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A Conversation on Dress An Excerpt from Beautiful Girlhood By Margaret Hale
       "Mother, said Jennie Vane one day as the two sat together sewing. Why do you not want me to wear my necklines low?"
       "What do you call a low necked dress?" asked her mother.
       "You know how the girls mostly wear them low like this," said Jennie, with her finger making on her bosom a line that she called low. Mrs. Vane looked to God for wisdom to rightly answer, and to equip Jennie with enough Christian sense to dress modestly despite the popular trend and fashion.
       "I do not require you to make your dresses with close fitting necks, Jennie, but I have reasons which I am only too glad to explain to you why I do not approve such necklines as you've described."
       "I want to know just why Mother, for sometimes I feel a little odd that none of my dresses are made that way."
       "One of the first evidences of a real lady, is that she should be modest. By modesty we mean that she shall not say, do, nor wear anything that would cause her to appear gaudy, ill-bred, or unchaste. There should be nothing about her to attract unfavorable attention, nothing in her dress or manner that would give a man an excuse for vulgar comment. When we dress contrary to the rule of modesty we give excuse for unwholesome thoughts in the mind of those who look upon us, and every girl who oversteps these bounds makes herself liable to misunderstanding and insult, though she may be innocent of any such intention."
        "Shouldn't men learn to guard their thoughts?" asked Jennie.
        "There," replied her mother, "is the very question, put in a little different form, that Cain gave to God about his brother: 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Yes, Jennie, to a great extent we are responsible to our brother's thoughts. But I would not have you think that all men are so weak. There are strong, true, pure-minded men and boys to whom these weaknesses of women are not a temptation. But there are the weaker also, and for them we are partly responsible. Let us suppose that upon the streetcorner there stands a group of men and boys among them being two boys whose minds are pure. You and another girl are dressed with very low necks, very thin blouses and your skirts are quite short. The scantiness of your dress attracts attention to your person. You may behave as perfect ladies, but as you pass the corner your appearance causes worldly minded to think and say vulgar things about you. The pure-minded boys hear, and their minds are defiled. You girls are as much to blame for what has happened as the impure man or boy who said the evil things."

http://www.momof9splace.com/conversation.html

The other day I went to walmsrt to look for a blouse. Almost everything this year is cut too low, or too sheer for my tastes or too ugly for my tastes.

There is a war out there against hetero men, I believe. Tell them they can't learn by trying to teach them like girls, keep them sexually stimulated by having all the women prancing around in things that have no modesty, and attack them if they can't act like eunuchs except when given permission.

Seems like an unholy alliance between the feminist movement and the gay agenda to me, but maybe I'm either being paranoid, or just another factor in that bad dream that the modern world is turning into - and it isn't hard to catch the whiff of sulphur behind it all....

Thank you for the post, very worthwhile I stumbled across this argument yesterday, so in keeping with a topic within the post (You're judgmental!) it is passed along. I recognize that how I dress will cause others to form opinion of me.
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"Jesus tells us not to judge." ... one must make a distinction between internal and external judgment. When Our Lord says: "Judge not, that you be not judged" (Matthew 1:7/DRV), His dictum refers to one man's judgment of another man's internal state of soul. Only God can see the internal disposition: was the external action done out of good or ill, out of friendship or fear, etc.? Man can see only the external result, not the internal intention.

On the other hand, we must make external judgments. We do this every day. A parent judges his child's action unacceptable and punishes him. A judge or jury judges a criminal guilty. We judge that murder is wrong, that adultery is wrong, that theft is wrong. These are external judgments that we must make by God's authority. Otherwise, the commonweal falls. We must judge the external action -- we don't want criminals walking around because they cannot be judged! God gives us that authority, as He established the State with its due authority: "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Matthew 22:21/DRV).

This "judge not" is a typical ploy of the Modernists. It's a way of saying that we cannot judge anyone else's morals. We can't say that adultery is wrong, or homosexuality, or theft. Of course, not even the Modernists really believe this. They don't advocate the dismissal of law-courts. They don't advocate the firing of judges. They don't advocate letting murderers, thieves, and rapists go free with impunity. Obviously, even for them, external judgment is just and a necessity. They only judge differently, not in accordance with God's law.

So what does this "judge not" dictum really mean? St. John the Apostle clarifies it for us: "Judge not according to the appearance: but judge just judgment" (John 7:24/DRV). In other words, it is not judgment itself that is condemned, but unjust judgment. Catholic teaching is that just judgment is proper when it pertains to external judgment. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to judge an external act such as murder, to consign the murderer to the courts, and to execute the murderer if found guilty.

What we cannot do, as only God can do that, is judge the internal disposition. Perhaps the murderer was not compos mentis when he committed the murder. Courts can try to infer from external actions what might have been the internal motive, just as a priest can try to infer the culpability of a penitent, but only God knows the true heart as a certainty.

So, when someone gives you that "judge not" quotation to suborn every kind of moral and doctrinal perversion, tell them to go down to the courthouse, dismiss the judges and juries, and lock the doors! "Moral relativism is not only an intellectually bankrupt idea; its real-life consequences can be deadly." Otherwise, we would have no justice in this world -- just anarchy.