As I’ve been slapping paint around and filling my lungs with dust and anxiety (school room almost done), besides listening to the very funny Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers, I’ve been musing on the ridiculousness of Lena Dunham, and of modern feminism in general. I finally got to see her petulant tuxedo selfie, for the Met Gala, which garment I guess she hoped would allure and seduce, and simultaneously shock and dismay.

What, I asked myself, are the reasons a woman might wear a traditional man’s outfit to a fancy occasion? There might be all kinds. I tried to wrap my mind around some of them. Comfort? Being so settled in oneself that, preferring black shiny trousers and a tie you just went with it? Confusion? You were standing in front of your closet and accidentally took your husband or one night stand’s fancy dress pants and shoved them on and miraculously they fit? Only later you realized, Oh No, I’m out in public and I’m not wearing a dress! Or, more likely, you want everyone at the party to Notice You. And so you do what you think will be shocking.
Except, in the year 2016, a woman wearing trousers isn’t shocking. And for real, there are some sort of very beautiful neck tie, scarf like things that I’ve seen some women wear that have made me commit the sin of envy. But Ms. Dunham wasn’t trying, apparently, to be pretty, except that she was, because when she wasn’t noticed she took grave offense.

Maybe none of this matters, but I’ve been thinking about it because I think Christians tend to be just as confused about these sorts of things as little Miss Lena (as she is always acting like a child, it’s so hard to call her Ms. Dunham). Well, maybe not Just as confused, but close.

I mean, there’s that whole chapter in Ms. Held Evan’s Year of Biblical Womanhood (which I seem to have lost in the move, felicitously) where she bashes her way around the bible, sees the injunction for women to cover their heads, decides not to work her way out of her exegetical paper bag, puts on the scarf and then angrily goes and sits on her roof, all to show that the bible is so stooopid. The whole contrived scenario smacks of Lena’s petulant, childish refusal to deal with reality as it stands.

Men and women are different. And women, for the most part, are physically more delicate. And, would you believe it, many men like to look at women and find women to be physically appealing, not when they wear tuxedos nor also when they put on spandex, but when they look sort of ordinary and maybe even a little bit put together.

Like maybe some man’s wife shaped her eyebrows, and went the middle way between comfort and grace on the shoe, and applied a little product in the hair to make it look less frizzy. She put on something sort of pretty, but not skin tight, but not the ugliest most ‘modest’ thing she could find either. When she sat in her pew, struggling with her toddler, some of the men could see her collar bones. (Actually, you, when you saw her, weren’t thinking about what she was wearing because You, at least, were thinking about Jesus.

This, of course, is very evil. All men should only be attracted to pure womanhood divorced from any material form. Whether in a long denim skirt or a tuxedo, men must take what they can get. Oh wait, that’s too aggressive. They must just be silent and if a woman decides she wants attention, he might give it ever so meekly.

Christian purity culture, which, I confess, I don’t really understand, seems like it falls into the same sort of gnostic confusion. Don’t be bound by the body. So that means, unaccountably, covering it completely up. Because holiness. How is this very different from Lena Dunham expecting a hunky man to like her in the clothes of a man? The body is complicated and appealing. Shouldn’t you think about it, pray about it, try to work with it as it is? Frail, but sometimes glorious?

This is only half a thought. I have some things to say about femininity and self loathing. But I have to go on a horrid walk, because health, Not Vanity. Just kidding, it’s only vanity.