Thursday, June 23, 2011

Teaching Chastity

I've actually wished out loud that none of my daughters be drop dead gorgeous. I fear the trouble that comes with being pursued by young men. I want worth to be defined from within for my girls. It's not impossible to teach to beautiful girls it's just harder.

Ryan and I have discussed the fact that the church's teachings of chastity clearly fall short. Teaching that everything sexual is evil and needs to be avoided at all costs not only isn't working but isn't really accurate and leaves some young people confused when they get married and suddenly aren't supposed to see sex as evil. We didn't know what was the right way though. It's such a difficult thing to have to teach to teenagers. There is no church handbook on the subject and so bishops and Young Women's presidents are left guessing.

Today I read a very interesting article on this very subject. It is mostly about teaching Young Women but I think she hit the nail on the head pretty well. Read it here
There are many notable things said in this article but here is one of my favorite quotes
"Some might say it's a shame she was conceived in sin, a shame that Amy failed to keep her personal temple holy. But I believe the shame is not so much what girls like Amy do, but why they do it. And I believe it's a shame we collectively bear, the shame of creating a world where too many women opt to trade sex for power because they don't see any other convincing options. All of humanity suffers every time a woman, young or not, uses her body not to express herself, but to secure a self; not to feel pleasure, but to gratify another's; not to share love, but to barter for it."

4 comments:

Karen said...

As to the beautiful part, just read in a doctor's office, "Happiness has a greater chance of making us beautiful than beauty has of making us happy. Love that thought! You have a while before you have to worry about the chastity part with your own daughters. In today's world, this is a much greater problem than when we were raising our family. You'll do just fine!

ShaunaJorgenson said...

More importantly than being drop dead beautiful, you wish for them to have confidence. Kind of like she was saying in her article about feeling empowered. If girls don't have great self esteem by the time they hit teenage years, they might try to temporarily boost it by seeking it from male attention.

Liz said...

Wow. That was a great article. Kind of eye-opening for me, because I NEVER considered sexual attraction to be a means of power I could wield-- Just never occurred to me, for various reasons I guess. But reading that, I'm SURE so many young women feel that way. And it REALLY makes me want to make sure that my daughters (and sons, of course), feel like they DO have power and control in their own lives, so that they feel less of a need to wield that sort. Thanks for sharing.

Charlotte said...

So late on this (I usually check blogs on my iphone and it's a pain to log in and comment there). When I first began reading your post, I was thinking, "She should read this article..." and then found that you had already found it! Hooray- my sister shared it with me. Now my oldest is about to turn 15 and I'm perplexed as to how to present it to her in such a way that she can really understand. Something I'm spending a lot of late nights thinking about these days.