The Return of Modesty

Note: A longer, revised essay on this topic is here. A later post is here.

We — at least those of us in the United States — live in a hypersexualized culture.

Pornography has become mainstream. Young women – and even teenage girls – are placing suggestive photos of themselves on the Internet. Hundreds of college students willingly flash their breasts for Girls Gone Wild! film crews (see this for a profile of the company’s founder that will make you cringe). Magazines like Maxim and FHM are increasingly popular. The latest fashion is low-riding jeans that hang far below peoples’ waists, reveal their thong underwear, and leave little to the imagination. Nearly all advertising now incorporates sex appeal to some degree. Marketers are even targeting pre-teen girls and children with sexual imagery in the form of Bratz dolls (see here for information on the controversial product) and “Future Porn Star” T-shirts. High school and college students rarely date or have significant relationships; instead, they “hook up.”

Something has gone horribly wrong, and I think one cause is an unintended consequence of feminism. Men and women are indeed equal under the law, and it was a travesty that women could not vote or own property, among other rights, in the United States and other countries for decades, if not centuries. But one major school of thought within feminism has been that men and women are the same — and that any differences are a result of societal indoctrination. Now, following decades of sexual liberation, women are acting like men. More accurately, they’re acting like men at their worst.

But this behavior will change soon. Pendulum shifts in everything — from politics to religion to culture — occur in all countries over time. Governments go from left-wing to right-wing and back again. Parts of the Middle East and Europe went from Christian to Muslim and back again. In the United States, the permissive 1960s gave way to the conservative 1980s, and now we’ve gone far beyond the sexual revolution of decades ago.

I think the same holds true for these current attitudes towards dress and sexuality. To be frank, I don’t think the Western world can go much further in the direction of permissiveness without people walking around naked and having sex in public. I don’t forsee anything like Islamic burkas, of course, but there is a middle ground between women completely covering themselves out of fear and looking like prostitutes because of low self-esteem.

Within a few years or more, the pendulum will shift, and society will become more conservative in this context. Women will dress in ways similar to the person pictured at the top of this post. (She seems to be a modern Orthodox Jew in Israel who posed for a YNet News article. The piece pokes fun at Orthodox dress, but it misses the point completely. Conservative clothes can be very fashionable — after all, there are more clothes with which to arrange an outfit.)

The very essence of trendiness, after all, is to dress in a way that differs from everyone else (in the hopes that others will follow). When everyone dresses in thongs, micro-miniskirts and revealing tube-tops, the people who dress conservatively and fashionably will stand out. Others will follow suit, and the pendulum shift will begin. I, at 26, may be turning old, but I find conservative outfits on women to be more attractive. When every woman wears the same clothes, they becomes boring — no matter how revealing they are. The ones who show true style will stand out.

Earlier: Is the West’s increasing decadence a reason for the rise in religious fundamentalism? Addendum: It seems I’m not the only one who feels this way. See here. Essay: The Battle of the Sexes