As a relatively new Catholic, I have found it of great value to watch the Catholic network, EWTN, to get a better understanding of the Church and its practices. I especially like the two shows hosted by Father Mitch Pacqua, a Jesuit priest who has a Ph.D. and is fluent in 12 languages. He is a very nice person and an excellent teacher, also. One of the shows he hosts is EWTN Live, in which he interviews various guests. This Wednesday night his guest was a Catholic psychologist (I forgot his name!) who mentioned something called the New Puritanism.
Essentially, if a society abandons traditional faith-based morality (as much of the US has done) it invents its own morality. He mentioned several new "sins" in our modern culture that were not sins in the traditional sense. But he did not mention one that I have noticed for a while, and one that is probably more obvious to women. The body standard for today's woman is thin, thin, thin, in spite of some who say it shouldn't be. And, now, you need to be both muscular and thin. Yes, it's true that many Christian churches promote maintaining a healthy weight and taking care of your body, but this goes well beyond that. So today, we have the young single woman who will, in one evening, have sex with a man she just met and also have a piece of cheesecake, feel guilty about the cheesecake but not about the sex. There is something backwards about that.
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