Two items in this file: * Emily Eakin's review of _A Return to Modesty_ by Wendy Shalit * the LA Times interview with Wendy Shalit ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The New York Times View Related Topics March 7, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 7; Page 17; Column 1; Book Review Desk LENGTH: 1080 words HEADLINE: Maids of Honor BYLINE: By Emily Eakin; Emily Eakin is a senior editor at Lingua Franca. BODY: A RETURN TO MODESTY Discovering the Lost Virtue. By Wendy Shalit. Illustrated. 291 pp. New York: The Free Press. $24. THIS is a book about an oppressed group that you might not have heard of before: virgins. The idea might surprise you. It might occur to you that being a virgin -- unlike, say, being black or short or gay -- is a universal (not to mention invisible) human condition; at one time or another, it affects every person on the planet. Why would anyone discriminate against virgins? Yet, according to Wendy Shalit, self-appointed spokeswoman for the moral minority and the author of "A Return to Modesty," this is precisely what many of us do. Once a country that ranked maidenhood among its highest virtues, America, Shalit writes, is now a place where sexual modesty is actively repudiated and the woman who voluntarily abstains from sex is regarded as neurotic, repressed, hostile, socially maladjusted or unhealthily obsessed with her father. And not just by insensitive cads. In their efforts to establish a "nonsexist paradise" free of "all traces of patriarchal rules and codes of conduct," feminists, liberals, women's magazines, even well-intentioned parents, Shalit argues, have inadvertently made our culture more misogynistic than ever. "Today men expect to be able to treat all women like prostitutes, only without just compensation," she declares, "and the virgins are the ones who are now stigmatized, told that no man will have them." Shalit should know. At 23, she is a senior veteran of our culture's war on purity. Her battle scars date back to the fourth grade, when a strange woman arrived to instruct Shalit and her classmates in the mysterious properties of the number 69. Stumped by the lesson and the giggles it elicited from the back of the room, Shalit went home and reported the encounter to her mother. As a result, she found herself sitting out sex education in the library, embarrassed and confused but, most important, with her innocence still intact. There were to be other close calls: a fifth-grade teacher who made a desk drawer full of tampons and condoms available to her students; a counselor at high school debate camp who made lewd remarks and stroked her hair; the coed bathrooms in her college dorm; girlfriends who told her she was uncomfortable with her body; boyfriends who accused her of "hang-ups" and dumped her because she wouldn't sleep with them. If Shalit survived these assaults on her virtue positively brimming with self-esteem, most girls, she assures us, do not. She depicts a generation of frightened, unhappy, overmedicated young women having too much sex too soon, and -- worse -- having it like a man, by which Shalit means having sex that is indiscriminate and loveless. "I see so many young women around me spending half of their time sleeping with all these men, and the other half telling me how heartbroken they are," she writes. "I wonder who gave them the idea that this is what they had to do in the first place?" For women, Shalit insists, the new sex-equity ethos is exacting a terrible psychic price: epidemics of anorexia, bulimia and self-mutilation; soaring rates of sexual harassment, date rape and stalking. The proof is right there in the pages of Glamour and Cosmopolitan and the other women's magazines from which she so lavishly quotes. Why are there millions of women on Prozac? To make it easier for men to get them into bed, of course. "By drugging these women, we have accepted the rapist's view of womanhood," Shalit concludes. "Our culture is continually frustrated with women the way they are, and seeks to loosen them up." Shalit believes that female modesty is innate ("a reflex, arising naturally to help a woman protect her hopes and guide their fulfillment -- specifically, this hope for one man") and thus that sexual promiscuity is a violation of female nature. This logic doesn't merely inform her thinking; it envelops her book like, well, a chastity belt, guarding against the kind of nuances, complications and contradictions that might help enliven her prose and even advance her case. Populated by lecherous men, lovelorn young women and beaming virgins ("Why do these women then have that undeniable glow about them that is absent, for instance, in our modern anorexic?" she muses), her world has the telltale contours of caricature. Likewise her solution to its ills. Why, Shalit begs us to consider, are women flocking to Jane Austen movies? And why, she wonders, "are none of my grandmother's friends anorexic?" The explanation, she argues, is simple: As far as relations between the sexes are concerned, we were better off a hundred years ago, when dating a woman meant kissing her gloved hand and reading her Keats in the parlor, when sex meant love and marriage meant "till death do us part." THIS is what women really want. (As for men, those boors, it goes without saying: All they want is sex. It's up to women to teach them manners.) Happiness, she declares, is within our reach: "We must decide as women to look upon sex out of wedlock as not such a cool thing, after all, and re-create the cartel of virtue." This, it must be said, hardly has the ring of a winning campaign slogan. (There must be a way to make the cartel of virtue sound less like voluntary house arrest.) But, more important, there is no evidence that women were happier about their sexual lives -- or more free of rape -- in the pre-sex-ed days of Jane Austen. (For all her admirable modesty and her fiction's devotion to the marriage plot, it's worth pointing out that Austen was never rewarded with enduring love. She died an old maid, a fact that some scholars believe accounts for the bitterness of her last novel, "Persuasion.") Still, despite its limitations as historical or contemporary sociology, "A Return to Modesty" provides one invaluable service. There is a growing body of scholarly research on young adulthood that may, in the aftermath of Shalit's booming polemic, be more difficult to ignore. Thanks to the work of educators and psychologists like Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher and William Pollack, we are beginning to understand that -- for both girls and boys -- the Sturm und Drang of adolescence can be far from benign. Most of us are grateful to have those painful years behind us, and would give anything not to relive them. But that's no reason not to look back and try to make that treacherous passage a little easier to navigate. Copyright© 1999, LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1999 Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times January 10, 1999, Sunday, Home Edition SECTION: Southern California Living; Part E; Page 2; View Desk LENGTH: 634 words HEADLINE: PAGE 2 / NEWS, TRENDS, GOSSIP AND STUFF TO DO; BACK TO THE FUTURE; SHOULD WOMEN TODAY EMBRACE MODESTY AND VIRGINITY? BYLINE: BOOTH MOORE, TIMES STAFF WRITER BODY: Wendy Shalit has spent all of her 23 years ashamed of her sexual inexperience--pressured to overcome embarrassment, romantic hopes and body image "hang-ups" in favor of meaningless "hookups." In her new book, "A Return to Modesty" (Free Press, 1999), the young author calls for a return to restraint and virginity. Citing evidence from Stendhal, Rousseau, Beauvoir and Orthodox Judaism, as well as from women's magazines and her own personal experiences, Shalit explores the forgotten ideal. "We must decide as women to look upon sex out of wedlock as not such a cool thing after all, and recreate a cartel of virtue," she says. Shalit, who graduated from Williams in 1997, believes it is society's casual attitude toward sex that has ruined women's lives and caused them to be anorexic and depressed. We asked Shalit to expand on her proposed modesty movement. * Q: Your book laments the state of women's happiness today. What's so wrong with us? A: Our culture gives women bad advice by encouraging promiscuity. Women are told that is the road to equality, but that's a lie. Usually what happens is the opposite. Women become more insecure. Modesty is a wonderful impulse that protects us. I think that's really the point of the whole book: If women are conditioned to suppress their natural longings for loyalty and love and are encouraged to be cold, calculating and detached, it leads to unhappiness. It's not good to be cold and calculating. These are the emotions that lead to date rape and sexual harassment. * Q: Aren't you placing the responsibility solely on women? Why not insist that men change their behavior? A: What fascinates me about modesty is that it invites male honor. Today, manliness has to do with scoring. Where adulterers used to be stigmatized in the past, now it's virgins. Men have responsibility too. Just because a woman is alone with a man, he has no right to rape her. Men need to understand vulnerability and the differences between the sexes. * Q: You take to task both feminists and conservatives for their views about the state of women. Why? A: A lot of feminist writing has been valuable. I just disagree with their assessment of the cause of the problem. They put the blame on patriarchy. But we've been moving away from patriarchal rules, and we have more misogyny. The conservatives' response--that female concerns are exaggerated--also misses the boat. * Q: So what's the answer? Waiting for a single partner so you can marry, lose your virginity and be in love for the rest of your life? A: Yes. That is where modesty is different from prudery. Prudery is more like promiscuity, because you are saying 'I can't be touched or moved by sex.' But modesty is very much about waiting for the right man. * Q: So modesty is sexy? A: It's definitely an erotic virtue. Today's youth are interested in Jane Austen and ballroom dancing because they want to experience some mystery. It's more interesting than promiscuity. When everything hangs out, it's boring. * Q: Should men have to abstain too? A: Yes, and modest women do inspire men in that way. * Q: It sounds like you believe modesty can be a woman's secret weapon, that it can be empowering? A: I think that's a fair characterization. Equality for women does not mean sameness. I was surprised to find that Simone de Beauvoir, who was one of the most radical feminists, thought a society that did not respect modesty would include violence against women. * Q: How will you respond to critics who say you're too young and inexperienced to know that waiting for "the one" is the answer? A: The book isn't about me, it's about an idea. It's my intention to get people talking about the idea of modesty, not to say, "My way is the right way." GRAPHIC: PHOTO: (E1) Tired of being stigmatized for her lack of sexual experi- ence, author Wendy Shalit is issuing a call to modesty. She says it's time for a counter sexual revolution. PHOTO: (No caption) Copyright© 1999, LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.