Google “Karen Myers farm-fresh,” and after results for Florida vegetables, Ohio windmills, and Tennessee acreage, you’ll see the fourth Web hit is a “farm-fresh twenty-two-year-old with braids in her hair.” Excerpts from a Rolling Stone article that once shattered my self-image.
Before the age many people graduate college, I had already landed a dream job as operations director for the largest and oldest Christian radio station in Wichita, Kan.
Pastors and stockbrokers knew me, my congressman personally invited me to his son’s funeral, Chris Tomlin joked about our heights since we’re both short, Josh McDowell said I was the “most informed” interviewer he’d ever had, and the Wal-Mart clerk who sold me the magazine recognized my voice from weather forecasts. But after my shift that day, I took the “Rolling Stone” into my bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror, sat on the toilet, and emptied a box of Kleenex.
It didn’t matter that my cotton blend skirt was cute and trendy. It wasn’t relevant that my brunette braids were pinned back as a Princess Leia crown. All that counted is one journalist who met me one day for one hour wrote that I was “farm-fresh.” She might as well have called me a chubby, mascara less hick garbed in a potato sack and clogs, with Pippi Longstocking pigtails.
One label destroyed my notion of beauty.
Every day, we women struggle with beauty. Am I beautiful? Is beauty really only skin deep or does it have nothing to do with skin? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or is it objective? What is beauty anyway? In a sense, we can relate to Pilate asking Jesus, “What is truth?”
It feels so abstract, so elusive. With such tension, how can a lady look lovely?
Even at Biola some guys “want to see it,” admits Eric Toles, a screenwriting major. “It” meaning “skin.” We live in a sex saturated culture and skin is in.
Other Biola men think commonplace display of skin cheapens a woman’s beauty. They argue that beauty should be distinctively expressed at distinctive occasions. Daniel Tavizon, a junior English major, says, “If you’re going to class, dress beautifully appropriate for class, not beautifully for the beach or beautifully for prom.”
The student handbook prohibits “halter tops, miniskirts, strapless [sic], bikinis and visible undergarments,” yet how many times a day do I see a pair of legs walking into the cafeteria or a bosom about to spill onto a desk?
“I think that guys will often complain about how a girl dresses,” acknowledges John Semione, a senior double majoring in biblical studies and humanities. “But I don’t think we understand the plight of our Christian sisters.”
He pauses. “When we do see a modestly dressed girl, we don’t realize the level of sacrifice she’s making.”
Sacrifice. Beauty. It’s a relation I hadn’t considered before. I asked some of my girlfriends what they think.
“Sure,” says Annalyssa Lee, a philosophy major. “You’ve committed to being part of the Biola community, so it’s not ‘What can I get away with?’ but ‘How can I love my brothers best?’”
Lee explains that just as every Biola girl signs a contract to relinquish her rights to dance or drink or smoke for a specific time, she also relinquishes her right to choose immodest clothing.
It’s a matter of community respect, of Christian sacrifice.
And for practical, tactical theology? “Read “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity” by Lauren F. Winner,” suggests AmyBeth Lindvall, a music major from Seattle. “It’s not like stupid dating books. It reworks old-fashioned ideas of modesty, chastity and community.”
Could be that real beauty is farm-fresh after all.
Dialogue with me! Is modesty really a form of sacrifice or is it natural self-respect? Is appropriation of beauty necessary to maintain human dignity? Is chastity just a biblical command or does it liberate you to explore femininity while you’re single?
