The sexual counterrevolution is at hand. And contrary to the darkest fears of some, it is being led not be Bible-thumping fundamentalists or prune-faced matrons with beehive hairdos. It’s being led by young women looking for romance.
In A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit — a twenty-three-year-old just two years out of college — argues that the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women. It has prematurely robbed girls of their innocence, coarsened their feelings, deeply wounded their self-respect, and damaged their physical and mental health.
Though the widely published reports of the crises of young women — low self-esteem, male violence, and all the other afflictions decried by feminists — are overblown, Miss Shalit has no doubt that they spring from a real source: the false notion that a woman’s sexual desires and attitudes are indistinguishable from a man’s. And salvation, she thinks, lies in the restoration of sexual modesty — the return to a feminine virtue jealously guarded by girls and their parents, and respected, even treasured, by men.
Neither Miss Shalit not her parents can be described as typical. Unlike the baby-boomer mothers and fathers who were either absent or terrified of seeming uncool, Miss Shalit’s parents objected to explicit sex-education classes all the way back when she was in the fifth grade — making her sit alone in the library while her classmates discussed questions like “What is 69?”
When the time came to go away to college, Miss Shalit caused an uproar at Williams College by objecting to coed bathrooms, and then arguing in class that men and women might be, well, different in certain key respects. In search of customs that celebrate the difference between men and women, Miss Shalit became fascinated by the long skirts and dating rituals of Orthodox Jews. Eventually, she adopted more modest dress herself. And her decision to remain a virgin until marriage became a principle that she was willing to defend in public.
The feminists who first burst upon the scene in the 1960s upheld a view of human sexuality as androgyny: What men and women want from sex, and what they do in sex, are one and the same. Miss Shalit’s contention is that this androgynous ideal objectifies women far more than did the Victorian ideal those feminists decried. Indeed, the feminist view seems indistinguishable from a deeply held misogyny — a hatred of anything in women that seems different from men and a despising of the marriage, children, and home that most women hold dear.
But try as the androgynists might, Miss Shalit argues, traditional feminine virtues and aspirations cannot be completely suppressed. They will always find expression; and when their natural expression is curbed, they will make their appearance in pathological ways:
We seem to have spawned a generation of girls whose thwarted feminine nature is reasserting itself in grotesquely distorted forms — in food hang-ups (that culturally acceptable way to create social distance), in self-mutilation (often, and poignantly, directed against the feminine, most unacceptable, parts of their bodies), or in charges of sexual harassment and date rape.
The idea that young women are facing unprecedented psychological problems first gained currency in the early 1990s and has been the subject of several recent bestsellers, including Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia. Though not supported by much data, this notion of a “girls’ crisis” has been embraced by feminists, education bureaucrats, and gender-equity specialists as a rationale for new government programs. One complaint about A Return to Modesty might be that Miss Shalit accepts the existence of the widespread “girls’ crisis,” based on little evidence other than the assertions of feminist authors and the anecdotes and letters in such popular women’s magazines as Glamour and Seventeen.
But, once we grant her this questionable assumption, Miss Shalit profoundly differs from the feminists in her diagnosis. Even in the absence of a full-blown crisis, Miss Shalit argues convincingly that sexualizing women early on — sending teenaged girls off into the arms of casual lovers — leaves those women feeling used, anguished, and degraded.
The letters, personal stories, and articles that Miss Shalt has culled from women’s magazines do seem to reflect something about the sexual and romantic anxieties of the average young woman of today. And the portrait they paint is a depressing one.
Our culture expects teenagers to engage in premarital sex, it affords them explicit instuction on how to do it, and it provides no reasons not to. “To the extent she has no social support in her decision to say no,” writes Miss shalit, “when a girl for whatever reason wants to say no to sex today she is always making a personal comment on her date: that he is ugly or in some other way unappealing.” The letters to Mademoiselle pour in with the same basic question, “How can I keep a man from pressuring me for sex before I’m ready to be with him?”
This lack of cultural support is compounded by negligent, often absent, parents. Miss Shalit describes a fourteen-year-old girl named Courtney profiled in Patricia Hersch’s study of teenagers, A Tribe Apart. According to Courtney, her parents aren’t helping her at all by giving her so much freedom: “They let me go over to my boyfriends’ house when they know his parents aren’t home. That is weird. I am surprised they let him come over all the time.” Eventually Courtney “runs out of excuses” and has sex with her boyfriend because “he rally kept bothering me about it.” In an article in Glamour, a teenager described the night he took his girlfriend’s virginity in a hotel room — to which the pair were driven by her father, “knowing full well what was about to transpire.” No wonder, as A Return to Modesy concludes, “our mothers pined for liberations, and we are pining for interference.”
As Miss Shalit understands, in the heart of even the most jaded young woman, there lurks a longing for a man who will court her in a respectful way no fraught with sexual pressure. This is the explanation of the great revival of interest in Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and the novelists of manners. The sexual modesty championed in A Return to Modesty is not to be confused with a distaste for sex, a prudishness, or a denial of female sexual desire. The feminists may think so, but Jane Austen’s heroines know otherwise. Traditional modesty, writes Miss Shalit, existed not to oppress woman, but with the aim of putting them on an equal footing with men. The delay modesty created not only made it more likely that women could select men who would stick by them, but in turning lust into love, it changed men from uncivilized males who ran after as many sexual partners as they could get to men who really wanted to stick by one woman.
Perhaps in order to make her book more palatable to liberals, Miss Shalit sometimes presents herself as steering a reasonable, middle course between Left and Right. Feminists, she says, are prescribing the wrong remedies to restore order to a chaotic sexual landscape. Such measures as date-rapeawareness seminars, sexual-harassment litigation, and “Take Back the Night” rallies are, she says, “a valiant attempt to restore order,” even if unltimately they are like “trying to put a Band-Aid over an amputated limb.” And she scolds conservatives for adopting a counterproductive attitude of “boys will be boys” and failing to take the “girls’ crisis” seriously.
But her characterization of conservatives as unconcerned about he plight of young women is wrong. Thoughtful criticism of the effects of the sexual revolution on women, children, and society has been well articulated by many conservative writers.
If, in fact, Miss Shalit has constructed her “conservative” straw woman in order not to seem conservative and antifeminist in every respect, her tactic is doomed to fail. Contemporary feminists will never — can never — accept her argument, because it would destroy the rock upon which modern feminism is founded: the myth of androgyny.
By the end of the book, through the force of her own analysis, Miss Shalit is led to examine the terrible impact of divorce, the loss of social sanctions against adultery, and other vanished barriers to socially destructive behavior. Thus she implicity concedes the radicalism of her proposal: Restoring modesty means teaching boys and girls a whole new — or very old — set of gender-specific moral and ethical values. Honor and manliness for men? Chastity for women? Radical indeed.
Miss Shalit, however, does not really complete her analysis of the burdens and responsibilities that go with any restoration of traditional sexual virtues. Reading passage after passage of lyrical prose celebrating the nobility and promise of courtly love and undying marital devotion, the reader will find it hard not to think of the fluttery warbling of Snow White singing “Someday My Prince Will Come” to the bluebirds and the bunnies. Given that a central premise of A Return to Modesty is that young girls should be allowed to cherish and preserve their romanic dreams, there is nothing wrong with this.
At the same time, A Return to Modesty leaves unanswered serious questions. What happens — to use Danielle Crittenden’s phrase — when Miss Shalit’s prince actually does arrive? What else do men and women, husbands and wives, bring to marriage? What does a mean get for giving up sex on demand with a variety of women? Will he do his share of the dusting and cleaning? Will he change his half of the diapers? It is not clear that the old sexual order — which reached its fullest expression in a life-long, fruitful marriage — can be rebuilt simply by restoring old-fashioned courtship rituals.
That said, however, it is entirely understandable that Miss Shalit takes her excellent argument only as far as she does. A Return to Modesty deserves to be given to every young woman who is forced to grow up in today’s feminist culture. And to help persuade those miseducated young women to reconsider their basic assumptions about sexuality and gender, Miss Shalit is right to proceed gently, even stealthily.
Wendy Shalit
A Return to Modesty
Discovering the Lost Virtue
Free Press, 304 pp., $ 24
Melinda Ledden Sidak is a writer living near Washington, D.C.
