Director of Academic Resources Stephanie O\u2019Brian and senior Caitlyn Denison were heavily involved in planning Harding\u2019s first Sexual Assault Awareness Week in April of 2017 and also helped to create HU Brave, a social media campaign and now campus organization that aims to diminish the stigma surrounding open conversation about sexual assault.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cMen almost get a license to be visual and make judgments about a woman, and it\u2019s like our job to protect them from that,\u201d O\u2019Brian said. \u201cAnd I want to give men more credit than that.\u201d\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n
\u00a0Denison said the rhetoric used when discussing men and women in regards to modesty is often harmful.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cIn my Bible class, we were reading a book that was about men but it was written for women, kind of like a guideline,\u201d Denison said. \u201cMind you, this is an entire class full of women. But there is a chapter in there about the visual rolodex, and it\u2019s about how men can\u2019t help themselves from looking. And they store those images in their minds.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Denison believes telling men they are visual, while telling women they are to be lusted after, cultivates problems that Christians fear: problems that cannot be solved with dress code.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, modesty is less about clothing and more about your personality or your spirit,\u201d Denison said. \u201cI think when we teach women modesty, the first issue there is that we teach women modesty. If you\u2019re going to teach them to dress \u2018appropriately,\u2019 then why aren\u2019t we teaching men? \u2026 I feel like the modesty that is described by today\u2019s Christian families is supposed to be this blanket term for everyone, and that\u2019s not really how it works.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Denison added that playing on gender stereotypes in this way is detrimental to Christian families.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cTeaching women who are about to be wives that you need to always appreciate your husband how he is because he\u2019s just going to look at other women and that\u2019s how it is \u2014 that\u2019s wrong,\u201d Denison said. <\/b><\/p>\n
Senior Ethan McGaughy said that growing up in the church, modesty was something that was taught specifically to girls.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cGuys were taught modesty as in what we should want in a woman,\u201d McGaughy said. \u201cModesty for women was taught with certain length specifications \u2026 On one youth group trip (in high school), someone pointed out to me that my shorts were much shorter than any girls\u2019 on our trip because they were told to follow a modesty rule that no one enforced on me.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
McGaughy said he disagrees with <\/b>the way modesty is often taught.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cI personally think whatever someone wears is their own choice, and it is each person\u2019s duty to decide what clothing gives off certain messages in our culture,\u201d McGaughy said.<\/b><\/p>\n
Denison said she refuses to speak on modesty in such a way that discredits men or shames women. She also spoke of shaming questions that she received after her own rape. According to Denison, these types of questions can be detrimental.<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cI was asked several times like \u2018What were you doing that night?\u2019 or \u2018Were you leading him on?\u2019\u201d Denison said. \u201cFor the record, it was New Year\u2019s, and I was wearing jeans, tall boots, a long black shirt and a green vest, so it wasn\u2019t anything wild or crazy.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n
Denison said she is passionate about modesty because enforcing a dress code does not protect people from harm, nor does telling people they are visually-oriented keep them from harming others.<\/b><\/p>\n
According to the oxford Dictionary, rape culture is defined as a \u201csociety or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.\u201d Denison drew a parallel to modesty culture, which often suggests that a woman must protect a man from sexually sinning because of her body.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cI think this is one of the more dangerous epidemics in our culture,\u201d Denison said. \u201cIt fuels nothing but this assault and rape culture. It\u2019s terrifying how it all connects.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Director of Academic Resources Stephanie O\u2019Brian and senior Caitlyn Denison were heavily involved in planning Harding\u2019s first Sexual Assault Awareness Week in April of 2017 and also helped to create…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14831,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14831"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}