Modesty Survey: Conservative Clothing Helps on Dates

JERUSALEM — British researchers have dis­cov­ered what sen­si­ble men have always known:

Strik­ing the right bal­ance between reveal­ing too much and being too con­ser­v­a­tive in how much skin is on show has long been a dilemma for women when choos­ing the right out­fit for a night out.

How­ever, a study by experts at the Uni­ver­sity of Leeds has come to the res­cue by cal­cu­lat­ing the exact pro­por­tion of the body that should be exposed for opti­mum allure…

Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who cov­ered up.

How­ever, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that show­ing too much flesh puts men off because it sug­gests they might be unfaithful.

Psy­chol­o­gist Dr Colin Hen­drie, who led the study, told the Daily Mail: “Any more than 40 per cent and the sig­nal changes from ‘allure’ to one indi­cat­ing gen­eral avail­abil­ity and future infi­delity.” (empha­sis added)

Although I agree with the find­ings of the study, there are a few issues with the method­ol­ogy. Of course, it is impos­si­ble to con­trol for the hun­dreds of vari­ables that occur dur­ing inter­per­sonal reac­tions in a club. There are poten­tially untold num­bers of rea­sons why one woman would be approached more or less often than another.

In addi­tion, the inten­tion of the men observed must be taken into account — were they look­ing for a one-night stand or some­thing mean­ing­ful? It would have been impos­si­ble for the researchers to dis­cern this. (More on this later.)

Still, the for­est is cor­rect even if they were some issues with the trees. Teenage girls and women who wear extremely-revealing cloth­ing can always be cat­e­go­rized as one or more of the following:

• They have low self-esteem and want inter­est from men to make them feel bet­ter about themselves.
• They have low self-esteem and think their looks are the only pos­i­tive qual­ity they possess.
• They are — for lack of a bet­ter term — sluts who are look­ing for action.
• Service-sector employ­ees like wait­resses and bar­tenders who are look­ing for good tips.

As I noted in a prior post, teenage girls and women are much more attrac­tive when they dress mod­estly and con­ser­v­a­tively — what is unseen is always more sexy and allur­ing than what is seen. A sense of mys­tery cre­ates desire. For exam­ple, I have always thought that Israeli girls in Jerusalem — where I once lived and will shortly live again — are gen­er­ally much more attrac­tive than the “hot” women in Israel in Tel Aviv. (The pic­ture posted above is an exam­ple of the type of cloth­ing that modern-Orthodox Israeli girls may wear.)

In addi­tion, a conservatively-attired woman will attract a bet­ter class of men. The British researchers in the posted arti­cle noted that women in the club who cov­ered up too much were approached less often. The rea­son is obvi­ous: drunk guys in clubs are look­ing for one-night stands, and they know sub­con­sciously that a modestly-dressed girl will likely not be inter­ested in mean­ing­less sex. (Not one of my mar­ried friends met his or her future spouse in a bar or club.) The researchers would have found that a con­ser­v­a­tive dress was more ben­e­fi­cial in a dat­ing envi­ron­ment other than a bar or nightclub.

The cited study reports that women should leave forty per­cent of their skin uncov­ered if they want to attract atten­tion in a club. I would posit that women should cover more if they want to attract a qual­ity guy anywhere.

Related: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay, Fash­ion­able Mod­esty, and The Return of Mod­esty.

(Hat tip: Vox Day)