I walked into Walgreens this morning to buy some Benadryl cream for the kids, and walked out a prude. How did that happen so quickly? I think it was happening for years, but my mind always told me to stop over-reacting. I mean, what am I supposed to do, walk around with a blindfold?
Until I saw a picture of a model provocatively posed on a motorcycle in a g-string with her bottom to the lens. On the bottom shelf of magazines. Freely available. To ANYONE.
I got the general manager who happened to be there and took him to the magazines to point out the offensive one. As we walked over there, he started defending my concerns by asking if it was the annual swimsuit issue of a mens magazine, thinking that I had overreacted. When he saw the magazine, he quickly started to apologize as at first, he thought a staff member had brought it in and was pranking the store.
Then he saw the stack of them, a few rows up. He quietly gathered them up, slightly red-faced, and took them to the other manager to discuss. The other manager, a woman, was disgusted and embarrassed that this magazine was even allowed into the store.
As I walked away, my eye was caught by another popular women's magazine...no, not Cosmo. It was SHAPE, a fitness magazine. And the woman on the cover didn't "just" have a bikini on, she was twisting her sheer cover-up very suggestively.
I had a revelation in that moment that in this world of "sex sells" I will have to try to raise a little boy with a Godly mind, who respects women and loves what HE loves. I have to raise a little girl who values herself and loves herself the way God made her. And that Seth and I are the protectors of their little hearts and minds.
I give up, we are moving to Montana.
