In revolutionaries are urging women to preserve their virginity
until marriage. Is this real revolution, or just a blast from the past?
In a culture where one-night stands, reality porn and Playboy logos on kids’ stationery have all become shrug-worthily normal, it takes quite a leap of imagination to be sexually subversive. Take up pole dancing? No, that’s so commonplace that women organize group lessons for hen parties. Threesomes? No longer noteworthy. Faux-lesbianism? Yawn ...
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
A growing number of American women believe that they have the answer. Through books, Web sites and clothing ranges, a new breed of modesty-loving gals is spreading the word: chastity is chic! While most young Americans are keen to forget their abstinence education by their 20s, these women choose to take it a whole lot further, saying that not only is premarital and casual sex a bad idea, but that modesty — in sexual behavior, dress and comportment — is, in fact, essential for building strong relationships. Although returning to a long-discarded form of femininity might seem truly retrogressive, many of these women assert the opposite. They are, they say, sexual revolutionaries.
Arguably the best known proponent is Wendy Shalit, a writer and broadcaster who first burst on to the scene in 1999 with her book, A Return to Modesty. Writing about the benefits of chastity, Shalit quickly became a kind of professional virgin on the media circuit, prompting a few rather creepy male commentators to spell out their lust for her. It turns out that the modesty trend is popular enough to sustain a whole publishing career. Shalit’s latest ode to chastity, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, is due out this coming March.
Last year, riding a wave of popularity, Shalit also founded the ModestyZone Web site and its blog Modestly Yours, which features 21 regular bloggers. The Web site is billed as “an informal community of young women who don’t have a voice in the mainstream media ... . Whether you’re a virgin waiting until marriage, or just against casual sex more generally, you can find a safe harbor here to share your ideals, interests and goals for the future.”
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
And while it is not clear how many women are buying this message, a large swathe of products has cropped up for those who are. So, for instance, “Pure Fashion” shows are being put on in US cities from Miami to Washington DC, and companies that sell modest clothing seem to pop up every day. One site sells the ModesTee, a black leotard meant to be worn underneath less “appropriate” clothing. It is touted as “a fashionable solution to dressing modestly by turning the clothes that may be a little too sheer, too short, or too low into clothes you can wear.” Another company, WholesomeWear, sells modest swimwear. This layered — yes, layered — swimsuit is made up of spandex and nylon and covers most of the body. A bit like a waterproof kaftan.
But being modest does not end at your wardrobe. Alexandra Foley, a 34-year-old mother of four who blogs at Modestly Yours, says: “Modesty is both your outward appearance and your interior disposition. A woman can be modestly dressed, but not carry herself in a modest way.”
Foley recently wrote about the Middle East edition of Elle magazine, remarking on a close-up of a model wearing a headscarf (which she thought showed too much hair). She said the model had a “Take me” face, “the slightly pouty, slightly angry, bold stare into the camera with the seductively half-opened mouth that whispers to a man, ‘Take me.”’ She continued that, despite the modest clothing, “the Elle model remains a poster girl of immodesty regardless of how many square yards of fabric she is draped in.” What does a girl have to do to get the modesty stamp of approval? Headscarf, bodysuit and a blank face?
Allison Kasic, a member of the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) — a US-based conservative group — organizes Take Back the Date, a campaign that seeks to “restore chivalry” on college campuses. “Young women still overwhelmingly want to get married, but they are not engaged in the traditional courtship that leads to marriage,” says Kasic. “This can have dangerous consequences and long-term effects on marriage.”
It is not exactly news that most young women (and men, for that matter) want to get married. But implying that any premarital action will somehow render you incapable of finding a spouse is not just outdated — it is wrong. Most people will have premarital sex, and most will still get married. According to the proponents of modesty though, sex outside marriage is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot.
Dawn Eden, a writer who is currently penning a book called The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding fulfillment while keeping your clothes on, says casual sex is actually ruining young women, fatally skewing our attitudes to men. “(W)hen you become chaste, you’ll notice for the first time that women who have sex outside of marriage don’t really appreciate men,” Eden writes.
Don’t get me wrong, reviving romance sounds great, and if you want to hold out on sex, more power to you. But can you really base a movement, a revolution even, on the idea that women’s life goal should be marriage?
While it focuses on traditional gender roles and norms, the ModestyZone also firmly positions itself as rebellious. In some ways, this seems fair: after all, keeping your clothes on does seem like a novel idea these days. But this modesty revolution seems like the same old thing in brand new rhetoric. For example, ModestyZone’s June “Rebel of the Month” (“Our rebels make James Dean look like a chipmunk,” says the site) is 48-year-old Catherine Fournier, a mother of six and grandmother of two: “I rebelled against modern society and got married at 18 and had my first child just 18 days past my 20th birthday. My friends all have ‘tweens and teens, and I’m a gramma!” Hmmm.
Another retrogressive aspect of the modesty movement is its disconcerting message that women are responsible for men’s behavior.
The notion of dressing modestly comes at least partly from the idea that men can’t control themselves; by telling women that they have to dress a certain way to quell men’s desires, modesty advocates are sending a clear message that the onus is on us to control men’s sexual — and possibly violent — actions.
Shalit, Foley and Kasic all insist that their work is about giving young women choices, and I don’t think anyone would argue that increased options are a bad thing. But IWF and ModestyZone keep some fairly stifling company. Both their Web sites feature Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield — author of the widely criticized book Manliness, which came out earlier this year and argues that women belong in the home and that our “autonomy” has made for a crisis in masculinity.
Mansfield has also argued that gay people should be on the “margin” of society and blames feminism for any lack of chivalry.
“Women play the men’s game, which they are bound to lose,” he said in a lecture last year. “Without modesty, there is no romance — it isn’t so attractive or so erotic.” (Why young women are supposed to care about what an ageing misogynist finds erotic, I don’t know.)
The idea that women are inherently modest also puts an uncomfortable spin on an otherwise reasonable notion. Shalit argues that modesty is “a reflex, arising naturally to help a woman protect her hopes and guide her fulfillment — specifically, this hope for one man.” But the insistence that this is the “natural” way for women to be only leads us to the conclusion that anything else is unnatural — even dangerous. Shalit has also written that “teens, especially girls, tend to regret their sexual experiences, and the more experiences they have, the more likely they are to be depressed and commit suicide.” Staying chaste is one thing, implying that those who don’t are depressive is irresponsible.
Revamping outdated notions of femininity and positioning them as cutting edge may be a smart way to sell a glut of baggy bathing suits, but it sure doesn’t sound like a revolution.
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