Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering The Lost Virtue (Simon and Schuster, 1999, $13) is more than a book about modest dress. It is an examination of current sexual mores, particularly in regards to young women; a study of the enormous pressures on women to become more and more like men; and a call for young women to set their own rules in sex and morality rather than to depend on those boundaries established by their mothers and grandmothers.

Shalit begins her book with a unit titled “The Problem.” Here she primarily examines what she calls the “war on embarrassment,” and the attendent etiquette and problems rising out of the way our country, and the West in general, has handled sex and sexuality in the last 40 years. Shalit’s primary resources are women’s magazines, television shows, and direct interviews with her contemporaries - Shalit herself was only 24 the year this book was published - and she employs these resources to devastating effect as she makes connections between our modern ideas of sexuality and the consequences of those ideas. What is especially refreshing in this part of Shalit’s analysis is that she uses not only the dramatic cases to demonstrate that we have gone awry - the rape of children by children, the crude stupidity of most sexual education - but many subtle sources as well, such as intimate conversations, magazines articles, and her own experience.

The second part of Shalit’s book examines the ideal and practice of modesty in both the West and other cultures, and compares these with our current, nearly nonexistent ideas of what Shalit calls “the forgotten ideal.” Through writers like Rosseau and Stendhal, and by looking at ideas of modesty from other cultures, Shalit argues that the dress and manner of women, and ultimately of men as well, has an enormous effect on the society in which they live. Shalit easily demonstrates that we have become a society of ugly manners, immodest in both our dress and our behavior; the loudmouth, the jerk, the lewd, and the crude dominate both our entertainment and our daily lives.

In the book’s final chapter, Shalit makes a strong case for a return to modesty. She is particularly adept in revealing that it is modesty and not crudeness that most men find attractive in women. Although the book is filled with examples, one in particular deserves mention here. From a 1995 issue of Mademoiselle comes this “sex secret”:

Gary, the toy designer, says he’s unsure how to tell his girlfriend that he’s less than aroused by her lingerie. “Sometimes Gwen will surprise me with a see-through negligee because she thinks that’s what I want to see her in ... but I think I get more excited by seeing her in an oversize T-shirt.”

Shalit’s call for modesty pertains both to dress and manner, but also to the very soul - the interior life of both men and women. Until that point, she has made practical arguments for modesty: its attractive sides, the idea that to have fun by testing or breaking rules means having rules, the real possibility that modesty is at the heart of the erotic. Yet in the last paragraphs of the last chapter of the book, Shalit tells us that:

“... the most obvious connotation of sexual modesty is, of course, innocence. Yet I have been shying away from this aspect of it all along. I have defended modesty, essentially, in the most obscene way, but I did it because I had a hunch that this was the only way our culture would ever consider it. At least at first. But now that we have explored the aspects of modesty which are most counter-intuitive, let’s end by examining what is intuitively true about modesty.”

By both the above statement and by the advice of numerous friends who told her “how much trouble” her book would bring her, Shalit reveals not only that she was prepared for attacks on her ideas, but was also well aware that her book might be ignored by a culture touting “The Sopranos,” “Hannibal” and “Seinfeld.” Yet by writing so well (Shalit has an incredible command of the language, especially for someone so young), by being unafraid to let her faith into the debate (Shalit is an Orthodox Jew), and by taking a middle way in the choppy waters of political correctness, Shalit has given us a fine treatise on an issue that may lie at the heart of the so-called sexual revolution.

I do have one quibble - not with Shalit, but with the publisher. Here is a book on modesty with what is becoming a sort of recent standard in the publishing world - a near-naked figure on the cover. I puzzled over the meaning of this cover, this nude by Durer. Is the publisher trying to attract, as did Shalit, adherents to modesty by stressing modesty’s sexual nature? Is the publisher simply trying to sell more books? Is the book’s editor simply stupid?

Having thought it over, I have decided that the last two options work for me. Conclusion: good book, bad cover.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville.)

 

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