Product Description

At the same time that young women today enjoy the right to unparalleled opportunities, the author, Wendy Shalit, argues there has been a marked increase in sexual harassment and date-rape. This book explores the philosophical debate over modesty and knocks down the accompanying myths one by one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #395148 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review
Florence King"National ReviewA Return to Modesty is,.".so uncompromising in voice and stance that one is tempted to think of its author as Simone de Shalit or Wendy Wollstonecraft, but make no mistake: she imitates nothing and no one...Every page of this book [is] wise, fresh, and funny, sparkling with her special brand of astringent charm.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant critique of popular culture.
Shalit has done a brilliant job of exposing some of the underlying myths and assumptions that prop up our culture. I could not sum up her book in the 1,000 words Amazon allow for reviews, but here are three particular gems of quotes:

"In this post-sexual revolution era, a young woman may freely cohabit, but she may not choose to wait. If she does, there must be something wrong with her." (p.188)

"Which, really, is the more misogynist view: the view that for all of world history women have been idiots, or the view that gives women more credit, and thinks we have only gone overboard in the blip of the last thirty years?" (p.216)

"I'm struck by how similarly everyone behaves and sounds. It's fascinating, but also a but eerie, because ours is supposed to be a time of great freedom. And yet most people have **ended up letting the culture they live in dictate our choices**" (p.220)

Some will be offended by Shalit's book; but this, I would suggest, is because she has hit a nerve. Her call is not so much for a return to modesty but for a call for women (and men) to take a stand against the heady rush of popular culture and say, 'wait a moment, I want more than *that*'.

I cannot recommend this book more highly; it deserves a wide audience, and it deserves to shake many of us out of our complancency.

Fantastic book!
This is such a brilliant book I really hope Wendy Shalit writes more books in the near future. She is an incredibly witty writer and thereby manages to expose the confusions of libertarianism, political correctness and radical feminism without in fact being too rude to any individual proponents of these views. Sadly the converse is often not the case due to the insiduous philosophy that 'the personal is the political', which has given many radfems the 'right' to make very bitchy attacks on people with more conservative views rather than arguing seriously with them. Shalit is far, far more perceptive and intuitive than so many contemporary writers on women. Indeed, she has a very intuitive and feminine style of writing which is reminiscent of more old-fashioned Puritan feminists, and is a real breath of fresh air. By means of simply interviewing a range of people on their opinions and personal experiences of the sexual revolution, she is able to untangle all the strings that are attached to libertarian attitudes. There is no judgmentalism or finger-pointing in this book, and that is because it is securely based in essentialist views of gender which hark back to the Enlightenment (and possibly to the author's Jewish background). In other words, the author is secure in herself because her views are objective and not 'personal politics'. There is a problem here though. The author mentions Rousseau as one of the proponents of this essentialism. For all his talk of political freedom, Rousseau propounded a very restrictive education for girls, as did other French 'revolutionary' thinkers. (Liberty, equality, fraternity but not sorority.) His ideas are inadequate as a basis for a modern ethic of gender relations, not the least as he himself gave away his five illegitimate children to an orphanage - hardly the sort of behaviour the author would approve of! Neither is there much discussion of sociobiological views on the topic of modesty, i.e.that it was evolutionarily advantageous, in this book. Seeing as modesty is a social device for restraining men and avoiding unwanted pregnancies, one would expect such a discussion. Then again, her chapter on Male Modesty is a gem; there is so little writing of this kind around it's a pity. There are lots of women who would just melt at the way she says that 'to be a man is to be gentle around a woman'. Plus she makes the honest point that feminists fail to understand, that male modesty has never been valued or praised officially as much as female modesty, and indeed needs to be elicited by it. All in all, a funny, readable book and worth keeping for all the interviews and quotes.

a brilliant critique of contemporary immodesty
This is a brilliant, brilliant book! The cultural and educational etablishment - and those whose behaviour and mindsets have been formed by them - will be outraged ... which is good evidence that Wendy Shalit is right on the money. She shows the devastating effect that late-twentieth-century promiscuity has had on young women: almost unheard-off afflictions from anorexia and bulimia to self-inflicted injuries are now commonplace. So too are psychological problems. And the remedy that culture offers them: loosen up further on your sexuality; be 'comfortable with your body'. Shalit points out that natural embarrassment, when it is not rooted out by a culture that makes war on modesty, exists to tell us something, and that that something is important. A society which bares all (whether literally or metaphorically) is a society in which nothing is sacred and nothing is safe - particularly not women. Modesty makes dignity and 'self-esteem' possible ... without having to try and teach them or build them in after they have collapsed. I mean, isn't all this obvious anyway? How the heck do we imagine our ancestors managed for all these millennia without self-esteem classes to prevent them from cracking up? Answer: they didn't keep throwing their dignity and modesty away!

Of course, all of this is very upsetting for our cultural elite. If Miss Shalit is right - and she is - we will all have to live rather differently. We will recognise the majority of the output of our media and educational systems (to say nothing of the attitudes of government) for the harmful and pitiful trash that they are. Rather a lot of people have an awful lot invested in Wendy Shalit being wrong. Yet she shows, with example upon example upon example, the facile nature of 'pop culture's' concern with our 'self-esteem' whilst incessantly urging us to do the very things most likely to destroy it. Hence she cites a popular magazine in which a woman confesses to needing "constant reassurance from my lover that he really loves and wants me", whilst a few pages later telling women they should sleep around "just like men do".

Wendy Shalit's arguments are formidable indeed. What makes her wittily written debut book even more impressive is the fact that this young lady (and she would welcome that epithet) produced it while only one year out of college at the age of 23. Depressing for those of us with lesser talents, perhaps, but: read it! read it! read it!