperance movement’s slogan had it. Since respect for her modesty gave her the freedom to withhold affection, so to speak, until a virtuous man came around, men were in turn inspired to become worthy of her. Whether the cause was liquor or something larger, if you strung together enough modest women, they could quite literally change society. This was why, as Stuart Cloete put it in his 1943 Congo Song, ‘The woman was the stabilizing factor… world regeneration, when it came – if it came – must come through woman, as life cam through her. She was the source.’ In a society that respected the power of female modesty, the men were motivated to do what the women wanted. A 1997 issue of Cosmopolitan shows us this basic connection very nicely, but this time in inverted form. Its cover is split between two headlines: ‘ARE YOUR HANG-UPS SABOTAGING YOUR LOVE LIFE?’ and ‘MAKE HIM COMMIT 100%: 25 WAYS TO GET A MAN INTO A ROCK-SOLID RELATIONSHIP.’ This is becoming our great modern divide, his commitment problem and her hang-up problem. These two problems have emerged together for a reason. A society which sees her modesty or her ‘hang-ups’ as a problem is necessarily a society which will not be able to get him to commit. Conversely, a society which respected modesty, or what now goes by ‘hang-ups,’ was one in which the men were obligated. -Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty (pp. 97-98)

Women, you need to know that… o You are created in God’s image. (Genesis 1:26-27) o You are knit together specifically by God. (Psalm 139:1-18) o You are worth waiting for. (Song of Songs 2:7, 2:16, 3:4, 4:12-15, 6:3, 8:10-12) o You are worthy of unconditional love and Christ-like respect. (Ephesians 5:25-29) o You are worth dying for. (John 15:12-13, Ephesians 5:25) Now go and read pages 123-127 in Sex God

Questions for men: o do you treat women with the respect that they inherently deserve, that God requires of you? o Do you refuse to objectify or consume their beauty for your own gratification? o Do you preserve their modesty even when it’s being given away?

Questions for fathers: o Do you tell your daughters in words and in actions that they are lovely, lovable and loved? o Do you tell your sons that they have what it takes to do anything to be anything? o Are you modeling how to treat women?