COMMENTARY: In defense of modesty

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ It should be possible to support the rights of women and oppose […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ It should be possible to support the rights of women and oppose all sexual and physical abuse and all verbal harassment and thus be a feminist. However, for some ideologically rigid feminists that does not seem to be enough. To be orthodox in one’s feminism _ at least in some views _ one must hold that there are no differences between men and women. As feminist Andrea Dworkin puts it,”`man’ and `woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs.” This is so much nonsense, of course.


If there is no difference between women and men, it follows that sex means the same thing for women as it does for men. Romance and love must be rejected in favor of sexual equality _ which means sex dominated by male values and behavior.

Many people will say no one seriously believes such baloney. In fact, however, it is the unchallenged wisdom of sex education classes, the women’s magazines,”gender”classes at colleges and universities and college polices mandating mixed-gender dorms and mixed-gender bathrooms.

For predatory males this is good news indeed. Women are just like the other guys, so let’s treat them like the other guys. This kind of feminism in the name of total equality actually creates an environment where forced sex of one sort or another is OK _ and then complains about the result of its own work.

When I recently remarked to an interviewer that women are much better novelists then men because, on the average, they have a better feel for the crucial details of setting and relationships, he warned me that such a comment would get me in trouble with the feminists. Well, if it does, so be it. I defy anyone to find a male novelist who can write like Alice McDermot in her”Charming Billy”or Anna Quindlen in her”One True Thing.” An effective answer to the Dworkins of our age is Wendy Shalit’s”A Return to Modesty.”Shalit is 24 years old, outspoken, funny, very bright and very Jewish. Her book is a delight, if for no other reason than that one can laugh as she devastates the conventional”sexual revolution”wisdom about the genders. Modesty, she argues, exists as a protection against predatory males. Take it away and women are even more defenseless.

When she is told she is beautiful and therefore will have many men, she replies,”What if I want only one?”When told she will have to work very hard to become a real woman, she responds that she feels she already is one.

She observes that half of the young women she knows have broken hearts over break-ups with casual lovers and the other half are desperately seeking such lovers. “We seemed to have spawned a generation of girls whose thwarted feminine nature is reasserting itself in grotesquely distorted forms _ in food hang-ups (that culturally acceptable way to create social distance), in self-mutilation (often and poignantly directed … at the most unacceptable parts of their bodies) or in charges of sexual harassment and date rape. Perhaps we’re learning after 30 years of trying harder that a young woman’s hopes are simply very hard to suppress. That the search for love cannot be so easily condescended to.” Some of the feminists, she argues,”drill into our heads … (that) being as promiscuous as any man is … a badge of one’s liberation. But why, then, do so many young women end up sounding like victims today? Though now it is considered sexist to admit that women are naturally more vulnerable than men in any way, it seems it is precisely denying a woman’s special vulnerability and stripping her of her natural way of compensating for it that is the height of true misogyny.” The so-called sexual revolution, she argues, is in great part very hard on women, and wonderful for men. It assumes those sexual attitudes which were in earlier ages thought to be typical of women were in fact imposed on them by men. Destroy these attitudes and women are free _ and defenseless. Free to be exploited by men who argue that a woman’s resistance to casual sex is merely a hang-up.

Liberation this is not. Whether Wendy Shalit represents a new wave of”fourth generation”feminism remains to be seen. However, because she is clever, unafraid, and outspoken, her voice is going to be heard for a long time ridiculing the lunacies _ and dangerous lunacies at that _ of previous generations of feminists.


There are certain similarities between Shalit and Monica Lewinsky _ both are young, attractive, smart, and Jewish. But the former writes in defense of modesty; the latter seems utterly innocent of its existence. As a Hebrew saying quoted by Shalit puts it,”Ein b’not yisreael hefker”_”the daughters of Israel are not available for public use.” Yeah! And that should include those daughters of Israel who are Christian too.

DEA END GREELEY

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