Wendy Shalit in “A Return to Modesty”: if women would only hide their bodies from the male gaze, men would treat them better (or how the oppression of women is a good thing)

September 30, 2009

I suppose Shalit was so busy attending her Young Republican meetings on campus that she skipped a few English classes, and never got around to reading literature actually written by real women in the “good old days” – for instance, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The basic premise of conservative Wendy Shalit’s A Return To Modesty is that women are personally responsible for the bad behavior of men largely because women don’t hide their bodies or remain virgins until marriage.

According to Shalit, if women would only hide their bodies from the male gaze, men would treat them better. And women would therefore naturally remain virgins, because heaven knows, they don’t have sexual urges of their own. Everything from rape to coed bathrooms would be eliminated, if women would just behave themselves. (And I don’t know whoever came up with the stupid idea of coed bathrooms, but it wasn’t this woman.)

First of all, have we even established that women have departed from modesty at all? Modesty for Shalit appears to be largely centered in what females wear. As for young women, it’s true some misguided immature women consider Beyonce or Lady Gaga as role models, but aren’t these the same young women who in another era would have chosen someone equally odious as their heroes? (Recommended reading: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy.)

As for young women baring all to Girls Gone Wild, didn’t Marilyn Monroe pose nude as a teenager? There have been young women doing dumb things like giving up their personal dignity for a buck or two, or a fleeting moment of male approval, since time began, the only difference is now any two bit sleazeball can buy a video camera to capture it in living color for all eternity.

I agree that that our culture has been overly saturated with sex, sex, sex – kids are exposed to too much too soon. I’m uncomfortable with all of that, as well. We are in an age of incredible openness, largely due to advances in technology coupled with our fundamental right to free speech. Most of us want to protect kids, so wouldn’t the logical next step be to take common sense measures to address the problem?

I am all for cleaning up mainstream broadcast television, that’s the common stomping ground and no place for explicitly sexual performances. And let’s just dismiss the ruse that only the religious right feels this way, I’m hardly a member of that demographic. But instead of focusing on solutions that really do appeal to the majority, including liberal, moderate, and conservative, Shalit fast forwards to a conservative religious agenda fraught with illogic.

Like the irrational position that by making condoms available to teens, they will have sex, whereas if we don’t make condoms available, they won’t have sex. What’s wrong with making them available to sexually active teens but not pushing them on teens who don’t want them. Is there no way to achieve balance without going to extremes?

If Shalit can come up with a way to stop sexually active teens, who are hell bent on ignoring their parents’ advice to wait (and I have yet to see a parent tell a child not to wait), from going at it, more power to her. But once that bottle is opened, as parents from the beginning of time have found it’s hard to put the genie back in. And human nature being what it is, it’s not difficult for two hormonally charged teenagers to figure out how to go at it, even without being formally taught the mechanics.

So I don’t see how keeping teenagers in the dark and keeping contraception out of their hands will solve anything. But I can see how this could cause more problems (for instance, the U.S. has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the western world).

Shalit’s conclusion that women – not men – covering themselves from head to toe, will heal societal ills, as well as women returning to past behavioral constraints she doesn’t even historically fully explore, is disturbing. And she wholesale dismisses the lessons many women learned, even the “modest” ones – did Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique come out of nowhere? In fact, Mystique was a meticulously researched piece of objective journalism. Unlike Shalit’s hodgepodge of nonexistent “trends” (journalist Katha Pollitt polled universities, including the Rabbi at Shalit’s college, and came up with no support for the “modestynik trend”) and random quotes from Glamour and Seventeen fashion magazines.

In some sections of the book, Shalit rhapsodizes about Muslim women wearing veils. But she neglects to mention that for many Muslim women, wearing a veil, some of which leave no part of their body visible (the burqa), from the time they are girls until they die, is not a choice. Rather, wearing the burqa is forced upon them by males in their societies (even though it is not supported by the teachings of Mohammad) and to reject the practice is to risk death.

And Shalit rhapsodizes about Orthodox Jewish women wearing ankle length skirts. But she neglects to mention that most Orthodox women, from the time they are first married until they die, wear wigs every day of their lives, even in the heat of summer and at home. It is forbidden for anyone except their husbands, including their families, to see their real hair. Again, this male-imposed mandate is based on one obscure line of scripture that has been twisted to oppress women.

Shalit proclaims that in the Victorian era, women had it made, because being fully clothed from head to toe was sexy – men were forced to notice the twinkle in their eyes. No mention of the internal organ-crushing corsets women wore underneath that distorted their figures into abnormal shapes to please men. No word about how women frequently fainted, nor about the limited opportunities for exercise. And men, what did they wear? Comfortable trousers and jackets.

And she neglects to mention that Victorian women were often married off at young ages to older men they didn’t love, not given the full rights of citizenship, not able by law to inherit or own property or heaven forbid even vote, forbidden to be doctors or lawyers or even attend most colleges. And those sexy (but modest!) women died young after bearing a child each and every year, because the men in power decided nice “modest” women didn’t have a need for birth control.

There is always a reason for change – but Shalit neglects to explore those reasons, and I must conclude her excuse is either an inability to write and reason well, or that she is promoting a conservative political agenda for which controlling the bourgeoisie is critical. Or both.