Comparing modesty for guys and girls

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My sister and I went to the San Diego zoo in jeans and t-shirts that were not too tight once, as one does. We were loudly and obnoxiously told by a large group of Muslims (the men in the group- the women were all in niqab and didn’t say anything to us) that we needed to cover up. Obviously, the two of us were considered immodest by obnoxious Muslim busybody standards, even though we looked perfectly normal to everyone in our own culture.
 
CoffeeFanatic said:
that we needed to cover up.
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I would have kindly told them that if they were bothered, to please not look at me then! And walk away. I know some Muslims and they completely understand and accept that we don’t dress like them. They seem to have no problem!
 
Safety in numbers you know.

Never underestimate the power of people in large numbers…
 
As a man, I don’t see why men feel the need to be shirtless in public - apart from the beach or pool. I agree that if a woman can’t so much as show her stomach, a man shouldn’t show his entire upper half.
 
I really don’t see shirtless men unless it is in those two places.
 
Re: “Sacra Propediem,” you’re talking about 1921 fashions and dances.

And frankly, if you have ever seen footage from 1921 nightclubs that were considered hinky in the US, sometimes women did wear stuff that most people today would never wear, and dance with their lack of underwear obvious while they did high kicks. And it was worse in Europe. And sometimes they did go try to church in that stuff in Italy.

The wilder flappers also weren’t wearing corsets or bras, for the most part, so the top half was ridiculously obvious under their clothes. And women weren’t just wearing rouge on their knees, so it was really really obvious that they weren’t wearing bras. I don’t need to go into more detail, do I? Because there was a lot of this stuff, honestly.

But you also notice that Pope Benedict XV did not define what was modest and what was not; he just said his piece and asked people to do better. He didn’t give sleeve lengths or bodice heights, because those change.

As for shirtless men – on the day when XY-chromosome men can nurse babies with their tiny little nipples, and develop entire secondary erogenous zones and nerve systems on their flat little chests, that’s the day when I’ll worry about men being too immodest with their shirts off.

Given all the wicking undershirts and shirts that we have now, and all the worries about skin cancer, I doubt we’ll see bare male chests much longer.
 
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This is a real quote:
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Let parents keep their daughters away from public gymnastic games and contests; but, if their daughters are compelled to attend such exhibitions, let them see to it that they are fully and modestly dressed. Let them never permit their daughters to don immodest garb.’

The Sacred Congregation of the Council (by the mandate of Pope Pius XI), January 12, 1930 A.D.
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But the rest of the quote is not from that document. The document says nothing about gauze, clothing lengths, or anything else of that nature.

Here is a full translation of the document, “De Inhonesto Feminarum Vestiendi More” (Concerning a Degrading Manner of Dress for Women), with links to where you can find the Latin original on the Vatican website.

What has happened is that various documents by various people have been smushed together and confused, and then passed around by ditto, photocopier, and the Internet. It’s a real pain to find the real documents at this point.
 
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twf said:
As a man, I don’t see why men feel the need to be shirtless in public -
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Well…now…see…back in the old days there were a few times I took my shirt off over the summer when I was working outside at a college. Groundskeeper/gardener work. It was a workstudy job. I was a student there. And it so happened that maybe young women happened maybe to ask to take my picture. Maybe a couple times. So there’s a pretty good reason right there.

Now, few decades later, my wife says the last thing she wants to see when she drives into our neighborhood is shirtless men working in their yards and washing their cars. Which means I myself am always shirted, despite my ongoing photogenicity.
 
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Well, that’s the trouble. You go looking in Google Books or somewhere, and you find a date or a title or a Vatican congregation that put it out. So you go looking for that document at that date (and for the next couple years, or ten, or twenty, around it) in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, and there’s nothing. Or you search around and find something, but the dates are scrambled by bad OCR. Or they say it’s a Vatican document in Latin, and it turns out that it was some random Italian sodality or guild putting out a document for their club newsletter.

It’s very troublesome. I like primary documentation, and the Internet is usually great for finding that. But no, that would be too easy.
 
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People can do what they want, but I find it rather sad that with coronavirus raging, CAF is having the same modesty discussion that we’ve had about 800 times before.
 
Okaaayy… If men who come into church wearing shorts & tank tops isn’t immodest then I don’t know what is.
 
I have never seen a man in a tank top at mass. But shorts on men are immodest? That’s news to me.
 
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