Modesty: The Forbidden Topic—Regina Doman

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 10, 2026 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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Regina Doman joins the podcast to talk about the currently forbidden topic of modesty—why it is almost impossible to talk about it without women getting angry, the three spiritual-social layers of modesty, why there is a different emphasis for women vs. men when it comes to this virtue, and above all, her very helpful advice for how parents can teach their daughters modesty from a young age.

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Transcript

THOMAS: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Catholic Culture Podcast. I’m Thomas Mirus. This podcast is a production of catholicculture.org. If you’d like to support the show, please go to catholicculture.org/donate. My guest today, Regina Doman, is the author of several novels as well as children’s books and graphic novels. She’s a teacher at the hybrid K-12 school Padre Pio Academy. She blogs at her Substack, The Culture Recovery Journal, and she is a mother of 10. And we are going to be talking about the very, very contentious issue of modesty because Regina wrote on her Substack possibly the best thing that I’ve read on this topic, maybe definitely among the best things I’ve read on this, an essay titled Why We Should Dress Our Little Girls Modestly. But it really touches on a lot of different angles of modesty, much more than just the topic of raising children, although that’s a big part of the framing of it. So I’m really happy to have Regina on the podcast. Welcome.

REGINA DOMAN: Oh my gosh, it’s so great to be here.

THOMAS: Well, I mentioned this being a very contentious issue, and I noticed at a pretty young age, um, I don’t know, sometime in my late teens probably, that you can’t really talk about this issue without people getting really, really angry. Um, uh, specifically women getting really, really angry. And, uh, in the online discourse, whenever someone brings it up, they really get piled on. And what’s interesting, I’ve noticed is that you’d think, you know, an observer hearing me say that might think, well, what did he say? Did he say something mean? Did he say something, you know, puritanical? Did he call out some individual woman and shame her in an uncharitable way? And really the answer is it doesn’t really matter what he did. Any public concern about immodesty expressed by a man is treated with like kind of an equal amount of vitriol from what I’ve observed. So for instance, a man who suggested that it would be a good thing to have separate gyms for the separate sexes so that men wouldn’t have to be, you know, exposed to women in their exercise attire while they’re working out themselves, got just as much pushback as people I’ve seen who were like shaming some individual online in an uncharitable way or whatever. And you know, even priests online, I’m sad to say, will come after people who talk about modesty and sort of put a chilling effect on any kind of discussion of this topic. So I wanted to ask you, because you had an interesting perspective about, you know, why it’s a difficult topic to talk about. I think there’s a bunch of different reasons, but you got into one of them in your article.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of it is, I think, you know, when we’re talking about online discourse in particular, there’s the natural flattening out, you know, that happens when you’re conversing through an abstract medium as opposed to face-to-face. Right. But there’s also the thing about spheres of influence. That’s what kind of comes to mind, that a lot of times I feel like because of the breakdown of our culture, you know, our culture is decaying. We’re kind of like, you know, like Yeats said, you know, the center has rapidly—the falconer is farther and farther away from the center. The center is not holding. Modesty is kind of one of the flags of that, you know, that we lack a common sense of what is appropriate in public. And a lot of times I find that when you’re trying to address that problem in a sphere in which you have very little influence, it’s just ineffective, you know, and pointless and things like that.

So that’s one of the reasons why in my article I’m talking to parents about their children. Because, you know, the sphere in which you have the most influence is when you’re a parent to the child. During the time when the child is under your care, is dependent upon you for everything, that’s when you have the most influence. And you have to kind of be aware of that and exercise it wisely, especially as that child grows into an adult and takes their place in the wider society, which is of course what you’re supposed to do with parenting. Um, so that was one of the reasons why, like, having thought about and discussed and heard discussions on this issue for years, I decided to kind of go with the strongest framing, as you say. Does that make sense?

THOMAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But why is it the case that even among Catholics who should be able to agree at the very least that modesty is a virtue and that we shouldn’t be occasions of sin for others—not that that’s all that modesty is about, but it’s certainly an important component of it—and that there are some standards, even if people might debate over what the standard is, why is it that people, or Catholic women even, will get so angry at even like the raising of a concern about widespread immodesty?

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, I think there’s basically two fundamental reasons. I mean, aside from the fact that when you say Catholic, you mean here comes everybody, you know, because the Catholic Church is very broad. And also that the Catholic Church is, by our Lord’s intent, nested inside this broader paganish society in which we live, in which there are no real standards. Aside from those two things, well, one of the fundamental things I think is—I’m indebted here to Dr. Mary Stanford, who speaks about John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

THOMAS: Right. She’s been on the podcast a couple times.

REGINA DOMAN: Oh my gosh, what a wonderful woman. Yeah. She basically makes the point that for a woman, her body is herself. So if you’re talking about how to dress her body, you are telling her how to adjust her psyche. You’re telling her, like, you’re saying something intensely personal. Like, you’re not addressing a man saying, hey buddy, if we’re gonna paint this, if we’re gonna, you know, be spray painting here, you might want to change out of that dress shirt into a t-shirt that you don’t really care about. And the guy will be like, oh yeah, there’s, you know, we’re doing a job, that makes sense, I’ll change. You say the same thing to a woman in a different context and she’d be like, you’re judging my character, my sense of myself. You’re judging, you know, my ability to choose my own clothing. Like, you see what I mean? Like, she just hears it differently because for her, her body is herself. And, you know, and so that’s one of the reasons why I think women will push back on almost any question that involves dress, whether it involves especially modesty, but even dress in general, you know. And I’ve even seen this in faculty meetings or parish meetings where somebody says, well, why don’t we say that, you know, why doesn’t the father say from the pulpit that the men should wear suits and that the women should wear, you know, church clothing to church, and that we shouldn’t have people coming in t-shirts and shorts? And invariably some woman will say, well, what if all they can afford is the t-shirt and shorts? Won’t we be shaming them? And that brings in the second thing about women, in that we are very empathetic. You know, and a lot of times because, you know, God made us, especially in our mothering instinct, to be an advocate for someone who can’t speak for himself or herself—a young baby—because like we naturally think of others. And so even if a woman herself has a good, you know, from outward appearances, sense of modesty, is always dressed with decorum, she may feel the need if she hears a talk on modesty to stand up on behalf of her sister who’s outside of the church or her friends who have a—or were raised in a different place, or for whoever, you know, because that’s the genius of womanhood there, is to, uh, yeah, to think of others, you know, even more than they think of themselves, and to get angry on behalf of others, which is another, you know—these are all—they don’t make it impossible to discuss modesty, but it does make it very difficult. And this is one of the reasons why I say sometimes a face-to-face conversation is not any more effective or helpful than, you know, a text, a phone call, or an online article, or a talk at the parish. All of those things can be equally, you know, shoved away. They can be equally condemned or equally refused by the average woman because of all these things, if that makes sense.

THOMAS: So, I mean, part of it seems to be a matter of like needing to grow in spiritual maturity so that you can take criticism and not take things overly personally, especially when it’s not even being directed at you personally. People still manage to take it personally. It’s quite remarkable.

REGINA DOMAN: I’m still learning how to take criticism. So, you know, yeah, I have a lot of growth to do in that area. So yeah, talk about spiritual maturity, certainly. And we certainly, you know, you have to, if you’re going to say something, something like, it seems unfair to put expectations on others that you can’t meet yourself. You know, so it might be wise to start out by saying that.

THOMAS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are other aspects of it that are maybe specific to our time. And by that, I don’t mean what you already alluded to, which is like the fact that immodesty is very popular and common in our time. That’s kind of obvious. But the kind of element of feminism or just individualism more generally—like, I don’t want to be told by somebody else how to dress because everybody’s like that today. There’s a very—there’s a lack of any kind of broad standards. And it’s not—again, it’s not just a matter of chastity, but a matter of decorum and professionalism and everything else. But then also specifically, I don’t want to be beholden to a man. Like, I’m not my brother’s keeper. Because one of the things the mean women online say is like, you know, why don’t you cut your own eye out? You know, and like, why don’t you just, you know, like, if this is even a problem for you, then you’re just a hopeless pervert. You need to get your act together. Like, if you’re tempted by women half naked walking around, there’s kind of like a callousness which seems to be a reaction, an angry reaction against the idea that I have to take others into consideration with how I dress. And particularly the idea that a man would—that I’m responsible for, partly responsible for, you know, making it easier or harder for someone else to be virtuous.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, no, there’s certainly a growth in charity that needs to happen there. And it is one of the things I think that is true is that this topic is more easily addressed by parents, by mothers to daughters, by women to women that they have equal standing with. And it is difficult for a man to wade into it. I feel like mothers, mothers of sons—my oldest is a son—are a lot more sensitive to this issue when they see their own sons struggle. And here I want to bring out something that does open up a woman’s heart, and that is that same empathy. So what I have found is that once a woman is in a place where her heart is open to men, you know, where she is able to see them and meet them as brothers in Christ, you know, and whether that’s because she’s married a good Catholic man, whether because she’s in fellowship with men who are, you know, pure and chaste and safe to be around but who nevertheless struggle and who are vulnerable about those struggles—once she’s in a place where she’s no longer self-protecting or protecting her friends, once she’s in that place where they have that kind of fellowship, then I find that woman is somebody who’s open to hearing about how modesty connects with charity. Right. But if a woman is not ready to be charitable towards men, she’s not gonna hear it. You know, I remember writing that. I think, yeah, part of that I will say does fall on the men, okay? Just because, I mean, there is a great problem with unchastity among men.

THOMAS: Yeah.

REGINA DOMAN: And the effect of that, especially through pornography—you know, the widespread shoved-in-your-face pornography—about 5 to 10 years ago, your average 8-year-old child was able to see porn because we didn’t have all the web safe web searches or things like that, and parents were not concerned. And most pornography, because it’s triggered by shame, needs to show some amount of violence towards women, you know. And girls who saw that and who were told in some way, shape, or form by the culture, oh yeah, this is your average man, all men like this sort of thing, that has—for a lot of women, that instilled at a young age a very deep fear of the masculine. And so anytime they meet a man who represents himself as masculine, that fear can be triggered. And so I feel like that’s, you know, the more that men get their act together, the more that men sort of, you know, reject porn, which I think is one of the devastating things in our society, the more that a man can, um, like basically conquer himself in that area and call on other men to that. That is a man who is gaining the sympathy of women and healing them at a very deep place. So, I mean, as much as it’s a pain in the neck to go into a gym and see immodest women, it’s kind of like judgment begins with the household of God, you know, and that begins with the men. You know, the more that men are on board with publicly embracing chastity, publicly renouncing the sin of porn, you know, whether that—and more like basically able to live that out. And yeah, are they gonna be mocked and ridiculed and called whatever? Yeah, sure. That’s, uh, that’s kind of what you signed up for if you decide to be a Catholic, right? There’s—the crucifix is there for a reason, right? You know, so I feel like that—I hate to bang on that, but I think it does need to be said.

THOMAS: No, you’re absolutely right. I think just part of the missing picture for some of the people who want to just throw it all back on men—not in the way that you just did, in a correct way, but—is that they’re missing that part of the man’s duty is precisely to uphold standards in society, like in the public sphere and in their own families. And like, there is a male authority as well. And like, to correct others is also the province of man. And that’s—and a man is going to be far more mocked and attacked for doing that today than he is for just being chaste as a private individual, right? Like, he’s going to be much more mocked and attacked for publicly talking about modesty and chastity than he is going to be for simply like kicking his own porn addiction quietly, so to speak, you know?

REGINA DOMAN: Well, I think the one, my point here is I think that the one leads to the other. Like if he is vulnerable and goes public with the fact of his struggle with unchastity and he, you know, is able to evangelize—I think Matt Fradd is somebody who’s done that quite well—that that’s the necessary building block upon which you can actually have that conversation about modesty and chastity. Right. Like, I’m thinking about, I think it was Steve Bollman, you know, That Man Is You!, who, I’m not sure if this is the original quote, but he said, the first man that I need to protect my daughter from is myself. You know, like, I need to get my own act together. I need to be pure. I need to be protecting my wife. I need to be, you know, saving myself completely for her. I need to get my marriage in order, you know, in order to parent my daughters effectively. Yeah, I know that’s an apostolate that’s done a lot of good. You know, That Man Is You!, of course, what Nathan said to King David about his own sin of unchastity.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: Right, right. So yeah, I mean, you know, in a certain sense, there’s not—we don’t want to put the cart before the horse, so to speak, although the cart is causing a lot of trouble, you know, in this case. Right.

THOMAS: Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, although one thing I’ve noticed is the discourse now is like—an increasingly common rhetorical tactic is the accusation of you have porn brain. Like, if somebody upholds maybe some older standard of modesty, they say, oh, that’s just because you have porn brain and everything is sexual for you. Which, if you stop and think about it—first of all, it’s like slanderous and incredibly uncharitable, but secondly, it makes no sense if you think about it for just a second because modesty standards were much stricter in the era before widespread pornography. In other words, like the time when seeing an ankle might have been provocative—and I don’t know when that might have been, but that’s like a stereotype kind of thing that people joke about. Yeah. Like if there was such a time, it was obviously in a time period—it wasn’t at a time period when people—the culture was so pornified that people were turned on by everything. It was at a time when the standards were so much stricter, you know, you know what I’m saying? So like, you can’t really blame high modesty standards on porn brain when the standards were much higher before pornography was like an everyday factor of life.

REGINA DOMAN: Well, yeah, and I think that when people say that—I recognize that immediately as a kickback to Freud. You know, Freud was the one who said that sexual repression was the cause of all societal ills, and that, you know, the virtue of self-control was totally trashed and vilified. And basically, you know, people were said to, you know, oh no, no, you’ve got to let it all hang out. And so they would look at the Victorian costume and say, oh, well, that was a fashion that came about through repression. You know, the women were suppressing their sexual urges, the men were suppressing it, and the result was, you know, this secret fire of pornography. Well, first of all, okay, Freud was wrong. He was just wrong. He was wrong about the human person. He was wrong. He did not have a correct anthropology of the human person. He might have gotten right the fact that sex is a very powerful and all-invasive sort of thing, but his attitude towards it was almost completely wrong. And again, there’s the virtue of self-control. So when people say that—I think that they’re not quite thinking as a Catholic, more kind of thinking the way the previous culture, the modern culture, as opposed to the postmodern culture, thought. I mean, Freud’s even been debunked in the secular realm, so I don’t feel the need to kind of go around that. But that’s sort of—I would see that as a kind of holdover from that. You know, the idea that repression leads to mental illness is the idea.

THOMAS: Right. I mean, I think part of the porn brain thing is too, is just like the desire to hit a man where he’s vulnerable. Like, or even if that particular man doesn’t have a problem, that’s just like, it’s this problem with a lot of men and a lot of men who have already overcome this problem. Like, it’s still a way to hit them where they might feel some shame or guilt for past sins. So it’s kind of like, it’s a way of just lashing out without really thinking about the logic of it as well.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, and again, this is not charitable on the part of Catholic women. Catholic women should not be doing that. Now, you know, regular secular women, oh well, what do they know? They don’t know any better, you know, and for them it’s all power. But this is a way in which, as Catholics, if we genuinely want to be in relationship with our fellow Catholics, not just call them names and score points online, if we generally want to be part of the body of Christ and be in relationship with them, we’ve got to withhold from saying such things, even when we’re behind a screen and it feels like we can just lash out.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: So that’s a fault of charity on the part of women. And no, it’s just unfair. You know, it’s just very unfair.

THOMAS: We’ve been talking about—before we get into modesty itself, we’ve been talking about the way in which the discussion of modesty plays out. And I want to stay on that for just a moment more. You mentioned, you know, mothers teaching their daughters of modesty, but in your article you also mentioned like your husband saying things. And I think that’s right, that like some people want to say, well, it should only be women correcting other women, but there clearly is the role of the father as a protector and an educator in this. Obviously, there’s a certain tact involved, but even if sometimes he’s maybe delegating the mother to communicate certain things, it seems right that the father has a role here both in admonishing his wife to be modest and admonishing his daughters to be modest, and of course his sons as well. We’ll get into that, the differences between the sexes on modesty later on.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, and let’s get away from the word admonish because admonish presumes they’ve done something wrong, right? When you’re a parent, you’re at a much more ground-level thing. There usually is no need to admonish, you know. First, you’re forming, and the only time for admonishment is if there’s a failure in formation.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: You know, and that’s something that a lot of times, from being a parent, so many times you teach a child things and you think you’ve formed them correctly, and then you see them, you know, do something completely inappropriate and you’re like, hey, don’t do that. And they’re like, oh, well, I was just doing what you did. I mean, you’re on the phone all the time, Mom. Why? You gave me a smartphone. Why can’t I be on the phone all the time? And then I’m like, oh yeah, that was an error in formation. So at that point, you know, I need to correct myself and then... But I also can say, just for those who are like, oh, well, I missed the parenting boat, I don’t have a good relationship with my parents, I’m a young person, how could I possibly learn this if my parents are not forming me? I will also say that for women, love is the most fundamental draw in their heart. For a man, a man really craves respect. A woman really craves love. St. Paul talks about this. Kind of a good way of putting it is that both human beings need both love and respect. But if they are put into a situation where they are forced to choose, men will tend to choose respect and women will tend to choose love. You know, St. Paul does say, husbands, love your wives. Why? Because that’s what they crave. And then he turns around and says, wives, respect your husbands because that’s what they crave. So I—

THOMAS: Obviously these are modalities of the same thing. It’s not like you can really have respect, true respect, without love or vice versa.

REGINA DOMAN: No, true, true, true. But I’m just kind of saying when you—you can kind of see it in the error, you know, the woman who stays with a man who doesn’t respect her, beats her up, whatever, but he loves her. And so because she feels she is loved, she’ll hold on. And then on the other hand, I guess you have the mafia don who like no one loves him, but they all fear him and he’s happy.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, yeah, right. So yes, obviously modalities, right. Um, but this is just saying that if a man is in a love relationship with a woman and she is loved by him, that does give him an opening to form her in this way. So for example, I think I was well-formed by my parents regarding modesty—1970s standards, whatever. You know, the 1980s was a very modest time, surprisingly, which I don’t know why. It’s weird. But I thought myself modest by 1970s standards. And then I got married. And my husband was kind of like, actually, could you not wear that? You know, and I would have thought that thing was modest. But then he was like, well, no, now that we were in a more intimate relationship, obviously being married, he felt free to kind of, you know, say what he was more comfortable with. And it wasn’t anything huge, but I learned a lot from that. And I learned a lot from that perspective. And I’ve heard from other women who—it was their first boyfriend who was a truly good man that they were able to kind of be like, oh, wow. Yeah, I guess the way I dress does affect guys. And they were able to kind of adjust that. Why? Because they loved the man, you know, and that opened their heart to actually hearing his perspective, even if the man—and I think in the cases where it was the boyfriends, it wasn’t like the man was trying to teach them. All he was doing was sharing his heart. And the woman—the woman’s genius again—was like, I can easily change that. I can easily wear a different blouse. I can easily, you know, wear a different dress. No problem at all. I love you. It’s not a big deal, you know. Mm-hmm. And that’s an amazing thing when you see that. So again, we’re back to spheres of influence, you know. There is a great lack of love in our world, there’s a great lack of love in society. It’s not too surprising that dress is used to be uncharitable.

THOMAS: There’s a lot of things that priests are afraid to talk about, but modesty is something that I’ve essentially never heard preached about in a homily. Um, but it’s obviously something that’s kind of important, whether or not you have a, one of those like St. Peter’s-style dress codes, you know, at the front of the church, which is—I mean, not a terrible idea because those St. Peter’s standards are actually pretty moderate by modern standards. Like, they’re totally—

REGINA DOMAN: What do you mean by St. Peter’s?

THOMAS: Uh, the requirements for dress to enter into St. Peter’s Basilica, or—

REGINA DOMAN: Oh, St. Peter’s Basilica. I thought you were talking about the Bible.

THOMAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

REGINA DOMAN: Sorry.

THOMAS: If you’ve ever seen those, it’s like, you know, it’s definitely more conservative than modern dress standards, but it’s also not like total trad, like jean dress, long jean dress or whatever standards.

REGINA DOMAN: Oh, can I say a word on that? Can I say a word on that? Because that was actually something I had an insight on. This was a result of having arguments with other Catholic women, my friends. And one person said, well, the weird thing is they want you to cover the shoulders. And I was like, yeah, like as opposed to talking about cleavage, talking about skirt length, they’re talking about covering the shoulders. Then one day it hit me. Okay, I basically was kneeling at the Consecration, looking, trying to find our Lord at the front of the church, and I suddenly became aware that most of the women in front of me were wearing backless dresses. Yeah. I actually made an image—I was going to show you—I used AI to try to recreate my perspective there. And I was like, oh, duh. You know, here it is, the most holy part of the Mass where men are trying to concentrate, and our Lord is this tiny little host all the way up there at the front of St. Peter’s. And if they’re having to look through a sea of skin, right, is it possible that they might be distracted? Oh yes, very much. Well, I’ll tell you what, I covered my shoulders after that. And that’s why that standard is there, because it’s like, yeah, when everybody is kneeling down, and most of the time aside from the people that you’re next to, you’re only seeing the backs of people, you don’t really care how low-cut their dresses are or how high their skirts are. You care about their shoulders because that’s what’s visible. Yeah. And I’m like, oh my gosh, that makes sense. And can I do that as a Catholic woman? Yeah, sure, no problem. I can just wear a jacket. I can bring in a shawl. I can do whatever. I can make some fashion statement that covers my shoulders while I’m in church so that people are not distracted at the Consecration. No problem. Easy peasy. No skin off my back. I can do that. Hahaha. So yeah. Yeah, right.

THOMAS: Yeah, I mean, I think even outside of church, what I was saying is like, I think the St. Peter’s Basilica standards are good standards for life in general. They’re not like ultra-conservative, but I do think that it’s just a fact that—I mean, I can tell people as a man, like a naked back or naked shoulders, so to speak, they draw the eye to the flesh, you know. Yes. It’s not like the same level of immediate near occasion of sin that something else might be. But it does kind of draw your eyes away from the face, you know. It’s one of those kind of basic common sense things. And until recently, I think it was fairly understood that there’s something a little bit provocative about bare shoulders, for instance, you know.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, yeah. No, no, it is because it’s a little unusual, you know. And so it draws your attention. I mean, it is one of the reasons why women who are police officers, women who are surgeons, women who are nurses—that’s why they have what we call professional dress that covers that. Why? Because like, if you’re in the middle of eye surgery, you don’t want to be distracted by your fellow surgeons or the nurses or whatever. I mean, it is distracting for women too. It’s just a general human thing. But I think you’re right, there is something a little provocative about it for men. And also, if you’re a surgeon, a woman surgeon, you don’t want to be worrying if you’re distracting the male nurses when you need them to be holding those flaps of skin and those little instruments for you. You don’t want to be a source of distraction for them. So that’s why everybody covers up and everybody understands that. It’s only in this strange free-for-all sphere that people pretend that they are ignorant. You know, that we are disembodied spirits in a machine. What do you call it? Skin Legos or flesh Legos or whatever the term is. Which I mean is not—that’s not the—thank you, the meat robots. Sorry. And that’s not how the human person works. You know, we’re body-soul composites. You know, our body is important. And of course, that’s something that the wider culture pretends to not understand.

THOMAS: Well, one of the interesting things—I think you mentioned this, if not in the article that I mentioned, then in one of your other articles, and I’ll link to all of your articles on dress in the show notes—One of the things you mentioned was the weirdness of modern standards where women, even let’s say for formal dress or even in church or at a wedding, for instance, it’s bizarrely the standard for women to show as much skin as possible. Uh, even like a woman who normally dresses pretty conservatively will show more skin at a wedding or like when she’s getting married. It’s—that’s the weirdest thing to me is like I normally dress very conservatively, but on my wedding day when I’m presenting my, you know, hopefully virginal self at the altar, that’s when I’m gonna wear the low-cut, shoulderless dress, the tube top dress or whatever. I don’t even know the names of the outfits.

REGINA DOMAN: It’s just so pagan. No, it’s just so pagan. And it shows—I think it shows a great disrespect for the Sacrament, you know. I mean, it’s a great disrespect of—it’s very uncharitable to the congregation, you know, for all those reasons. And I think that people—but most of the time brides are just ignorant, you know. I did just go to a wedding where I was amazed to see that all the bridesmaids were wearing beautiful, beautiful white silk coverings over their low-cut dresses for Mass. And I was like, oh, that’s wonderful. And then the bride came down the aisle and she had nothing, you know. And I was like, okay, well, clearly—and I mentioned that, and they said, oh yeah, at this parish they have a rule that the bridesmaids have to cover themselves. And I said, okay, well, I would think that that would go for the bride too, and I think there is a great deal of fear among church ministers. There is a great, reasonable fear of wounding people who haven’t been formed. But I mean, if a pastor has led a couple through premarital instruction and he knows that they’re mature and he knows that they take their faith seriously, I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t say something. Right. You know, I think that’s a great teachable moment, especially if he has a good rapport with the couple. Certainly, I think it’s something that the mother of the bride, the father of the bride should say something.

THOMAS: But why is it the case more generally that we have this weird—in other words, if a man at a formal occasion or on actually on any occasion whatsoever were to wear a sleeveless shirt—and you occasionally see this, but usually only in an athletic context—it would be considered slovenly, whereas women can wear a sleeveless dress and it’s considered formal. There’s just something odd about the cultural standards of it.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah. And let me dial back then. Let me dial back. And I talk about this in the article. And again, I am indebted to another very wise woman, Erica Zepeda, for this, who I believe said, “Oh, well, this is what my mother told us.” And I was like, you have a very wise mother. But basically, to go back to the basics, you know, of the Theology of the Body and what men and women are for. Man was made for work. You know, as soon as he’s made, he’s given a job. You’re gonna till and you’re gonna keep the garden. A man’s body is made for work. And that’s why society recognizes that when men are engaged in work, it’s okay for them to strip down. It’s okay for them to be shirtless, you know, it’s okay for them even to have less clothing than that if it’s like really, really hard work, because a man’s body is made for work. And also, honestly, a lot of times guys are not that great to look at. There’s nothing particularly arousing about the bodies of most men when they’re stripped down, you know. It’s just because—and that’s okay because women don’t really care.

You know, an average woman cares more, despite what you hear on the internet, an average woman will care more about a man’s character and about is he a good protector. You know, is he good at—is he a good worker? Is he a good protector? Will I be safe with him? Those are the things that last and endure. You know, that’s why my one friend called it the “ugly contractor with the hot wife” syndrome or phenomenon. Well, you had these ugly contractors with hot wives. Why? Because she looked at him, she didn’t care what he looked like, and she said, he is going to protect me and he’s going to build everything I could possibly want. You know, so men’s bodies were made for work, and that’s shown especially in our Lord there in the greatest work of all, the work of redemption on the Cross. He’s naked. You know, the loincloth is just for prudence in church, but, you know, he was naked on the Cross. And he was using his body to save us all from sin. So I mean, that’s the anthropology of the human person right there. So now, so that’s one of the reasons why. And so, but when a man wants respect, which is on most formal occasions, he clothes himself, you know. And that’s again, like, what do you call a person who on a formal occasion would not dream of going into a formal occasion without wearing an outfit that went up to their chin, that went down to their toes, went down to their wrists? What do you call that person? A man. Because that’s what men’s formal dress is, you know. It does hide their body because on a formal occasion you’re not working. That’s why.

Whereas the woman—the woman was made in the garden and she was made in relationship and she was made out of the most precious thing, a human rib. So her body is completely different, and it is the most beautiful. It’s the crown of creation. You know, a woman’s body—one of the reasons why modesty, or lack of modesty, is so distracting is because a woman’s body is beautiful. Right. Like, it’s just, you know, and it’s hard to look away from beauty. Okay? So, and also too, in the same way that our salvation changed male nudity, our salvation also changed female clothing because Our Lady, who was part of the redemption, she gave birth to our Lord. She nursed our Lord. And by that, she made those parts of a woman’s body—you know, roughly from her chest down to her knees—that whole area is now sacred. Because that was the tabernacle of our Lord. And that is why Christian women understood that that had to be veiled. That is why you always see Our Lady with—you never see her in a sleeveless garment. You never see her in anything like—you might see her low cut, but you’re gonna see—because there are some medievals where she is nursing the way the medievals did apparently and showing her breasts. Right. You will see that from time to time, but you’ll see mostly it veiled and you’ll never see her showing her legs. Why? Because like, she’s a tabernacle. And so that part is sacred, and that part should normatively be covered by all women.

So when you say, like, well, why are women wearing these scantily clad things in public? Well, I think it’s because our culture actually hates women and exploits them, uses them, does not care about them. You know, if you think of a woman and a man at a formal occasion, the woman is wearing as little clothing as possible, but the man, he’s still completely covered. He’s got his respect where the woman is on display. And I think that’s the exact inverse of the crucifix, where the man is naked and the woman is fully clothed.

THOMAS: That’s pretty interesting. I mean, it’s just striking to me because some women will complain about modesty standards and how burdensome they are on women and stuff, but it seems to me that women, even in like, say, conservative Catholic circles, just get away with showing a lot more in a formal occasion than any man ever would, you know. Like, so it’s just sort of interesting.

REGINA DOMAN: It’s true. I mean, there’s—again, I don’t want to set any standards here, okay, because there is wiggle room in certain things. And also, you know, I’m part of an apostolate, which I mentioned, that teaches about fashion and modesty, and women’s bodies vary a lot, and so one of the reasons why it is difficult, just in the same way that it’s difficult to clothe a man, is that men don’t have curves, they have angles. And so from a sewing and a fashion point of view, you need to measure male clothing in inches because men’s body parts widely vary from the individual man. With women, the proportions between women, they vary. And so sometimes like, I’ve heard this, there’s been some camps that have like, okay, well, your shorts have to be touching your fingertips. But if your daughter has very short arms, she can wear really short shorts. So I mean, there’s such a thing as body types and proportions, and what is beautiful and pleasing on one woman can look totally immodest on another just because of the different proportions. So one of the things that we encourage parents and their daughters and other teenagers—anybody who’s interested in this issue—should really start to learn in a real way about fashion and about beautification, you know.

So we talk about body types, we talk about colors, all the things that women tend to be interested in anyhow. And even if a woman is not naturally interested in them, it’s at least useful so that she knows her body type, knows her colors, knows what she can wear that’s modest, knows what kind of necklines work on her, so then she can just check all the boxes, figure out what to dress, and then forget about it and go on with whatever else she wants to do. You know, but yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s very difficult when it comes to formal wear between setting a standard that makes all women look attractive, you know, and that’s the goal of formal situations. You know, we all enjoy looking at women. We all do. You know, we enjoy it. That’s one of the reasons why I think a great cure for unchastity is restoring gorgeous statues of the Blessed Mother so that men who are struggling with this can just go into a church when they’re struggling and they can just enjoy looking purely and with love at a beautiful woman.

You know, I blame, on some level, I blame all the ugly 1970s art for the current state of things, that we’ve denied that kind of beauty to Catholic men. You know, so I’m always about like, look, it can’t just be about modesty. It’s got to be about beauty because that’s what God created us to be. We are the crown of creation. We have to take up that call. You know, in one of my articles I talked about—I teach high school. One of my students who’s a very driven girl, very ambitious, was like, I just hate dresses. I hate everything. Like, I don’t want—I don’t care. I just want to go and be an Air Force pilot. I just want to do what I want to do. And I was like, well, no, you can’t do that. Like, you were—God made you a woman. You have to learn how to care for yourself and how to make yourself beautiful. That’s part of your call. Sorry. And to her great credit, she did. She is an Air Force pilot and she dresses gorgeously.

THOMAS: Nice.

REGINA DOMAN: So yeah, it’s part of our call. So, I don’t know if that helps at all.

THOMAS: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been—I’ve been sort of going out of order here, but so let’s get to the center of your article here on the different meanings of modesty. You sketch out three different meanings of modesty, so can you talk about those?

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, yeah. And again, this came from the apostolate that I worked with, that we discovered that we needed to differentiate these things. So we kind of came up with these terms, but I think they’re helpful. First, we talk about interior modesty. Okay, interior modesty, that is the virtue of modesty. That’s connected with humility. It is the—it is basically the virtue of not putting yourself forward. Why? Well, we connect it to a woman’s relationship to God the Father. You know, seeing herself as a precious daughter of God, as being loved by God, as being treasured by God, as being made beautiful by God. And this is a message that so many girls are just yearning to hear. You know, they haven’t heard it from their dads. They haven’t heard it from anywhere else. And so they need to discover—like, the first two years of our apostolate, all we did was talk about God the Father. Like, we couldn’t get any further because there was healing that needed to happen in the hearts of those girls because they needed to know that God was their Father and he treasured them and that there was no need for them to kind of draw attention to themselves by walking around half naked, that they could treasure themselves and know that they were precious, you know, in the eyes of God. And that was huge, you know. And so when you see yourself as precious, you don’t have to put yourself forward. You don’t have to be getting attention. You don’t have to be grabbing the spotlight. You don’t have to be Cinderella at the ball. You know, you know that you’re precious. You know, and that can bring about—that’s the fundamental thing that I think women need to understand, that they’re loved. That even if nobody else loves them, they’re loved by God, you know, and that they can draw upon that love to fill up their inner need in a very beautiful way. It’s one of the wonderful things about our Catholic faith. And Saint Thérèse of the Little Flower helped us recover that image of God as a loving Father. It’s one of the reasons why they made her a Doctor of the Church, you know. Because that society of the time kept on thinking of God as distant and cold and judgmental. And human beings were never good enough. And she, through reflecting on her relationship with her own wonderful saintly father, was able to restore that image of God as a loving Father, you know, to the Church and in the modern age. And a wonderful, wonderful thing. So that’s interior modesty. A little complicated, but, you know, that’s the foundation. So that’s kind of like seeing yourself as precious in the eyes of God and deserving of dignity. Okay, that’s where we start.

Second: social modesty. How is your dress and yourself a gift to those that you love? You know, how is dress part of charity? And we actually spend a lot of time talking about how your dress is a gift to other women because our culture runs on competition and our culture really doesn’t believe that women can be friends or sisters or anything like that. You know, lowbrow popular culture is like, you know, the woman who’s gonna get the most love is the one who’s the hottest and gets all the love from the men. And in order to do that, she’s gotta push down all the other girls and be hotter than them. That is just a lie from Satan, you know, designed to isolate women and make them feel estranged from other women. So we talk about how your dress is a gift to other women. You know, um, how holding to a standard of modesty is a way of saying to other girls, I’m not going to compete with you. I’m not gonna try to wear a shorter skirt than you. I’m not going to try to wear a lower-cut dress than you. I’m not going to try to wear more makeup than you. I’m gonna make my dress a gift to you. And that again turns out to be an important building block because it’s in the Church that women should find sisterhood. You know, we can’t be friends with everybody, but we certainly can be brothers and sisters with our fellow parishioners. And yes, on the natural level, you fight with your sisters and brothers, right? So I mean, it shouldn’t surprise us that we fight with our fellow parishioners as well. But just like we apologize and can repair relationships between our natural brothers and sisters, we should be able, learning from that in the family, to do that with our fellow parishioners as well. You know, so getting the girls to kind of work in community with each other, see themselves as part of a community—that’s the first part. And after that, we can talk about the guys, okay? Because I find that if girls rush straight into relationships with men, if they never manage to make friends among other girls and then just rush right into having a boyfriend—you know what’s going to happen? By the time they’re in high school, they’re gonna have a string of broken hearts and a lot of guys that they hate because those guys broke up with them or whatever. They have a lot of wounds from that, and they still don’t have girlfriends. So once you have good solid girlfriends, then you’re in a position to form friendships with men, you know. And it’s actually the right way to do things because honestly, women are just harder to get along with, you know. There’s a reason why previous generations called men dogs and women cats, because cats don’t get along with each other whereas men can run in a—dogs can run in a pack. Guys can get along with other guys if they’re all focused on the same thing. Women have a hard time getting along with each other. Okay? So this is the thing. If as a woman you can learn to get along with other women, you can learn to get along with men. Men are way easier. They’re a lot less complicated. So it’s kind of like I always say: it’s like learning classical music first before you go off and play all those rock music songs that you actually want to learn. So, you know, a good foundation for dating is to form good sisterhood relationships. And then you can go and form friendships with other men, you know, with other boys in high school, in young adulthood, and then eventually, hopefully find marriage if that’s your call. And once you are seeing dress as charity, then you can understand—you’re in a position where you can hear how dress affects men and what’s charitable towards men. Does that make sense? We had to go through a lot of layers there before we got to how it affects men. And I think that that’s how it’s meant to be.

THOMAS: I’d be interested in hearing your take on whether women are naive about how their dress affects men or whether they are—

REGINA DOMAN: Yes, naive.

THOMAS: But on the other hand, it seems like women in the culture clearly know very well that their dress affects men because otherwise they wouldn’t dress a certain way. I mean, there has to be—is there some element of naivety for some women, but also some element of being in denial? Or I only want this kind of man to notice me, but not this kind of man, like a selective provocation of lust kind of thing?

REGINA DOMAN: There’s a lot of stupidity. There’s a lot of stupidity and there’s naivety. That’s probably the best way. I mean, Saint Josemaría Escrivá always says that we should think the best of people. And I think for men especially trying to navigate this world, it’s best to think yeah, these are women who haven’t been formed, who are naive. I mean, as a former teenage girl, I can tell you that male sexuality is terrifying. You know, if girls actually knew what guys were thinking most of the time, they would find it terrifying. And you can tell when they’ve found that knowledge out too young because they are terrified. Those are the girls who are wearing hoodies, who won’t talk to a guy or make eye contact or whatever, who are terrified, right? So I mean, there is a reason why girls were allowed to be protected, naive, sheltered, and then gradually, you know, as they grew, experienced, “Oh, you know, this is how it is for men.” Because yeah, there is something that is rather terrifying about it. I mean, even so, and I think the naivety on the part of men—and I think this is just something that is in the nature of a man—and I don’t think that men think this consciously, but I think they tend to think it until they realize they’re thinking it. Men tend to think that everything a woman does is deliberate. We are far more complicated than that. Okay, an analogous example would be: I remember my husband telling me this story, saying like he went into a new school and this girl came up and talked to him, and he’s like, “Oh wow, she likes me. She actually likes me, clearly, because she came up and talked to me.” And then he watched her turn around and talk to other guys and talk to other people, and he’s like, “Oh wait, she’s just nice. She didn’t single me out. She’s just nice to everyone, and that was why she talked to me. She’s a friendly person.” So I think the analogy is: when guys see a woman who’s dressed immodestly from their point of view, they can tend to think, “Oh, she’s doing this on purpose and she knows what she’s doing.” No, we have a very stupid culture. We have a culture that is dressing little girls in sports bras at the age of 2. I mean, how are they to know any better? I talked about that in the article about how this is what’s in Walmart. Immodest clothing for toddlers is in Walmart. And if a girl grows up dressing that way, and if the parents are dressing her that way—and of course this thing is sort of like the tide that lifts all the boats, so to speak—when a woman dresses her toddler this way, goes to the park, sees how all the other girls are dressed, and be like, “Oh, I don’t want to stand out, I’m going to dress my daughter the way everybody else is dressed.” Or she takes a look around the kindergarten room or the first grade classroom or the seventh grade classroom and is like, “Oh, all the girls are wearing that, I better dress my daughter like that.” So, and then if a girl grows up being dressed that way, you know, a lot of times, yeah. And yeah, I think that that’s true. And, you know, in the interactions that I’ve had with girls—we have a really strong parish community here where I live. But I know as a guy here, I talk to teens all the time. That’s my job. They’ll talk to people on the outside. I remember one of my daughter’s friends came back and said, “Yeah, I was just in the Big Lots with some of my guy friends. And two of the local girls came up and started talking to the guys. And then they started talking to us. And then they said like—and these two girls, they were all talking in a group. And then the girls said, ‘Are you guys Catholic?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we are.’ And they were like, ‘How’d you know?’ And the girls were all like, ‘Am I wearing a scapular? Is my scapular showing?’ That sort of thing. And the girls said offhandedly, ‘Well, you girls are wearing a lot more clothing than girls usually wear.’“ And the girl who related this to me was like, “I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Like, I was not wearing anything like—I wouldn’t have gone to church in my outfit, but I was still wearing more clothing than what these other girls were wearing.” And we just reflected on how sad it was that girls felt that that was the way that women should dress, you know. So I think, yeah, a lot of ignorance, and I think the culpability largely lies on the fashion industry and on the people who are making the decisions about what women should be wearing. And I’m kind of like, as a woman, as a mom, as a culture creator myself, I’m like, why are we still paying attention to these people? Like, they don’t even know what a woman is. So why are we listening to them when they put clothing on the rack for us to pick out and wear?

THOMAS: I want to talk a bit more. You’ve used the word “terrifying” about male sexuality, and certainly I understand what you’re saying with, let’s say, a young woman who’s exposed to pornography at a young age, which too many boys and girls are, unfortunately. But it shouldn’t be. Ideally, parents could explain this to their girls—in other words, give them a sense that they need to be aware of how their dress affects men in a way that isn’t terrifying. I mean, there’s a sense in which there should be a certain, maybe—I mean, there is something impressive and maybe even sublime which involves a certain fear, I suppose, of like masculine strength and intensity, but we don’t want it to be like a pathological fear that makes you thinking that all men are just animals because that’s what I didn’t like to hear in like chastity talks when I was in high school: the speaker giving the impression that, like, yes, men have these thoughts going through their heads. They have a lot of temptations when they are, especially when they’re exposed to occasions of sin constantly in the modern world. But that’s not the same as saying that men are, like, inherently—I know you weren’t saying this, obviously—but that men are inherently kind of bestial and disgusting. So, like, how do you kind of communicate that in a way that’s not traumatic, I guess? This is assuming the girl hasn’t already been traumatized just by the whole—yeah, totally.

REGINA DOMAN: Oh, and by the way, remind me on the third level of modesty. We have to get back to that.

THOMAS: Yeah, we will. No, I’m keeping track.

REGINA DOMAN: Excellent. Yeah, I’m thinking about that because actually I remember that I heard similar things from chastity talks. And I certainly heard that from my own dad. And I’m thinking that it was probably the product of the 1970s sort of education. Because my dad, one of the reasons I know why he gave that talk is because he had fought in the Vietnam War and he had seen men at their very worst. And he had seen the wreckage of what soldiers were doing—the terror that they were inspiring. So when you—I think when you see men at their worst, what the human male is capable of, I think that does kind of affect how you approach this vulnerable little girl that you love so much and want to protect from all the evil that’s out there. And so I think that certainly does affect—like, in the ‘70s, honestly, it was just a very dark time. It really was. There was so much sewage in the culture. It was kind of all coming home right then, the bad parts. The ‘80s I see largely as a reaction to all the darkness that was in there. So I’m not too surprised that when chastity educators approached—and also we can’t forget how promiscuity was just outright encouraged. You know, just sleep with whoever, sleep with tens and twenties, and it doesn’t really matter. It was pushed on every level—like in the pop songs, it was pushed in the movies, you know, including those made for teens. And so I feel like that generation was really focused on the dangers of promiscuity and the fact that there really were a lot of men who were serially abusing girls and were just kind of looking for the next innocent victim. And naivety was definitely going to be something. Also, the culture before in the 1960s had been largely safe for children. And then all of a sudden, turn into the 1970s where you had serial killers, you had pornography being sold and things like that. I don’t fault the chastity educators for wanting to convince their young audience that the world was no longer safe the way it was in the 1950s and ‘60s when those educators were growing up. Does that make sense?

THOMAS: Yeah.

REGINA DOMAN: You know, I mean, I think we got the safety. By this time, if I were a chastity educator, I would be doing it differently now because the culture is different. I think kids are a lot more protected in this way, and now I feel like the job of an educator is to encourage them to take risks, to encourage them to be brave, to encourage them to be more vulnerable and daring. Because like I said, that’s kind of what the need is right now. Does that make sense?

THOMAS: Yeah, that makes sense.

REGINA DOMAN: But certainly, no matter how you do it, you are bound to fail in one direction or another. You know, that’s what I’ve learned in over 11 years of being a high school teacher. Everybody—you can’t help compensating for the way—and sometimes overcompensating or reacting against the way that you were taught. In your rush to correct the errors of your teachers, you as a teacher can overbalance on the other side very easily.

THOMAS: Right. I want to read a quote from Karol Wojtyła, future John Paul II, in his book Love and Responsibility. And this was shared with me online by Dr. Matthew DuBroy some months back, and it’s a really great—it’s a long paragraph, but it’s really great on this point:

“The development of sexual modesty, as we call the constant capacity and readiness to feel shame—[so Wojtyła was using shame in a positive and necessary sense here]—follows one course in girls and women, and another in boys and men. This is connected with something which we have already stressed in the psychological analysis of love: the rather different structure of the psychological forces, and specifically the different relationship between sensuality and emotion in the two sexes. Since sensuality, which is oriented towards the body as an object of enjoyment, is in general stronger and more importunate in men, modesty and shame, the tendency to conceal sexual values specifically connected with the body, must be more pronounced in girls and women. At the same time, they are less aware of sensuality and of its natural orientation in men, because in them emotion is usually stronger than sensuality, and sensuality tends to be latent in emotion. This is why woman is often said to be ‘purer’ than man. This tells us nothing about the virtue of chastity. Woman is purer inasmuch as she experiences more powerfully the value of a human being of the other sex, the value of a sort of psychological masculinity. She is, it is true, greatly influenced by physical masculinity, although the feminine reaction to both forms of masculinity is primarily psychological. But this very trait in her mentality may in a certain sense make modesty more difficult for her, for since a woman does not find in herself the sensuality of which a man as a rule cannot but be aware in himself, she does not feel so great a need to conceal the body as a potential object of enjoyment. The evolution of modesty in a woman requires some initial insight into the male psychology.”

I think this is a great passage because it touches on, first of all, why we emphasize modesty for women more than for men. Clearly, it’s a virtue that both sexes have to have, but in the sexual realm of modesty, I think Wojtyła says it is more pronounced or needs to be more pronounced in girls and women. I think that’s correct. Women and men are just different.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, I think that also too—it reminds me of something that my husband said: that it’s important—and he said this to our sons as well—it’s important that in a relationship, like in a dating relationship, the man should be in charge of like how far they’re going, you know, so to speak, in terms of affection, hugging, things like that. Like that he should look at restraining himself and not put that upon the woman. You know, the woman should not be allowing the man to go as far as he could. He’s like, no, especially in this day and age, you can’t count on a woman to have that, as Carol Wojtyła said, to sense exactly where the line is. It’s a lot harder for women to figure that out. And he says, as a man, it’s important that we be—in the marriage, as men, men are the leaders. They’re the initiators and all that. He said, so it’s important that the man be the leader in exercising restraint in a dating relationship.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: You know, so I think—but again, everything that he said there—everything that Karol Wojtyła said—is so wonderful.

THOMAS: Yeah, I mentioned the resistance today to the idea of “I am my brother’s keeper,” that I have responsibility, that I can be guilty for provoking another person to sin. Um, and I have a specific question because I think one way in which some Catholic women push back against this is the desire not to be scrupulous and neurotic in feeling that you are completely responsible for the behavior of others. So how do you strike that balance in talking about modesty for women where we are partly responsible for how others react to us, but the others are ultimately responsible for their own actions? I mean, it seems to me that this is an aspect of charity and avoiding scandal, just as in any other area of life—that it’s not unique to the modesty discussion, but it’s just especially fraught when we’re talking about the modesty discussion.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, I think that—I remember that again, previous generations of chastity educators—like, I went to Franciscan University of Steubenville, and back in the day they didn’t really give any modesty talks to anybody because they didn’t really have to, honestly. I mean, looking back, the ‘80s was extremely modest. And again, I’m still curious as to why that is, but people have pointed out that in the ‘90s fashion became much more debauched, for want of a better word. I don’t know, it was the Clinton presidency, who knows what was going on. But, and I know that at the smaller Catholic colleges, they frequently did give modesty talks. And I had friends who just said that they were scarred by hearing those talks because it made it sound as though it was all on them and that the men weren’t responsible at all. And in one of these discussions on modesty, I said, “Well, was the talk given to men and women or was it just to women?” And they said it was just to women. I said, “Well, you don’t know what they told the guys. You know, they might have told the guys it was all on them. You were not there to talk to them, you don’t know.” Yeah, probably. And I said, “I would guess that they probably told the guys that they were responsible too. So it’s not like they were just beating up on you as a woman and saying it was all on you. They probably told you separately that you both had to—guys, you’ve got to be chaste; girls, help them be chaste by being modest.” And given that at the smaller Catholic colleges—and this is kind of where the rubber hits the road a bit—because at the smaller Catholic colleges, they were trying to inculcate a community where men and women could learn together, where they weren’t going to segregate the sexes in the classroom. Men and women would be learning together, and in order to do that, they needed to have a standard of modesty because that’s just the way that women are charitable towards men. And I think that basically it did not go well, or that the idea of it being a community was not heard correctly by the freshmen. Who knows? You know, and again, I’m not saying—I only heard from the girls who didn’t like the talk, who are now grown women. I didn’t hear from the girls who thought it was a completely sensible talk, adjusted their dress accordingly, and had a wonderful time.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: All I can say is that my experience is—and I did live in the—when I was growing up, my parents were involved in a covenant community. I had a wonderful experience there. I had a large amount of friends of both sexes in that community. And it was just the standard. And the standard was never communicated to me, but I was like most teenage girls. I looked at what the other girls were wearing and I dressed accordingly. And it was very modest. It was t-shirts, shorts, dresses, jumpers—long dresses and jumpers. But that was kind of the thing that was in in the ‘80s. If you’ve looked at the music videos, the celebrities are all dressed pretty modestly in a lot of the early music videos. And the great outcome of that is that I really made good friends with guys. There wasn’t competition among the girls. We all just kind of hung out together. We ran around in packs and did things, did treasure hunts and capture the flag and all sorts of fun things. And modesty never came up; inappropriate stuff never came up. You know, there were times I think that things needed to be tweaked with different individuals, but aside from that—so for me, the connection was made: reasonable modest dress enables freedom. And that is what I tell people over and over again. I was like, why do you want to have rules and standards? It’s because you want to be free. You know, you want to experience that brotherhood with men and that sisterhood with other women. Like, that is the fruit of the Spirit. You want that. You know, wouldn’t you want to be involved in a vibrant Catholic community where you could trust a wide variety of people of all ages and do things together, do apostolates together, celebrate together, and there were never to be issues? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Don’t you want that? Don’t you want that for your teenagers?

REGINA DOMAN: You know, so sometimes I think people need to see the vision before they can understand why they’re being asked to make the sacrifice.

THOMAS: We’ve been talking about—before we get back to modesty itself—the perception of a double standard by some of those students, and this connects to the sort of bugbear, I’ll call it that, of so-called “purity culture,” which seems to be a worry for a lot of people. You have a take on that, right?

REGINA DOMAN: Okay, and I’m willing to be shot down here because it’s like—I don’t really think it’s a thing in this sense, okay? I mean, I believe that people think they’ve experienced purity culture, but in terms of the way that these people talk about purity culture as being a place where if you are a woman and you put a single toe out of line, you are completely, like, given the Scarlet Letter, whatever. And that this culture was enforced by a bunch of men who sat around in their spare time measuring the hemlines of all the women mentally and making judgments upon them. I don’t see that happening. I’ve been in a lot of really intense Christian and Catholic cultures. I have not heard reports where guys ever sat around and did that, where leaders or priests got around and said, “Okay guys, we wanna keep these women down. We wanna make them know their place. So they’ve all gotta wear these certain length of skirts. They’ve all gotta wear this. Otherwise, we’re gonna all shame them.” It may have happened that way—it might have been that certain women perceived that this conspiracy existed. I personally doubt its existence. Just saying.I don’t think guys have time for things like that.

THOMAS: So we’ve been talking about—yeah, they’re much more busy debating predestination online for that. So, uh, the—one more thing. So we’ve been talking about different meanings of modesty. We started with interior, then social, and everything we’ve been discussing here has been under the realm of social modesty. One more point on that, in your article you had a bit where you said, on the topic of rules: “I believe it’s important as parents to help children draw the connection between loving others and following the rules set up by others in different situations.” Can you say a bit about that with regard to rules?

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, yeah. I mean, nobody likes rules. I mean, I’m an artist and a creative type. I don’t like rules. I’m not a rule follower, as my siblings would always say, but I began to follow rules when I understood what those rules got me. I mean, if you don’t follow the rules of a game, you can’t play the game. If you sit down with a bunch of people who think they’re playing Monopoly and you decide not to play by those rules, you may have a different kind of experience, but one thing that can be said: you’re not playing the game. And whatever benefit was in the game, you’re not going to get it. So, I mean, I think we understand this. Children understand this instinctually. You know, kids will sit around and make rules for a game—like very arbitrary ones, like even Calvinball, where the rules change all the time. But a lot of times in our American culture, we don’t see rules that way. We don’t see rules as enabling us to play the game. We just see rules as a stricture on our freedom. And I think that that’s immature. So basically, it’s like if you want to—going back to the earlier thing about being a surgeon—if you’re gonna be a surgeon, if you’re gonna make that money, you’re gonna get that salary, you’re gonna save those lives, well, you know what? You’re gonna have to dress like a surgeon. You’re gonna have to disinfect your hands like a surgeon. You know, you’re gonna have to follow all these rules that a normal person wouldn’t have to follow because you want to be a surgeon. Mm-hmm. So we accept that when it comes to our professional life because the connection is drawn between dressing in these scrubs and this mask and being a surgeon, which is who you want to be. So a lot of times I think that Catholic parents need to say—yeah, I think that this is kind of what happens: kids come home from high school and they say, “Oh man, we were given the dress code talk today. And girls, we have to wear these different skirts, the skirt’s got to be this length. And I think it’s just stupid.” And the parents just say, “Yeah, that does sound really stupid,” but you know what, you got to do it anyway. And they don’t bother to defend why those rules are given. And so I think that this happens a lot. So this is the hill I will die upon because I believe in co-ed education. We have a rule that the skirt needs to be to the knee or preferably below the knee. And all the girls are like, “Oh, this is so stupid, we’re gonna look like homeschoolers, we’re gonna look like Amish,” or whatever. Well, okay, there’s a really simple reason for that. At our school, we have a science lab. The science lab, you know, you have to sit at benches and you have to kind of sit all packed together. When a girl’s skirt is above her knee and she sits down next to a guy and they’re bending over the dissected rat or whatever, her crotch might be visible. You know, her upper thighs. She may be showing more thigh than she’s comfortable with. When she’s in the middle of dissection, we don’t want her to be thinking about her hemline. We want her to be thinking about dissecting that rat. Okay? That’s the same thing. That’s the same rule with necklines. And honestly, that is something that would be easy for a parent to explain. It is difficult for an educator to explain that in a mixed classroom.

THOMAS: Right, of course.

REGINA DOMAN: Okay? So I’m like, please, parents, exercise your sphere of influence here. Explain to the girls that that’s why the rule exists. It’s not because we want you to look stupid or dumb. It’s because we want you to learn. And we want you to learn side by side with guys and for it not to be a problem where you’re embarrassed or he’s embarrassed or whatever. You know, we want you to have that freedom and we want you to learn together with men because I find one of the reasons I’m so in favor of co-ed education is because I find when we’re discussing something in literature, it is so useful to see the guy’s perspective versus the girl’s perspective. I mean, literature is about helping us to understand ourselves and understand other people. In high school, they’re really trying to understand the opposite sex. The discussions over something like Red Badge of Courage or Jane Eyre are so useful when both men and women are contributing in the same pool. It never gets old seeing the understanding dawn, you know, on the lights of young people. So I will fight for that. And modesty, social modesty, is an important part of that. And I just wish that Catholic educators would not be embarrassed about it.

THOMAS: Okay, so we’ve talked about interior modesty and social modesty. What’s the third sense of modesty?

REGINA DOMAN: Okay, the third sense of modesty is kind of my favorite. It’s cultural modesty, and that is the way of basically considering how you’re dressed—dressing in such a way that people who don’t know anything about you—they just saw you on the street, they saw you in the airport, they saw you in the grocery line—what is your dress communicating to them about what you believe? And that’s kind of where I’m just sort of challenging people. Like, if the first level is God the Father and the second level, social modesty, is about God the Son—being a follower of God the Son and loving others the way he wants us to love them—cultural modesty is about the Holy Spirit. It’s about evangelizing others by the way we dress. Fulton Sheen has very beautiful words spoken to Catholic women about the apostolate of beauty. That’s cultural modesty.

And it makes me very sad that when you see a Hindu woman at the airport, you know that she’s a Hindu. When you see a Muslim woman at the airport, you know that she’s a Muslim. When you see an Amish woman at the airport, you know she’s Amish. When you see a Catholic woman, you sometimes can’t tell what she believes. Now, part of that is us being salt and yeast in the wider culture. Totally. But it would be better if we had a higher standard. I’m not saying that we need to be identifiable as Catholics, but I would like to think that every time I saw a gorgeous, beautifully dressed woman at the airport, I would know that she was a Catholic. Like, I would see—every time I saw a woman that was going the extra mile to make herself look put together and beautiful and just elegant, stylish, whatever. I would like to think that I would know. I’d see her cross or I’d see her Miraculous Medal or I’d see that scapular always poking out and know that she was Catholic. That’s the challenge that I’d like to make, that I feel like we Catholic women, especially those of us who love fashion and beauty, we should set ourselves to creating a better way of dressing. Since the culture has clearly dropped the ball. That’s the challenge. That’s the gauntlet I throw down, the glove I throw down to my fellow Catholic women, that if they are concerned or upset that if there’s rules about modesty everyone’s gonna look like potato sacks or whatever, well, you know what, let’s change this. You know, I don’t know, let’s lobby our local Walmart and say, “Hey, get us better dresses to wear.” Because you know what, they want to sell clothes to us and they don’t really care what they look like. So yeah, you know, we have the ability as Catholic women to organize ourselves and fill our local stores or even our churches with better clothing.

THOMAS: So the cultural aspects of dress and the meanings of different garments and changes in style and the practical aspects of it as well is something you discussed in three different articles on your Substack that I’ll link to as well. But is there anything else more broadly you want to say about that?

REGINA DOMAN: Well, I think the field is open, and I would love to support and get behind anybody who is entering that field. Like, as part of the apostolate, we sometimes put on a fashion show run by members of the apostolate. And I try to regularly put out the word to Catholic designers and say, “Hey, contribute clothing to our fashion show.” Like, I’d like to make this bigger. I’d like to make it nationwide and just kind of put down the challenge for making beautiful outfits and showing them to others. Because dressing well and dressing beautifully does not require a lot of money. Like, I’ve found beautiful—oh Lord, I’ve just had six daughters, so I’ve had a chance to go through this modesty fashion thing a lot. Um, my daughters who just got married found beautiful modest dressing from an individual designer in China that we found on Etsy who did 100% linen dresses with lace, beautifully modest. I think we paid $30 a dress.

And I mean, for my other daughter’s wedding, she decided to go to India, contacted designers over there and got dresses for $20, $30, $50. I think I paid maybe $60 for my mother-of-the-bride dress, and it was gorgeous. So in other parts of the world, other cultures value modesty, and they are willing to make—like, my daughter got her wedding dress from—she built her wedding dress out of a silk dress that she got from a Japanese designer. And she ordered it and it came and it was too small, and she emailed the designer and told her that, and the designer was like, “This is your wedding dress? Oh my gosh, send me all your measurements and I will make a new one exactly the way you want it.” You know, and her dress was gorgeous. And again, under $100. So I mean, there is—when people always say, because whenever I say, “Oh, you should dress more modestly or get better prom dresses,” they’re like, “Oh, but you can’t find anything. It’s so hard and everything’s so expensive.” And I’m like, “Oh, give me a break. Come on, go on Etsy.” There are people there who want to make these things for us and who are willing to go the extra yard for us. So why not take advantage of them?

THOMAS: That’s great. Okay, so let’s get to the topic of your article that I referenced at the beginning on dressing your children. Um, you mentioned modern creepy fashion for little girls—putting them in bikinis and all the weirdness that happens. Uh, and essentially a form of grooming, basically. Um, you know, however, whatever the intent of the designer may be, that’s what it is. And somebody might say, “Isn’t it like weirdly sexualizing children to talk about dressing them modestly?” What’s your—how would you introduce this topic in that respect?

REGINA DOMAN: Well, the general thrust of my article is that—the article is called Why Should We Dress Our Little Girls Modestly?—and the general idea is that the standards of modesty which I said—like covering the shoulders, covering the knees, or going from shoulders to knees—teaching our girls that that’s the normative way to dress is something that you can do from a very young age. You know, you can do it from toddlerhood. You know, just never let your little girl run around naked. I mean, yeah, put her in a swimsuit; let her splash around in the water, give her baths, etc. But when she’s out in public around other people that you don’t know, always make sure she’s covered from her shoulders to her knees, including in church. Because I always see toddlers in flimsy sundresses in church, and I’m just like, oh my gosh, those babies must be freezing because our air conditioner is so cold in the summertime. But you know, just let them think of that as normative. You don’t have to explain why. You’re their parent.

And so if they think that that’s normative and that the only reason why they wear less clothing than that is for a specialized thing like swimming, or going to the doctor, or being a gymnast, or being a ballet dancer—those are specialized tasks. You know, those are fine. You can come up with standards of modesty for that. I mean, I definitely—if my kid was in a ballet and the costumier was like, “Okay, well, she needs to expose her belly button,” I’d be like, “Uh, no. We’re not doing that.” But most of the time those type of specialized things, people are very reasonable. One-piece swimsuits are the norm in most swim teams and things. So, I mean, if a daughter grows up thinking of that as normative, then hopefully modesty will not be an issue. Because she’ll—as you said from Karol Wojtyła—girls do have a natural sense of shame. They do have a natural reluctance, especially as they enter puberty, they want to cover themselves—hence the hoodie and the sweatpants a lot of times. And so then when your girl gets to that tender, vulnerable age of 12, of 13 and 14, then you can give—that’s normally the time when you’ll be giving her “the talk”: the talk on sexuality, her sexuality, men’s sexuality, things like that. For myself, I do it in steps.

My sister and I have this great program that we formed together called Women Wonderfully Made, where we talk about how to give the talk on a woman’s sexuality—a woman’s cycle and things like that. It’s a beautiful, beautiful little course that moms and daughters can take. It’s great bonding. We’ve done it in our parish, things like that. It’s just like a day retreat for girls and their moms. But for the actual talk, we usually go away. I take the individual daughter away and we have this talk about sexuality. I almost always—if you’ve raised the girl that way, when you’re giving her that talk, the next thing you can do is teach her how to paint her nails. You can teach her how—like, that’s the weekend on which my girls get their ears pierced and we go out and we buy them some fun clothes, you know, because now we’re teaching her about beauty and style. We’re not teaching her about, “Oh my gosh, dear, that bikini you wore, you have to stop wearing that. Those miniskirts that I let you wear all that time, we’re throwing those away. We are torching those because you might be—“ No, no. Oh my gosh, it’s so wrong. Like, why would you do that to your daughter? So kind of like you have to, when you’re a parent, you have to play the long game. If you do all these things when she’s young, when you don’t have to explain anything, then when she’s at the point where she’s vulnerable and she’s learning that great mystery of sexuality—I mean, we read the Song of Songs together, that’s how I do it around age 15 or so—then you’re teaching her about beauty, you’re teaching her about freedom, you’re teaching her about being friends with men, being friends with boys, and eventually dating and things like that. Like, the conversation is completely different and it’s so much fun.

THOMAS: It’s such a great practical point about like if you just suddenly spring the whole idea on her when she’s in puberty and it’s suddenly this big argument, this big set of rules when you’ve been training her to dress this different way the entire time. It’s crazy actually.

REGINA DOMAN: No, it’s—yeah, yeah, I just can’t. I mean, and that’s why I say, I mean, honestly, a lot of times when Catholic women don’t dress modestly, it is naivety. And even when they have daughters, they’re not thinking about what they’re gonna have to tell their daughter at the talk or the night before prom, or God forbid, when she comes down in her prom dress and her date’s right there, that suddenly the Catholic parents have to be like, “Uh, dear, go upstairs and change, burn that dress, we’ll give you a potato sack, and now you can go on your date.” No, like—What parent would do that? You know, maybe a little bit more intentional and have forethought about how to address this very complicated vocation of raising a woman.

THOMAS: Right. I mean, I like what you said about too, like, having it be the beginning of—there’s like a celebration. You go out, you get your ears pierced, and it’s celebrating your entering into womanhood instead of suddenly—again, like very suddenly—yes, there is an element of sobriety and gravity to having that talk and everything. But it’s not just like suddenly you’ve been this innocent child all along and now you have all these rules imposed on you arbitrarily. It’s like, no, we’re moving forward on a track that we’ve already been heading along this whole time, and now we’re celebrating this new stage of life, including the responsibilities that go along with it. I like that idea. It seems a much more healthy approach. And it’s sort of the correct version of—I think a lot of worldly women, it’s like, “Here’s—now I’m gonna teach my daughter how to get boys.” And I live in New York City and I see these mothers walking around with their daughters, and sometimes it’s like horrific. It’s like this horrific training in turning your daughter out or something. It’s disturbing to see, you know, how the mother is clearly setting the example for the daughter in immodesty. So this is the good version of that: the mother leading the daughter into this new stage of life.

REGINA DOMAN: Oh, I’ve done it four times so far and it’s been such a great thing. You know, I’ve had so much fun taking my daughters out, going shopping with them, buying them prom dresses, helping them make wedding dresses—just such wonderful memories for them. And they’re evangelists when it comes, like, I remember somebody just told me the other day in the parish, they were like, “Oh, it’s you. Yeah, your daughter dresses so beautifully. I always admire her outfits when she comes into Mass.” I’m like, “Thank you.” And I was like, that was not accidental. It was intentional. That like you can have this experience where your daughter kind of surpasses you in her intentionality and her beauty and her fashion. And I think that’s what we all want. Like, there’s my daughter evangelizing just by putting together a great Sunday outfit, you know, one that is stylish, not sack-like or anything like that, but one that does make people appreciate her as a Catholic woman. And it is meant to be joy. There’s meant to be so much more joy in the Catholic life. And I feel we need to cast a vision for that so that people understand what it is that they’re saying yes to.

THOMAS: Right. You mentioned like going back to dressing little kids, you mentioned parents can be very just slothful in this regard.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah. I think that some of it comes from wounds. You know, they are either ashamed of their own childhood or they have wounds from their dad or their mom and their attitudes toward that. And so a lot of times I think a lot of things happen because we don’t live an examined life. You know, we haven’t made that general confession where we go over everything in our life, or we haven’t opened all those boxes. We haven’t gone back and really kind of thought it through. So that’s why I say I think a lot of it is just ignorance. And also sometimes the problem is so big that parents don’t know how to address it. They don’t know where to start. So that was what the article was meant to do: give people a place to start. And then the other thing is that especially when it comes to the teenage years, if you think of it this way, the mother is the one who’s nurturing the child in the family circle and creating the home and the culture that the child is growing up in.

Where the father, his job is kind of to take that child and position them correctly towards the world, orienting them towards the world and having their back as they go out into the world. Hmm. So that’s one of the reasons why I mentioned the role of the dad, especially in the teenage years. So if the mother has done her part of the job, then she clears the way for her husband to step in in the teenage years. Because, you know, yeah, sometimes us, we women are a little naive when it comes to men, standards, things like that. And also too, we can be a little like—they’re always coming out with new fashions and it might not really be clear to us how those fashions are affecting men. You know, like keyhole backs, for example, or peekaboo sleeves. I might see that and be like, “Oh, that’s cute.” And meanwhile a man is having a completely different take on that, and especially whether or not he wants his daughter to wear that. So that’s one of the reasons why I think both parents kind of have to get on the same page as to what’s modest or immodest according to their family culture and their standards. And I’m just saying family culture and standards because we all live in different parts of the world. Some parts are a lot hotter and you have to dress for the heat. Some parts are a lot more humid, like in our area. So I think that there is some leeway with local cultures and just geography, things like that.

THOMAS: But you ever notice that like people in past eras would dress in way more layers even in hot weather, just in general? I mean, they would wear different materials, maybe lighter materials, but it’s like people weren’t just whining about how hot it was all the time. And, and you know, as a guy, when I go to Mass, I wear long sleeves and I’ve started wearing—I just got a linen summer jacket for the first time this summer, which I’m really happy with. And like, it’s fine. Like, I don’t have to be the most comfortable I could possibly be, and it’s pretty comfortable. My church doesn’t really—it’s a Gothic New York City church. It doesn’t have like suburban church AC running. Yeah, yeah, totally. And so like, it’s fine. But it’s just funny where people are like, “Oh no, I can’t wear—I can’t be a little warm.”

REGINA DOMAN: No, no, it’s true. I do talk about that in Why the Way We Dress Has Changed, that article that you’ll link to. And part of it is, I think—I mean, honestly, I think that maybe climate change is true, that it was colder before. But I think it’s also true that in the wintertime, given when they didn’t have adequate heating, you would go through the winter—it’s possible that a lot of people went through the winter never getting completely warm. In other words, you went from house to inside to outside, and at no time were you ever completely warm. And so that meant that even when you were indoors, you were dressing a lot more warmly because the houses were cold. You know, and so I think that was behind why a lot of people just wore hats, because they were cold all the time, or they were hot all the time—sun and stuff like that.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: You know, so there, yeah, there’s definitely changes there. Oh, but going back to the dad, that’s why I think that it’s important for dads—I want other dads to steal my husband’s line, which he made up. Basically, if one of our daughters would come downstairs wearing something that he thought was inappropriate, he’d be like, “Okay, look, honey, I don’t want you to wear that outfit again. You know what? It’s time for me to take you shopping. Let’s go out shopping tonight and get something that both of us love. Throw that out and we’ll just find something. I’ll get you a new dress. You name it, you find it, we look at it, we both agree on it, I’ll buy it. And I’ll take the bite to my wallet.”

THOMAS: Nice.

REGINA DOMAN: So a lot of times, because my husband—talking about the long game—had spent all of their childhood building up a good relationship with them. You know, my husband—I married a great guy—once a month he takes each of our kids out on the day of their birthday. Like, my son was born on the 2nd, so on the 2nd of the month he would take that kid out on a special time. Like, they’d go—when they were little—they’d go to the gas station and get some candy, and then come home and watch a special video or something like that. When they got older, he would, especially with the teenage girls, take them out to a restaurant and say, “Honey, what’s going on in your life?” And they’d just tell him everything.

THOMAS: That’s great.

REGINA DOMAN: So he really kind of was in a position of relationship to them so that when he gave them a critique about their dress, it wasn’t just kind of coming out of nowhere. And a shopping trip with Dad just sounded like fun.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: Also because he doesn’t take them on shopping trips normally.

THOMAS: That’s awesome.

REGINA DOMAN: So I mean, really, he built the ground well. And I think, yeah, most of my girls found it difficult to resist Dad—a shopping trip with Dad. You know, they had to get rid of the one thing, or wear it in a different way. A lot of times we’ve realized going through fashion shows and stuff like that, that having produced two fashion shows and worked with different designers, really a lot of times the individual item of clothing entirely depends on how it’s worn. It’s not like there’s something that’s intrinsically immodest most of the time. It’s just that it’s immodest if it’s worn a certain way, but it’s completely appropriate if it’s worn another way.

THOMAS: I wanted to mention also, for little kids, beyond sexual modesty, just like sort of respecting your children, boys and girls—like respecting them enough to dress them decently and not just like the most slovenly possible, if that makes sense.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, part of a lot of immodesty is just honestly lowest common denominator dressing. I’m really big on complaining about this—that slouchy knits can outfit the world as far as most of our clothing stores are concerned. I think it’s really pathetic. I think that people deserve—people of all ages deserve more than sweatpants and athletic wear, honestly. And I think that when you dress your children well, especially on Sundays, it communicates to them and to the congregation how precious they are. Like, I have friends who traveled in Europe and they say even in Europe kids are dressed much, much better. You know, there’s much more care taken on the clothing of French children as opposed to American children that are usually—and I also, another parenting tip I picked up is: if a child is really annoying you—like whatever they—whenever they come into the room, they’re just annoying to you—go out and buy them better clothes. Hmm. You know, if you’re happy to see them because of their outfit, especially if you’re going through a rough time with that child, if you dress them more decently, it’ll soften your heart towards them, maybe in the way that they need. I have 10 kids, so every kid goes through that stage where they’re just really annoying. They’re doing the thing that annoys you and you can’t get them to stop. Upgrading their dress really helps them feel better and you feel better. So—

THOMAS: No, that’s very interesting.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, psychology.

THOMAS: Yeah, very, very interesting. Okay, I know we’re not getting that deep into specific standards of dress. We already talked about it a little bit, but when this topic does come up, people do tend to throw up the either legitimate question or roadblock, and often enough it does function as kind of a roadblock to discussion, which is like: “Okay, so what’s the standard? You have to give me a specific standard that is like foolproof and objective and completely...”—and there’s all these appeals to cultural relativity, which is a real thing, but I don’t think it goes nearly as far as people want it to. I don’t know. Do you have any general thoughts? Not—I’m not even asking you to give a specific standard, but on the whole question of “Well, what’s the standard or else?” and “If you can’t give me one, then there must not be one” kind of thing.

REGINA DOMAN: Okay, let’s reframe the question. If this problem were simple and easy, we would have solved this by now. So the mere fact that the problem hasn’t been solved and that we can’t get an agreement tells us that we should quit thinking as though there is a simple and easy answer, because we’re all intelligent adults here. And if there was a simple and easy answer, we would have found it by now. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m like: look, you’re not gonna solve the modesty issue in an article. You’re not gonna solve it in a tweet. You’re not gonna solve it in one homily or one retreat or one talk. No, no, no. That’s why we run an entire school-year-long course on modesty, because what we discover the more we dig into it is it is difficult. It’s complicated. And standards do vary. So I think the first thing we have to do is maybe take a lot of this discourse offline, because offline favors the simple, easy answers that are solved with information. This, I think from this discussion, is not a topic that can be solved with mere information.

THOMAS: Okay.

REGINA DOMAN: I mean, this topic is nested inside relationship: relationship to self, relationship to God, relationship to those you love, relationship to your wider culture, relation to society as a whole. That’s really complicated. So let’s stop treating it as though there’s an easy answer and that everyone who doesn’t see the easy answer is an idiot. That’s the first thing I would say, you know?

THOMAS: Okay.

REGINA DOMAN: So yeah, so let’s cut ourselves and our neighbors a break. And yeah, we probably need to delegate a few, or maybe many, intelligent people who can appreciate complexity to kind of study this issue, maybe become fashion designers, maybe start a clothing factory, maybe start holding national parish fashion shows. Who knows? Start a fashion magazine, whatever. Maybe we need to expend a lot more effort on this issue than we’ve currently been giving. Maybe even just having a conference for anybody who’s—what about a national Catholic fashion conference? Just throwing that out there. You know, anybody who’s—make it online so anybody can attend, and throw a bunch of Catholic women into a room and let them hash this out. What could possibly go wrong? But no, but seriously, we do need to kind of think about this a little bit more intelligently and realizing that turning the Queen Mary around is going to take a little bit more time and engineering than.

THOMAS: But we can’t do it if we don’t talk about it at all.

REGINA DOMAN: We can’t do it if we don’t talk about it. And that’s, again, we’re back to spheres of influence. I think the place to begin this is in the home.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: At least we’ll be talking about it with the people that most matter, our spouse and our children, and then broadening it out to our little social groups, you know, our playgroups or Catholic schools or Catholic colleges, Catholic apostolates, in an organic way.

THOMAS: Yes, but of course a lot of people will never talk about it in the home if somebody in the public sphere doesn’t tell them to talk about it in the home, and that’s why we’re doing this podcast.

REGINA DOMAN: That’s a very good point. So I hope that this podcast will spur a lot of conversations.

THOMAS: Because ultimately, I mean, an argument I make is it is a matter of public morality, right? So like, it is a public concern, you know.

REGINA DOMAN: It’s a public concern. It’s a public concern. The morality is nebulous just because of culpability and because of widespread ignorance.

THOMAS: Well, yeah, I don’t mean culpability. I just mean public morals in the sense of the moral tone of society kind of thing, you know.

REGINA DOMAN: And this is why I like this. At this state of our culture—I mean, it’s not too surprising that this has become a sore point, honestly.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: I mean, it was bound to happen, you know. The less common ground we have, the more and the further apart the islands are as the flood pours in, it’s not too surprising that it’s hard to talk to the other islands. So we got to start building bridges and pretty fast, I would say.

THOMAS: So my friend Eamon, just a random tangent, but he’s a moral theologian and works for Catholic Culture. He made a video on his own YouTube channel recently directed to young Catholic women. And when he made one point about modesty and he said, “Here’s a good standard.” I think he got it from someone else, “which is, you know, the funeral standard.” So when you have your funeral and they have the photo of you sitting in the church—in funerals they usually have a photo of the person—if you would be embarrassed or feel uncomfortable with that being the photo of you at your funeral, then don’t wear it. I thought that was kind of a funny but interesting take.

REGINA DOMAN: I thought you were gonna say laid out in the coffin. That would be interesting.

THOMAS: No, no, no, no. But like the picture of you at the funeral, I thought that was sort of an interesting take.

REGINA DOMAN: I make frequent visits to funerals and I’ve seen—at our local cemetery—yeah, not everybody is modest in their funeral pictures. So it might not actually work quite as well, but yeah. It’s a good exercise. That’s the sort of thing we do need—long-term thinking. That is what we need.

THOMAS: Right. Before you go, what’s your take on pants?

REGINA DOMAN: Haha, I am wearing a pair right now.

THOMAS: Okay.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah, I have—I don’t know, I like these kind of blousy pants that are in right now is what I’m wearing.

THOMAS: Okay.

REGINA DOMAN: Very flattering to the middle-aged figure. But um, the rule I’ve always had—I have two simple rules with my own kids, you know; other people could adopt them as they see fit, but this is kind of what I do. Okay. And I should mention, my attitude here is I try to adopt the tactics that Dr. Dobson used. Okay, Dr. Dobson, if you remember, the late, great Dr. James Dobson, he was once asked—like, this lady was like, “My 13-year-old wants to shave her legs. I think it’s completely inappropriate. We’re not talking to each other. She said she’s gonna run away from home. I think she shouldn’t shave her legs. Like, she’s not old enough to do this, and like, it’s destroying our relationship. What should I do?” And he’s like, “Lady, buy your child a razor.” You know, like, come on, let her shave her legs. It’s not—you don’t want to die on this hill. So in that context, I do not want to die on the hill of pants. Okay? Just, I do not want to. I prefer skirts. I do not want to destroy a relationship with anybody over pants.

THOMAS: Right.

REGINA DOMAN: Okay? So this is kind of what I do because I love skirts, and I think skirts are the prerogative of a woman—to wear a gown, to wear skirts. Men only get to wear gowns on formal occasions if they’re judges, if they’re monarchs. Women can wear gowns all the time if they want to. So it’s not—again, I don’t see them as something that inhibits a woman’s freedom. I see it as a privilege, and I don’t surrender any privilege that a woman has. Okay, so here’s my attitude: I dress my little girls in skirts until they ask to wear pants. Okay? Right. So I always dress my babies in skirts—appropriate. Like, they’ve—my one little girl learned to crawl in a very long skirt because she was shorter than everybody else. So the skirt that was knee-length on her sister turned out to be floor-length on her. She learned to crawl in it anyhow. She was amazing. You know, so, yeah. And also, it’s harder to move around in a skirt. So if a little girl masters that, it requires a certain grace and a certain finesse. And I see that she keeps that for the rest of her life.

THOMAS: Hmm.

REGINA DOMAN: It kind of gives her a certain grace in how she moves that I think is a win-win-win as far as I’m concerned. It kind of gets around all that clumsiness that certain people have. It kind of mitigates that. So I ask them—I dress them in skirts until they ask to wear pants. When they ask to wear pants, I let them wear pants. But I require that the pants be feminine. So. You know, just because I think that, again, I want people to know that we’re women. Other cultures, women wear pants, but the pants are very feminine. And when our culture—when occasionally those pants come into fashion, I wear them right away. Yeah, so I don’t really let them wear—I mean, some little girls look very feminine in overalls and dungarees and things like that. I certainly don’t. So I try to find them—usually by the time they’re asking to wear pants, they’re about 10. They’re noticing how other girls are dressing and they want to dress like those little girls. That’s why I’m like, “Hey, I don’t want to give you a hang-up. If you want to wear pants so you can fit in with other girls, let’s do it. Let’s be reasonable about this.”

THOMAS: Right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, obviously pants can be immodest, but dresses also can be immodest.

REGINA DOMAN: Totally.

THOMAS: Yeah. I think the issue is probably more of maintaining cultural customs that highlight the differences between men and women instead of breaking them down. That’s why I love to see women in skirts and dresses because it celebrates—it’s a more colorful, beautiful world when men and women dress differently. But I like your point about there’s different forms of maybe not pants but like trousers, you might say, in different cultures that are sort of like the Middle Eastern style of trousers where it’s sort of like flowy and you almost can’t tell the difference—if you were looking at them from a distance, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it wasn’t a dress or a skirt kind of thing. There are feminine styles of pants, like you said. It’s kind of interesting.

REGINA DOMAN: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. And I try to use that. The idea is we’re creating beauty here. We’re not just creating rules, we’re creating beauty. That is one of the reasons that makes this whole thing so complicated is because if you’re building a house, you can print out the blueprints and you’ve got yourself a house and it’s livable. But if you’re trying to make a home, that’s a lot more complicated. And if you wanted to ask me, “How did you make your home?”, I couldn’t even tell you. I’d have to sit down and document everything and probably miss a lot of things. I think that beauty, fashion, modesty—it’s all more like making a home than it is like making a house.

THOMAS: Yeah, that’s a great point. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?

REGINA DOMAN: Well, I mean, I’m really glad to be able to discuss this issue. I’m grateful for all the girls and women who kind of kept bringing this to the forefront. And I also just love Our Lady. Like, I would just say our final issue is: look to Our Lady. Behind me is a beautiful original image that one of the fashion models that I work with—she’s an artist, her name is Juliana Heroux—she did this. It’s a copy of a very beautiful picture of Our Lady of the Rosary. And I’ve been privileged to work with her as a photographer and as a model. And we are constantly inspired by Our Lady. So when it comes to any difficult, complex, culture-defining problem—and especially when the fights between Catholics and the difficulties in getting on the same page are so difficult and so painful—I would urge us all to look to Our Lady and just ask her to come into the situation and give us wisdom, as she is the Spouse of the Holy Spirit. Especially men—men who are frustrated because of the lack of standards of modesty, just cry out to Our Lady and beg her to bring about understanding and bring about wisdom. So give them the ability to speak wisely and persuasively.

THOMAS: Amen. Well, that’s a great note to close on. Regina, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

REGINA DOMAN: You’re welcome. This has been a lot of fun.

THOMAS: Um, and is there anything else you’d like me to link to besides your articles on Substack regarding your work in fashion? Do you have any online resources on that or—

REGINA DOMAN: Mostly The Culture Recovery Journal is what I’m working on these days on Substack. Yeah, and fashion obviously has a lot to do with culture, so that’s why I kind of went into this tangent on it. Yeah, but people can check out my novels—you know, Angel in the Waters is my picture book, the fairy tale novels, you can find them on Amazon and in other Catholic bookstores. But yeah, I just encourage people—oh yeah, also, The Messy Family Project is where you can find Women Wonderfully Made, which is the course I mentioned on introducing your daughter to womanhood. And they do plan to do two other levels of the course. So I’m hoping and praying that that will happen in the future. Yeah, yeah. So lots of good things going on that many people are working on, and I get to be part of it. Wonderful.

THOMAS: Thank you very much, Regina.

REGINA DOMAN: All right. God bless you.

Theme music: “Franciscan Eyes”, written and performed by Thomas Mirus. Download the Catholic Culture Podcast soundtrack.

Thomas V. Mirus is President of Trinity Communications and Editor-in-Chief for CatholicCulture.org, hosts both the Catholic Culture Podcast and Lives of the Popes, and co-hosts Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast. See full bio.

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Tue10 November
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Memorial of St. Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church

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The Church celebrates the Memorial of St. Leo the Great (400-461), during whose pontificate the Council of Chalcedon (451) defined that Christ is one divine person with two natures, divine and human. It was a confirmation of his Epistola Dogmatica (Tomus) to the Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople.…

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