Some people think that “modest” is a synonym for “frumpy” and “dowdy”… I do beg your pardon! Here’s a snap of Svetlana Medvedeva (1965- ), the wife of President Medvedev, with the late Lyudmilla Zykina (1929-2009), the famous singer. Svetlana Vladimirovna is many things, but she’s no frump!
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“How people behave in public places, at school, and on the job isn’t just their own private business…”
According to Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the MP Synodal Department for Church and Society, we must restore a sense of order to Russian standards of acceptable attire. “It’s a good thing that companies, universities, and schools have introduced dress codes. It would be good if we could implement an all-Russian standard of decent attire (we shouldn’t put up with standards that come from strip joints and cat houses)”, Fr Vsevolod wrote in a reply to an open letter to Patriarch Kirill posted on the Internet, which was signed by over 700 people. The authors of the petition, amongst other things cited recent remarks about women that Fr Vsevolod spoke at a roundtable on ethnic relations. At that time, he said, “If a woman wears a short miniskirt, it not only fires up Caucasians, but Russians too. If she’s drunk at the same time, it’s even more provocative. If she actively encourages men to come forward, she shouldn’t wonder why such an encounter ended in rape… that’s not right”.
The petition claimed that Fr Vsevolod tried to “switch the public discussion on violence against women to a discussion on their attire”. The authors of the petition stated that one’s choice of dress is a person’s personal decision, and everyone has the right to sexual integrity, regardless of attire, social circle, etc. They called on the Patriarch to condemn the “discriminatory and offensive remarks against women made by some representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church”. Meanwhile, Fr Vsevolod pointed up, “Under most circumstances, a person’s personal appearance isn’t always considered a 100 percent private matter. How women behave in public places, at school, and on the job isn’t just their own private business. By the way, men aren’t in the least exempt from this, too. You see guys in our big cities dressed in shorts and T-shirts, or sweats and sneakers; they don’t have respect for themselves. They make themselves look like pathetic ne’er-do-wells”, he said in a reply published Tuesday on the Interfax-Religion website. He thinks that the time was coming “when indecently dressed people running about in sweats would try to crash civilised places. Decent self-respecting people would rise up and drive them out. Do you think that’s utopia? No… it’s something that we may have to do”.
He expressed satisfaction that his proposal to discuss the personal attire of Russian women and girls aroused interest, but he was astonished that the authors of the petition concluded that he thought that indecent attire justified rape and indecent solicitation. “That wasn’t my idea at all. There’s no justification for such actions. Incidentally, the problem still haunts us. Not so much for me… but there are guys who confuse the scene on the street with a strip club… (chuckle) well, when winter’s over, that’ll happen again”, Fr Vsevolod said. In his view, “A woman, who dresses and paints herself up like a clown, a woman who looks for encounters on the street, the metro, or in gin mills, runs not only the risk of running into a drunken idiot, she’ll also certainly find herself in the company of men who won’t even have the least trace of good sense and self-esteem. She might find herself a sober simpleton… but is such a man what she’s really looking for?” Fr Vsevolod went on to say, “At all times, amongst all peoples, women became respected and cherished life companions, if they showed modesty, if the men knew they were a bit more serious than someone they’d meet on the streets or in a gin mill. Wayward appearance and behaviour is a straight road to disaster. It leads to empty ‘one night stands’. It leads to short-lived marriages, immediately followed by casual divorces. It leads to children with shattered lives. It leads to loneliness and mental illness… it all ends in catastrophe”, he warned.
18 January 2011
Interfax-Religion
http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=39115
Editor’s Note:
The Western press is having a field day with mistranslations of Fr Vsevolod. Here’s a clear translation. It’s nothing that we haven’t heard over the years in many forms and in many variations. Lighten up… it’s nothing but a standard talk on morality. Here’s a URL to one of the Western pieces bashing Fr Vsevolod… it’s chock fulla beans… but it’s what they’re writing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/world/europe/19russia.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Absolute flapdoodle… I don’t know who are worse… multi-culti creepozoids, or, unibrow gun nutters. Mike Royko, where art thou?
BMD
Voices from Russia 
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