complications of modesty

I have very mixed feelings about modesty talks, in church or in other forums. Certainly there are types of clothing that I wouldn't wear, or encourage my daughter to wear. Certainly some clothing can be appropriate in some venues while being inappropriate in others. Certainly I think people can wear clothing that draws too much attention to the body and not enough to themselves as complete human beings.

But what I hear often is that women in particular should be modest in order to protect men from sexual thoughts, and to protect women from men and themselves. This is rhetoric I try to stay far away from.

First of all, I'm not convinced that men are beasts who can't control their thoughts. I think the majority of men are conditioned by their cultures to see certain things as sexual. Women's breasts, for instance, have been ridiculously hypersexualized in many Western cultures. In other cultures, however, breasts are not sexualized at all. They are seen as tools to feed babies. And what about hair in many Islamic nations? And what about ankles in Victorian England? In short, there is no prescribed notion of what is sexual. We simply learn to interpret what is or is not sexual from our culture.

Strong evidence also suggests that how women dress does not correlate with sexual violence, such as rape or other assaults. Culture is the greatest predictor of rates of violence against women. If a man can rape or assault a woman sexually with little retribution legally or socially, he, or other young boys or men, learn very quickly that this is an acceptable action to take. In some parts of Africa and Afghanistan, a man is absolved legally from raping a woman as long as he offers to marry her afterward (even if she refuses). Even if he doesn't offer marriage, women are so afraid of the social retributions of having been raped that men often get away with it. A culture that implicates a victim as responsible for the crime is a strange one indeed.

Since women's protection from men doesn't correlate with modesty, why do we talk about it as if it does? I become very impatient with rhetoric that indicates this. If for no other reason, I think often "protecting" women's modesty sometimes perpetuates the view that women's bodies are inherently sexual. Women's bodies (and men's bodies for that matter) are not inherently sexual. What they do with their bodies can be sexual. A woman wearing a bikini to a beach, or walking down the street in a short skirt does not indicate sexual behavior. This is very different from porn where women and men are doing blatantly sexual things with their bodies. The qualm I have with modesty talks is that I feel they teach women, and the men who overhear, that women's bodies are sexual. Period.

My question is, when and where does it stop? Burqas are a clear indicator of what can happen when women's bodies are viewed as purely sexual. In her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi discusses the wearing of the veil and burqa to some length. The setting is Iran. Khomeini and his supporters have already overthrown the Shah. Khomeini has made the wearing of the veil, then the burqa compulsory. Nafisi hosts a weekly literature class at her home for a number of handpicked students. A student of Nafisi's tells her that one day she and some schoolmates were standing on the sidewalk eating apples. Some guards standing nearby approached and then told the girls they were eating their apples too seductively. What?!

I, like most normal mothers, want to teach my daughter to dress in ways that are appropriate; ways that represent her as a multi-faceted human being with a wide range of characteristics. I want to teach her how to protect herself; to warn her of the dangers of being alone at night or in certain places, of date rape, of drugs and alcohol, and how to be a good judge of character (but even these things, unfortunately, do not stop rape from happening. Only would-be rapists can do that.). I want to teach her to be careful, because even though her body is certainly not to blame, some people out there are just sick perverts who have been conditioned to absolve themselves of all responsiblity.

In Toni Morison's book, The Bluest Eye, Pecola is a poor girl frequently told by people and by her culture that because she is black, she is ugly . More than anything, she wishes for a pair of blue eyes in order to rectify the situation. Then, she believes, she would be beautiful. Her friends, Frieda and Claudia, also black, are aware that the view that blackness equals ugly is a common one, but they have the wonderful gift of knowing that "the Thing to fear" isn't why they don't fit the beauty criteria, it is the Thing that teaches others that blacks are ugly and whites are beautiful. I hope to teach Lissie that it is the same with her body. The Thing to fear is not her body, but the thing that renders all girls' and womens' bodies as purely sexual.