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Wendy Shalit
A Return To Modesty | PAGE 1, 2 ,3
As for the feminists, I want to invite them to consider whether the cause of all this unhappiness might be something other than the patriarchy. For here is the paradox: at Williams, as on so many other modern college campuses, where there was such a concentration of unhappy women, everything was as nonsexist as could be. We had "Women's Pride Week," we had "Bisexual Visibility Week," we were all living in coed dorms, and many of us even used coed bathrooms. We were as far from patriarchal rules as we could get. So if we were supposed to be living in nonsexist paradise, then why were many of us this miserable?
Perhaps there is a difference between patriarchy and misogyny. Now that we have wiped our society clean of all traces of patriarchal rules and codes of conduct, we are finding that the hatred of women may be all the more in evidence. But why, exactly? I think we might have forgotten an important idea, lost our respect for a specific virtue.
My essay is divided into three parts: the first concerns our culture's view of sexual modesty and some of the problems that this view has created; the second is a survey of the intellectual battle which preceded this state of affairs, and an immodest attempt to reconstruct the lost philosophical case for modesty; and the final third is about women who are ignoring their culture's messages and, for new reasons, returning to a very old ideal.
A thread that runs through all three sections is the story of why this idea happened to captivate me. I would have preferred to avoid this personal thread and hide behind the disinterested sociological, the speculative philosophical. Unfortunately, it didn't work. I simply found it impossible to clear up what I perceive to be some central misunderstandings about modesty without, in some cases, getting very specific. Since I want to recover the idea, to submit what a case for modesty looks like, I have needed to rely on my experience -- as well as that of other young women -- to fill in the gaps.
Stendhal admits in his short study of female modesty that he is just guessing about it since so much of his argument depends on certain sensations that are necessarily hidden from his male experience. His survey is too vague, he says, and not as good as if a woman had written it. Nevertheless, he predicts, a woman would never write about such things. After all, for a woman to write sincerely about what she truly felt would be too embarrassing for her, "like going out not fully dressed" -- and then everyone would point and laugh. For a man, on the other hand, "nothing is more common than for him to write exactly as his imagination dictates, without worrying where it's going."
Outrageous as this may sound, it cannot be denied that for hundreds of years, it has held true. Though there are many women who conduct themselves "modestly" in their personal lives, no woman has ever attempted a systematic defense of modesty. One has to admit there is a very good reason for this: a woman who is reticent about matters sexual is an unlikely candidate to step forward and squawk, "Hey, everybody, look at me! Boy, am I modest!"
Nonetheless, I think it's about time that a woman proved Stendhal wrong. First, many of the men who have written about sexual modesty have either attacked or defended it for reasons that strike me as false. Was it because they were sexist? Or do we accept the more charitable interpretation -- that, as Stendhal says, men can only guess? I don't know. But I have a strong feeling that one of the reasons relations between the sexes have come to such a painful point is precisely that the embarrassed, secretive women usually do not come forward, only the exhibitionists do. And so I think many young women now have a vastly inaccurate picture of what is normal for them to think or to feel. They have been trained to accept that to be equal to men, they must be the same in every respect; and they, and the men, are worse off for it. It is for the next generation of young women that I am writing this book. Perhaps as Stendhal predicted, I will only end up making a fool of myself, but I think the stakes are now high enough to justify the risk.
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Today modesty is commonly associated with sexual repression, with pretending that you don't want sex though you really do. But this is a misunderstanding, a cultural myth spun by a society which vastly underrates sexual sublimation. If you stop and think about it, you realize that without sublimation, we would have very few footnotes and probably none of the greatest works of Western art. Moreover, leaving aside the whole question of utility, when you haven't yet learned to separate your physical desires from your hopes and natural wonder at everything, the world is, in a very real sense, enchanted. Every conversation, every mundane act is imbued with potential because everything is colored with erotic meaning. Today, this stage in one's life -- when everything seems significant and you want to get it all "exactly right" -- is thought to be childish, but is it really? Maybe instead of learning to overcome repression, we should be prolonging it.
Many children these days know far too much too soon, and as a result they end up, in some fundamental way, not knowing -- stunted and cut off from all they could be. If you are not taught that you "really" want just sex, you end up seeking much more. The peculiar way our culture tries to prevent young women from seeking more than "just sex," the way it attempts to rid us of our romantic hopes or, variously, our embarrassment and our "hangups," is a very misguided effort. It is, I will argue, no less than an attempt to cure womanhood itself, and in many cases it has actually put us in
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A Radical idea
I WANT TO OFFER A NEW RESPONSE. First, I want to invite conservatives to take the claims of the feminists seriously. That is, all of their claims, from the date-rape figures to anorexia to the shyness of teenage girls, even the number of women who say they feel "objectified" by the male gaze. I want them to stop saying that this or that study was flawed; or that young women are exaggerating; or that it has been proven that at this or that university such-and-such a charge was made up. Because ultimately, it seems to me, it doesn't really matter if one study is flawed or if one charge is false. When it comes down to it, the same vague yet unmistakable problem is still with us. A lot of young women are trying to tell us that they are very unhappy: unhappy with their bodies, with their sexual encounters, with the way men treat them on the street -- unhappy with their lives. I want conservatives really to listen to these women, to stop saying boys will be boys, and to take what these women are saying seriously.
I propose that the woes besetting the modern young woman -- sexual harassment, stalking, rape, even "whirlpooling" (when a group of guys surround a girl who is swimming, and then sexually assault her) -- are all expressions of a society which has lost its respect for female modesty.
A friend of mine had an affair with her professor when she was 21. She was in his class at the time and madly in love with him; he had no intention of doing anything other than using and summarily disposing of her. She was a virgin before the affair. As she related the story to me, ten years after it happened, I was struck, not that what had happened had deeply upset her, but that she felt she had to apologize for the fact that it had deeply upset her: "And, well, and it didn't mean the same thing to him, and um...this is going to sound really cheesy but, um...I mean, for God's sake, he took my virginity!" As she struggled to find the words to explain what had happened to her, it occurred to me that in an age where our virginity is supposed to mean nothing, and where male honor is also supposed to mean nothing, we literally cannot explain what has happened to us. We can no longer talk in terms of someone, say, defiling a virgin, so instead we punish the virgin for having any feelings at all. Nevertheless, although our ideology can expunge words from our vocabulary, the feelings remain and still cry out for someone to make sense of them. It is to restore this lost moral vocabulary of sex that I am writing this book. And then everyone can come out of the closet about how closeted he or she always wanted to be.
From the Introduction of A Return To Modesty,
Discovering the Lost Virtue.
