A Return to Modesty

Elizabeth Powers

...[A] powerful and witty book that registers the changes in our social landscape in all their starkness while also illuminating many of the steps that brought us to where we are.
—Commentary

Florence King

She imitates nothing and no one, and her roast of the sacred cow of female sexual freedom is going to stampede our nation of sheep.
— The National Review

Norah Vincent

The word "modesty" has a schoolmarmish ring to it. It's anathema to most women of the "third wave" generation. That's why we are likely to take one look at this title, snarl and move on to Elizabeth Wurtzel's more rage-filled Bitch, Katie Roiphe's more simpatico Last Night in Paradise or Naomi Wolf's hip Promiscuities. But, although the terminology in these latter books might suit us better superficially, their arguments, if they can be said to have arguments at all, will do nothing for us in the long run. We'll feel patted on the back for being bad girls, but the pain and loneliness we feel as young women won't have been assuaged in the least. Now, that's not to say that Wendy Shalit's book is the nostrum for what ails us either. It isn't. But it is the first book of its kind the first argument by a third-waver to blaze down the center of the postfeminist battleground between left and right.

"First," writes Shalit, "I want to invite conservatives to take the claims of the feminists seriously," i.e. date rape, anorexia, low self-esteem. "As for feminists," she continues, "I want to invite them to consider whether the cause of all this unhappiness might be something other than the patriarchy ... I propose that the woes besetting the modern young woman ... are all expressions of a society which has lost its respect for female modesty."

What does Shalit mean by "modesty"? She certainly doesn't mean that women should walk around with everything but their eyes covered in black robes, or that they should be seen and not heard. She merely wants to suggest that modesty is a kind of innocence, both physical and emotional, that exists naturally in women more than men. Preserving it means that women shouldn't be ashamed of their romantic hopes, their desires to be courted and loved and not just banged and left. It means they should feel encouraged to keep their virginity as long as it suits them, without incurring the ridicule of their peers. It means they shouldn't feel bad about what embarrasses them or makes them squeamish, whether it's being forced to learn about "69" in fourth grade, as Shalit and her classmates were, or as adults, enduring the sight of their boyfriend's Playboy lying around the house. (In Shalit's case, and as she quickly learned, in many of her female classmates' cases, it meant not sharing a bathroom with men in her dorm at Williams College.)

In short, says Shalit, from date-rape to stalking to anorexia, "This culture [meaning post-sexual revolution culture] has not been kind to women," and changing that means recognizing that women, on the whole, are less crass than men, perhaps even more fragile emotionally, sexually and physically, and that women should be proud of this and thereby inspire more honorable behavior in men.

You may find Shalit's tone too cloying, in places, but that may be less because Shalit is too earnest or too sheltered to be taken seriously (she is, in fact, a first-rate intellectual who has done her homework) and more because we are too cynical. Some of Shalit's more jaded readers will feel tempted to hurl her book against the proverbial wall. They should resist the temptation.

In part, they'll be annoyed for good reasons. Shalit has too much faith in her young intellect. She is long on brainpower, but short on experience. Her argument is almost too tidy to make sense in the real world. As she tells us from the start, she is the daughter of an economist "of the Chicago-school variety." She is enamored of theorems that work, like math problems, on their own hermetic terms. As such, Shalit's people can seem more like integers than fraught human beings. She feeds her sad girls into the modesty machine, and poof, the cured product plops out the other end. Shalit is sometimes too sure that a return to female modesty and male honor will make the world new again. But at least Shalit is offering us a course of action that we can try, which is more than we can say for the bulk of her carping peers.

But if the modesty package as a whole turns out not to be quite the new deal Shalit hopes it will be, what of lasting value can we take from A Return to Modesty? First, there's the fundamental truth that men and women are not the same, but that equality of the sexes can be achieved without making women into men. Oddly enough, as Shalit points out, the most unfortunate legacy of the sexual revolution has been more misogyny. "A young woman today has basically two options open to her: to pretend she's a man, or to be feminine in a desperate, victim-like way."

Both alternatives are misogynist. Either way, women are still left playing by men's rules, and they are not built for it. As Shalit insists, "the game isn't equal ... because men always win the game of vulgarity," and physical aggression, and casual sex, and no-fault divorce, and so on. Second, by teaching this generation's young men to be honorable, and its young women to protect themselves, we're likely to have more immediate success in righting our socio-sexual ills. This is a distinctly conservative argument for personal responsibility: "If there could be such a thing as a 'philosophy of modesty,' I think it would be more an argument from internal inspiration than an argument from external authority." In the end, governments and laws have less power over people than people have over themselves. Wendy Shalit is an original thinker who will be goosing us with her ideas for a long time to come. If, in the end, her prescription for a better society is too rosy and catch-all, it offers, nonetheless, some of the best observations anyone has made in recent years about the plight of young women.
-- Salon

Wall Street Journal

Shalit marshals impressive evidence from philosophers as well as the tabloids to make her case for a return to modesty — as both a sexual ideal and a strategy for greater pleasure.

Weekly Standard

Radical indeed....Should be given to every young woman to help them reconsider their basic assumptions about sexuality and gender.

Emily Eakin

[D]espite its limitations as historical or contemporary sociology, A Return to Modesty...[shows that] the Sturm and Drang of adolescence [is] far from benign. Most of us are grateful to have those painful years behind us....But that's no reason not to look back and try to make that treacherous passage a little easier to navigate. -- The New York Times Book Review

The Weekly Standard

Radical indeed....Should be given to every young woman to help them reconsider their basic assumptions about sexuality and gender.

Kirkus Reviews

A heartfelt (and controversial) plea, insisting that the power to heal the American female's ills lies in the reinstatement of sexual restraint, resurrection of romantic ideals, and simple good manners. Twenty-three-year-old Williams College graduate Shalit, whose 15 minutes of fame arrived when her red-faced critique of co-ed bathrooms on campus reached the pages of Reader's Digest, has produced a daring book aimed at the core of contemporary gender theory. Shalit demonstrates familiarity with both conservative and feminist explanations of women's problems such as eating disorders, teen pregnancy, date rape, and stalking, but presents what she terms a "middle path" to elucidating and curing these problems. It is natural for women to be modest, she argues, and low self-esteem and disrespect from men were natural consequences of the promotion of sexual promiscuity among young people of both sexes. There is true compassion for women's sense of self in her critique of premarital sexual practices, and she insists that while male behavior is often unacceptable and degrading to women, men are only acting rationally within the constraints of popular expectations. She finds that despite the stigma placed on modesty today some traces remain, pointing towards the primordial defenses that once protected women by placing them out of reach of men who were not prepared to commit and treat them with respect. Orthodox Jewish rules of modesty and Islamic dress provide Shalit with material to show the benefits of restraint in male-female relations: it puts women in control of access to their bodies, allows them to preserve the beauty of their romantic aspirations, compels men to investthemselves in relationships, and enhances the erotic potential of eventual intimacy, she says. The message of this book is rarely heard, it is audacious, and it should not be dismissed out of hand-despite Shalit's occasional reliance on women's magazines such as Mademoiselle and Elle as a source of information on the state of the American female soul.