Triumph Despite Trampish Tragedy
Breaking Free, the blog of Covenant Eyes, posted on the subject of how parents are paying good money for fashion that makes their daughters look like tramps. CNN.com commentator LZ Granderson wrote about it in this opinion piece .
The he posted a video response to the readers who commented on his column.
Granderson makes a really good point when he stresses that you can’t ultimately blame entertainers and businesses that profit by pushing sexuality on young girls; the real place to lower the boom is on the parents who control where and how their money is spent. Moreover, there is the problem of parents who have no backbone and are unwilling to say “no” to their daughters when they want to dress provocatively in the first place.
The corollary for men dealing with pornography, lust and masturbation in our current society is that we cannot lay the blame on our overly sexualized culture either.
Sure, women wear inappropriate attire all the time, especially in the summertime. Yes, even a trip to the grocery store requires that we run the soft-porn gauntlet at the checkout line — all those magazines beckoning us with cleavage and sex advertised. And true also is the fact that the pornification of our times advances mostly undeterred, and has resulted in some of the very things Granderson mentions: Abercrombie’s thong for 10-year-olds and push-up bras for 8-year-olds, and so on.
The fact is, despite all of these challenges, God still calls us to be men of a certain quality. He still expects us not to look at a woman lustfully, or else Jesus would not have told us that doing so constitutes adultery.
As John Eldredge is fond of saying, passivity and masculinity never go together; they are incompatible. What that means in this context is that we cannot, as men, throw up our hands and say: “Well it’s everywhere; i can’t help myself;” which would be the equivalent of parents saying that they cannot say “no” to their daughter’s fashion requests because all the girls today dress that way.
Perhaps the darker reality is that some parents actually like having daughters that look “hot” because it’s a strange variation on how many parents today live vicariously through their children.
Regardless, for men who are called to purity, we need to know how to live and fight in these times when our society is increasingly saturate with sexuality, because we are active and responsible for our choices.
Intentional Warriors 
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