Yesterday as I waited in line at the
convenience store for my low-budget sub sandwich I couldn’t help but notice a
couple of young women and their several children, five I think but it was hard
to count as the kids kept running around wildly. It must have been five because they got seven
sandwiches. Anyway, the thing I noticed
besides the kids and the sandwiches and the fact that they bought the stuff
with food stamps was the blatant sexuality of the too small clothing they wore and
the large amount of body art which decorated their exposed fleshy parts. I’m talking about the women here, not the
kids.
Before you all start thinking about what
an old fuddy-duddy I’ve become you should know how much progress I’ve made in
shedding my fuddy-duddyism. So get ready
for a history lesson. When I was a kid
(I can hear you groaning, so stop it) the standards of decorum in fashion were
based on something called modesty. It
wasn’t the kind of modesty that prevented the hero who pulled the kitty-cat out
of the burning building from bragging about his heroic deed. And it wasn’t the kind of modesty that the
straight “A” student practiced when he kept his mouth shut around the dullards
in his class. No it was the kind of modesty
that prevented a young woman from exposing her ample charms in a bold,
attention getting way. It was the kind
of modesty that encouraged grown men to avoid Speedos at the community
pool. Why even the boys who spent summer
days at a secluded swimming hole up the creek near the second orchard would
wear swimming suits. We would wear them
unless we happened to be coming down the creek and the siren call of the
swimming hole became too strong and there was no time to go home and then come
back properly attired. But those were
the exceptions. And we would never wear
a Speedo, probably because they weren’t invented yet.
So, modesty was a standard of
dress. At the Catholic boys school where
I lived for a couple years the level of modesty was so high that the dorm
shower rooms had privacy curtains, walls between urinals and locking doors on
toilet stalls. Boys were required to
wear bathrobes and not just a simple towel wrapped around the waist as they
went from the shower to the dorm room.
And in the room the bathrobe became a dressing gown, modestly draping
one’s body as underwear and trousers were put on. Only then could the robe be hung up neatly in
the closet. Yes it was a repressive
society in that school. And that “training”
sure didn’t help me out when I got to military basic training. Of course, I recognize now that so much
repression bred more than a little strangeness.
Thankfully I avoided the strangeness and got rid of most of those
imposed inhibitions.
But I digress, as usual. Modesty existed. Girls wore clothing that covered quite a lot
of their bodies. Girls who exposed too
much were considered “loose” or “trampy”.
We loved those girls. But even
the bad girls back then didn’t come close to the average young woman of
today. And that brings me back to the
convenience store. At the risk of being risqué
I’m going to describe what I saw standing in line at the counter. The first young woman that I noticed was
blonde and quite pretty. She wore some
make-up but not enough to put her in the class of a “painted lady”. She was dressed in the conventional costume
of tube top, shorts and flip-flops. The
only problem with her costume was that it was made for someone at least four
sizes smaller. The shorts adhered to her
body almost as tightly as her numerous tattoos.
And the tiny top she was wearing was struggling mightily to keep her
womanly parts harnessed and not breaking free like a pair of horses running
away from a broken down buggy. A tattoo
on her lower back crept down into those tight shorts and probably didn’t stop
any too soon. In fact the bulk of her
backside was in the fresh air and seemingly enjoying the feeling. The other young woman was similarly attired
but she had even more body art. One
rather engrossing picture on her back showed a nude man and woman in a rather passionate
pose. The lady pictured resembled Sophia
Loren in her younger days. I didn’t
recognize the man.
I’m sure you, dear reader, are
chastising me for making such a thorough study of those girls. But I made these observations innocently and without
a lascivious thought in my senile old brain.
It was all in the interests of learning more about the world around me.
We all understand that standards of
dress are much different than they were forty years ago. When the hippies of the sixties and early
seventies started to let it all hang out there was no wrapping it back up. A significant segment of our population has
expanded upon that notion and there sure aren’t many limits of modesty around
these days. It’s always amusing to me
when I’m shopping at a supermarket or at Walmart and I see in line a couple of
girls like my convenience store friends with their unruly kids standing next to
a couple of Amish or Mennonite women and their well-behaved children. A simplistic view would correlate the modesty
of dress with the orderliness of lifestyle.
And one also might note that the Amish folks never use food stamps. But that’s a different issue, isn’t it?
So what’s my point here? I guess it’s just an observation on change
and how change isn’t always for the best.
Or maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy after all, full of complaints and
no suggestions for improving things other than to say…
Have a fine day and dress modestly.
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