Brainwash be gone. A podcast for women who've left a high control, high demand religion. In every episode, we deconstruct one specific rule you were taught so you can let go of the harmful conditioning and live an amazing life on your own terms. Today we'll be talking about.

Don't dress like a whore.

High control religions tend to spend an absolutely wild amount of time policing the physical appearance and personal grooming habits of their female membership. After all, apparently nothing could bring the downfall of civilization as we know it faster than the glimpse of a woman's shoulder or some sparkly earrings or some colored nail polish.

Heaven forbid, we have a little fun here on Earth. My goodness. This episode addresses the body shame and social harm that comes from oppressive constraints on how women dress, and hopefully it will leave you feeling lighter and freer to delight in your body and accept your freedom to dress exactly how you choose in any given moment.

The specific rules of what you were allowed to show and what you were allowed to wear and how you were allowed to decorate yourself may have varied in your particular high control group, but a lot of the underlying rationale was the same. Modesty is a spiritual virtue.

immodest clothing distracts men from God, causes them to sin, and women are responsible for preventing that sin from happening by covering their bodies.

Then there's the idea of. Protection for women. Alleged protection for women. A lot of the restrictive dress codes are presented as helping women avoid harassment, judgment, or even assault or rape. If they dress conservatively, hey, it's only for our own good that they're trying to cover us up.

And then there's the purity culture angle where clothing becomes an extension of the idea that a woman's body is inherently dangerous or attempting. And modest stress is the only way to maintain spiritual purity. Basically cutting yourself off from your own body that you inhabit.

Sometimes there's sort of a group pressure in terms of being a good role model. You know, you have to set a good example for younger members of the group or outsiders by dressing in a way that supposedly shows your moral superiority.

And then of course there's the whole vanity angle where if you want to look attractive or look nice or dress in a way that feels good to you, it's probably coming from pride or vanity or some other sinful root,

And of course I'm saying that sarcastically, but what are the possible other unstated reasons that a high control group. Would impose this rule or be so obsessed with enforcing it, why aren't they allowing women to just decide what they wanna wear when they wanna wear it, and how they want to present themselves to the world?

Unstated motives include having control over women's bodies because regulating your clothing is one of the easiest ways to just maintain. Broad behavioral control and to reinforce the whole authority system within the religion. It preserves patriarchal power because it makes women responsible for men's thoughts and men's behavior, and the group keeps male leadership unchallenged and unaccountable for problems within the group.

It causes social conformity because. Essentially there's sort of a uniform for the group. Everyone has to wear skirts or cover their shoulders or cover their heads or whatever your particular group uniform was. It minimizes the individuality of the members and strengthens the group Identity reduces descent, marks you as a member who is essentially owned by this group.

And there's just a general fear of healthy human sexuality where. That needs to be repressed and we're all gonna pretend that this doesn't exist and that by wearing clothing, this can erase our biological basis of urges towards each other, which continues our species. It's absurd.

That does not take it away, and it's unrealistic to not deal with. The biological urges we have towards each other in a direct way,

but realistically, groups like this like to avoid complexity and nuance, it's so much easier for leaders to just set a very simple, absolute rule about something, especially in terms of dress, rather than to try to teach nuanced concepts about healthy sexuality, consent boundaries, and personal autonomy.

It's more complex, but it's complex to be a human, and it's not realistic to avoid that.

So what kinds of impacts do we see on women and families and society that are caused by these strict dress codes? There is a ton of shame and body dysmorphia. As women, we may internalize the belief that our bodies are inherently dangerous or undesirable or bad and must be covered up.

It can cause hyper vigilance. When you are used to constantly monitoring your own outfit and feeling anxiety about any potential problems with the way you present yourself and how it's judged by the group, it can help you. Start feeling disconnected from your own body.

There's also a tie to sexual repression or confusion because if your sexuality has always been framed as a threat to other people and to society, how much are you gonna struggle with being intimate,

even if it's within the context of a marriage where the group would permit it, or outside of a religious context, overall, it can be really hard when you have had your first ideas about your body and your sexuality set as it's dangerous. You have to cover it up. Don't terrorize the community with your basic essence.

This causes a lot of victim blaming as well. Women may blame themselves for unwanted attention, for harassment, for assault because they were taught that they caused it,

and because victims are blamed, communities don't take the steps needed to actually protect people from the real causes of those sorts of atrocities rather than looking at the actual root causes and solutions for that type of interpersonal violence.

Having your manner of dress restricted also stunts your self-expression. Clothing is a form of identity exploration and restricting it limits development. It limits personal confidence. It stops the process of individuation, which is a concept from psychology describing how ideally every person would go through a lifelong process where they become unique whole, the different parts of themselves are integrated.

They're living as their authentic self, and developing enough self-awareness and finding a healthy balance between your inner world, your outer world. And that's a necessary thing for mature adulthood. So artificially stopping the process of individuation from occurring. Keeps people who are in adult bodies in an unnaturally childlike state, rather than allowing them to develop normally into fully emotionally mature adults.

The good news is that even if you experienced this stunting, I certainly resonate with that a ton and feel that I was significantly stunted by some of the experiences involving dress and other things that prevented individuation. It's not too late. You can have a delay and decide to pick up later with that development and you can do your teenager years or your young adult years much later into your adulthood so that you can still go through those developmental stages.

So don't be discouraged. It just is what it is, right? We're all part of this weird club, but you know, we're getting out of this and we are growing and changing and becoming who we wanna be, and it's really wonderful.

I'm constantly experiencing so much joy in this community of people who've escaped a very high control situation and now realize that they have freedom, because so much becomes possible when you experience that freedom,

but back to impact on society. There is a reinforcement of rape culture, meaning that they're suggesting that the clothing someone wears determines whether the person deserves respect, and it perpetuates really harmful myths about consent. That's not how it works. Policing women's clothing instead of holding men accountable, or anyone who does anything harmful to another person accountable, it becomes culturally accepted, and that's terrible.

It also causes an erosion of personal autonomy because dress code rules teach obedience to external authority rather than fostering critical thinking inside of each individual person, it discourages a culture that allows for broad personal choice and how people live their lives, and it discourages having respect for the personal autonomy and choices of other people.

What if we were teaching children not to judge and label people based on how they self-express, but to be aware of their own choices and healthy ways to interact with others

that respects their boundaries too. That would be amazing. And I think a lot of people are teaching children that now and it's a really wonderful shift in the right direction.

So what are the logical fallacies we see here? Victim blaming fallacy Because you're assuming that women's clothing can cause someone else's behavior, which is absolutely not true, and it completely ignores personal responsibility. There's a slippery slope argument because you claim that. Wearing a certain type of clothing, doing a certain thing, inevitably leads to all of these other outcomes that really are not related.

You know, moral decline, danger, all these things. There is some labeling because if you think about it, if your group used terms like, don't dress like a whore, you know, don't dress like a slut. Just these incendiary labels about women. They're not literally concerned that you're going to enter the, sex profession.

They are just using that term because it is triggering it. It's supposed to be a very shameful label that is supposed to make you feel bad and put you in your place rather than make a reason to argument. So the label and the shame trigger is. In place of the actual moral reasoning when, when an argument is made that way.

And then of course there's the classic double standard fallacy, which is that the rules of dress apply often only to women, or especially to women, despite the fact that men also have bodies that could attract attention and that are sexual.

So it really doesn't make a ton of sense.

We also tend to see inconsistencies where a lot of the groups will encourage women to look attractive for their husbands, but at the same time, they're shaming women for showing any skin or for being too attractive, like you have to shoot for this perfect, very narrow window that's almost unachievable where you're attractive, but not too attractive.

It's enough to keep women crazy, just trying to meet that standard.

So for those of us who've left these high demand religions, high control religions or cults, and now we are making our own choices about what kinds of viewpoints we wanna have, how we wanna address ourselves, it's. You know, it's such a challenge to make all of these decisions from scratch, but it's totally doable.

And as always, make your own choices about what all this means to you. But here are some of my thoughts on this topic that have come through years of coming out of that situation and my own individuation process. And also. Relating to other people who came from similar backgrounds and were finding their own authentic selves.

So I think that each person has the right to decide how to inhabit and present their body without moral judgment. Every person deserves bodily autonomy. They are the ones that have the power of their own body from childhood up into adulthood. That's an incredibly important basic first principle. I think consent and responsibility is extremely important as well.

People are responsible for their own actions towards other people. Clothing does not cause behavior and it never excuses inappropriate behavior. It just doesn't. Someone could walk naked in front of you and you still decide what you're gonna do or not do.

If you harm someone or violate someone that's on the person who harms or violates the person,

and it's not about how high buttoned up your shirt was. That's ridiculous. I think context matters a ton. Guess what? Style evolves. Humans are always doing a new thing. Whatever we considered immodest today was normal in other cultures or historical periods, and it's literally a social construct. We can do whatever we wanna do and once we realize that those are artificial frameworks.

It can help us to feel so free. There's no objective reality about how much of your body is good to show or not. Places where people run around naked, comfortably in, in good weather, and places where people wear furs from head to toe, and that's all right. That's just being human. Personally, I want to reject shame.

I wanna remove all dress and body-based shame from my life because. It makes me feel better. It supports healthier relationships with other people, with my own sexuality, my self-worth confidence. I think self-expression is healthy. Clothing is a totally legitimate form of creativity and identity development.

It's not a moral hazard. In fact, dressing in a way that feels fun and expresses our essence is one of the great joys of being in this human body. Why would we cut ourselves off from that?

So here are a couple of questions to reflect on this topic. When you think back to times you were told your clothing was immodest. Whose comfort or expectations were actually being prioritized? How did dress rules affect your relationship with your body and your sense of autonomy?

And if you removed fear and judgment from the equation, how would you choose to dress to express your authentic self?

How will you give yourself choice for your emerging and evolving self-expression through dress and self adornment?

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