Not the bad porn script you were expecting, I swear. 🙃
So here’s one for fans of grey areas.
SO has brought two daughters and a son into our relationship. They’re all young adults now. We generally get along well and I’m a trusted third party and, according to the then-minor younger daughter, a good source for pregnancy tests and the such “because you’re the least likely to freak out”.
We’re generally a very open and judgement-free family, and I’m immensely proud of the fact that the kids feel comfortable talking freely about love and sex with both of us despite their ‘traditional’ catholic indoctrination upbringing. We’ve established that we can talk about anything but won’t go into detail about their or my personal preferences. This works very well and there’s a lot of trust. Whenever their mother’s not around, the kids talk to me about whatever’s on their mind (anything really, not just love/sex stuff).
There’s one thing that makes me slightly uncomfortable though, and I’m not sure if I’m the one who’s at fault here. It’s the older daughter’s choice of clothing at home. Especially in summer and near the pool, she often walks around in a t-shirt or scant bikini top and panties whose front just about covers the crack and whose back leaves nothing to the imagination.
I’m very happy that she’s both happy enough with her body and feels comfortable enough around me to walk around this way. Especially the former has been a bit of work on her mother’s part.
Now my own background is that I come from a very uptight family myself (sex is an evil and shameful thing that the wife endures because she owes it to her husband) but am very open now (swinger clubs, former co-host for BDSM meetings etc.). I also have a minor degree in both communication and sex therapy.
Still you never entirely shake off an upbringing based entirely on shame and guilt, and occasionally there’s a situation that instinctively makes me uncomfortable, but upon closer inspection I conclude that it really shouldn’t.
I’m currently trying to figure out whether this is one of those false-alarm situations, and it really bothers me.
On the one hand, “you don’t wear that kind of outfit in front of men you’re not biologically related to.”
On the other hand, why not? She should be able to wear whatever she’s comfortable with in the privacy of our home. And you can’t make a request such as “dress more modestly” without it smelling of misogyny.
On the other other hand, it would definitely be inappropriate for her to walk around entirely in the nude, so there’s got to be a line somewhere.
(Let me add that she’s never even remotely tried anything, and I really don’t think of her in ‘that’ way, so that’s not the issue.)
TL;DR: Adult stepdaughter sometimes wears revealing clothes, makes me uncomfortable, not sure if it’s supposed to. Nothing fishy going on.
EDIT: Wow, so much food for thought. I don’t think I’m going to be able to reply to everyone individually, but I’ve come to realize that what makes me uncomfortable is probably the idea that she or other people around us might feel uncomfortable, and in the classic stepfather-stepdaughter constellation I could be seen as a potential ‘perpetrator’, which I’d need to protect myself against. So it’s really just mostly me worrying about what other people might think (but probably don’t).
But the point is, if she’s comfortable there’s really nothing tangible for me to worry about.
You bring up an interesting point, and I have an answer in my head that makes perfect sense to me, I’m just not sure I have the vocabulary to convey it.
A lot of sex- or genitalia-related things (or intimate things in general) depend on the context more than on the act itself - e.g. even though my urologist has seen & handled my wedding tackle in the past (and I’ve even paid him for it!), it would be considered rather unprofessional of him to want to do exactly the same thing if we happened to meet at the pub. My masseuse only touches my butt during a massage, etc.
Nudity is not a bad thing as such. It’s just that we’re not a nudist family at all, and so if anyone walked around in the nude, it would be way beyond the social norms (for lack of a better word) that we as a family have been practicing for years. I would at the very least expect them to give us a heads-up and explain to us why they suddenly want to stop wearing clothes.
The social norms we have don’t always make perfect sense, but may still be important to either maintain or challenge as a group because other people’s comfort zones depend on them.
Also, as a male in the perfect age group for a mid-life crisis interacting with impressionable young females that are somewhat dependent on me, I always feel like I need to be super-duper extra cautious.
I hope that makes sense.
Heheh… “wedding tackle”… niccceeeee
See, now this is where I would disagree. How much should society care about an individual’s comfort zone? What if I hate seeing gay men? Should gays be banned from existence because I feel uncomfortable around them? What if I don’t like women showing their hair? Should then we criminalize women not wearing hijabs?
This is the way I see it. If an individual’s freedom to do act A adversely affects another individual’s “freedom to live” above a certain limit, then and only then must Act A must be criminalized. If I am sexually touched without my consent, then it encroaches upon my freedom to live. This is because being touched without consent has demonstrable ramifications on my mental health, which statistically have further ramifications on my will to live. However, seeing someone naked does not have any of these consequences. This is demonstrable by comparing different cultures around the world.
Now for the “norm” part, I get it. Is it “different” or “out of the ordinary” for someone to suddenly be naked in a non-nudist family like yours? Sure. It is also natural that you would be curious as to why someone would be doing something like this. You’re right. Context matters. However, context is also set by humans, right? Which means, that the rules of permissibility can be modified or maintained by these very humans.
In your specific case, there are two possibilities: your daughter is being nude-ish intentionally or unintentionally. From what you’ve written, chances are that she’s doing it unintentionally. This then makes stuff quite easy. Does her nudity affect you in ways you cannot control? Examples of such scenarios that I can think of would be “I was sexually assaulted, and the sight of women bits brings back PTSD” or something like that. If that is not the case then imo, it is not your place to tell her what or how she should choose what she wears. However, if you think she is doing stuff intentionally (which seems improbable based on what you’ve said in your post), then you definitely can ask her about the reason behind her doing that. Again, this doesn’t mean that you can tell her what she wears/doesn’t wear. This just means stuff like “If you’re flashing your bits to woo me, then sorry, I’m not being wooed”.
So in conclusion, in my opinion, “because it makes me uncomfortable” is not a good enough argument to tell another human what to do /not do something. Sure, if it has demonstrable negative repercussions like the way harassment/physical assault, etc. do, then it makes sense do prevent someone else from doing the causal action. Hence, in your case, unless you seeing your daughter’s bits has demonstrable negative effects on you, you have no right to dictate her choice of clothing.