(RNS) — Let’s start with the good news: A sleeveless garment top is coming for women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It has already been rolled out in hotter climates around the world and is expected to come to the United States by the end of the calendar year. That hasn’t stopped various American influencers from smuggling in the redesigned garment — previously short-sleeve style — to model for their viewers and followers, stoking even more enthusiasm for the garment glow-up.
Temple garments are considered sacred underclothing that adult Latter-day Saints wear. Those who have been endowed in the temple commit to wearing them for the rest of their lives, consisting of the aforementioned shirts and knee-length shorts.
The bad news is, the long-sought after appropriate sleeveless garment is, ironically, also causing a lot of pain for some women. In the last few months, I’ve seen women from all across the LDS spectrum expressing their feelings about the garment change, ranging from ambivalent resignation to all-out rage. The reason? It came too late for them.
Many of these women were explicitly taught their bare shoulders were sexual objects that could drive righteous young men to lustful thoughts, or worse. They learned that how women dressed could lead men astray, because no one could expect men to be able to control their sexual impulses if presented with objects of temptation in front of them.
Some pre-2025 temple garments for LDS females. (Video screenshot)
The phrase “porn shoulders” became shorthand for this way of potentially thinking about women in a pornographic light just by the way they dressed. Elder Dallin Oaks contributed to this notion when he said in 2005, “And young women, please understand that if you dress immodestly, you are magnifying this problem by becoming pornography to some of the men who see you.”
Two things have been interesting to observe in the months since the garment redesign was announced. First, many women are talking about how painful it was to never be allowed to wear sleeveless clothing, especially when they were younger. The church taught them they were making a holy sacrifice, that covering their shoulders was what the Lord expected them to do to remain untainted by the world. So they covered up for their proms, weddings and every occasion in between, often while experiencing great frustration about how hard it was to find attractive clothes that met the church’s standards.
Second, many people are now gaslighting these women, saying they’re exaggerating or even fabricating how the church’s rampant modesty culture affected them. To that point, there’s data.
I’ve written before about a study that tracked all of the church’s guidance on modest dress from 1971 to 2014. Every reference to modesty, whether directed at males or females, in the Ensign (the church’s magazine for adults), the New Era (for teens) and the Friend (for children) was recorded and coded.
Teen girls were six times as likely to hear modesty advice in LDS church magazines as teen boys in the early 2000s. (Source: Zelophehad’s Daughters)
From the chart you can see that modesty instructions for teen girls (solid blue line) started going nuts in the early 21st century. There are also spikes for guidelines for adult women in the Ensign (solid red line) and younger girls in the Friend (solid orange line).
At the bottom, you can see the guidance tracked for men and boys, which through the 1980s and 1990s was at least in the same ballpark as guidance given to women and girls. But the church began aggressively clamping down on modesty for teenage girls in particular, so much so that girls 20 years ago were hearing about it six times as often as boys, the data shows.
What the church magazines modeled was taken up with gusto at the local ward level. Some years ago, I came across an advertisement for a “Mormon prom” that contained clear and unambiguous dress standards. For boys, a button-down shirt and tie were required, and low-riding pants were regarded as objectionable. For girls: no bare shoulders, naked upper arms, visible cleavage, visible bra straps, sheer fabrics, low necklines, low backlines, bare midriffs, tight or revealing clothing, or hems more than three fingers above the knee. And as a preventive measure, girls were required to text a photo of their dress beforehand to obtain approval from a leader in the Young Women program.
The boys’ guidelines took up a single line of space, while the girls’ rules comprised the bulk of the poster. And just in case there was any ambiguity, there were promises of public disgrace for any girls who disobeyed: “We will have lovely cardigans and maxi skirts for those who show up without meeting these guidelines.”
Recalling all this, the first compassionate thing we can do now is to stop pretending these women didn’t live through an intense period of ecclesiastical focus on their bodies — a focus that left many feeling ashamed and prompted some to leave the church.
The church wasn’t always this fixated on policing women’s bodies, including shoulders. Exhibit A is the photo at the top of this page of Brigham Young University’s Homecoming queen from 1964, before the shoulder wars began in earnest.
With the garment changes and the recent overhaul of the church’s “For the Strength of Youth” pamphlet targeted toward young people — which now avoids specific clothing “don’t” lists in favor of teaching youth to honor their bodies as temples — we’re in a brave new/old world. Some Latter-day Saint women will enjoy the refreshed tank top garments — and stay cool when it’s 95 degrees outside. But others are grieving that they never got to enjoy the sun on their shoulders before. One woman lamented that she used to have beautiful arms, but now in her middle age, she has saggy “Relief Society arms” and won’t feel comfortable wearing sleeveless tops — even now that the church has suddenly done a 180-degree turn and indicated that women’s shoulders are fine. I feel you, sister.
Poignantly, I’ve also seen women hold “do-over proms” where they got to wear the dresses they were forbidden to back in the day. Sleeveless, backless, strapless: all are on the table as they seek to reclaim this lost part of their youth. I’ve even seen one woman who has now left the church redo her wedding so she can wear the bridal gown she wanted to.
Extreme reactions? Maybe. But the church’s modesty rhetoric when these women were growing up was extreme, so their actions make an odd kind of sense.
I’m glad the church is going to offer sleeveless garments, and I’m hopeful the days of shaming girls and women for violating the church’s shifting standards of modest dress are over. But how hard would it be to admit it went seriously overboard in policing women’s bodies and is now trying to make amends? How hard would it be to confess that the church sometimes listens to women, and then changes its policies because of what women say?
