Tznius (and crises)

This is a topic I’ve been learning more about recently, a lot on Tiktok, with plans to go check out other sources soon.

Tznius (or Tzniut, depending on what part of Europe your yiddish came from) is basically the set of modesty laws for Jewish women. The basics that I’ve figured out so far are: covered collar bones, elbows, and knees (and everything in between), covered hair, no pants. It’s really similar to the modesty laws of a lot of other religions.

Actually this whole article seems like a decent intro into how to dress Tznius as a modern woman.

This gets into some of my interesting questions! What sorts of gendered mitzvot am I going to try to follow? Do I want to do the ones for men? The ones for women? Different ones depending on how I’m feeling? Will I wear a tichel or a kippeh? Will I want to use tefillin to pray? Particularly in the Reform movement, a lot of the laws have been translated and interpreted in more gender-equal ways, and that’s obviously important and interesting to me.

I kind of like the idea of dressing Tznius, but also I like wearing scandalous clothing to kink events?

HOW WILL MY RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE AFFECT MY PARTICIPATION WITH THE KINK SCENE? WHO KNOWS? Will I be talking to a rabbi about it???? Who knows?!

I’ll probably try to write a slightly more comprehensive post about this soon, but for now this feels like the important parts to my brain.