Reflections after Wearing Jeans for a Decade

Dear friend,

Every month I set to-do items, no more than about three or five, of things I want to accomplish that month that will help me gain traction toward things I want to do, or become, or be. This month, it is to write an essay, and here I am on July 31st on the cusp of the goal. There is technically another week before my goals reset, but I had something on my mind tonight that would be fun to write about, and hopefully to read.

I found an awesome pair of jeans at a Goodwill, which everyone knows is almost the ultimate item to find for $6. They are Express jeans, and technically not my size, but if I dry them in the dryer they work well. On the bottom of the left pant leg is black floral appliqué. I feel elegant in these pants, and I love to feel elegant.

Nine going on ten years ago I moved to North Carolina. As most people experience when they leave their parents home I began to set life on my own terms. As a people pleaser I made no changes quickly because I still attended a sort-of Anabaptist church, but probably more quickly than my submissive self from about two years earlier who had told my mother I wouldn’t secretly wear pants for my winter in Guatemala. At least not without a small dress over them, because while most people knew that I had legs, probably nobody suspected I had a butt.

There is a book written about Victorian society toward the end of its time, in which one character remarked to another that the new ankle length dresses were scandalous because now men would begin to suspect that women have legs.

It is not my intention to write about how my family and our circle viewed modesty with any kind of editorializing on what is right or wrong. At nearly ten years later I understand that we draw the lines we draw, and the best we can do is draw them with the knowledge we have. If we are wrong, then we are wrong. Not all sins lead to death. My parents didn’t wreck me by requiring dresses, and I still like dresses. Admittedly I choke at the thought of long maxi skirts and dresses, and prefer to keep them either at the knee or if they are long, with no sleeves on the top half of clothing. I have not fully recovered from my awkward teen-Menno-girl stage. The prairie dresses Target sold for awhile made me nauseous. Probably most of my audience can relate. Did anyone actually wear prairie dresses for any purpose other than making funny reels?

We all have hangups when we leave one kind of culture for another. The swap between switching one way of thinking or living always comes at a price of questions and doubts and reactions. I used to blame these things on the religion I left behind, not understanding these things were actually my own hangups.

“Switching” cultures from niche conservative, even as gently as I have been doing, is grueling inner work. We feel guilty about leaving the things we were taught behind, so we trot out the religious spirit and blame what we left behind for legalism. The blame is sometimes deserved, but we need to deal with our own sense of guilt and wrangle the issues properly. Most of us don’t get into the fighting ring when we need to, and are therefore content to diss things from our safe distance. I don’t think we understand how these things inside us get carried about from place to place. Leaving a place physically will only remove proximity, not transform us.

By now you have suspected, rightly, that this post swings back and forth between ruminating on what I like about jeans and spiritual ramblings. Please give me grace? I haven’t had the discipline of writing in a few years. There might be some awkward switches, which describes my experience with clothing and what to wear.

I like the form of women’s jeans. The way they fit snug about the hips and gently settle the feminine shape. I am a visual person, sometimes exceedingly so, and I always notice and appreciate physical beauty. (When using the word beauty here, to me it is like it was used 150 years ago: it can be applied to male or female)

That is one of the distinctive differences that has shifted me for in the near-decade of starting to play around with which clothing to wear. It took me a long time to know that it was ok to love beauty. One of the hard things about the culture we live in, in the western world, is how sexualized beauty is — as soon as I say I admire the female form someone will call me a lesbian. But I don’t want to have sex with a woman, that is very different. It is sad to me that I can’t walk in public, holding hands with a friend as other cultures do, without it being immediately tied to eros. It is sad that men are not allowed to want or need any touch other than a sexual kind.

I think the shape of a woman is very beautiful, and I love how jeans subtly complement that. On men, who have less curves, I tend to think that jeans especially should be fitted well. I liked growing up in the midwest, but I will be ok if I never see another pair of baggy jeans on a man. There especially, you can’t have a man in tighter jeans because he will immediately be thought of as gay or getting there. I have men friends who prioritize a great fit in their jeans, and they’re straight. I appreciate it when men have the security to do things like that.

One thing that must be prioritized with jeans is a little mystery. Not bagginess, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes jeans are poured on a person like a sort of mold and that is rarely deeply attractive. I used to wear my jeans like that, probably trying to stay in a smaller size, and dang they’re uncomfortable. I suppose modesty could have something to do with that, but to me it’s not immodest, so much as restrictive. Why do the folks claiming to leave oppression put themselves in for another kind of oppression?

My thighs were definitely oppressed, or repressed, or compressed. Perhaps all of the above.

Speaking of modesty. We always hear things like “modesty is about the heart.” I have mixed feelings when people say that because if they were to say that, and someone who was present to the conversation would suddenly strip all their clothes, we would feel differently about it. Maybe modesty has something to do with clothes.

About 3-5 years ago I fell into the line of thinking that modesty is only in the heart because I didn’t understand how holistically we are meant to live: body, soul and spirit. When you have grown up in legalism, or at least degrees of it, it is a breath of fresh air to understand how much it doesn’t matter to God if you show your knees or cleavage. It may matter to your culture, which counts for something, but legalism is good at taking the things of culture and making them the things of God. They have a legitimate place, but they are being abused and used as something from God when in fact, God originally created us in just our birthday suits.

I luxuriated in that for several years, until my understanding developed and I saw that we are part of something bigger than ourselves and might sometimes be careful around our family in God.

The apostle Paul’s passage about eating meat offered to idols is a great example of how to treat the topic of clothing now. Some people are free in their conscience to wear bikinis and speedos, and do so freely (emphasis on free- lol), but some people are not. Around those people these others who wear less must be kind, hoping not to make them stumble. But, to be clear, these are mentioned as the ones with weakness. We do not want them to have this weakness forever, so there must be some growth there along with accountability. Now if you don’t want to see people in bikinis, or don’t want to wear one, don’t. It is an awful lot of visual intimacy with someone’s body, but do consider that for some to show a lot of skin is just as pure as you in your full body swimming gear. If you struggle with lust, that is not a problem that will be cured by any amount of clothes on yourself or other people. Furthermore, you might not get to enjoy the beach, since most people there dress minimally.

So you see, it is the heart from which all other things come. If I lust when a see a great pair of legs then that is exactly the time I need to be asking God what it is in my heart that I think will be satisfied by these thoughts. Lust is nearly always a connection problem or a spiritual issue first. Something we need is diverting into impurity. The original need may be a good one, but it has taken some bends and twists. We will not do any good by assuming we can will ourselves to no longer need the thing we crave. We need to get close to the Bread of Life and godly people before we try to cure ourselves. Confession is valuable here.

I will say a word on abstinence. A friend once said that God gives special grace to people who are not married, and I endorse this statement. This may not be something the married people reading this essay will agree with, but in matters of relating to physical beauty we have a harder struggle than you do. As C.S. Lewis says, a man does not know how hard it is not to sin until he tries not to do that thing. If you can have sex whenever you want, (and I’m aware there are many issues that might surround that in marriage) dealing with thought life is a different thing entirely. If you are turned on by say, a sexy pair of shoulders and you can go home and have sex, then the direction of your thoughts need only be short term discipline. For people abstaining from sex for moral reasons, it has to be long term discipline on more than one front.

Christians of these modern times have been too used to judge people around them on what they think is objective truth, but is only observation based on their own viewpoints or experience. This is not godly. He who is without sin must cast the first stone. Perhaps it is sin, but you must be very, very careful that your words do not come from a pride that understands nothing of the struggle of someone else’s experience.

Some of the time we simply need to understand what is actually a sin and what is the effect of sinful people wanting to have their own way in what they believe is right.

I have friends who draw their clothing lines differently from me. They are less inhibited, and have done things that shock me. BUT, I own that shock to be my own. They may choose to wear basically nothing, and it will not harm their salvation in God. When Christians draw lines they must be careful not to use fear or their own comfort level as their baseline. If a friend of mine, married, wanted to sleep with someone not their spouse I would be able to say decisively they should not. It doesn't matter if it was my experience or not, it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if I’m afraid of what will happen to their existing marriage. It is plainly, wrong, no matter the consequences. The thing itself is wrong.

But if this same friend wanted to go to a conservative church wearing a hot pink, body con dress that would make people uncomfortable, I would likely shut my mouth. Relationally, that could be a problem and certainly if you are doing things just to shock people you may not be building the body of Christ. The argument there could be drawn for the sake of relationship, but our first objective is not to make people look good or comfortable, but to lead them to Jesus. Mess up that order and you see why many, many ex-church-goers are messed up. Some personalities may challenge the hypocrisy that exists in churches over this disordering.

A story I heard a few years back has stuck to me. It was from a woman who was influential on my understanding of modesty when I was a teen, and she is still around. She is wise and lovely. She tells the story one time of a girl in their church who started coming while going through a rebellious phase. She wore crazy things and did crazy things to her skin and hair, but no one there mentioned her clothes. They talked to her of Jesus, and built the relationship. Once the girl had met Jesus she made some decisions on her own to dress more aesthetically pleasing, without external guidance. I loved that story. Lead people to meet Jesus, and then if there are changes that could be made, that spirit of life is a good start for a guideline, not human standards. Eventually humans may figure into the story, but they should be secondary. I want to always be second place to Jesus, even if what someone is doing is not my favorite, or even what I believe should be done.

In 10 years of wearing pants now, I have discovered that it is useless to strike back against shame using clothes. Either the loss of them, or the donning of them. You can go around getting naked with anyone you want, and the shame still carries with you. Conversely, you can cover from top to bottom and stay a virgin and the shame persists. Sometimes it gets worse in either extreme. Clothing has not been quite the protection that we think it will be: neither taking it off or putting it on. At the end of the day we can be skinny and ashamed, and we can be fat and ashamed. We can be naked and ashamed or have animal skins and be ashamed. We can rage and howl at the world for giving us terrible messages about who we are and still feel those involuntary gasps of shame clutch at us, even when we think we’ve overcome. We think of gaining or losing weight, with fear. Buying a different size of jean is a big deal. We wonder if we are attractive.

So often we live as if we were made to fit the jeans. Like they are some kind of standard, or something. What I am challenging today is not how our jeans fit, or even if we decide that jeans are ok to wear, it is to challenge the presupposition that we are taking our marching orders from clothes, of all things. If I need an extra half yard of fabric in my jeans to reach the whole way around my legs, then good gracious, an extra half yard it is. These things are made for me, and not me for them. We must get our priorities straight, ladies and gents. You are more important than a size arbitrarily decided by someone who never eats burgers, or by someone who is overcompensating for what they perceive their manhood to be in largeness.

Gasp.

Breath of life, come breathe in me.

Breakup jeans, do you know that’s a thing? I bought new clothes trying to regain confidence. I could’ve saved the money and waited until my health went to pots, and I had to buy a whole new wardrobe with different sizes anyway. New things made me feel better though, because I felt like I had been tossed in the trash, and wanted things that weren’t worn out and shabby, since I felt so un-new.

My counsellor asked me one day if I thought maybe there was a possibility that my ex had hurt something inside me that had already been hurt before. I didn’t like that. I wanted his actions to carry the full weight. Because I am a bull doggish kind of person about things like this though, I grabbed the idea by the horns and considered it as fully as I could. It was here that I found healing. I had always been insecure, always looking to something outside of me to make me feel like a person. Then, the very person I expected to value me, didn’t. It was a severe blow to go from trusting and loving someone to being a nothing to them.

But I have learned a thing or two about negative experiences since that time. I could either consider that he had not treated me well and let that drive who I am, or I could say, “what a gift to be shown exactly where to find my insecure, broken spot.”

I saw that my ex had not thrown me in the trash first. I had. It didn’t reduce the weight of how he chose to go about breaking up with me, which wasn’t good, but had I been secure in myself I would never have believed the reinforcements the devil sent in to back up the lies I already believed. Him breaking up with me was not a nice experience, but at the same time, I might’ve gone on not understanding my value and honor a lot longer. I believe the same dynamic is happening in other ways when we leave a culture and start making external changes. We still have the same lies, but instead of understanding that these things are symptoms of a heart break somewhere else, we back them up with nice jeans instead of cape dresses. Rooting out lies is difficult self-work and while I’m not denying that a well-fitting pair of jeans is a comfort, at the end of the day we still have to reckon up where we feel broken and ask God for some help. Christians have the leg up on soul work, by far. We have the creator who made us, there with the original and new plans. We’re never going back to what we were, but we are going to be new and I find that even more comforting than good jeans.

The next time you or I stumble into an insecurity, or even a deep hurt, we should take a breath and hold up a mirror. What can this thing tell us about our hearts and minds? Insecurities are no longer my sworn enemies, though sometimes they feel like it. They are messengers. Broken or dysfunctional relationships are horribly painful but they can lead us straight to where it hurts.

I think we can spend a lifetime squeezing ourselves into bad standards, or running away from where we came from. The jeans are not my standard, and neither is my ex, and neither are my parents. My standard is that I am valued by God and made in his VERY OWN IMAGE.

If we’re going to take a stand as Christians, it should be on this truth of humans being made in the likeness of God. Imago dei. If any changes are made it should be done with this in mind, because there is not one other standard that can bear a banner of love like this. Cultures will always change, and standards of individual man will change, but the word of our God stands forever. Be humble, for most certainly we will get to heaven and see that we were actually even more imperfect and wrong than we knew.

Wear clothes because you are loved, and made pure, not to be loved and made pure.

Amen.

L.Raine

All photos sourced from Unsplash.