June 12, 2021 • 49 mins
Since ancient times, women have been advised to cover up in order to protect their dignity. More recently, a so-called "modesty movement" has gotten underway, and Cristen and Caroline undress how the "modest is hottest" message ultimately strips agency from women and men alike in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to Stephane.
Ever told you, but actually I heart radio. Would you
describe yourself as modest, Samantha, I will say that I'm
very self conscious, so it's not necessarily about modesty but insecurity.
(00:28):
But I think overall, yes, my dress is typically modest. Yeah,
I probably am. I went to your period where I
was really trying to push out of my comfort zone
and I was gonna like crop tops, short shorts, and
I look back on that period fondly, But the whole time,
I was like so tense. When I did, I felt
so nervous and uncomfortable, and I was like constantly straightening
(00:52):
things out, wondering what I looks like. So I I did.
I did struggle with that, and when I was growing up,
it was very difficult for me to go outside of
that boundary. Will Like my grandmother used to say, you
have an excellent figure, and it would like bring me
to tears since I was embarrassed. Yes, yes, but because
(01:13):
we were recently talking about the editing of yearbooks to
get rid of any sign of cleavage or shoulder, it's
just something I've been thinking about about that kind of
line where you can't win of either yeah, you're to
modest and prude or the opposite of that, and and
how there is this morality attached to modesty. But it
(01:34):
also made me think about forever ago, and we did
that many where we read the sex words how to
write sexy. Modesty is a word that is often used
for like nudity, like you cover your modesty or you
hide your modesty, which always kind of cracked me up.
(01:56):
It does seem really official. Yeah, it's just to me,
it feels like another example of how we're so uncomfortable
talking about sex. Yes, you gotta keep your modesty covered,
and it's usually typically always referred to for women. Yes, yes, Well,
we wanted to bring back this plastic episode looking into
(02:17):
the history of of modesty, So please enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stup works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline,
and today on the show, we're talking about modesty. And
(02:40):
before we get into the research that we found, we
first wanted to share what some of you think about
this issue of modesty. Um As we were researching, we
took to the Stuff Mom Never Told you Facebook page
and said, hey, what what are your thoughts on this
issue about telling girls to cover up? Um, about this
(03:02):
so called modesty movement taking place, and here are just
some samples of what some of you had to say. Yeah,
I have a note here from Elise, who brings up
weather and body image all in one fell swoop. She
says modesty is just a social construct. There's nothing inherently
wrong with bare skin. It is simply too hot where
(03:23):
I live to be fully covered all the time, and
I hate the double standard that allows men to go
shirtless while women cannot. That said, I personally tend to
wear a bit more clothing because society has successfully made
me ashamed of my five pounds overweight body. Caitlin brought
up something that a number of women also mentioned, which
is the issue of boobs. Especially if you have ample boobs,
(03:47):
it can be harder to adhere to certain modesty standards,
So Caitlin writes, I personally choose to dress more modestly.
I'm a bigger girl with a quote ample bosom, so
even the less revealing outfits can make me look a
him endowed. I have zero problem with women my size
or any size, wearing whatever they feel comfortable in. Though,
(04:09):
one of my dear friends, who is a little smaller
than me but still curvy, wears things that are so
low cut they would make me blush, but they look
amazing on her and she has the confidence to that
is the key. Yeah, and Jamie adds to this, talking
about how difficult it is to wear a skirt when
you are above average height. She says, even when I
stick with a knee length skirt, I've been accused of
(04:30):
showing too much. This is in the professional setting where
others are wearing much shorter skirts. Plus I'm on the
busty side, so I can't win either way. Yeah, as
a five nine almost five tin woman, I can definitely
empathize with the leg length issue. Jennifer McPherson, though, made
me laugh with her comment. Maybe this is why in
(04:51):
all of the quote future movies everyone pretty much just
wears the same jumpsuit problem solved. I used to have
a jumpsuit. I would totally wear a jumpsuit if a
it wasn't challenging to find one that fit because I
have a super long torso, and b if I could
actually pull off a jumpsuit, well yeah, no, mine was
(05:11):
definitely not like a fashion jumpsuit. Mine was part of
my April O'Neil Halloween costume. It was bright yellow. So
if that's if that's in in the post apocalyptic future,
then I'm all set and yeah, you're ready, You're ahead
of the curve. Well. I do think one thing that
was interesting about all of the comments, because there were
a lot of them in response to that question about modesty,
(05:33):
was how varied everyone's opinions were. We had a lot
of women firmly in the camp of modest as hottests,
and other women saying, you know, modesty is basically a
social construct, and other women saying, you know what, let's
just take all of our clothes off because this is ridiculous.
What's what's your opinion? Do you feel like people should
(05:56):
sew a certain line or just dress however makes them happy,
even if that's just like a big bikini top. What
do you think do you think? I think that there
are certain situations that call for certain types of outfits. Obviously,
if you want to wear a bikini top to a
job interview, you're probably not going to get that job,
unless you're interviewing for a lifeguard position or something like that.
(06:20):
And I'm all for women dressing in a way that
makes them feel comfortable and confident, whether that is a
turtleneck and a floor link skirt or a crop top
and short shorts. Um. I think what's maybe more important,
and what we'll get into more in the podcast, is
just checking ourselves on the way that we talk about modesty,
(06:42):
specifically to girls, Because even though there might be a
lot of good intentions with talking to girls about the
importance of covering them up, covering themselves up, and you know,
leaving things to the imagination, a lot of it is
often just framed as ultimately making sure that they are
appealing sexually. Two men. Right, what do you think, Caroline?
(07:06):
I mean, I I share, I share your opinion. I
think there's a time and a place for everything. I'm
not going to wear my pajama shirt to a job interview,
you know, or a tank top because I do have uh,
I am blessed in the bubular area, and so a
shirt that I might wear and find comfortable could actually
(07:27):
look to some people inappropriate in the workplace. Yeah, that's
the thing. Once we get into the lines of like
what is professional, that's when it does get hard because
you can say I should be able to wear whatever
I want. But then but also yes, like I I
hear that statement, and then I also think, well, there's
(07:49):
the whole argument and modesty, which will we will obviously
get into in this podcast talking about like, uh, covering
up for men or around men um, but also with
my clear leavage, I also want you looking at my face,
you know. So it's not even so much that I'm like,
I better protect myself by covering up. It's more like
I just don't want my boobs to be an issue
(08:11):
in every conversation I have. But is that then a
double standard if for someone like me who cleavage is
rarely an issue because it's mostly invisible, in which case
I could wear the lower cut top to the office
and people would probably still be looking me in the eye,
even though as a tall woman, if I'm wearing he
(08:32):
might be face to face with my boobs. But you
know what I mean, does that ever feel like a
frustrating double standard that if you are a more curvacious woman,
whether it is in the boobular region which is the
scientific term for it, or a little lower down in
the butler region, that issue becomes a lot more challenging
(08:54):
because it's like, well, then, what what am I supposed
to wear? Do I have to just cover up my
entire figure in order to be d A appropriate? I know,
I I I hate it. Yeah, I mean I will
it being all of it, the conversation about it, the
fact that we have to work so hard every morning
to pick out something from our closet to go to
work that's not in a pro And I don't mean
(09:15):
like Kristen and I going to work, I just mean
work in general. Yeah, you know, like it's it's such
a challenge, and women are told from the time they're
itty biddy little kids that they have to watch what
they wear and and watch how they dress around people,
especially boys and men. Yeah, and this entire head scratching
(09:36):
issue of how do we even talk about it? How
do we hash all this out? Is why we wanted
to do this episode in the first place, because clearly,
like I said, judging by the outpouring of Facebook commentary,
this is something that a lot of other women have
dealt with as well. So let's go way, way way
(09:58):
back in time. And first of all, I'll say that
when it comes to this very brief historical snapshot of modesty.
We're not really going to get very much into religion. Yeah,
that could be a whole other topic unto itself. There
were a lot of women on Facebook who brought up
things like, you know, veiling, traditional veiling in Islam, also
(10:22):
head covering in Judaism and even in some Christian denominations.
But that's not really what we want to get at. Yeah,
we're we're kind of gonna be focusing more in this
episode on the sniping that goes on between and among women,
more more so in a secular kind of viewpoint. Yeah,
(10:43):
not not to say that there aren't certainly religious undertones
to a lot of aspects of what is referred to
as the modesty movement. In my personal upbringing in an
Evangelical Christian home, modesty was a huge thing that was
always talked about. Um. But yeah, we're going to stick
to the more secular And we found this paper called
(11:05):
let Modesty Be Her Reignment by Tamina Tariq from two
thousand and She talks about the tradition of veiling in
the pre Christian Classical era, so focusing on like fourth
and third centuries BC, And it turns out that for
well to do women. In ancient Greece and Rome, veiling
(11:27):
or covering their hair was a way of a transporting
the private domestic space or the proper place for women
into the public, and doing so in a way that
protected the honor of her male guardians or father's husband's brothers,
and finally outwardly symbolizing the value of her virginity. I
(11:50):
think it's interesting that from the get go you have
something that a woman wears being tied into the honor
of a man that she is with um. But at
also this this isn't necessarily all women in these cultures.
People who were in the lower classes, including slaves and
peasants and others deemed inferior, would not have veiled their
(12:11):
hair because nobody cared whether they were of honor or
whether they were virgins. But if he were a woman
of means, you would certainly cover your hair with different
kinds of head coverings at the time that were called
faros him and nations and pep loose, and all of
this was really to prevent the possibility of men looking
(12:34):
at the sensualized parts of her body, because in addition
to veiling, she would also wear what we would think
of is very modest clothing, but it was important that
the hair also be covered because that was also a
highly sensualized part and still is of the female body.
And by essentially blocking those off from view, the thought was, well,
(12:56):
then that would lower the chances of him fantasizing about her,
which even just in the fantasy realm, would demean her. Well, now, Kristen,
you wrote about this whole hair issue on stuff I
Never told you dot com, and I think it's interesting
to bring up why hair was so sexualized during this time. Yeah,
if you go back to ancient Greece, Hippocrates, for instance,
(13:18):
had this theory that when men and women had sexual
intercourse that his semen would actually be directed into a
woman's hair. So our long flowing hair is just a
mass of semen magnets and that, and so in that way,
(13:43):
women's hair was seen as a symbolic extension of our genitalia.
That is just so weird and like the opposite of
Okham's razor, Like why is semen filling up your hair?
Like the simplest explanation for I don't know, because where
else would it go? I guess I needed us that
need at someplace, Yes, where else would it else couldn't
(14:03):
go But this is also side note, and I feel
like we need to do a whole podcast on this
because I want to learn more. This also was very
much linked to the tradition of a bride wearing a
veil because she, you know, has her face covered by
the veil. She's walking down the aisle, and in that way,
her sexuality is still intact and preserved, but then broken
(14:26):
when the husband lifts it up just to gaze on her.
It was the power of the male gaze. They got
the power of the mail gaze all the way back
in ancient Greece and Rome. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know,
we already talked about how women would wear headcoverings to
go out to protect their honor and everything when they
went out of the house, to extend that private sphere
into public. And so why wearing that veil. The bride
(14:47):
is being protected if she's handed off from the one
man in her life to the other man in her life. Well,
in addition to us walking around with these uh all
these seamen magnets on our head a k air hair,
this was also a time when women were people were
very concerned about protecting women's honor and sort of covering
(15:07):
up all signs of our sexuality, because this was also
an era when women were presumed to be sexually aggressive
and prone to hysteria, and we would essentially go wild
if we weren't being physically attend to do well enough. Well, so,
in that argument, it only makes sense that women should
dress modestly. If we're so aggressively sexual and we're always
(15:30):
trying to trap a man into having sex with us
and like doing things to our hair and whatever, well,
obviously we should veil ourselves and cover ourselves up, right. Yeah, yeah,
there are There are all sorts of conflicting messages. That's
still though, echo today in a lot of the modesty
messages that girls and women are being taught. And there
(15:55):
was a quote from to Minatrig's paper that jumped out
to me. Uh. She said, neither the veil nor its
usage has ever been monolithic. The discourse of modesty, shame,
and protection, however, has always been present. Uh. And and
those three things, modesty, shame, and protection are very much interwoven.
(16:16):
In that relationship between those three factors, I think is
a big reason why we have all of these sort
of questions about modesty today. Well, yeah, and speaking of
the modesty movement today, when you move into the late
nineties and early two thousands, you start to see a
lot of literature being published on women remaining modest, dressing
(16:40):
modestly and how that will benefit them both out in
society and in their relationships with men. Yeah, there's Wendy Shallotte,
whose name comes up all the time. She's actually been
referred to as the mother of the modesty movement, and
in her first book, A Return to Modesty, she wrote
many of the problem ONMS we hear about today, sexual harassment,
(17:02):
date rape are connected to cultures attack on modesty. And
I believe that came out in And I remember this
clearly because I was in high school and this was
the era of low rise jeans and Britney Spears at
her peak before she shaved her head, and specifically Britney
(17:23):
Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing those low
slung pants, sparkly pants with the thong visible pulled out
from it, and how horrified everyone was by this. And
I remember also having like a conversation after conversation with
my mother about why it should be okay for me
(17:45):
to wear thongs and how horrified my mother was at
low rise jeans. There was a lot of modesty panic
at the turn of the millennium. Interesting. Yeah, I had to,
I definitely had to start buying thongs and buy I
I mean my mother bought them for because the jeans
I was wearing were so tight. See, my mother never
would have because I gave her, of course, the argument
(18:07):
of but visible panty line, and she said, no, no, no, no,
thongs are for sexual activity and you will not be
wearing them. But she finally broke down. I think, like
my junior year and I just bought one. Huh. And
it's funny now that that as a thirty year old woman,
I'm like, I would never wear a thong anymore. I
wear I wear the laser cut like really super thin
(18:29):
boy boy shorts instead. Listeners are learning a lot about us.
They are I do not like a thong. Um. But yeah,
so Shallotte's book, I return to Modesty, and then her
two thousand seven follow up, Girls Gone Mild. We're accompanied
by Don Eden's two thousand six book The Thrill of
the Chased. A lot of wordplay going on here, finding
(18:51):
fulfillment while keeping your clothes on and Laura's Session Steps
two thousand eight unhooked how young women pursue sex to
lay love and lose it oath. And that's sort of
a huge part of this modesty discussion among a lot
of these authors, basically saying, like, part of the problem
is that when young women are dressing really provocatively and slowly,
(19:12):
and they're feeling forced into dressing that way and engaging
in sexual activity, and we should empower our young women
to wear a turtleneck. Yeah, And there were a lot
of common culprits repeated over and over again in these
kinds of books. So, for instance, Britney Spears comes up
over and over again. Uh. There's also the so called
(19:35):
mom's gone wild who are you know, moms who we
hear about who dress even wilder than their daughters. And
along with that permissive parenting, sex educators, feminists, I mean,
apparently feminists are very much to blame. Uh, and of
course hook up culture as well. And and the big
argument with these modesty books is that it's not just uh,
(19:59):
girls sexual purity at steak, it's also self esteem. That
by dressing this way we are degrading ourselves and thus
um just eroding our collective female self esteem. And then
on top of this, we have a very male Harvard
professor Harvey Mansfield who wrote Manliness, which urged women to
(20:21):
cover up. He said that women play the men's game,
which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is
no romance. It isn't so attractive or so erotic to men. Yeah,
and that kind of leads to the whole modest as
hottest sort of thing of, Well, if you really want
to be as sexually attractive as you can possibly be,
then cover up so that you leave something to the imagination,
(20:43):
make him wait for it, make him win it, I
guess by marrying you, and then everything will be fine.
Which that that's not a perfect message to deliver either,
because ultimately it's like, wait, wait, I thought the point
of this was to build self esteems outside of their
sexual desirability. Oh wait no, you're telling them to cover
(21:04):
up as a way to amplify their sexual desirability. Yeah,
I know it. It gets it gets super sticky because
I mean, they're accusing feminists of ruining young women's lives,
but they're people like Shallot are making the assertion that
feminists as a whole as this monel Lithic group are
(21:26):
telling young women, you've got to go out there and
have lots of sex with lots of people, or else
you're not a real woman or a real feminist. And
it's like whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. That's not what
feminism is about. Feminism is about choices, right, and about
supporting women and doing what they choose to do. And
so while I feel that you should absolutely have the
choice and the option to dress as modestly as you want,
(21:49):
I think that we forget that women are sexual creatures too,
and this whole discussion about modesty often circles around women
covering up to protect themselves from men, because feminists have
been telling us that we should go out and have
all the sex and no, no, but that's bad for society.
It's more like, well, no, I mean, I think that
just means that for once, people are remembering that women
(22:11):
are sexual creatures to just like men are, and that
we should have the choice if we so desire, to
dress however we want and have sex if we want
or not exactly well, and I think that's the big
thing that or not is what's often left out of
these conversations. There's never the assumption that it's also or not. UM.
(22:32):
And on top of these books, they're also around this time,
in the early two thousand's and still today, lots of
pro modesty websites popping up clothing lines. There's even fashion
magazine called Eliza that is all about modest fashions, how
to look pretty and fashionable while still covering up. Um.
(22:53):
There's even something called the Pure Fashion Training Program, which
we started in two thousand and five to essentially teach
girls how to dress modestly. I mean, it's it's all
kind of different versions of the same thing. A lot
of it does have a Christian, very Christian undertones. Um.
And as we have I'm sure very clearly hinted, not
(23:17):
everyone is a huge fan of this modesty movement. Particularly
when uh Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shallotte came out
in two thousand and seven, there was a lot of
conversation about it and a lot of critique. Yeah, around
this time, the critiques that were coming out were were
so I thought they put things pretty darn well, especially
(23:40):
when from Shia Tarrant over at Bitch Magazine, where she
talks about how girls and women this is a quote.
Girls and women are charged with being the gatekeepers of
what's sexually appropriate, but what's judged inappropriate is measured by
the effect it has on men. And I think this
is the key to understanding the art human against this
(24:01):
particular modesty movement, because it's a catch twenty two because
we are the gate keepers of our own sexuality, but
we are also responsible for men's reaction to us. Y
um well and something that Joshua Zeitz, who is the
author of Flapper, A mad Cap Story of Sex, Style,
(24:23):
Celebrity and the Women who made America Modern, was also
talking to Newsweek about this whole modesty movement, and he said,
the thing is, this is really nothing new. They have
always been culturally conservative reactions to spikes in outward expressions
(24:44):
of women's sexualities. As during the era of the New
Woman and the Flapper, people were horrified by it. And
he says that quote the concern at the time was
that the culture was sexualizing young girls, and we're talking
about back in the twenties. And he says that the
backlash then came during the Great Depression, when you see
a movement to get women back into the home in
(25:06):
part to correct this culture of licentiousness. So, I mean,
and you can. I feel like any time you have
a progressive cultural movement, especially one that trends more liberal,
there's always the flip side to it. There's always the backlash.
There's always the fear and the panic that that the
status quo is being challenged a bit too much, and
(25:27):
it will all lead to us going to you know,
just hell in a handbasket. Yeah, So what do we
have now? We have more women in the workplace, more
women as bosses, we have the gay rights movement, more
and more states okay in gay marriage. There's a lot
of one would say cultural change going on. Well, and
more women having sex more openly, and by that I
(25:48):
mean not like out in parks, but being more open
about their sexuality, about choosing yes, about choosing to participate.
And going back to that quote from Share Tarrant at
Bitch Magazine talking about how we're the gate keepers of
what's sexually appropriate, but we're also um being judged for
(26:09):
it um and Kareem at The l A Times wrote
something similar. She said, it's not a lack of female modesty,
but a sense of male entitlement that leads to sexual violence.
So if we're looking at the modesty movement as a
way for women to protect themselves and to remain pure
and all of this stuff to remain safe, I don't
(26:32):
think the modesty movement, And obviously and Kareem does not
either think that this is the way to do it. People.
It's not that wearing a turtleneck and a long skirt
it's going to prevent rape from happening. Yeah. And that
quote from and Kareem was in direct response to Shallots
quote in a Return to Modesty saying that many of
the problems we hear about today sexual harassment and date
(26:54):
rape are connected to our cultures. Attack on modesty and
saying that how you dress will determine whether or not
you will be raped is completely victim blaming and is
disproven by statistics and also disproven by just taking a
walk down the sidewalk in some sweatpants you'll still get
(27:17):
cat called. It just happens. Um. So obviously there are
lots of problematic messages that are tied up with this
when when ultimately the message should be. There are certain
times and places when certain uniforms are called for as
in the workplace, sometimes in in schools, et cetera. But
(27:38):
beyond that, you know, women should be taught to value
themselves and have self esteem outside of their bodies as
sexual commodities. Um. Absolutely, But when women are being told
address a specific way, specifically so that they will not
you know, attract sexual assault, then that just doesn't even
(28:04):
it doesn't even make logical sense. And just for one
side note on all this, one thing that's often tied
up with the modesty movement is virginity pledges, and studies
have found that kids who do take virginity pledges are
just as likely to have pre marital sex and have
(28:25):
higher rates of STD transmissions, probably because, uh, they might
not have received as comprehensive of sex education and they're
doing things in secret. So something's not necessarily working by
just saying nope, let's just just didn't just shut off
your sexuality and everything will be fine. Well, Kristen, you
(28:45):
mentioned dress codes and schools a second ago, and we
are going to talk more about that whole issue when
we come right back from a quick break. Now, I've
talked about dress codes before or on the podcast. We
dedicated an entire episode to this, So this is a
(29:05):
little bit of rehashing, but it's important to talk about because,
especially when we're looking at modesty in more secular settings,
school dress codes are the prime place where this happens.
Where these messages of girls, you your bodies are just distractions.
(29:26):
Then this isn't this is where it's happening. It's happening
mostly in the classroom, and there are plenty of reasons
why kids should be expected to dress certain ways in school.
I do think that there's a lot to the idea
of dressing for success, and when you are, you know,
(29:47):
dressed in a certain way, it kind of helps you
feel better, it helps you pay more attention. However, a
lot of dress codes take it too far and end
up penalizing certain types of body types. Yeah yeah, well,
I mean it's the same thing that we talked about
at the beginning of the podcast. With any girl who
(30:07):
is slightly curvyer, or bigger in any way than what
is considered like a safe body almost is penalized, like
something will look too low cut or too short or
to this or to that. God forbid, You're tall and slim,
and your shorts are the exact same shorts that your
friend is wearing, but they just look longer on her
and shorter on you. You know, it's like it's a
(30:29):
lose lose proposition when it comes to getting girls in
trouble for what they're wearing. And and I totally agree
with you that, yes, there obviously should be guidelines. I
went to school with a strict dress code. Um. But
when you get into the argument that girls have to
dress a certain way so as not to distract the
other half of the population at school, I think that's problematic. Yeah.
(30:52):
I mean because tossing that too the fact that girls
bodies are developing at different times, and when you are
stay an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old girl, and you
got boobs out of nowhere, you got a butt or
both out of nowhere, and you're kind of dealing with
how you know the world around you is now responding
(31:13):
to this more womanly body while you're still dealing with
the fact that you have an adolescent brain. Is confusing
and confounding enough to begin with, But to then have
adults tell you that your body is a dangerous distraction
for yourself and for other people is certainly harmful. Um.
(31:35):
And there are all sorts of examples of modesty and
dress codes kind of gone wild. Uh. There was one
incident that went viral that a lot of listeners have
probably heard about during prom season earlier in when a
girl went to a homeschool prom and she wore a dress.
(31:57):
It was short, but she double checked that it was
going to be fingertip length even with her super high
high heels on, and she was eventually kicked out of
the prom because she was told by a female chaperone
that she was distracting male chaperones who were watching her
and watching her dance, to which she wrote a blog
(32:21):
post about it and was enraged by understandably, and it
went completely viral, right, yeah, And she was basically arguing
that she was within the stated dress code, that it
was fingertip length, and more so, what are these male
chaperins doing looking down at all of us and judging
what we're wearing and determining whether it's inappropriate. Well, not
(32:45):
not even just judging, but actually saying that they were
becoming too aroused by the sight of this like fifteen
sixteen year old girl, so she needed to be removed.
They didn't need to do anything with checking their own
thoughts and fantasies. It was her as the gatekeeper of
her own sexuality and apparently the reactions of everyone else
around her, she's the one who needs to be punished
(33:08):
for that. And um, even I mean I feel like
things like that when when people are like, oh, well
it's a homeschool prom, of course that's going to happen,
because it's just a bunch of evangelical Christian nuts. That's
where the only place that happens. No. No, As a
past former evangelical homeschool, I feel okay saying that. And
also there have been issues in public schools at proms
(33:31):
with girls who have dresses that meet the dress code,
but their bodies are simply deemed like too busty. Nope,
we can see too much of your boobs, we can
see too much of your butts. Go cover up. Mm hmm.
But I mean talking about school, it's not just happening
at high schools or elementary schools or whatever. It's also
(33:51):
happening at nursing school. If we look at U T. Austin,
they had a modesty promoting sign hung up in an
elevator I think it will us or somewhere in the
hall that basically was like, hey guys and gals, you're
at nursing school now, so don't dress in appropriately. And
it's like if they had just left it at that, well,
it specifically said no cleavage, yeah, but they didn't just
(34:14):
leave it at that. They listed like no cleavage, no
short skirts, no short shorts, no this and that, and
so it was obviously targeting women and women's bodies, but
the sign was removed thanks to social media. The sign
was removed within twenty four hours. Yeah. And the thing is,
this is where we get into the difference between intent
and impact, because you could say that the intent of
(34:35):
all of these messages is perfectly fine, well and good,
because the intent is for girls to have a healthy
self esteem, for them to you know, not experience sexual
harassment or sexual assault, uh, to create more positive and
effective learning environments, all perfectly good intentions. But the problem
(35:00):
is the impact is not that because a lot of
times the messages the girls are being delivered is that,
you know what, the fact of the matter is, you're
living in a rape culture, so you better cover up
because if you don't, you will be considered as someone
who is fine to sexually assault. And that sounds extreme,
(35:23):
but when you break down those kinds of messages because
it's well, I mean, boys will be boys, so you'd
better cover your boobs or else are gonna want to
honk them like it just doesn't. It's insulting to girls,
But it's also insulting to boys, yeah, because yeah, you're
telling girls that your body is dangerous. You're going to
(35:43):
distract everyone, and it will be your fault if you
get assaulted. But you're delivering the message to boys that well,
it's fine, boys will be boys. You obviously can't control
your animal sexuality, so if you do assault that girl,
you know, it's just of course. Yeah, And there was
one thing that I wanted to look into, which is
(36:04):
kind of debunking this whole boys will be boys nonsense,
because I do think that that a lot of it
just strips everyone of agency because essentially we're all powerless
over our own bodies. Girls are powerless over, you know,
the messages that their cleavage might deliver, and boys apparently
(36:26):
are powerless over the messages that their penises deliver to
their brains because a lot of times the comments that
you hear is that, well, boys and men are just
visual creatures and you can't you know, we we really
do need to just protect what they then see. But
(36:48):
when you look into studies on the sex specific responses
to visual stimuli, yes, men are completely visually stimulated, absolutely, um,
but a so are women. And also the specific response
to the sexual messages that men infer from said stimuli
(37:10):
do have beyond biological influencers. And what we're talking about
is coming from a two thousand seven meta analysis called
sex specific content Preferences for Visual sexual Stimuli, a review
by Kim Wallen and Heather Rupp, and in looking at
how men sort of uh respond when they are viewing
(37:32):
a woman or women interacting with women, they found that
that sort of almost rape cultural response that we expect
that we think, oh, well, if a woman's exposed, that's
her fault and she's just arousing all of the men folk,
that that response is actually minimized in men who have
more exposure to women, have been in experience coeducational experiences
(37:57):
with them. Um, basically, as I would interpret it, men
who respect women as people more. Yeah, there is clearly
a strong correlation between the interactions that men had with women, essentially,
like the more they were simply seen as people rather
than sex objects, and the the inference from seeing a
(38:19):
sexual stimuli as an invitation and open invitation for them
to approach and interact at will. Because the thing about
it is, I don't see anything wrong whatsoever with men
or women. That's another thing in all of this. Women
are also visually stimulated. But anyway, I see nothing wrong
with men or women seeing another body and being sexually
(38:45):
aroused by that. That is simply going to happen. I
don't think the the ultimate purpose of watch what You
dress is to try to like shut down our complete
and total sexual responses. It's more when we get into
the rape culture territory, it's more that visual stimuli and
that thought of huh, wow, that's a very attractive person,
and even to the point of that's a very attractive person,
(39:06):
and I wouldn't mind being naked with them. That line
then going into and you know what, I'm just gonna go,
you know, get naked with that person, whether he or
she likes it or not. Right, So, then the researchers
were also talking about how this whole stereotype of men
being so visually stimulated and women not apparently being visually
(39:27):
stimulated at all according to just stereotype. They were talking
about how because there's that expectation and that stereotype that
exists that women are less likely to say that they
are sexually stimulated because of visual cues. Yeah, I mean
a lot of times we're not supposed to obviously, Like
women have for so long been the gatekeepers over and
(39:52):
over again of sexual propriety. You know, women don't. That's
why you know, the popularity of fifty Shades of Gray
so mind blowing to people because it's women openly saying like,
oh wow, I'm really into this, and because it's sexually arousing.
Apparently women talk like this too. And when it comes
(40:12):
to sexual objectification, which obviously is a big piece of
this of seeing women not as people but as sex
objects therefore their gratification, one two thousand eight study found
that there is a learned part of that that's not
just some natural, as we often call it, instinct of
(40:35):
a visual creature. No. It found that men are often
taught from an early age to emphasize physical appearance, and
that they tend to be more aroused in context in
which they can objectify another person, and that that tendency
is often learned because we're societally we cater to that interesting.
(40:59):
And while that might like we have a hopeless situation,
that's actually good news is the fact that, oh no,
there's actually a lot of learning and socialization involved with this.
I think it's highly possible. In the same way that
we want to teach girls to refocus their self esteem
away from just the value of their bodies, we can
also teach boys to refocus the value that they see
(41:20):
in women beyond just being potential sex objects. Right, it's
unlearning that entitlement we talked about earlier that actually is
what leads to the danger of rape and sexual assault,
not what a woman is wearing exactly. And I want
to underscore again that this isn't an argument for just
let people always, in every single context, dress however they want. Um.
(41:46):
I think that it would be foolish to say that
that that the way you dress will you know, shouldn't
have to shouldn't make any kind of impact on what
other people think about you. There are issues when it's
good to dress professionally, or where it's good to dress
in clean, neat clothes, where you know, there's definitely an
(42:06):
interaction between how we dress and how we feel. Because
I do think there comes a time for a lot
of girls, especially when we hit puberty. At least I
can just speak for myself, when you start getting curious
about what it is to feel sexy and feel desired,
and you want to dress in provocative ways and you
want to test those boundaries, and it's like, okay, Well,
(42:29):
the question then becomes how how do we talk to
girls about this? How do we And because I think
just telling girls no, no, no, just don't do that
you'll be asking for it isn't going to solve anything
at all. Even if she does say okay, it's nothing
but overalls and turtlenecks from here on out. It's not
really that's not really teaching her anything beyond just what
(42:55):
to put on. That's not you know, that's not really
building up um, building up this self esteem. Yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of it goes back to the
choices that we talked about earlier, the choices of dressing
modestly if you so choose, and not tying sexuality or
or the potential for danger just to a woman's body. Yeah,
(43:18):
I mean, because the taking this back a few levels,
it's not so much about the clothes. It's the fact
that ultimately you know that the best thing a girl
can be called in our culture is beautiful and desirable.
And I think that that's where we get into the trouble.
(43:40):
It's not that girls want to wear thongs when sometimes
it's completely unnecessary, which brings up my follow up question
of is a thong ever necessary? Really? Um more so
than the clothes. I just think that it's the issue
that we need to take a closer look at of, Well,
why is it that the highest compliment you can pay
(44:02):
to a girl in our society is that she's beautiful?
Is that she is desirable? Is that you know? And
and why for boys is obtaining a girl, of having
sex with a girl some kind of prize to chase down?
And there there was one Facebook comment that jumped out
(44:22):
to me from someone who is arguing in favor of
dressing modestly because we have a natural line of decency,
to which I say, but then why is it that
if you travel around the world to some areas, it's
natural in quotes for women to be topless, for women
(44:44):
to be far less modest than we are in Western society.
All of that, really, to me is evidence that modesty
in many ways is a construct and we just need
to pay close attention to what we are really saying
when we are saying be modest. Yeah, I'm definitely interested
(45:07):
to hear from people once. You know, we prompted people
before this episode to tell us what they thought. I'm
interested to hear it. The same people respond once they've
heard us, especially if you have girls. This is the
thing that I still don't I still don't know how
to talk to a girl about the issue of dressing
without alienating her from her own body, if that makes sense.
(45:33):
So if anyone has cracked that code, please let us know.
Mom Stuff at how Stuff Works dot comm is where
you can send your letters, and I know we're gonna
be getting a lot of them. You can also message
us on Facebook or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast,
and We've got a couple of messages to share with
you that have nothing to do with modesty. Right now. Well,
(45:57):
I've got an email here from Becky about our Women
Traveling Alone are Women's Wanderlust episode. She writes, thank you
so much for your podcast about women traveling Alone. I
too travel to Italy on my own to study abroad. Well,
it was pretty nerve racking to fight international on my own.
The freedom I felt was amazing. It's also the best
feeling in the world after small victories like finding somewhere
(46:19):
decent to eat on your own, finding your plane, making
it through a day without feeling like you want to
cry a little. It's been five years since i went
to Italy, and I'm looking forward to going back again.
This podcast gave me an extra nudge to make that
goal of reality. Whether I go by myself or with
another female companion. It makes me scared that I forego
my travel dreams, as corny as that sounds, just because
(46:40):
I'm afraid of experiencing things alone. So thanks for the
encouragement and thank you Becky. Alright, I have a letter
from Rochelle. She said that our Wanderlust podcast made her
long for her first solo travel trip to the States
ten years ago. She says, I'm from Perth, Western Australia,
(47:01):
and I've since been back to America two more times.
Back in oh four, I was twenty two and I
had signed up to work in an American summer camp
in the Poconos. I had a little time before camp
started to see New York and lots of time afterwards
to see the rest of America. My parents were very concerned,
and my dad even gave me a rape whistle, which
I assured him I wouldn't need. Traveling alone, I had
(47:22):
a lot of interesting experiences that I wouldn't have had
if I was traveling with someone. My first interesting experience
happened when I got off the subway in New York
after flying in. I had booked a hostile a little
further out than I thought. I thought i'd booked somewhere
on the Upper West Side, and it ended up being
in Harlem. When I came up from the subway, a
guy approached me and asked if I needed help with
my luggage. He could have been just being a complete gentleman. However,
(47:43):
I said that I was fine and carried on to
my hostel. It's very true that you were approached more
often when you're alone. In New York, I was approached
by another tourist asking me for directions, and in l A,
I was waiting at a bus stop when an ausee
couple asked me the difference between dimes and nickels. After
a minute of talking, they really lies. They frequented the
store where I worked. Back home. Very small world I
(48:05):
also had the interesting experience of staying in a unisex
for bed dorm for two weeks, and the whole time
I was the only female in the room while the
men came and went. I never felt threatened. I ended
up being taken under the wing of a slightly older
German dude who took me on all sorts of crazy
adventures I never would have gotten into had I not
been traveling alone. UM So, Rochelle, I'm so glad you
(48:25):
had some amazing solo travel experiences. I um just had
my own to a Ruba not too long ago, and
it was awesome and I I definitely felt like I
press pressed the reset button. I think traveling alone is
something that you, the general, you should all do if
you get the chance. And thanks everybody who's written into
us Mom stuff at how Stuffworks dot com is our
(48:46):
email address, and you can also find all of our
social media links, as well as all of our blogs, videos,
and podcasts, including this one, which will also include all
of our sources, so you can follow along with us
over at stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
(49:07):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to Stephane.
Ever told you, but actually I heart radio. Would you
describe yourself as modest, Samantha, I will say that I'm
very self conscious, so it's not necessarily about modesty but insecurity.
(00:28):
But I think overall, yes, my dress is typically modest. Yeah,
I probably am. I went to your period where I
was really trying to push out of my comfort zone
and I was gonna like crop tops, short shorts, and
I look back on that period fondly, But the whole time,
I was like so tense. When I did, I felt
so nervous and uncomfortable, and I was like constantly straightening
(00:52):
things out, wondering what I looks like. So I I did.
I did struggle with that, and when I was growing up,
it was very difficult for me to go outside of
that boundary. Will Like my grandmother used to say, you
have an excellent figure, and it would like bring me
to tears since I was embarrassed. Yes, yes, but because
(01:13):
we were recently talking about the editing of yearbooks to
get rid of any sign of cleavage or shoulder, it's
just something I've been thinking about about that kind of
line where you can't win of either yeah, you're to
modest and prude or the opposite of that, and and
how there is this morality attached to modesty. But it
(01:34):
also made me think about forever ago, and we did
that many where we read the sex words how to
write sexy. Modesty is a word that is often used
for like nudity, like you cover your modesty or you
hide your modesty, which always kind of cracked me up.
(01:56):
It does seem really official. Yeah, it's just to me,
it feels like another example of how we're so uncomfortable
talking about sex. Yes, you gotta keep your modesty covered,
and it's usually typically always referred to for women. Yes, yes, Well,
we wanted to bring back this plastic episode looking into
(02:17):
the history of of modesty, So please enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stup works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline,
and today on the show, we're talking about modesty. And
(02:40):
before we get into the research that we found, we
first wanted to share what some of you think about
this issue of modesty. Um As we were researching, we
took to the Stuff Mom Never Told you Facebook page
and said, hey, what what are your thoughts on this
issue about telling girls to cover up? Um, about this
(03:02):
so called modesty movement taking place, and here are just
some samples of what some of you had to say. Yeah,
I have a note here from Elise, who brings up
weather and body image all in one fell swoop. She
says modesty is just a social construct. There's nothing inherently
wrong with bare skin. It is simply too hot where
(03:23):
I live to be fully covered all the time, and
I hate the double standard that allows men to go
shirtless while women cannot. That said, I personally tend to
wear a bit more clothing because society has successfully made
me ashamed of my five pounds overweight body. Caitlin brought
up something that a number of women also mentioned, which
is the issue of boobs. Especially if you have ample boobs,
(03:47):
it can be harder to adhere to certain modesty standards,
So Caitlin writes, I personally choose to dress more modestly.
I'm a bigger girl with a quote ample bosom, so
even the less revealing outfits can make me look a
him endowed. I have zero problem with women my size
or any size, wearing whatever they feel comfortable in. Though,
(04:09):
one of my dear friends, who is a little smaller
than me but still curvy, wears things that are so
low cut they would make me blush, but they look
amazing on her and she has the confidence to that
is the key. Yeah, and Jamie adds to this, talking
about how difficult it is to wear a skirt when
you are above average height. She says, even when I
stick with a knee length skirt, I've been accused of
(04:30):
showing too much. This is in the professional setting where
others are wearing much shorter skirts. Plus I'm on the
busty side, so I can't win either way. Yeah, as
a five nine almost five tin woman, I can definitely
empathize with the leg length issue. Jennifer McPherson, though, made
me laugh with her comment. Maybe this is why in
(04:51):
all of the quote future movies everyone pretty much just
wears the same jumpsuit problem solved. I used to have
a jumpsuit. I would totally wear a jumpsuit if a
it wasn't challenging to find one that fit because I
have a super long torso, and b if I could
actually pull off a jumpsuit, well yeah, no, mine was
(05:11):
definitely not like a fashion jumpsuit. Mine was part of
my April O'Neil Halloween costume. It was bright yellow. So
if that's if that's in in the post apocalyptic future,
then I'm all set and yeah, you're ready, You're ahead
of the curve. Well. I do think one thing that
was interesting about all of the comments, because there were
a lot of them in response to that question about modesty,
(05:33):
was how varied everyone's opinions were. We had a lot
of women firmly in the camp of modest as hottests,
and other women saying, you know, modesty is basically a
social construct, and other women saying, you know what, let's
just take all of our clothes off because this is ridiculous.
What's what's your opinion? Do you feel like people should
(05:56):
sew a certain line or just dress however makes them happy,
even if that's just like a big bikini top. What
do you think do you think? I think that there
are certain situations that call for certain types of outfits. Obviously,
if you want to wear a bikini top to a
job interview, you're probably not going to get that job,
unless you're interviewing for a lifeguard position or something like that.
(06:20):
And I'm all for women dressing in a way that
makes them feel comfortable and confident, whether that is a
turtleneck and a floor link skirt or a crop top
and short shorts. Um. I think what's maybe more important,
and what we'll get into more in the podcast, is
just checking ourselves on the way that we talk about modesty,
(06:42):
specifically to girls, Because even though there might be a
lot of good intentions with talking to girls about the
importance of covering them up, covering themselves up, and you know,
leaving things to the imagination, a lot of it is
often just framed as ultimately making sure that they are
appealing sexually. Two men. Right, what do you think, Caroline?
(07:06):
I mean, I I share, I share your opinion. I
think there's a time and a place for everything. I'm
not going to wear my pajama shirt to a job interview,
you know, or a tank top because I do have uh,
I am blessed in the bubular area, and so a
shirt that I might wear and find comfortable could actually
(07:27):
look to some people inappropriate in the workplace. Yeah, that's
the thing. Once we get into the lines of like
what is professional, that's when it does get hard because
you can say I should be able to wear whatever
I want. But then but also yes, like I I
hear that statement, and then I also think, well, there's
(07:49):
the whole argument and modesty, which will we will obviously
get into in this podcast talking about like, uh, covering
up for men or around men um, but also with
my clear leavage, I also want you looking at my face,
you know. So it's not even so much that I'm like,
I better protect myself by covering up. It's more like
I just don't want my boobs to be an issue
(08:11):
in every conversation I have. But is that then a
double standard if for someone like me who cleavage is
rarely an issue because it's mostly invisible, in which case
I could wear the lower cut top to the office
and people would probably still be looking me in the eye,
even though as a tall woman, if I'm wearing he
(08:32):
might be face to face with my boobs. But you
know what I mean, does that ever feel like a
frustrating double standard that if you are a more curvacious woman,
whether it is in the boobular region which is the
scientific term for it, or a little lower down in
the butler region, that issue becomes a lot more challenging
(08:54):
because it's like, well, then, what what am I supposed
to wear? Do I have to just cover up my
entire figure in order to be d A appropriate? I know,
I I I hate it. Yeah, I mean I will
it being all of it, the conversation about it, the
fact that we have to work so hard every morning
to pick out something from our closet to go to
work that's not in a pro And I don't mean
(09:15):
like Kristen and I going to work, I just mean
work in general. Yeah, you know, like it's it's such
a challenge, and women are told from the time they're
itty biddy little kids that they have to watch what
they wear and and watch how they dress around people,
especially boys and men. Yeah, and this entire head scratching
(09:36):
issue of how do we even talk about it? How
do we hash all this out? Is why we wanted
to do this episode in the first place, because clearly,
like I said, judging by the outpouring of Facebook commentary,
this is something that a lot of other women have
dealt with as well. So let's go way, way way
(09:58):
back in time. And first of all, I'll say that
when it comes to this very brief historical snapshot of modesty.
We're not really going to get very much into religion. Yeah,
that could be a whole other topic unto itself. There
were a lot of women on Facebook who brought up
things like, you know, veiling, traditional veiling in Islam, also
(10:22):
head covering in Judaism and even in some Christian denominations.
But that's not really what we want to get at. Yeah,
we're we're kind of gonna be focusing more in this
episode on the sniping that goes on between and among women,
more more so in a secular kind of viewpoint. Yeah,
(10:43):
not not to say that there aren't certainly religious undertones
to a lot of aspects of what is referred to
as the modesty movement. In my personal upbringing in an
Evangelical Christian home, modesty was a huge thing that was
always talked about. Um. But yeah, we're going to stick
to the more secular And we found this paper called
(11:05):
let Modesty Be Her Reignment by Tamina Tariq from two
thousand and She talks about the tradition of veiling in
the pre Christian Classical era, so focusing on like fourth
and third centuries BC, And it turns out that for
well to do women. In ancient Greece and Rome, veiling
(11:27):
or covering their hair was a way of a transporting
the private domestic space or the proper place for women
into the public, and doing so in a way that
protected the honor of her male guardians or father's husband's brothers,
and finally outwardly symbolizing the value of her virginity. I
(11:50):
think it's interesting that from the get go you have
something that a woman wears being tied into the honor
of a man that she is with um. But at
also this this isn't necessarily all women in these cultures.
People who were in the lower classes, including slaves and
peasants and others deemed inferior, would not have veiled their
(12:11):
hair because nobody cared whether they were of honor or
whether they were virgins. But if he were a woman
of means, you would certainly cover your hair with different
kinds of head coverings at the time that were called
faros him and nations and pep loose, and all of
this was really to prevent the possibility of men looking
(12:34):
at the sensualized parts of her body, because in addition
to veiling, she would also wear what we would think
of is very modest clothing, but it was important that
the hair also be covered because that was also a
highly sensualized part and still is of the female body.
And by essentially blocking those off from view, the thought was, well,
(12:56):
then that would lower the chances of him fantasizing about her,
which even just in the fantasy realm, would demean her. Well, now, Kristen,
you wrote about this whole hair issue on stuff I
Never told you dot com, and I think it's interesting
to bring up why hair was so sexualized during this time. Yeah,
if you go back to ancient Greece, Hippocrates, for instance,
(13:18):
had this theory that when men and women had sexual
intercourse that his semen would actually be directed into a
woman's hair. So our long flowing hair is just a
mass of semen magnets and that, and so in that way,
(13:43):
women's hair was seen as a symbolic extension of our genitalia.
That is just so weird and like the opposite of
Okham's razor, Like why is semen filling up your hair?
Like the simplest explanation for I don't know, because where
else would it go? I guess I needed us that
need at someplace, Yes, where else would it else couldn't
(14:03):
go But this is also side note, and I feel
like we need to do a whole podcast on this
because I want to learn more. This also was very
much linked to the tradition of a bride wearing a
veil because she, you know, has her face covered by
the veil. She's walking down the aisle, and in that way,
her sexuality is still intact and preserved, but then broken
(14:26):
when the husband lifts it up just to gaze on her.
It was the power of the male gaze. They got
the power of the mail gaze all the way back
in ancient Greece and Rome. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know,
we already talked about how women would wear headcoverings to
go out to protect their honor and everything when they
went out of the house, to extend that private sphere
into public. And so why wearing that veil. The bride
(14:47):
is being protected if she's handed off from the one
man in her life to the other man in her life. Well,
in addition to us walking around with these uh all
these seamen magnets on our head a k air hair,
this was also a time when women were people were
very concerned about protecting women's honor and sort of covering
(15:07):
up all signs of our sexuality, because this was also
an era when women were presumed to be sexually aggressive
and prone to hysteria, and we would essentially go wild
if we weren't being physically attend to do well enough. Well, so,
in that argument, it only makes sense that women should
dress modestly. If we're so aggressively sexual and we're always
(15:30):
trying to trap a man into having sex with us
and like doing things to our hair and whatever, well,
obviously we should veil ourselves and cover ourselves up, right. Yeah, yeah,
there are There are all sorts of conflicting messages. That's
still though, echo today in a lot of the modesty
messages that girls and women are being taught. And there
(15:55):
was a quote from to Minatrig's paper that jumped out
to me. Uh. She said, neither the veil nor its
usage has ever been monolithic. The discourse of modesty, shame,
and protection, however, has always been present. Uh. And and
those three things, modesty, shame, and protection are very much interwoven.
(16:16):
In that relationship between those three factors, I think is
a big reason why we have all of these sort
of questions about modesty today. Well, yeah, and speaking of
the modesty movement today, when you move into the late
nineties and early two thousands, you start to see a
lot of literature being published on women remaining modest, dressing
(16:40):
modestly and how that will benefit them both out in
society and in their relationships with men. Yeah, there's Wendy Shallotte,
whose name comes up all the time. She's actually been
referred to as the mother of the modesty movement, and
in her first book, A Return to Modesty, she wrote
many of the problem ONMS we hear about today, sexual harassment,
(17:02):
date rape are connected to cultures attack on modesty. And
I believe that came out in And I remember this
clearly because I was in high school and this was
the era of low rise jeans and Britney Spears at
her peak before she shaved her head, and specifically Britney
(17:23):
Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards wearing those low
slung pants, sparkly pants with the thong visible pulled out
from it, and how horrified everyone was by this. And
I remember also having like a conversation after conversation with
my mother about why it should be okay for me
(17:45):
to wear thongs and how horrified my mother was at
low rise jeans. There was a lot of modesty panic
at the turn of the millennium. Interesting. Yeah, I had to,
I definitely had to start buying thongs and buy I
I mean my mother bought them for because the jeans
I was wearing were so tight. See, my mother never
would have because I gave her, of course, the argument
(18:07):
of but visible panty line, and she said, no, no, no, no,
thongs are for sexual activity and you will not be
wearing them. But she finally broke down. I think, like
my junior year and I just bought one. Huh. And
it's funny now that that as a thirty year old woman,
I'm like, I would never wear a thong anymore. I
wear I wear the laser cut like really super thin
(18:29):
boy boy shorts instead. Listeners are learning a lot about us.
They are I do not like a thong. Um. But yeah,
so Shallotte's book, I return to Modesty, and then her
two thousand seven follow up, Girls Gone Mild. We're accompanied
by Don Eden's two thousand six book The Thrill of
the Chased. A lot of wordplay going on here, finding
(18:51):
fulfillment while keeping your clothes on and Laura's Session Steps
two thousand eight unhooked how young women pursue sex to
lay love and lose it oath. And that's sort of
a huge part of this modesty discussion among a lot
of these authors, basically saying, like, part of the problem
is that when young women are dressing really provocatively and slowly,
(19:12):
and they're feeling forced into dressing that way and engaging
in sexual activity, and we should empower our young women
to wear a turtleneck. Yeah, And there were a lot
of common culprits repeated over and over again in these
kinds of books. So, for instance, Britney Spears comes up
over and over again. Uh. There's also the so called
(19:35):
mom's gone wild who are you know, moms who we
hear about who dress even wilder than their daughters. And
along with that permissive parenting, sex educators, feminists, I mean,
apparently feminists are very much to blame. Uh, and of
course hook up culture as well. And and the big
argument with these modesty books is that it's not just uh,
(19:59):
girls sexual purity at steak, it's also self esteem. That
by dressing this way we are degrading ourselves and thus
um just eroding our collective female self esteem. And then
on top of this, we have a very male Harvard
professor Harvey Mansfield who wrote Manliness, which urged women to
(20:21):
cover up. He said that women play the men's game,
which they are bound to lose. Without modesty, there is
no romance. It isn't so attractive or so erotic to men. Yeah,
and that kind of leads to the whole modest as
hottest sort of thing of, Well, if you really want
to be as sexually attractive as you can possibly be,
then cover up so that you leave something to the imagination,
(20:43):
make him wait for it, make him win it, I
guess by marrying you, and then everything will be fine.
Which that that's not a perfect message to deliver either,
because ultimately it's like, wait, wait, I thought the point
of this was to build self esteems outside of their
sexual desirability. Oh wait no, you're telling them to cover
(21:04):
up as a way to amplify their sexual desirability. Yeah,
I know it. It gets it gets super sticky because
I mean, they're accusing feminists of ruining young women's lives,
but they're people like Shallot are making the assertion that
feminists as a whole as this monel Lithic group are
(21:26):
telling young women, you've got to go out there and
have lots of sex with lots of people, or else
you're not a real woman or a real feminist. And
it's like whoa, whoa, pump the brakes. That's not what
feminism is about. Feminism is about choices, right, and about
supporting women and doing what they choose to do. And
so while I feel that you should absolutely have the
choice and the option to dress as modestly as you want,
(21:49):
I think that we forget that women are sexual creatures too,
and this whole discussion about modesty often circles around women
covering up to protect themselves from men, because feminists have
been telling us that we should go out and have
all the sex and no, no, but that's bad for society.
It's more like, well, no, I mean, I think that
just means that for once, people are remembering that women
(22:11):
are sexual creatures to just like men are, and that
we should have the choice if we so desire, to
dress however we want and have sex if we want
or not exactly well, and I think that's the big
thing that or not is what's often left out of
these conversations. There's never the assumption that it's also or not. UM.
(22:32):
And on top of these books, they're also around this time,
in the early two thousand's and still today, lots of
pro modesty websites popping up clothing lines. There's even fashion
magazine called Eliza that is all about modest fashions, how
to look pretty and fashionable while still covering up. Um.
(22:53):
There's even something called the Pure Fashion Training Program, which
we started in two thousand and five to essentially teach
girls how to dress modestly. I mean, it's it's all
kind of different versions of the same thing. A lot
of it does have a Christian, very Christian undertones. Um.
And as we have I'm sure very clearly hinted, not
(23:17):
everyone is a huge fan of this modesty movement. Particularly
when uh Girls Gone Mild by Wendy Shallotte came out
in two thousand and seven, there was a lot of
conversation about it and a lot of critique. Yeah, around
this time, the critiques that were coming out were were
so I thought they put things pretty darn well, especially
(23:40):
when from Shia Tarrant over at Bitch Magazine, where she
talks about how girls and women this is a quote.
Girls and women are charged with being the gatekeepers of
what's sexually appropriate, but what's judged inappropriate is measured by
the effect it has on men. And I think this
is the key to understanding the art human against this
(24:01):
particular modesty movement, because it's a catch twenty two because
we are the gate keepers of our own sexuality, but
we are also responsible for men's reaction to us. Y
um well and something that Joshua Zeitz, who is the
author of Flapper, A mad Cap Story of Sex, Style,
(24:23):
Celebrity and the Women who made America Modern, was also
talking to Newsweek about this whole modesty movement, and he said,
the thing is, this is really nothing new. They have
always been culturally conservative reactions to spikes in outward expressions
(24:44):
of women's sexualities. As during the era of the New
Woman and the Flapper, people were horrified by it. And
he says that quote the concern at the time was
that the culture was sexualizing young girls, and we're talking
about back in the twenties. And he says that the
backlash then came during the Great Depression, when you see
a movement to get women back into the home in
(25:06):
part to correct this culture of licentiousness. So, I mean,
and you can. I feel like any time you have
a progressive cultural movement, especially one that trends more liberal,
there's always the flip side to it. There's always the backlash.
There's always the fear and the panic that that the
status quo is being challenged a bit too much, and
(25:27):
it will all lead to us going to you know,
just hell in a handbasket. Yeah, So what do we
have now? We have more women in the workplace, more
women as bosses, we have the gay rights movement, more
and more states okay in gay marriage. There's a lot
of one would say cultural change going on. Well, and
more women having sex more openly, and by that I
(25:48):
mean not like out in parks, but being more open
about their sexuality, about choosing yes, about choosing to participate.
And going back to that quote from Share Tarrant at
Bitch Magazine talking about how we're the gate keepers of
what's sexually appropriate, but we're also um being judged for
(26:09):
it um and Kareem at The l A Times wrote
something similar. She said, it's not a lack of female modesty,
but a sense of male entitlement that leads to sexual violence.
So if we're looking at the modesty movement as a
way for women to protect themselves and to remain pure
and all of this stuff to remain safe, I don't
(26:32):
think the modesty movement, And obviously and Kareem does not
either think that this is the way to do it. People.
It's not that wearing a turtleneck and a long skirt
it's going to prevent rape from happening. Yeah. And that
quote from and Kareem was in direct response to Shallots
quote in a Return to Modesty saying that many of
the problems we hear about today sexual harassment and date
(26:54):
rape are connected to our cultures. Attack on modesty and
saying that how you dress will determine whether or not
you will be raped is completely victim blaming and is
disproven by statistics and also disproven by just taking a
walk down the sidewalk in some sweatpants you'll still get
(27:17):
cat called. It just happens. Um. So obviously there are
lots of problematic messages that are tied up with this
when when ultimately the message should be. There are certain
times and places when certain uniforms are called for as
in the workplace, sometimes in in schools, et cetera. But
(27:38):
beyond that, you know, women should be taught to value
themselves and have self esteem outside of their bodies as
sexual commodities. Um. Absolutely, But when women are being told
address a specific way, specifically so that they will not
you know, attract sexual assault, then that just doesn't even
(28:04):
it doesn't even make logical sense. And just for one
side note on all this, one thing that's often tied
up with the modesty movement is virginity pledges, and studies
have found that kids who do take virginity pledges are
just as likely to have pre marital sex and have
(28:25):
higher rates of STD transmissions, probably because, uh, they might
not have received as comprehensive of sex education and they're
doing things in secret. So something's not necessarily working by
just saying nope, let's just just didn't just shut off
your sexuality and everything will be fine. Well, Kristen, you
(28:45):
mentioned dress codes and schools a second ago, and we
are going to talk more about that whole issue when
we come right back from a quick break. Now, I've
talked about dress codes before or on the podcast. We
dedicated an entire episode to this, So this is a
(29:05):
little bit of rehashing, but it's important to talk about because,
especially when we're looking at modesty in more secular settings,
school dress codes are the prime place where this happens.
Where these messages of girls, you your bodies are just distractions.
(29:26):
Then this isn't this is where it's happening. It's happening
mostly in the classroom, and there are plenty of reasons
why kids should be expected to dress certain ways in school.
I do think that there's a lot to the idea
of dressing for success, and when you are, you know,
(29:47):
dressed in a certain way, it kind of helps you
feel better, it helps you pay more attention. However, a
lot of dress codes take it too far and end
up penalizing certain types of body types. Yeah yeah, well,
I mean it's the same thing that we talked about
at the beginning of the podcast. With any girl who
(30:07):
is slightly curvyer, or bigger in any way than what
is considered like a safe body almost is penalized, like
something will look too low cut or too short or
to this or to that. God forbid, You're tall and slim,
and your shorts are the exact same shorts that your
friend is wearing, but they just look longer on her
and shorter on you. You know, it's like it's a
(30:29):
lose lose proposition when it comes to getting girls in
trouble for what they're wearing. And and I totally agree
with you that, yes, there obviously should be guidelines. I
went to school with a strict dress code. Um. But
when you get into the argument that girls have to
dress a certain way so as not to distract the
other half of the population at school, I think that's problematic. Yeah.
(30:52):
I mean because tossing that too the fact that girls
bodies are developing at different times, and when you are
stay an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old girl, and you
got boobs out of nowhere, you got a butt or
both out of nowhere, and you're kind of dealing with
how you know the world around you is now responding
(31:13):
to this more womanly body while you're still dealing with
the fact that you have an adolescent brain. Is confusing
and confounding enough to begin with, But to then have
adults tell you that your body is a dangerous distraction
for yourself and for other people is certainly harmful. Um.
(31:35):
And there are all sorts of examples of modesty and
dress codes kind of gone wild. Uh. There was one
incident that went viral that a lot of listeners have
probably heard about during prom season earlier in when a
girl went to a homeschool prom and she wore a dress.
(31:57):
It was short, but she double checked that it was
going to be fingertip length even with her super high
high heels on, and she was eventually kicked out of
the prom because she was told by a female chaperone
that she was distracting male chaperones who were watching her
and watching her dance, to which she wrote a blog
(32:21):
post about it and was enraged by understandably, and it
went completely viral, right, yeah, And she was basically arguing
that she was within the stated dress code, that it
was fingertip length, and more so, what are these male
chaperins doing looking down at all of us and judging
what we're wearing and determining whether it's inappropriate. Well, not
(32:45):
not even just judging, but actually saying that they were
becoming too aroused by the sight of this like fifteen
sixteen year old girl, so she needed to be removed.
They didn't need to do anything with checking their own
thoughts and fantasies. It was her as the gatekeeper of
her own sexuality and apparently the reactions of everyone else
around her, she's the one who needs to be punished
(33:08):
for that. And um, even I mean I feel like
things like that when when people are like, oh, well
it's a homeschool prom, of course that's going to happen,
because it's just a bunch of evangelical Christian nuts. That's
where the only place that happens. No. No, As a
past former evangelical homeschool, I feel okay saying that. And
also there have been issues in public schools at proms
(33:31):
with girls who have dresses that meet the dress code,
but their bodies are simply deemed like too busty. Nope,
we can see too much of your boobs, we can
see too much of your butts. Go cover up. Mm hmm.
But I mean talking about school, it's not just happening
at high schools or elementary schools or whatever. It's also
(33:51):
happening at nursing school. If we look at U T. Austin,
they had a modesty promoting sign hung up in an
elevator I think it will us or somewhere in the
hall that basically was like, hey guys and gals, you're
at nursing school now, so don't dress in appropriately. And
it's like if they had just left it at that, well,
it specifically said no cleavage, yeah, but they didn't just
(34:14):
leave it at that. They listed like no cleavage, no
short skirts, no short shorts, no this and that, and
so it was obviously targeting women and women's bodies, but
the sign was removed thanks to social media. The sign
was removed within twenty four hours. Yeah. And the thing is,
this is where we get into the difference between intent
and impact, because you could say that the intent of
(34:35):
all of these messages is perfectly fine, well and good,
because the intent is for girls to have a healthy
self esteem, for them to you know, not experience sexual
harassment or sexual assault, uh, to create more positive and
effective learning environments, all perfectly good intentions. But the problem
(35:00):
is the impact is not that because a lot of
times the messages the girls are being delivered is that,
you know what, the fact of the matter is, you're
living in a rape culture, so you better cover up
because if you don't, you will be considered as someone
who is fine to sexually assault. And that sounds extreme,
(35:23):
but when you break down those kinds of messages because
it's well, I mean, boys will be boys, so you'd
better cover your boobs or else are gonna want to
honk them like it just doesn't. It's insulting to girls,
But it's also insulting to boys, yeah, because yeah, you're
telling girls that your body is dangerous. You're going to
(35:43):
distract everyone, and it will be your fault if you
get assaulted. But you're delivering the message to boys that well,
it's fine, boys will be boys. You obviously can't control
your animal sexuality, so if you do assault that girl,
you know, it's just of course. Yeah, And there was
one thing that I wanted to look into, which is
(36:04):
kind of debunking this whole boys will be boys nonsense,
because I do think that that a lot of it
just strips everyone of agency because essentially we're all powerless
over our own bodies. Girls are powerless over, you know,
the messages that their cleavage might deliver, and boys apparently
(36:26):
are powerless over the messages that their penises deliver to
their brains because a lot of times the comments that
you hear is that, well, boys and men are just
visual creatures and you can't you know, we we really
do need to just protect what they then see. But
(36:48):
when you look into studies on the sex specific responses
to visual stimuli, yes, men are completely visually stimulated, absolutely, um,
but a so are women. And also the specific response
to the sexual messages that men infer from said stimuli
(37:10):
do have beyond biological influencers. And what we're talking about
is coming from a two thousand seven meta analysis called
sex specific content Preferences for Visual sexual Stimuli, a review
by Kim Wallen and Heather Rupp, and in looking at
how men sort of uh respond when they are viewing
(37:32):
a woman or women interacting with women, they found that
that sort of almost rape cultural response that we expect
that we think, oh, well, if a woman's exposed, that's
her fault and she's just arousing all of the men folk,
that that response is actually minimized in men who have
more exposure to women, have been in experience coeducational experiences
(37:57):
with them. Um, basically, as I would interpret it, men
who respect women as people more. Yeah, there is clearly
a strong correlation between the interactions that men had with women, essentially,
like the more they were simply seen as people rather
than sex objects, and the the inference from seeing a
(38:19):
sexual stimuli as an invitation and open invitation for them
to approach and interact at will. Because the thing about
it is, I don't see anything wrong whatsoever with men
or women. That's another thing in all of this. Women
are also visually stimulated. But anyway, I see nothing wrong
with men or women seeing another body and being sexually
(38:45):
aroused by that. That is simply going to happen. I
don't think the the ultimate purpose of watch what You
dress is to try to like shut down our complete
and total sexual responses. It's more when we get into
the rape culture territory, it's more that visual stimuli and
that thought of huh, wow, that's a very attractive person,
and even to the point of that's a very attractive person,
(39:06):
and I wouldn't mind being naked with them. That line
then going into and you know what, I'm just gonna go,
you know, get naked with that person, whether he or
she likes it or not. Right, So, then the researchers
were also talking about how this whole stereotype of men
being so visually stimulated and women not apparently being visually
(39:27):
stimulated at all according to just stereotype. They were talking
about how because there's that expectation and that stereotype that
exists that women are less likely to say that they
are sexually stimulated because of visual cues. Yeah, I mean
a lot of times we're not supposed to obviously, Like
women have for so long been the gatekeepers over and
(39:52):
over again of sexual propriety. You know, women don't. That's
why you know, the popularity of fifty Shades of Gray
so mind blowing to people because it's women openly saying like,
oh wow, I'm really into this, and because it's sexually arousing.
Apparently women talk like this too. And when it comes
(40:12):
to sexual objectification, which obviously is a big piece of
this of seeing women not as people but as sex
objects therefore their gratification, one two thousand eight study found
that there is a learned part of that that's not
just some natural, as we often call it, instinct of
(40:35):
a visual creature. No. It found that men are often
taught from an early age to emphasize physical appearance, and
that they tend to be more aroused in context in
which they can objectify another person, and that that tendency
is often learned because we're societally we cater to that interesting.
(40:59):
And while that might like we have a hopeless situation,
that's actually good news is the fact that, oh no,
there's actually a lot of learning and socialization involved with this.
I think it's highly possible. In the same way that
we want to teach girls to refocus their self esteem
away from just the value of their bodies, we can
also teach boys to refocus the value that they see
(41:20):
in women beyond just being potential sex objects. Right, it's
unlearning that entitlement we talked about earlier that actually is
what leads to the danger of rape and sexual assault,
not what a woman is wearing exactly. And I want
to underscore again that this isn't an argument for just
let people always, in every single context, dress however they want. Um.
(41:46):
I think that it would be foolish to say that
that that the way you dress will you know, shouldn't
have to shouldn't make any kind of impact on what
other people think about you. There are issues when it's
good to dress professionally, or where it's good to dress
in clean, neat clothes, where you know, there's definitely an
(42:06):
interaction between how we dress and how we feel. Because
I do think there comes a time for a lot
of girls, especially when we hit puberty. At least I
can just speak for myself, when you start getting curious
about what it is to feel sexy and feel desired,
and you want to dress in provocative ways and you
want to test those boundaries, and it's like, okay, Well,
(42:29):
the question then becomes how how do we talk to
girls about this? How do we And because I think
just telling girls no, no, no, just don't do that
you'll be asking for it isn't going to solve anything
at all. Even if she does say okay, it's nothing
but overalls and turtlenecks from here on out. It's not
really that's not really teaching her anything beyond just what
(42:55):
to put on. That's not you know, that's not really
building up um, building up this self esteem. Yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of it goes back to the
choices that we talked about earlier, the choices of dressing
modestly if you so choose, and not tying sexuality or
or the potential for danger just to a woman's body. Yeah,
(43:18):
I mean, because the taking this back a few levels,
it's not so much about the clothes. It's the fact
that ultimately you know that the best thing a girl
can be called in our culture is beautiful and desirable.
And I think that that's where we get into the trouble.
(43:40):
It's not that girls want to wear thongs when sometimes
it's completely unnecessary, which brings up my follow up question
of is a thong ever necessary? Really? Um more so
than the clothes. I just think that it's the issue
that we need to take a closer look at of, Well,
why is it that the highest compliment you can pay
(44:02):
to a girl in our society is that she's beautiful?
Is that she is desirable? Is that you know? And
and why for boys is obtaining a girl, of having
sex with a girl some kind of prize to chase down?
And there there was one Facebook comment that jumped out
(44:22):
to me from someone who is arguing in favor of
dressing modestly because we have a natural line of decency,
to which I say, but then why is it that
if you travel around the world to some areas, it's
natural in quotes for women to be topless, for women
(44:44):
to be far less modest than we are in Western society.
All of that, really, to me is evidence that modesty
in many ways is a construct and we just need
to pay close attention to what we are really saying
when we are saying be modest. Yeah, I'm definitely interested
(45:07):
to hear from people once. You know, we prompted people
before this episode to tell us what they thought. I'm
interested to hear it. The same people respond once they've
heard us, especially if you have girls. This is the
thing that I still don't I still don't know how
to talk to a girl about the issue of dressing
without alienating her from her own body, if that makes sense.
(45:33):
So if anyone has cracked that code, please let us know.
Mom Stuff at how Stuff Works dot comm is where
you can send your letters, and I know we're gonna
be getting a lot of them. You can also message
us on Facebook or tweet us at Mom's Stuff podcast,
and We've got a couple of messages to share with
you that have nothing to do with modesty. Right now. Well,
(45:57):
I've got an email here from Becky about our Women
Traveling Alone are Women's Wanderlust episode. She writes, thank you
so much for your podcast about women traveling Alone. I
too travel to Italy on my own to study abroad. Well,
it was pretty nerve racking to fight international on my own.
The freedom I felt was amazing. It's also the best
feeling in the world after small victories like finding somewhere
(46:19):
decent to eat on your own, finding your plane, making
it through a day without feeling like you want to
cry a little. It's been five years since i went
to Italy, and I'm looking forward to going back again.
This podcast gave me an extra nudge to make that
goal of reality. Whether I go by myself or with
another female companion. It makes me scared that I forego
my travel dreams, as corny as that sounds, just because
(46:40):
I'm afraid of experiencing things alone. So thanks for the
encouragement and thank you Becky. Alright, I have a letter
from Rochelle. She said that our Wanderlust podcast made her
long for her first solo travel trip to the States
ten years ago. She says, I'm from Perth, Western Australia,
(47:01):
and I've since been back to America two more times.
Back in oh four, I was twenty two and I
had signed up to work in an American summer camp
in the Poconos. I had a little time before camp
started to see New York and lots of time afterwards
to see the rest of America. My parents were very concerned,
and my dad even gave me a rape whistle, which
I assured him I wouldn't need. Traveling alone, I had
(47:22):
a lot of interesting experiences that I wouldn't have had
if I was traveling with someone. My first interesting experience
happened when I got off the subway in New York
after flying in. I had booked a hostile a little
further out than I thought. I thought i'd booked somewhere
on the Upper West Side, and it ended up being
in Harlem. When I came up from the subway, a
guy approached me and asked if I needed help with
my luggage. He could have been just being a complete gentleman. However,
(47:43):
I said that I was fine and carried on to
my hostel. It's very true that you were approached more
often when you're alone. In New York, I was approached
by another tourist asking me for directions, and in l A,
I was waiting at a bus stop when an ausee
couple asked me the difference between dimes and nickels. After
a minute of talking, they really lies. They frequented the
store where I worked. Back home. Very small world I
(48:05):
also had the interesting experience of staying in a unisex
for bed dorm for two weeks, and the whole time
I was the only female in the room while the
men came and went. I never felt threatened. I ended
up being taken under the wing of a slightly older
German dude who took me on all sorts of crazy
adventures I never would have gotten into had I not
been traveling alone. UM So, Rochelle, I'm so glad you
(48:25):
had some amazing solo travel experiences. I um just had
my own to a Ruba not too long ago, and
it was awesome and I I definitely felt like I
press pressed the reset button. I think traveling alone is
something that you, the general, you should all do if
you get the chance. And thanks everybody who's written into
us Mom stuff at how Stuffworks dot com is our
(48:46):
email address, and you can also find all of our
social media links, as well as all of our blogs, videos,
and podcasts, including this one, which will also include all
of our sources, so you can follow along with us
over at stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for
(49:07):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
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