From No Modesty to Modesty-Wear Clothing

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 fore­see 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 is one of the many teenage girls in Israel who are mod­ern Ortho­dox Jews — she 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: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay.