About & Hiring
What started as a blog that would be about my life, and more importantly, a public outlet for my love of writing, has turned into more of a hub for opinion articles. They range form topics on intersectional feminism to space exploration. They may not seem to have a common theme, but they do. They are all about things that I believe, in one way or another, will make the world a better place. I would have never expected the surge in popularity and viewership, but here we are. I will always strive to provide you with well thought out, and well researched topics. The writing will seek to be intelligent and accessible at the same time.
We should work to use the tools at our fingertips to make change. I encourage all of you to not only engage in dialogue here and in other places on the internet, but in the real world. Vote! Volunteer! Do whatever you can to be an active part of your community, and strive to leave a better world behind.
I currently can be found at Blithe & Bonnie, where I am a regular news contributor, and The Mars Generation, where I do occasional public relations work.
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If you are looking for a writer, I am available for freelance work. Fill out the contact form below, and I’ll get back to you.
If you would like to see my resume, or portfolio, head to rebeccaannmoore.squarespace.com.
I’m now taking applications for guest bloggers. If you are interested, please fill out the form below with the title of your article and a brief summary.
Hey Becca, I just read your modest is not hottest post and I would like to point out a few things. Girls dressing modestly actually affects the ways males perceive them. If a girl is wearing skimpy clothing I am more likely to develop immoral thoughts than a girl who is completely covered in clothes. Sure, people can control their thoughts, but to a point. It is harder for a man to keep his mind clean if the women around him are not modest. Again, it is our responsibility to not act upon it, but it sure makes it easier when a woman dresses modestly. Yes, clothing doesn’t affect rapists, too an extent. Because rape is almost always predetermined, but immoral thoughts are not. I would be grateful if you would respond.
Ok, since you asked for a response I’ll say again what I just added to this post in all caps at the bottom. I THINK MODESTY IS GOOD. I am not advocating for immodest dress, as I mentioned in the first paragraph of the article. I also wrote this out of a desire to defend women who dress modest, and are still at the receiving end of degrading remarks. Most of all this was supposed to be a post about not teaching modesty as a scapegoat for mens responsibility. I’m aware that women have an effect on men. Just like men running around shirtless has an effect on women. I thinks it’s good to want other people to be comfortable around you. When I have guys over, I make sure that I go put on a sweater or something if I’m wearing a tank top. I’m just saying that women are all daughters of god who deserve respect. I wouldn’t treat the extremely sexy man at the beach who is all exposed as less of a person, and I would make sure my thoughts didn’t wander, as that is my responsibility. I don’t mean to sound snippy, I just feel like the last string of commenters missed the point of what I was saying.
It’s so overwhelming the complete lack of understanding many of your readers have on this post! How they cannot clearly see you are pointing out that besides women dressing modestly, men also have a role and it deals with their thoughts and actions. Ultimately, it is their responsibility to think and act appropriately. When they meet their maker they are not going to be told “well, because she dressed immodest you are off the hook…” It won’t matter one bit, each of us are judged according to ourselves, no one else. I dress modestly for myself and for my Heavenly Parents, it’s the respectable thing to do. I also think modestly because it’s for my own benefit, and out of respect for my Heavenly Parents and their other children here on this earth. Thank you, so very much, for putting the responsibility of an individual’s thoughts and actions back on them.
I just read your article. Great read.. I totally understand the purpose of what you said. I actually have noticed on some dating websites just how many woman feel the need to dress immorally to get attention and its sad. I feel like men should be held responsible. If you can’t control your thoughts or actions you should look away or remove yourself from the company of the woman. She should not be led to believe that she should have to dress in any certain way to control other people. Although I do have a preference to talk to and associate with women who have the moral fiber to dress modestly and expect respect from all men.. Hope your actions are rewarded with happiness in life and the company of a great man! Good luck.
Hello. I have just enjoyed reading your Modest is Not Hottest post. As an LDS woman who was a victim of Sexual abuse. I agree with a lot of what you have said. I have always enjoyed dressing modestly and always will. When I finally escaped my abuse both the bishop and councilors asked me what I had done or what I was wearing to provoke such actions against me. I was significantly under the age of 10 when it started. The responses of these men were that I must have done something. For a long time I believed that is was my fault that some how I had done something wrong and should be treated without the respect I know now I deserve. No child, youth or adult , male or female should be blamed for any abuse that is inflected on them no matter how they decide to dress. I agree greatly at your statement that it is not a woman’s responsibility for how a man thinks of her. It Is The Man’s. The same go for women. Sorry if I went on a bit of a tangent there. It is late and I wanted some of the commenters to see it from the perspective of a survivor.
My only comment on your Modest is Not Hottest post is the not-so-subtle lack of humility. I apologize for being bold and, perhaps, insensitive…but you want us all to know how hot you are, whether in a sweatshirt, or a tank top, or less.
That, in itself, is immodest – in two different meanings of the word.
I’m glad that you think that modesty involves thinking you are unattractive. And if you had been paying attention, my references to my body were not for the purpose of having everyone revel in the glory that is me, but to point out that even if I dress modestly, I am still at the receiving end of degrading remarks. I’ve had many women with similar body types tell me they appreciate me saying this, as they have had to deal with the same issue.
I will be honest about myself, no more no less. I’m attractive. I have a terrible singing voice. I’m a good writer. I’m not good at learning German. I think you have a false idea of what modesty is, sir. May I direct you to the 14th chapter of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. If you are unfamiliar with the premise of this book, it is a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon in Hell, to his nephew Wormwood. They are suggestions on how to effectively get a man to turn from God. This is the entirety of that chapter.
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of “grace” for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.
I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt – and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.
But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away from self to Him, and to the man’s neighbours. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents – or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love – a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. Your efforts to instil either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy’s side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame. You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient’s consciousness at all costs. The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings – the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair. But always and by all methods the Enemy’s aim will be to get the patient’s mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them. Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased, Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
I think I am in love with you. Would you consider a man who is 5’9″?
You’re confident, sure. And I appreciate your illogical conclusion of what I believe modesty to mean. Just know that there is a fine line between confidence and calling attention to yourself.
The multiple references to your body, in particular your breasts, do not become someone who wants to be modest.
Yes, I am not one of your normal blog followers who will read what you have to say and pander and pat you on the back. And, yes, most of them will come here and subsequently flame on about my comments. But it doesn’t make the multiple gratuitous references to your apparently ample bosom modest.
Mr. Thomson
The multiple references to my “ample bosom” were examples of men treating me in a degrading way, even when I was dressing modest. These are perfectly appropriate references as that is what the article was about. I was not trying to flaunt, but relate how the fact that I am well endowed has men constantly assuming I am not modest, regardless of clothing choice. Any references to my breasts were me quoting men.
When describing myself, I was using words to create an accurate image. That’s called good writing.
Having a body nor accurately describing what I look like, for the purpose of making a point, is not immodest.
I do not make a habit of referencing my figure, especially around men. You read one particular essay in which the subject was pertinent, so there for came up multiple times. From this you decided to assume I was, in fact, immodest.
I’m glad you missed the whole point.
Oh my goodness, thank you!
Not only are you entertaining and succinct–you quote from sadly forgotten literature. 🙂
Mr. Thompson…what can I say. You bring back bad memories from college…BYU no less. Sitting in my office working and taking a moment to sit up straight and stretch my shoulders after hunching over my desk for an hour…only to have my co-worker comment with a condescending sigh, “Yes, yes. You have an impressive chest.” As if the entire purpose of my stretch was to “brag” about my chest. The mote was in his interpretation, not in my actions.
I, too, was subjected to unwanted remarks, obiter dictum, and aspersions on my morals based solely on my…um…abundance of bosom. My dressing modestly had no effect on those who chose to see me in one specific light due to THEIR preoccupation with my endowments. It took me years of distress to finally figure out that the problem was not…me. Kudos to Miss Moore for figuring this out much quicker. 🙂
CDG,
It’s unfortunate that some idiots are prone to that sort of judgment. But that is different than what I read in Ms. Moore’s blog.
Unfortunately, there are far too many “idiots” out there. The amount of women writing in reply to that particular blog to thank her or share experiences shows that this is not an infrequent event.
However, my first response was aimed directly at your comment. I believe you may be misinterpreting her “stretch”, as it were.
I reread Miss Moore’s entry after you replied, but I am hard pressed to find any gratuitous references to her bosom. Each one is connected to a thought or point. Perhaps you could provide a few examples to help me understand your thought process?
Mr. Thompson,
I will submit that until you have grown up in a Mormon community as a full-figured woman you will continue to fundamentally misunderstand the point and value of Ms. Moore’s post for the male and female communities.
I will further alarm your apparently delicate sensibilities on this topic by revealing that I am also a large-bosomed female who grew up on the receiving end of impertinent and insensitive comments about the size of my chest. But such remarks were never an ego boost; I never felt “hot” when guys or girls for that matter commented on the largeness of my bosoms. On the contrary, those repeated occurrences only served to enforce the idea that there was something inherently provocative and, therefore, “wrong” with my body. Something that I had absolutely no control over and that no amount or style of clothing could adequately hide. I don’t expect, sir, that you will be able to empathize with the despair of wearing oversized shirts and sweaters on a daily basis only to receive remarks of “geez, you sure are proud of something”, but I include it here to echo Ms Moore’s comments concerning the detrimental effects on female self-esteem. Moore’s post in part raises appropriate awareness of the (albeit mostly unconscious) notion that body type can, and does, reflect whether one is or is not a “good Mormon”. I can only dress my God-given body type in clothing that covers and fits appropriately; if the outline of my breasts are still visible it is due to the inescapable fact that I AM A WOMAN, and frankly there isn’t much I can or desire to to do completely hide that for the sake of men’s thoughts. Ms. Moore’s post justly calls to attention the plight of the well-endowed female following the guidelines of modest dress with conviction only to be looked down on for an unalterable part of her physical appearance. Moore’s “gratuitous” talk, as you phrased it, of her own breasts are essentially unavoidable in this instance because it is vital to the point of her post in addition to being the basic and most socially acceptable wordage concerning that specific element of female anatomy. But as you, sir, are not (to my knowledge) an individual who falls into the category of women discussed by Moore, I will tell you plainly: admitting to having large breasts in a Mormon community based in modesty is in no way a profession of attractiveness, or “hotness” if you like (in case my point above was unclear). I also add that since her talk of breasts was your “only comment” on the post, I am left to wonder at this time whether you either missed out the first half of the piece, failed to grasp the overall message, or were so distracted by the mere mention of breasts that your mind shifted to thoughts of attractive, full-chested women so as to entirely muddle your overall impression of the post.
To the author, Ms. Moore, I would like to say that I am sincerely grateful for the issues raised in your post, and I look forward to more of your very well-framed and educated rebuttals to critics.
Thank you. Thank you so much. I cannot express to you how much I appreciate this.
Hester Prynne you took the words right out of my mouth in your response to Mr Thompson. Though you worded it much more eloquently than I ever could have. To me, Mr Thompson’s way of thinking is the principle cause of the exact issue Ms Moore wrote about. Whether due to the aforementioned distraction or a failure to see the complete irony in his comments, he reaches out to place blame on her for his undesired thoughts, even tries to label her as immodest, failing to recognize his own problem and his own responsibility for its cause. I truly hope we can change this archaic and damaging way of thinking in our religion as well as without. Thank you Ms Prynne and thank you Ms Moore!
You wrote a great article though I grew up lds and dressed modestly half of my life and I grew away from the church because I don’t believe in some of the teachings. I guess u say that I do dress un modestly for church standards, but they aren’t that reavling one because I don’t got any cleavage because I nursed my daughter and lost alot of what I had and I didn’t have much to start with but it was worth the price. My husband most of the time picks out my clothes in what he enjoys seeing me in. That’s not the point I work in a tire and oil shop. My uniform is modest short sleeve shirt that go to my elbows and pants. I have had two male stalkers that would Always come when I was there and just creep me out and its the stuff they would say and here I was dressed modestly. Then talkin with my male co workers they said ” It is the men one mind taking it in the wrong way” example from one of the guys, you have a mother nursing in public to my male co workers they are doing what is natural and right there is no way the woman is being sexual but yet some guys find it sexual and inappropriate. When in fact if you go to other countries where all the women don’t have tops on so that they can feed their children it is natural. It is just how the men perceive it, some of my co workers have been to nude beaches to the people that are there nothing about it is sexual.
Hey ran into your viral article on facebook. 🙂 Glad to find a new mormon blogging friend. It’s hard to come by sometimes! I hope you’ll stop by my blog too. 🙂
Sounds good!
Ms. Moore, your flow of words, your command of language, your wit and wisdom and fabulous comebacks, your honesty and openness… I am enamored with your writing and look forward to what the future holds for someone with your skill and courage. Kudos and best wshes, -from another writing junkie
Thank you. 🙂 You’re very kind.
I’ve read a few posts on your blog and I like you. In a non-creepy, random blogger reading another random blog sort of way. I think we could be friends. I’ll be reading more. Thank you for writing intelligent and well thought out pieces.
Being a very full chested woman myself I loved your blog post. I have always disliked “Modest is hottest”, as if my mind and soul didn’t factor into my attractiveness at all. When I hear it, because it is such a popular saying in the church and I can’t avoid it, I chose to understand it as a man respecting and honoring the woman’s desire to respect herself and live God’s laws and dedicate herself to living righteously. It has nothing to do with whether or not the woman’s clothes induces graphic inappropriate thoughts, but about supporting her desire to be Christlike.
I chose to dress modestly because it makes me feel comfortable with myself and has nothing to do with how others perceive or view me. It is a personal choice. One thing I have never understood is that being the full figured woman that I am because of the “boyish” clothes I wear and my short hair I frequently get called “Sir”. Once doing baptisms for the dead the older gentleman marking the cards insisted there had been a mistake and he needed boys names not girls. So though my experiences have been strangely the opposite of yours, I found your post no more profound and moving than if they had been the same.
I also read your article on women receiving the priesthood. I was supremely impressed by your eloquent thoughts on the topic. I have struggled in the past to explain to some of my non-member friends why women don’t hold the priesthood. You voiced all the opinions I have been unable to express myself. I plan on sharing it with them in an effort to have them better understand. I look forward to reading more of your posts and I am sure my admiration of you will just grow.