Home Pastors Articles for Pastors The Modesty Rules: Is a Woman Responsible for a Man’s Lust?

The Modesty Rules: Is a Woman Responsible for a Man’s Lust?

If you’re exhausted by managing other people, let me assure you responsibility to or for everyone else is something you were never meant to hold. If you try to carry it, let alone enforce it, it will cripple you and destroy genuine relationships.

I know this firsthand. Because of a lack of boundaries and the constant pressure of my culture’s Modesty Rules, my relationship with my body has been disjointed at best, my interactions with men were stunted, and my friendships with other women have been filled with jealousy and judgment.

Many of the discussions of The Modesty Rules relate clothing choices to lust, but I think that’s a mistake.

Let me explain: I propose we’ve lost sight of what lust actually is.

In fact, we have confused biological sexual attraction with lust and called it sin. This is one reason why shame is so rampant in Christian circles, why we hide rather than confess our reality, why we try to control rather than offer each other the open love and freedom of Christ: We have made into sin something that is not sin.

God created you to desire another person for affection, intimacy and relationship!

Being physically attracted to someone is not lust.

Wanting to kiss someone is not lust.

Enjoying kissing someone is not lust.

Those desires can be a catalyst for lust, but in themselves, they are morally neutral, God-created, biological and chemical reactions. Your body recognizing sexual compatibility with another person is not inherently evil.

Don’t get me wrong. Lust is serious, and lust is a sin. But lust is about control, not just sex.

Lust dehumanizes a person in your own heart and mind.

It is the ritual taking, obsessing and using someone else for your own benefit rather than valuing that person as an equal image-bearer of God.

Lust is forming people in your own image, for your own purposes, whether for sexual pleasure, emotional security or moral superiority.

In lusting, you are creating a world where every other person exists for your approval or dismissal. Lust reduces the complexity of each individual and their story to something you get to manage.