Right before I left for
The book was A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.
I wasn’t sure if this was a hint or not as to which side of the “lost virtue” I was riding. I awkwardly took the book and stuck it in my suitcase.
A few days into my first week in
The first chapter I went in extremely skeptical, ready to have the author bash me over the head with tales of covering one’s ankles and lowering one’s eyes. And there was some of this, though, I began to realize, not in the way I had anticipated.
I am now halfway through the book and thoroughly engrossed. While I am still hesitant to be “on her [the author’s] side” about everything because I have grown up in a society that tells me men are no better than women, nor different, she has some very interesting points to make about that very notion.
Her argument, in a nutshell, then, is this:
Neither the far left nor the far right are correct about the gender wars. There are two extremes to the idea: that either there is no biological or emotional difference between men and women (thus erasing the need for modesty, enforcing men to behave “boorishly” and women to behave like men because [and I will sound like a broken record on this] they are no different) or there is no need to have a discussion about it because if boys act rough, it’s because boys will be boys and women just have to deal with it.
She cites personal experiences, articles, essays, quotations from ancient etiquette books and modern teen-girl fashion magazines, as well as philosophers, significant authors, and personal interviews, blending it all in an academic tone that, for me at least, had highly personal applications.
While she tends to repeat herself, citing the same ideas almost word-for-word from chapter to chapter, her evidence is thorough and compelling with a splash of humor and sarcasm that keeps the reading of a somewhat “boring” topic interesting to someone who is not required by a class grade to read the thing in the first place.
I wish I had begun underlining poignant sentence before I got so far in, but I will try to recap on some ideas that struck me.
She reminisces about sex education and how children in kindergarten were being taught what an orgasm was, and how girls in second grade were instructed to put condoms on the fingers of the boys in class “so they would know how to do it properly when the time comes,” as it inevitably must.
She has countless interviews with young girls, generally ages 13 to 16, who had sex, “Because I thought I was supposed to.” Her argument against sex education—or at least sex education in its current form and especially the age at which it is introduced—is that it tells children how to “behave like adults” before they even understand how to behave like children, thus tarnishing if not prematurely destroying a certain sense of innocence necessary to a healthy life.
Another thing that caught my attention was the concept that women are no different than men. When she suggested that there were biological differences between the sexes in one of her college lectures, she was literally laughed into silence.
This strikes me personally for a few reasons.
As a teenager watching my parents go through divorce, it killed me every time I saw my mother struggle to do something my dad had always done with ease. I remember one time she was trying to put a shelf up on the wall and it either fell down or ripped out of the plaster. She screamed, throwing the screw driver in frustration, and started crying.
From these events, I learned that to not know how to do things that men knew how to do was to become dependent on them. Since I never, ever wanted to go through the hell of marriage, let alone the hell of divorce, I assumed that in order to be a successful, independent woman, I must know how to be a man.
Especially since my mother—and generally, all women I knew—showed frustration, sadness, even anger, in the form (generally) of tears, and since my father—and generally, all men—showed it through silence, I also took the stoic route to be the acceptable one. I made a rule for myself: no crying. This worked so well that years later, when I wanted to cry, I found that I could not. I’m slowly re-adopting the habit, because it feels pretty damn good.
The point is, by observation, it seemed the most logical route to act “manly” in order to survive. I started wearing boots, I started carrying knives, I became extremely uncomfortable in the presence of emotional women, even friends or relatives who were extremely important to me. I refused to let a man open a door for me unless I could reciprocate by opening the following door for him. If I knew there was no following door, I would not allow him to open it.
I knew that I was not a man—hence the self-protective instruments of knives and pepper spray, which I kept illegally on my person even in banks or at school—but I knew that to appear “weak”—a.k.a. “feminine”—meant a lifetime of being inadequate, incapable, and on the verge of tears, a position I found both unappealing and insulting.
I was falling for this “women are essentially no different than men” idea. I kissed a few boys in high school, but I made sure not to date them. I remember kissing one boy in particular—he pulled back and I smiled and made as if to drive off. He asked, “Are you okay with this?” and I said, “Of course.” And he replied, still unsure, “And you don’t expect, like…a relationship, right?” And I shook my head, still smiling. He murmured, “Awesome,” and got out of the car.
I was proud of myself in that moment. I could be as casual about physical intimacy (although, since it was just a kiss it didn’t seem to matter that much anyway) as any man. And there was no way I would end up on the kitchen floor crying over a shelf that I could not install.
In a way, this did “protect” me. I didn’t get my heart broken because I kept everyone away with my knives and my boots and my “don’t fuck with me” attitude. But, in a way, my “hang ups”—something that the author of the book gets into shortly—are what truly kept me safe.
I developed a weird philosophy. I didn’t want to get married. And of course I wanted to have sex. But the whole “thou shalt not have sex before thou art legally wed” thing just wouldn’t shake loose. So I kind of just coasted along with the occasional unsatisfying kiss and didn’t really mind all that much being alone. I was comfortable in my own head, and I had really good boots.
Here’s the big but.
If a man were chivalrous towards me—opening a door, paying for my coffee, whatever—I would feel a warm glow of appreciation followed by a quick bark of snarkiness with a flash of the image of a shelf on the floor. I could open my own damn door. I could pay for my own coffee. How ‘bout I buy you a latte? Feel pretty patronized, don’tchya?
I met guys in college that were cute, funny, even polite. But since I wasn’t really “looking” for anyone, no one really got past the blockade.
The spring semester of my sophomore year was—up to that point in my life at least—the most…gosh, I don’t even know, is there one word for “exhausting, emotionally-wrenching, and sanity-crushing?” I took on more than I could chew, but since I had, in fact, bitten it off, I was determined to prove that I could finish it all, and finish it up to my usual standards.
I was the director of photography and editor on one film, the writer and director of another, the assistant director of another, acted in two others, and there’s probably a few that I’m forgetting. I’ve listed my insane work habits before, so I won’t bore you with more details.
At that time, someone happened to become involved in all the same film projects that I was. They’d show up to check how things were going on and I would say, “Thank God, could you go put up the HMI?” and then they’d end up staying an additional eight hours for nothing more than a cup of coffee and a quick hug of gratitude.
This person also tended to be in the editing room late at night and would drive me over to my apartment so I could grab my coffeemaker, filters, and French Vanilla Cream, as well as mugs and spoons, to take back to the editing room so I wouldn’t pass out in the middle of cutting together zombie-porn-star-action-sequences.
When my arms were full, I would allow this person to open doors for me. Then, even when I had nothing to carry, I’d find myself engaged in conversation with this person, and since their arms were longer, they would happen to get to the handle first. Eventually, it just became habit for them to be the one to open doors.
I remember a particular night when all hell was breaking loose for the third time. I fast-walked outside and sat on the loading dock trying to breathe, trying to stay awake, trying to solve six problems at once, trying to find the will to not collapse.
This person came outside and sat next to me and didn’t say anything. And after a few minutes I leaned against this person and said, “Your hugs are kind of a daily essential.”
After another few minutes of quiet conversation, I was calm enough to go back inside and carry on.
I spent the majority of the summer at this person’s house, watching movies, going to the beach or the pool or reading books or falling asleep against them on the couch. Then, since we both had family in
And it was there that a comment from my mother finally shook me.
“So you like him.”
I called my sister that night and explained to her that I couldn’t like him, it wasn’t possible, because I had boots and I carried knives and I could install shelves, damn it. She asked me if I liked him and I told her it didn’t matter. I choked up in the middle of saying, “After what happened with mom and dad, what am I supposed to think?”
She told me she was happy that I was crying because she hadn’t heard me cry in years. That must mean I really like him.
When it was time to head back to LA, he and I left at around 9 at night to avoid the heat of the
Five hours in, I fell asleep against his shoulder. And he didn’t say a word.
So there I was, inadvertently snuggling, such a girly thing to do. And I was feeling all mushy and whimsical. Snap out of it! I demanded. You’ve already decided what you want, and falling in love is so not in the contract for the life you drafted when you were sixteen.
I didn’t understand how I—a fair bit of a feminist, though by no means lesbian, butch, or extremist—found the company of a particular male to be not only enjoyable, but conducive to a greater level of happiness than I had previously felt from my knives or my pepper spray.
How the hell was I supposed to be strong and independent if I was in love? Didn’t women fall apart when that happened? Didn’t they revert to being needy and fluffy and God forbid—weak?
I sat down with him and had the “let’s just be friends” talk, as awkward and horrible as it was.
A week later, he sat me down and had the “I’m okay just being friends but with the amount of time we spend together, we’re practically already in a relationship” talk.
And then a week later I said, “Fine,” and folded my knife back into its sheath to give this whole “relationship” thing a test-drive. I fully expected him to majorly disappoint me within the week, thereby giving me an excuse to say, “See, world, I told you so,” and thereafter completely and permanently forswear romantic notions of every kind.
As you are probably more aware than you want to be, Phil and I are still together almost 6 months later.
There was even a point this past semester when several very, very large things had gone very, very wrong all within about 24 hours. I had a massive amount of work to do that night that had nothing to do with the several crises that had cropped up, and, looking at an e-mail from my dad about some financial things, I felt my eyes burn with those “can’t-install-shelves” tears.
I walked, somewhat composed outside, made it to the parking lot, and started sobbing. Not because crying would fix anything, but because I could not think of anything better to do. I thought I had mostly composed myself and started walking back to the editing room from whence I’d come, only to discover that Phil had noticed my absence, wandered outside, and somehow instinctively known which direction I’d gone.
Hoping to brush past him with a question about something that would avoid the fact that I’d been crying mere moments before, I found that before he could even finish, “Are you okay?” I had slumped into his chest and started bawling into his sweatshirt all over again.
He practically carried me over to the nearest wall and sat down and held me and I just kept blubbering into his shirt, “I can’t take this anymore.”
As an independent, modern young woman, my behavior made no sense even at the time. There was nothing he could do to solve my problems. There was nothing that crying could do to solve my problems. And here I was, face pressed childishly against his chest as if to hide from the magnitude of everything I could not control, as if, for a moment, he could take the brunt of what was crushing me.
Realizing the stupidity of this course of action, I eventually made myself stop crying, told Phil with unquestionable authority that I was fine, and that we should get back to work.
Because the problem is, I have a history telling me that I am now doomed to be the woman crying over a shelf. And I couldn’t let that happen. So it was well past time to back off the tempting, but totally forbidden idea of “needing” him in any capacity. It was pleasant to be in a relationship. But that was all I could allow it to be. Pleasant. I could not allow myself to become so deeply attached that the removal of him from my daily existence would cause anything more than a moment’s logical, objective reflection.
Men never care if women come and go from their lives. My father certainly never cried over his divorce that I ever saw, and I assumed he was a representative of the whole of his gender. If 28 years of marriage didn’t make him bat an eye, and if I was trying to be like him, trying to figure out how to change the oil in the car and figure out taxes and financially support myself, then I would learn one way or another how to be as unaffected.
I only mention these specific examples of my parents’ varied reactions to their own divorce to highlight how they affected my actions for the next five years. While I wished to remain completely unaffected by either of them, being the angry victim, I have since discovered that I am now more like them than I think I normally would have been. I have also discovered this is not necessarily a bad thing. And because I love them both dearly, the reminiscence on a terrible period of all our lives’ is no longer painful, merely helpful in understanding what I have become.
So, onward-ho.
This does relate back to sex, and sex relates back to gender difference.
I thought my whole “I don’t want to have sex before marriage” thing was a “hang-up,” a residual soap scum spot on my brain from my religious upbringing, a religion I still claim, if shakily. But I have always tried to base decisions of this type and magnitude not just on what is or isn’t allowed by my religion, but whether or not I thought it made sense in light of what I knew to be true of both the world and myself as a unique individual.
This was always one I had no idea how to approach.
There seemed to be a sort of Pros and Cons list.
Pros:
- Sex seems to be awesome. Everyone likes sex.
- Sex brings people closer together, I’ve heard, not only physically, but emotionally, and in some iffy cases, “spiritually.”
- Sex is awesome.
Cons:
- Pregnancy.
- Disease.
- Not as awesome as everyone says it is.
- Heartbreak.
- Religious no-no.
So, since the Cons always outweighed the Pros by a few points, I stuck with the not-having-of-it. Plus, to be honest, there was never really anyone I wanted to give up my virginity for. Sorry guys, nothing personal.
The very round-about point of all this is everyone has been looking at everything entirely backwards.
Some realizations resolving in new definitions:
- Women are not men. Men are not women. Biologically, physically, emotionally. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it’s just true.
- As a woman, I do not need to pretend that, at 5’4” and 110 pounds, I am as strong as any man. I am not. There are limitations to what I can do.
- However, I need not pretend to be a man in order to be strong.
- As a woman, it is not sexist to expect that a man keep in consideration the fact that, in general, he could overpower almost any woman. It is not sexist to expect that he will choose not to.
- Needing someone is terrifying because it gives them the power to withhold from you that which you need (and no, I’m not talking about sex here).
- Love is the negation not of need, but of despair. Love is the negation of stoicism.
- Sex, while technically nothing more than a physical act, is also a physical expression. It can be used to say, “I think you are attractive,” or “I don’t remember your name, but thank you for this experience.” It can also be used to say, “I love you.”
- Marriage, therefore, is not that which “allows” one to have sex. It is that which negates the fear inherent in need and also the fear inherent in sex. It promises, “I know your name, I know your face, and I choose to preserve for our lifetime that which you have given to me in trust.”
I always thought I was bitter about love, bitter about marriage, bitter about divorce, bitter about people. I think what I was really bitter about what the inescapable sadness that surrounded everything I had once associated with joy.
Wendy Shalit, the author of A Return to Modesty says that women act like men because they are told there is no difference between them, that they will be most liberated if they stop thinking of themselves as feminine, as inferior in any way to the male gender.
While this is, on the surface, a noble assumption, at least the part about not being inferior to men, it is a dangerous way to phrase things.
These are some quotations from her book that caught my attention:
Camille Paglia says that “what is needed now…[is] more pornography, better pornography. Pornography everywhere!” But in interviews she is often described as walking down the street with her two bodyguards, a detail that to me is fascinating. She promotes pornography, safe behind her bodyguards, while the rest of us have to live in a pornographic culture without bodyguards. We who cannot afford bodyguards depend on men to treat us well on the street when we are walking alone, not to rape us or stalk us. We depend, in other words, on male respect for the fact that we probably want to be more sexually discriminating than they. A respect for female modesty was a woman’s natural bodyguard, invisible and free of charge. Thanks to the attack on modesty, and the attack on male respect for it, now only rich or famous women can feel safe…. If our culture always expects young women to be playing with their sexual power, always at the ready for the advances of anyone, this means they never have the right to say “no.” (54)
How do girls today handle it when they don’t want to? Not very well at all. A young author explains why she had first intercourse at 13: “Why not, since everyone seems to think you’re a slut anyway, just prove them right? Why not flirt and f— around with strangers?” She writes that she had sex with married men in the back of buses just because she had “nothing to say” to them “that wouldn’t be rude.” She “endlessly found [herself] in identical situations where it was easier to just f— them than to say no.” (54)
What kind of women do we want to become? And, for that matter, what kind of men do we want to become? These are not questions you are supposed to ask nowadays, and certainly with good reason. In a free society, nobody wants to interfere with anyone’s business. Being told how to conduct one’s personal life is extremely irritating. So everybody wants everybody to be able to do everything, to be whatever they want to be, with whomever they want. The interesting thing, however, is that in our own lives, we usually cannot be every kind of woman or every kind of man—we usually have to make a choice. We have to decide what to do in this particular car, bedroom, or hotel, with this particular person, at this particular time.
Our well-justified fear of interfering in other people’s business has resulted in a sad, and a little-remarked-upon reality: that a girl, when she is making this choice—when she is deciding what kind of woman she will become and how to handle the men who appear in her life—can expect virtually no guidance. She will be utterly alone when it comes to what may be the question of utmost importance in her life. And when it comes to teaching the boys how to treat women, they for the most part will be left alone, too. (76)
Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him you’re an independent person.
….Meanwhile, women all around the country, women who have already had numerous sexual affairs, are descending on nineteenth-century period dramas—at the cinemas, on PBS, anywhere they can catch a glimpse of Jane Austen’s Emma or Elizabeth—with a kind of religious seriousness that would be comical if it weren’t so poignant. While we may confess to each other our romantic hopes, we dare not go public with our thoughts. We are so afraid of being though “unbalanced.” (94)
Havelock Ellis wrote in 1899, “Without modesty, we could not have, nor rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candor which is at once the final revelation of love and the seal of its sincerity.” (96)
The argument from external authority labels a man as evil if he date-rates or sexually harasses a woman. From the standpoint of modesty, he is behaving abominably, but more crucially, he is really missing the whole point. (104)
…women who keep falling short, discovering how unlike men we are. Modesty acknowledged this special vulnerability, and protected it. It made women equal to men as women. Encouraged to act immodestly, a woman exposes her vulnerability and she then becomes, in fact, the weaker sex. A woman can argue that she is exactly the same as a man, she may deny having any special vulnerability, and act accordingly, but I cannot help noticing that she usually ends up exhibiting her feminine nature anyway, only this time in victimhood, not in strength. (108)
Have you ever wondered why Andrea Dworkin spills so much ink trying to prove that romantic love is a ‘mythic celebration of female negation,” and why marriage is more properly understood as “legalized rape”? Why should she care so much if women still harbor romantic longings and want to commit themselves to one man for life? I suspect is is because wherever a woman’s romantic hopes are allowed to exist, sexual modesty can never be far behind. If she is not made to feel immediately ashamed of her romantic hopes, who knows what could happen? (112)
Andrea, 28, tells me, “I’ve often wondered why, when I see men crowded helplessly around the pornographic magazine section, I never feel hostility toward them—but, rather, just sorry for them.” The problem with the game of obscenity is that it is essentially a lonely game. And perhaps this is why the man doesn’t really win, in the end, because it’s pitiful for a man to admit that he hasn’t grown up, that he cannot relate to a woman in any more interesting ways. So vulgarity is a man’s game, one that the man seems to win, but in the long run one might say women and men both end up the poorer by playing it. Women, I think, are trying to play the wrong game. We try to be as vulgar as possible, because we have been told that this is the proof of our “liberation,” and invariably we wind up feeling excluded. Well, we are excluded—that is the point. (120)
Could Rousseau have been right in saying that when the differences between the sexes are appreciated, each sex needs the other, and when women pretend to be men, men tend to need them less? (120)
Demi Moore can go around all she wants saying, as she does in the 1997 film G.I. Jane, “Suck my dick,” but the fact remains, she doesn’t have one. Why are women today taking all their cues from what the men do, trying to play all their games—even to the ridiculous point of pretending we have the anatomy which we do not, in fact, have? I thought feminism was supposed to be against penis envy. (120)
“Pffffft!” sexual modesty says to the world, “I think I’m worth waiting for, and worth concealing. So not you, not you, not you, and not you either.” (131)
A modestly dressed woman is one who is too important for “public use.” On the other hand, it is bragging and exhibitionism which we instinctively associate with insecurity. As Norman Lam points out: “You meet a person who is always bragging, always talking about his own achievements, boasting of his attractiveness or intelligence or talent or wealth, and you know intuitively that you have just me a person who despises himself.” (132)
Perhaps there is a difference between the pride that counts as one of the deadly sins (the outer, boastful variety that is concerned with what others think, often called vanity) and the pride that comes from inner sense of dignity—modest pride? (132)
Even before a child is capable of whispering a secret, he is always capable of playing Peekaboo. It is the most basic human game. Before “I think, therefore I am,” there is something else: “I hide, therefore I am.” Because I can withhold myself, this proves I exist. This is why Peekaboo is so delightful to a baby—because it involves the discovery that there is a self to withhold. (134)
If nothing is secret, nothing is sacred. (136)
If all girls suddenly announced they would not sleep with boys until they quit the gangs and gave them engagement rings, society could very well change overnight, but if the boys made a similar announcement about the girls, everybody would probably burst out laughing. (149)
I know that was quite a large chunk of quotations, but it seemed like a good span of the first third of her argument (I haven’t finished the book yet).
I guess what intrigues me most is there they may be a logical explanation as to why I neither work as a woman nor as a man. I have never felt comfortable with the “pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen” ideal of a woman, nor the “suck my dick” mentality of liberated (wo)manhood.
Perhaps there is a balance. And perhaps the balance begins with a sincere look at the idea of two things: true, natural gender differences, and a respect for those differences by each sex of its own unique build and the incomprehensible but no less important differences of the other.
I am still going to wear boots. I like boots. I am still going to carry knives because I like knives. I am still going to chop wood and carve leather and adore trucks because those are “traditionally masculine” things that I happen to enjoy regardless of my gender. I am also going to continue to sew and paint and cook and write and by golly I am going to enjoy the fact that I am a full foot shorter than Phil and therefore the perfect size for snuggling.
Sometimes when I hug Phil, I stand on his feet. My dad used to stand me on his feet and dance me around the kitchen—heck, he still does it sometimes. I associate that with a protective sort of affection; a recognition of my status as beloved and cherished.
I think Phil thought it was odd the first few times I did it. And what I couldn’t articulate then was that I wouldn’t stand on just anyone’s feet. That was a right that had to be earned.
I have no idea if there is a “correct” way to deal with loss. Maybe crying over a broken shelf was exactly the way my mother needed to express her grief. Maybe my dad sitting silently in his chilly transition-apartment was the way he could best process the rapid turn of events.
Maybe my shell of indifference was what I needed to get through high school.
Both of my parents are happily re-married and I am finally happy for them. My mother has picked up playing sports with her husband—golf, tennis, swimming. And my father attends all the UW women’s basketball games even though his step-daughter has graduated and no longer plays on the team. The shelf-crying has been packed away. The silence is replaced with the sounds of a life continued.
Phil, by being nothing less than reliable, became my most valuable friend, and in doing so, helped me pack away my bitterness. And when you find someone who is capable of doing that, you realize you would be insane to let them go.
The modern world is treacherous because it is undefined. It has no rules, it is “liberated.” Liberation, it seems, is just another word for anarchy. I have often talked about feeling “rootless” or “adrift.” I have not known my place in the world and I have not been alone in that feeling. While I have always been one to chafe at excessive rules, I think perhaps a few of them are good. After all, the law of gravity holds us down. But if it didn’t, we’d burn in the weightless atmosphere. I think the exhilaration of those few moments of flight could not compare to a lifetime of being anchored.
Perhaps I am waxing philosophical in areas I know nothing about. But I do know that this is the least frustrated I have felt for as far back as I can remember. That has got to count for something.
To all those with a strong opinion, a question, or a comment about being a man, being a woman, having sex, not having sex, marriage, divorce, or life in general, I invite all inquiries and discussion. I have learned the value of not keeping silent.
Just for the record, the "crying shelf" episode WAS much more about grief than about any kind of womanly inability to do certain things. As I recall, the shelf did eventually get hung. There was some inexperience with hanging shelves that motivated it, but I have since become quite handy with an electric screwdriver. You know, just for the record.
ReplyDeleteGreat essay.
Fabulous article, looking forward to following your story, so similar to my own inner dialogue many years ago.
ReplyDelete