Reply To: Magazines in host's house

Thanks for all the replies. Just to clarify a few points:

These are very close relatives–the kind who can walk into our house without knocking and whose fridge we open freely to hunt for food without asking them. I don’t want to say the exact relationship because there are a couple of people out there who know my identity, but my point is that there are some things you can ask of close family that you can’t ask of others. Still, we were guests in their home and there do have to be boundaries.

The particular daughter who uses this bathroom is a difficult person to approach about anything. She’s also more modern than the rest of her family and I don’t know if she would have understood.

Covering them with a towel wouldn’t have worked because they were on the back of the toilet and someone would have just pulled the towel off or it would have fallen into the toilet. There were also way too many of them for me to “borrow”–it wasn’t just 3 or 4.

My older boys are 13 and 14.5. My younger kids would probably also just say that it’s not tznius. My older boys are usually very careful themselves with what they see (they have requested that I don’t send them to abc store because of an inappropriate billboard), but I think the privacy of the bathroom makes things more complicated. They might have picked up the magazines not realizing what they would find inside also.

We’re going to have to go to this house again in the future, so I’m going to save this thread because I might get some ideas from it for next time. I really appreciate all your help.