takin' your wallet and stealin' your girl since 1983 volume 15 • issue 3 • Horror

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ne of my most horrifying experiences at Columbia happened on Thursday, October 7, 1999, when I attended Wendy Shalit's lecture on a return to modesty, which was co-sponsored by a number of the religious groups on campus.  The experience was horrifying in two ways: Shalit, a college educated woman and the author of A Return to Modesty, made ridiculous claims about the need for modesty based on a rather mis-informed, illogical, and patriarchal perspective.  Moreover, she never clearly defined her beliefs about what modesty was.  Is it a style of dress?  Is it a philosophy of living?  Is it a conservative cultural norm?  While it seemed as though her beliefs about modesty incorporated all these ideas, she never expressed what exactly her definition was. I also found some (thankfully not all) of the Columbia students there horrifying, because they seemed to totally agree with her and hang on her every word.

I want to clear up from the start that I am not opposed to modesty in clothing.  I consider myself to be a fairly modest dresser most of the time.  Prior to the age of 17, my most immodest clothing was a skirt that came to about mid-calf, and a rather loose skirt at that.  Never, in all my years of high school or college, did someone mock me for my style of dress.  They may have mocked my Dr. Moondance t-shirt, but that had nothing to do with modesty.  While Shalit is right that people should not have mocked her and alleged that she was uncomfortable with her body, I can only imagine they would do so because she was trying to force her beliefs on other people.  Generally, I find people are fine when you just live your life, but if you want to make them believe as you believe, they generally lash back, frequently by mocking your beliefs.

The numerous frightening statements she made in the lecture cannot all be covered in this article so I am only going to focus on a few.  First, she spoke of the 1948 song, "Baby, It's Cold Outside."  In this song, the man tries to convince the woman to stay the night based on the statement that it is too cold for her to walk home.  She turns him down by coming up with multiple excuses, such as that her maiden aunts will gossip about her reputation and her father will be waiting at the door. Now, what Shalit believes is good about this song and the society we left behind is that the girl was able to say no to sex and that she had an excuse.  Two things strike me here.  What if the girl actually did want to have sex, but felt she could not because of society?  While I personally choose to have serious relationships, and perhaps I do dress modestly so as to only attract men interested in serious relationships, I acknowledge the rights of other women to have casual sex.  If that is what they want, then I say good for them.  Shalit and I disagree that in an ideal society, sex with only one partner would necessarily be the norm.  In my society, there is room for both, and neither should be mocked for their decision.  The second problem with this part of her argument was the assumption that the girl should have an excuse rather than take responsibility for her own beliefs and actions.  

Shalit demonstrated her belief that women are timid creatures who need excuses in  another part of the lecture in which she described a woman interviewed on an MTV show about sexually transmitted diseases.  The woman was glad she got herpes because it finally gave her a way to say no to sex.  The members of the audience who disturbed me found this statement rather amusing.  Now, the way I see it, this is a sad demonstration of how we have failed to teach our young women to have confidence in their own beliefs and decisions.  Shalit sees it as demonstrating yet another reason we need to return to modesty and thus provide timid women with excuses.
 
However, unlike Shalit, I do not believe that the problems of our society can be boiled down to one simple source.  I also find her analysis of history somewhat frightening;  she views the entire history of the world as one in which a man's modesty (his "honor") was to stick by one woman, to pretty much protect her modesty (I read "shame"), and to control her as his property.  Anyone familiar with Ancient Rome may find these two concepts to be 2000-year-old antiquated beliefs that were not even clearly defined in those times.  History has not been all one giant stream of modest (but sexy) women protected by honorable men celebrating the mystery of love between us all, as Shalit would have us believe.  If life was so simple and so great for 1000s of years, why did the women's movement take place?  I cannot help but think of one older woman in my family whose husband told her that he would not be able to have sex with her if she was ever raped because she would have been defiled.  My mind also turns to some of the "modest" societies today and the gruesome tales that take place there.  For instance, women being stoned just because their sleeve falls and their bare arm is exposed.  Forgive me if I'm not leaping to go back to this society, and that I don't think it will solve the problems of today's world.

While Shalit is correct that we have many severe problems in our society, I do not believe that rape, sexual harassment, eating disorders, and many other issues confronting us today can be boiled down to the fact that we deviated from a patriarchal conception of modesty.  I am sure the same problems existed in previous times, even if we did not hear about them. People like Shalit would have us believe that the problems in today’s society can be traced to changes within the last 30 years, that our society is the deviant in a smooth strand of history.  We cannot forget that we have at least 6000 years of history that built up to this moment in time, that those 6000 years were complex and troubled, and that our ancestors did not have the answers any more than we do.