on my mind

It has lately become a habit of mine that while driving home from class (in Chicago, 3 nights a week...) I think about topics to potentially blog about. So I do have some fun ones in store, people. Let me know you're reading; it makes me feel bad when I don't post.

Topic One: A few weeks ago I was at the mall, and outside a store which I have never entered (mainly out of fear of being attacked by overbearing salespeople) was a small congregation of people--a couple of nice-looking (and by nice-looking, I don't mean that they looked "nice") girls, and a pretty attractive (and pretty cut) guy...without a shirt on.

I was taken aback by this. Mystified. Slightly appalled.

I walked by in a hurry, trying not to look in that direction, but not really being able to help it...kind of like a train wreck.

It threw me for such a loop that I haven't been able to really process what was happening there. Obviously some kind of intense advertising ploy. And although I'm not really one for boycotts, I don't think I will be frequenting aforementioned store.

I think I am beginning to understand why it bothered me so much. It's the sad fact that sex sells. That the word sexy does not mean what it really means anymore--it has evolved into a common adjective that often really doesn't even pertain to sex. It pertains to an illusion, to some elusive standard that has overtaken our culture, the essence of desire, sleekness, seduction, attraction.

We are really living in a sex-saturated culture, and it scares me to think of what it will be like by the time my kids are in their teens. What it will mean for my currently-non-existent daughter to grow up in a culture that feeds off sex and sexual imagery.

I wrote a paper last spring for a medieval class I was taking about the "sex factor" in medieval times and the effect it had on the development of gender roles. In the 12th-14th centuries, sex was a taboo topic. You couldn't, in good conscience, even have sex for any reason other than procreation, and that only on less than one-third of the days out of a given year, due to religious holidays, saints' days, etc. So how did we get from there to here? Somewhere along the way, people realized that it didn't have to be a sinful thing. And I can get on that bandwagon. Sex in the context of marriage--not a sinful thing. Not even when you're not procreating. But THEN, culture continued to perpetuate this notion that sex isn't a big deal. And that's when we run into trouble.

Now that sex isn't a big deal, it shows up everywhere--movies, TV shows, books, ads, commercials, even IN THE MALL. Does this end somewhere? Does it reach a limit and then recede? Or does it continue in the same pattern, leading to looser boundaries and reduced limits?

I recently led a small group of high school girls, watching some of them graduate last spring that had come into my group as freshman. How do you convince teenage girls to hold onto their dignity and their purity in a culture that is telling them to be sexy at all costs? I resorted to telling them to hike up their shirts and wear skirts/shorts that actually covered more than three inches of their legs...but it might not be enough to combat the rising flood of sexiness.

I have to laugh at the irony of me writing this post...as I sit on the couch with my hair up, glasses on, decked out in sweats. The complete opposite of sexy, if you will.

I think I may start carrying around an excess of clothes. Apparently that guy in the mall was in need of a shirt, and I didn't have one to give him. What a sad story.