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All I have to say is, good luck to whoever her sons decide to marry-- she is going to be the MIL from hell. And god forbid any of them end up being homosexual! I think that would be too much for this sanctimommy to handle.
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@lindseykaye: + 100
@mrsjyw I guess to me, if you're posting something publicly (in an "open letter' format no less), the point is for others to read it, and respond. It doesn't matter to me whether she is a 'nobody' blogger or not - it's fair/open game in my eyes. If this was a personal letter written to her sons that someone scanned and put online, I'd take issue with that aspect, but it isn't/wasn't.
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It makes me furious, TBH. First of all, I think it was completely inappropriate for her to post this "open letter" rather than, I don't know, just TALKING to parents of specific girls if she's actually concerned about them? But clearly this is about her sons, not the girls. So sexist.
I also think the whole thing comes across as extremely condescending, and it makes me angry that she places the onus on girls for keeping her sons' thoughts pure. That's THEIR SONS' responsibility. It's very close to the blaming-the-victim-mentality for sexual assault. She might as well say, "Keep your clothes on, girls, or there's no telling WHAT boys might do to you for distracting them and leading them astray from the path of righteousness." Please.
Also, if I were a parent of a girl in those boys' class and I read about the whole family looking at kids' instagram photos, as in my daughter's instagram photos, looking for inappropriate things, I would not be happy. Really, how does that work? Do they just sit around the table, mom, dad, husband, kids, perusing photos and saying, "Oops, nope, doesn't look like that girl is wearing a bra. What do you guys think? Here, zoom in a little, does she look braless?" I mean, SERIOUSLY?? Ugh. Sorry, but there are just so many things wrong with this post. Read this if you want a good counterpoint: http://theirondaisywrites.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/fyi-if-youre-a-teenage-boy/
ETA: Just saw @BananaPancakes posted the same rebuttal. Great minds...
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I think that monitoring what your children are exposed to is important; however, I agree that you should be discussing with your kids why certain things are inappropriate etc. Although we don't know that she is doing this, blindly blocking people/sites for one offense doesn't help your child learn why the behavior is unacceptable.
I can understand that she wants her boys to grow up to be decent men, which is commendable, but I believe she puts forth a double standard, esp. with the pictures. No one gender is to blame for the "impure thoughts/actions"--the girls have a choice to post, the boys have a choice to look/react, and we, as the adults, need to help them make good, educated choices in life.
I don't think immediately blocking a girl for one pouty picture is the solution. If we looked back at the ridiculous pictures we may have taken at that age (and our future MILs judged us on them), their sons would not have the strong, intelligent women that populate these boards as wives and partners.
FWIW, if she's trying to teach girls to be careful about what they post, which I think was part of her message, she probably should have taken that into consideration when she wrote her post and selected the original photos. Goes both ways, lady.
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This kind of slut shaming makes me want to lock my daughter in a box to keep her safe from the awful outside world. I want to move to a planet where it doesn't exist.
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I liked the post and I actually thought that she was nice about what she said. I didn't find her tone to be judgmental at all. I'm glad that I read it before I scrolled through the comments on here (like I usually do) because I would've read it with a completely different biase.
I do think men and women are different in the way that they react to the way the opposite sex dresses, etc and I think that's one of her points. She's letting the girls/their parents know...not slut shaming. Being on the beach with everyone in normal beach attire is different than scrolling through your FB feed and seeing a girl posing in her bathroom mirror just wearing a towel...completely different context.
I think that she genuinely cares about the girls that she's referring to in her post and I think she'll be a great MIL someday.
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@MamaMoose: I completely agree- with both of your posts. I thought the rebuttal was kind of ridiculous.
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@hilsy85: +1
It's unfortunate that this post went viral. She's a nobody blogger and she even mentioned it down in the comments. People write stupid shit on their blogs all the time, meant for their immediate family and friends who probably share the same views. i don't have time to linger over narrow-minded views, and I feel sorry for the girls her sons will date.
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@lindseykaye: Beautifully said - I agree completely.
Women like this continually sell men and women short. Instead of warning young gals (and guys) that taking provocative selfsies and posting them online can have real, lasting repercussions (colleges you've applied to finding them, employers, real pervs, etc.) she just is trying to short-term shame them with the old "boys don't like sluts/why buy the cow when the milk is free" line of thinking.
Instead of shaming girls and blocking them upon "first offense", why not spend time talking to your sons about respecting women and not making snap judgments based on how someone dresses. Teaching your sons that there are "good" girls and "bad" girls based on 1 photo they post or how they dress isn't helpful or IMO a healthy way to raise a man who respects *all* women.
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@Running Elley: What if a girl posted beach photos of herself in a bikini, but totally innocent? Wouldn't the cleavage and bare midriff cause tainted thoughts for her purity-striving sons?
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@yoursilverlining: Hear hear. You always say things so much more eloquently than i ever could.
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I think people are reading way too much into this. Slut-shaming- seriously?? Yes this mom seems a bit too helicopter-ish but I respect any parent in 2013 that is monitoring the online activity of their teenagers. If only more of them did we would be much better off. Her basic point is that- fair or unfair- people will judge you by the way you represent yourself online. Is this not something we should be teaching our kids? It's a lovely thought that you could post a selfie in a towel and duckface and no one will make judgments of you but that's not the reality we live in. College admissions people and future employers are monitoring online activity nowadays- you have to be aware of the way you are presenting yourself to people that don't know you.
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@MamaMoose: I also agree. I also think that *slut shaming* has become the new buzzword/buzzphrase having recently surpassed bully/bullying.
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@mrsjyw: the issue I have with the idea of her being a "nobody blogger" and feeling bad for her regarding all the attention is that wouldn't it mean she's not taking her own advice? She's claiming to want to warn girls about what they put out there on the Internet, how other people can see it, how things live on the Internet forever. She does this by writing a blog post to be published on the Internet, and then she tries to say that she's just a small-time blogger who never expected so much attention. But guess what? When you post something in the Internet, it lives there forever and anyone can see it. I think it would be disingenuous and hypocritical for her to complain about the attention she's getting from posting this online.
ETA: Plus, why write this and post it online if you don't want people to see it? If it's for the girls or their parents, talk to them. If its about venting, get a private diary.
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I think it makes sense.
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@MamaMoose: I agree 100%
I get it that we want a society where boys and girls are held to the same standard but the bottom line is, we can be equal but we are not the same. A shirtless man walking around does not have the same effect as a shirtless woman. I know they recently had a march for women to have the right to walk in public bare chested but honestly its not the same thing.
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@Freckles: Thats not what she's talking about though. She's talking about the pictures taken specifically taken to be viewed as sexy. I'd guess that she probably isn't a big bikini advocate but that's not what she was talking about in the blog post in question.
I do think that she's coming from a very specific viewpoint- Christian, conservative, etc. But I also think that's her normal audience. Which means that she's just posting from her worldview on her own blog just like every other blogger out there.
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@Mrsbells: Exactly. It's not the same at all and that doesn't "bring women down." It's just the way that it is.
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@Running Elley: You're right, i know that she was directing her comments at a certain type of girl but i guess her "scantily dressed high school girls" comment got to me. As if wearing revealing clothes is indicative of one's moral compass. I was raised in a very conservative family, and i got in so much crap from my dad when i wore...a tank top. I think it's a bit extreme to call it slut shaming, but i do feel as if she is teaching her sons to judge girls who dress a certain way.
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@dookie32: agree.
Wether or not the mom or her sons judge the girls as immoral or respect them less due to their photos the mom deems the photos inappropriate for her sons' viewing.
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@Freckles: I completely get that. I was raised the same way ("are you suuuure you don't want to wear a sweater with that??") and its definitely not the approach that ill take when raising my daughter!
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@dookie32: I agree.
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In general I agree with her... although I thought the beach pic sort of undermined it all. I don't think it was slut-shaming at all. (Although, if teenage girls are acting slutty, I think a bit of a personal sense of shame is probably not unhealthy.)
Having been a teenage girl, I know what it's like to NOT UNDERSTAND the difference between healthy and unhealthy attention. And I hope to help my daughter and my son to understand that. (I also remember a thing or two about horndog high school boys.)
After the whole Miley Cyrus incident my husband and I had a great talk. He is not a Christian, not religious and not at all conservative, and we both agreed that the Bible's advice on this is correct -- Son, do you see someone whose behavior shows she is about one thing? AVOID HER. (Or daughter, avoid him.) It's just not worth it. It doesn't mean these girls and guys are bad people or whatever, but you don't need to get caught up in their issues.
In short -- I think that's what this mom is trying to do -- help her sons avoid young women whose behavior indicates they don't have the kind of character her sons should be seeking. I think that's a parent's job!
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@mamimami: Ah, I don't think it's a character issue . . . it's more of a lack of perspective/ lack of judgment issue. These are teenage girls, (presumably, as most girls really are naïve to the true brutality of the world as we know it) making decisions that only a teenage girl equipped with limited teenage girl knowledge and (limited) experience can make. While we can try to protect them from a lack of knowledge or understanding, it seems unfair to (1) hold them to standards of judgment to which we would hold an adult, and along that line, (2) to assess their character based on same.
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I think going through the social media feed of teenagers is fine, I would do the same. I hate her message though, it really pisses me off. Those saying that a shirtless man doesn't have the same effect as a girl in a bikini or towel, go watch Ryan Gosling in Crazy Stupid Love in any of his shirtless scenes and then we can discuss it again.
It is one thing to say that teenagers need to think much more carefully about what they post online, it is quite another to write this, "Did you know that once a male sees you in a state of undress, he can’t ever un-see it? You don’t want the Hall boys to only think of you in this sexual way, do you?”
That statement sent me over the edge. Poor precious Hall boys with their minds that are purer than the driven snow being tempted by these selfies. It really is the beginning of a very slippery slope. Had she not included that, I almost would have believed her intentions were good but she betrayed her way of thinking with that line. It is depressing.
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@plantains: "Poor previous Hall boys with their minds that are purer than the driven snow" --- wait till she catches them looking at online porn, then she'll really go nuts! These are teenagers, their minds will be in the gutter, towel selfies or not
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Truthfully I don't see anything wrong with this blog post at all! I actually really like her approach! More power to her for staying active in her children's lives, and not being ignorant to social media.
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@MrsSCB: exactly! Selfies are the least of her problems.
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I think she had a good intention, but man she was preachy and judgy about it!
Edited to add that the rebuttal was written by a liberal Mormon in my town.
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@MrsSCB: Oh, but see, there's NO WAY one of her sons would look at porn. It would obviously be a set-up. Probably something to do with some tempting she-devil who got the best of him.
Hahahaha - this woman. I hate this article for reasons that others have put so much more eloquently than I could have. Good luck to this lady as her sons grow older. She obviously has some serious blinders on.
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It IS slut-shaming. Look it up. The post makes me so angry I almost can't even talk about it. It also makes me sad that women who read it don't notice how disrespectful it is. The issue isn't modesty- modesty is great. The issue is that she places the responsibility of modesty on women, to control men's desires. Modesty is a two-way street, and no woman is responsible for the actions of a man, no matter how she chooses to dress. She needs to teach her sons to look past outward appearances and have respect for ALL women, not protect their little eyes lest they lust after women. And NEWS FLASH, women are visual, sexual creatures, too, but we are expected to act like "good girls." That's completely unrealistic and only perpetuates rape culture in the idea that women have control over how men treat them based on their outward appearance. It's not right, and not ok to keep teaching our boys and men. Boys are also capable of not imagining every situation as sexual- they deserve much more credit than she's giving them. Let's focus on respect instead.
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http://www.renegademothering.com/2013/09/05/fyi-if-youre-a-hall-boy/
This sums it up well for me
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@erinpye: preach it! I don't see how this woman doesn't realize her post is pretty offensive to her sons as well. Plenty of men function just fine and are respectful of women regardless of what they wear.
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@erinpye: have I mentioned I love you? Haha. Seriously, this is exactly what I thought of the article.
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@HLK208: haha I love you back
@MrsSCB: exactly! -
@erinpye: you = my hero! Awesome response.
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@erinpye: Amen.
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I don't think this was written in response to the blog post we're discussing, but it's started popping up in my newsfeed and I think it is just excellent, particularly since this man seems to be coming from the same evangelical background that Mrs. Hall is. http://natepyle.com/seeing-a-woman/
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@erinpye: Yes! This. Thank you.
@Silva: That indeed sums it up nicely. I read the original after she changed the pictures and it really made my blood boil.
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@erinpye: So well said! Thank you!!! I've been avoiding responding to this post but you've stated my feelings exactly!
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