Ultra-Orthodox Men Now Wearing Special Blinders to Avoid Seeing Sexy Things [Genderal Interest]

Feeling tempted by scantily-dressed women on the bus, or sexy billboards by the side of the road? If you're an ultra-Orthodox man in Israel, you're in luck: you can now buy special blinders to prevent sin-enticing images from sneaking into your peripheral vision. As the Times of Israel reported yesterday, an organization called The Committee for Purity in the Camp is selling special stickers that the observant-but-easily-vulnerable-to-lady-business can wear on their eyeglasses. The stickers "blur vision of anything beyond the range of a few meters and so diffuse immodestly dressed women to a harmless blot." (If you don't wear glasses, the Purity Committee sells a non-prescription pair with stickers for the soul-saving bargain price of around $32.)

On the one hand, this is good news. As the Times notes, these eyeglasses mark a "change in tactics" in the Israeli ultra-Orthodox campaign against immodesty. Rather than forcing women to cover up (and spitting on eight year-olds with exposed forearms), these blinders place the onus for avoiding temptation where it belongs: on men. If the choice is between harassing women for displaying bare skin and turning men into carriage horses, the latter seems like the preferable option.

At the same time, these eyeglasses and their stickers send two toxic and unmistakable messages. First, women's bodies have such power to do harm that men need to partially blind themselves for protection. Second, men are totally incapable of exercising self-control. In the book of Job (Iyov in Hebrew) the title character says "I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then should I look lustfully at a girl?" A covenant is a promise sustained by faith, not by a crude device that impairs the senses. Deeply religious men usually have the ocular muscles to redirect their vision from that which might prove a solicitation to sin. Outsourcing that willpower to a pair of glasses makes the idea of self-control almost meaningless.

A pair of glasses that reduce rather than enhance vision is quite a novelty. And while these specs and stickers reinforce the myth that men are hopelessly weak, if we're forced into the false dichotomy between shaming women and blinding men, we might as well pick the latter.

Anti-Ogle Goggles for the Modest Set [Times of Israel]

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Waitresses Wearing Red Make Better Tips, Because Red Is All About Sexy Sex [Attraction]

If we've learned anything about the color about the color red, it's that some people can't see it, that it's nevertheless splashed over very important public signs, and that it makes people want to drop whatever they're doing and procreate. Procreate hard.

Despite an anthropological study of bygone months that disspelled the fanciful notion that men were more attracted to bright red vulvas, a French study published recently in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research found that waitresses wearing the color red can expect big tips from male patrons. Meanwhile, the waitress wearing other colors might as well just be extras in a black and white movie about a man who goes to lunch and discovers that the world is not strictly in black and white.

Researchers dressed waitresses in prismatic t-shirts and then unleashed them on 722 French diners. The waitresses were told to keep track of their tips and act normally, i.e. not like they weren't participating in something that would soon degenerate into a bizarre Skittles commercial. Waitresses wearing red earned, on average, about 15 to 26 percent more in tips than their non-sexualized colleagues, but the researchers were careful to note that, despite all the popular speculation floating around that red is an amorous color, the different color shirts had no effect on the waitresses themselves.

It's kind of short-sighted not to track the effect shirt color has on the shirt wearers because, if there's so much general consensus that red is the universal color for sexy times, then wouldn't wearing a red shirt somehow affect the behavior of the wearer? Or maybe, rather than trying to uncover some underlying primal urge in male diners to lust after and therefore give more money to women wearing red, researchers should have noted the obvious — red is the color societies employ when they want individuals to stop moving in a certain direction. Okay, so, if red means "stop," then maybe the waitresses in red shirts came as wake-up calls to bad tippers: "Hey, stop being parsimonious diners because it's hard work being someone's personal servant for an hour."

Waitresses in red get better tips from men: study [NYDN]

Image via Chubykin Arkady/Shutterstock.

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Teen Girls Are Wearing Shapewear to 'Normalize' Their Bodies [Spanx]

Today in sadface, more and more teenage girls have taken to wearing shapewear underneath clothes on a daily basis, even wearing it beneath their athletic uniforms, because they "don't want to stand out for the wrong reasons," i.e. be seen as fat among their peers. In fact, one of the hottest teen trends (ranked between One Direction and sexting) are Spankies, brightly patterned spandex shorts that work much like Spanx, except, you know, they are not for boring old grandmas.

Some, like doctors and psychologists, worry about the effects that shapewear will have on teens' mental and physical health (from all of the organ squeezing), but don't worry because fired Real Housewife of New York Jill Zarin says it's totally fine that girls are wearing these undergarments:

"Nobody wants to see anybody's body parts rippling. It's just not attractive... What I think shapewear does is that it normalizes the girls' body figures and it evens everybody out."

First, it's important to note that Jill Zarin is currently hawking her own shapewear line Skweez, which is to say that she has a keen interest in girls' health money. Secondly, "normalizes the girls' body figures" is a nonsense phrase for idiots. Third, Zarin's claim that shapewear is beneficial to teenagers because it makes them all the same (skinny) is a depressing sentiment that many people likely share, but few are oblivious enough to voice.

Spanx also weighed in on the issue, releasing this statement to Good Morning America:

"Our mission is to help women feel great about themselves and their potential... Regarding those medical issues for teens using [our] products, in twelve years of selling shapewear, we've never had this issue."

Dare we dream to live in a world where Spanx' reply would be that their product was meant for adult use only? DARE WE?

Shapewear Might Be Affecting Teen Health [GMA]

Image via lynea/Shutterstock.

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