XB!
LIUDMILLA,
I agree with what you've written in regards to modesty of women's dress and its relation to the weak will of a man. No matter how a woman is dressed(possible with the exception of dress for fundamentalist islamic women), there will always be the possibility of a lusty man finding something stimulating about it. Women are not solely responsible for the lust of men.
I happen to know some Hare Krishnas(a branch of hinduism). In the Hare Krishna temples women stand in the back during the service, and the men stand in front. Women almost always have their heads covered. Women are looked at as obstacles who might set men off the spiritual path by many men and are therefore avoided by many of the men(mostly the men living in these temples as their version of a "monk"). Women don't eat with the men at meal time, or sit next to men on car rides.
However, this "strict" adherence to gender segregation for the sake of fostering piety and cutting down on men's lusty impulses is a manifestation of a warped view of women, human sexuality, and a sign of a DEEP problem within the men. If you really get to know some of these men, the way they talk about women and relate to women becomes a kind of fixation for them...and it becomes abundently obvious in a short time that these men are lusty, lusty people! So who, in this case, should change? Should the women be completely hidden from view? Or should the men work on their lust and straighten out their sickness?
Back to Orthodoxy:
We're not talking about girls wearing mini-skirts and low cut spagetti strap tank tops to church here. That's something entirely different. But if a women comes to church modestly dressed wearing a skirt, not too tight of a shirt, etc. what's the problem?
I feel like I'm hearing watered down versions of arguments here that rapists use.
"Well, she was dressed so seductively, she was asking for it". etc.
That's ridiculous. A girl friend of mine was walking down a street in Boston a few years back wearing a hooded sweatshirt(with the hood up mind you and baggy jeans. Still she was hollered at by some construction workers. Who's at fault here?
Let's be reasonable. Let's look for the internal and deeprooted spiritual problems and not focus entirely on the external here.
