IMMODEST BELOVED
Family Legacy Hoochie Shorts
Being cheeky in public is a sign of well-roundedness and nothing more
I was having a comments-section conversation with James Morris, D.Min., after having read his piece on MuddyUm.
His thing, “When it’s Hot Mom Gets Hotter,” struck a nerve.
And I remembered the shorts.
My high school nickname was “short shorts” for a reason. I wore short-shorts at track practice. I found it liberating to flap some cheek as I was sweating my workouts on the rubber. This is to say nothing of the business end of my racing swimsuits at high school meets.
Didn’t the ancient Spartans — men and women — work out naked?
But not everyone approved of my “hands off, eyes on” stance, even in the name of athletics. And that was all it took to earn myself a “reputation.”
My dad once got mad at me when I tried to leave the house in a pair of booty shorts — which, in all fairness, were undies.
“Lindy.” He’d said. Dad brandished his no-bullsh*t tone and glowered.
“Yeah, Dad?”
“ARE THOSE UNDERWEAR?”
“No, Dad!” [Nervous laughter; my friend and I scurry off before he can question us again]
Narrator: They sure as sh*t were.
This pair of butt huggers wasn’t even the long or short of it. I had a pair of button-fly JNCOs that metamorphosed me from an angry Goth tween into a womanlet. I made them into cutoffs, shedding a heavy skin of stovepipe jean. My legs were bare, longer than I’d remembered, and shapely. My athleticism was growing fast.
Suddenly my attitude was loud and clear — I’d sloughed off my childhood and was now a teenager.
I also had a pair of Candie’s. For full effect, you’d have to imagine my mom’s stepmom, Juju, looking me up and down and taking note of my heavy eyeliner and scowl when I visited her in Florida at 14.
“Guess what we used to call those shoes?” She quizzed me on my footwear. I braced myself for a critique and hedged. Never having kissed a boy, I was not familiar with the particulars of old-timey slut shoe trivia. “Candie’s?”
“F*ck-me shoes!” Said Grandma.
Talk about the worst-kept secret!
There is nothing quite like having a septuagenarian call you out on what you’d thought were closely-guarded teenage ideas. But I lived to tell the tale. And another of my three grandmas had a different way of wearing femininity.
Rather than talking at me about suggestive clothing, she took an empathic approach. Grandma used to make stuff for people. When I say “used to,” I mean that she’s nearly 95 now and has delegated the family textiles industrial complex to another Miller.
Thankee Jesus that Grandma Miller didn’t try to crochet me some knock-me-down and do-me-dirty shoes. I would have had to wear them.
Good old Catholic guilt.
Where does the cloak of womanhood fall upon me? Or, more accurately, if female sexuality IS a thing to be worn, where shall I defy it to drape?
As usual, I blame my mother for any confusion over the “real” fabric of womanhood — or how bodies ought to be embellished. Mom parented me with what I call competitive inhibition of sh*tty decisions. (Competitive inhibition is a term borrowed from the biochemistry sphere.)
Example: I desperately wanted to get my navel pierced when I was 13. Then, Mom got her own navel pierced.
Party foul!
Parents of tweens, take note: “Beating them to it” like a rival enzyme to substrate is a surprisingly good strategy.
It all came full circle a month ago. My daughter is fifteen, and a few years back — when she was still young enough to be baffled by short-shorts — I was going through my closet and found my ancient cutoffs.
Guess which shorts have shimmied their way to the center of her summer rotation?
For better or worse I’ve fitted my only daughter — and to some extent, my sons — with ideas on themselves. And I hope my alterations to some of these “decency” norms will hold. To consciously and unconsciously influence our children’s feelings on their bodies, to wrap them again and again in a gauze of feminist resilience, may be as important as swaddling your infant in her first 90 days of life.
Adornment is simply that.
As parent educator Dr. Jane Nelsen [external link] would say, teenaged Easter is making decisions about herself. It’s a mistake to ignore what everyone thinks. But what we think about ourselves as we knit our own bones is most integral. Part of me hopes my daughter’s esteem for herself and her developing body will only lengthen like warm, soft scarves. But whether a woman wears her heart on her sleeves is another matter.
Shaming a person on how much or little her clothing reveals is warped. Hoochified, even. What if I got mad every time I saw this billboard [external link] by the side of I-96 in Michigan? It maaaaade me think of sexxxxx!
While I won’t necessarily race my daughter back to the dressing room to grab those sexy garments for myself, I’m not ashamed of a single part of my body, either. Like the Koegel’s billboard, I’m gonna “serve the curve,” and nobody has to look if they’re scandalized.
Will Easter crochet Granny Squares or shear herself some Daisy Dukes? She gets to choose. Or she can do both — or neither! I won’t rush to judge her, whatever the case may be. Nor will I hesitate to defend a young woman’s agency over her hem, self-image, mind, and soul.
And I hope she’ll see it as a “you” problem if you don’t like it when she shows a little cheek.
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