- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books; New edition edition (7 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0684863170
- ISBN-13: 978-0684863177
- Product Dimensions: 20.9 x 14.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 388,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Florence King "National Review A Return to Modesty is"...so uncompromising in voice and stance that one is tempted to think of its author as Simone de Shalit or Wendy Wollstonecraft, but make no mistake: she imitates nothing and no one...Every page of this book [is] wise, fresh, and funny, sparkling with her special brand of astringent charm.
Product Description
Where once a young woman had to be ashamed of her sexual experience, today she is ashamed of her sexual inexperience. Where not long ago an unmarried woman was ashamed to give public evidence of sexual desire by living with someone, today she must be ashamed to give evidence of romantic desire. From sex education in grade school to coed bathrooms in college, today's young woman is being pressured relentlessly to overcome her embarrassment, her "hang-ups," and especially her romantic hopes.
Meanwhile, the problems young women struggle with grow steadily more extreme: from sexual harassment, stalking, and date rape to anorexia and self-mutilation. Both men and women endlessly lament the loss of privacy and of real intimacy. What is it all about?
Beholden neither to conservatives who discount as exaggeration the dangers facing young women, nor to feminists who steadfastly affix blame on the patriarchy, Wendy Shalit proposes that, in fact, we have lost our respect for an important classical virtue -- that of sexual modesty. "A Return to Modesty" is a deeply personal account as well as a fascinating intellectual exploration. From seventeenth-century manners guides to Antonio Canova's sculpture, "Venus Italico, " to Frank Loesser's 1948 tune, "Baby, It's Cold Outside," "A Return to Modesty" unfolds like a detective's search for a lost idea as Shalit uncovers opinions about this lost virtue's importance, from Balzac to Simone de Beauvoir, that have not been aired for decades. Then she knocks down the accompanying myths one by one. Female modesty is not about a "sexual double standard," as is often thought, but is related to male virtue and honor. Modesty is not a social construct, but a natural response. And modesty is not prudery, but a way to preserve a sense of the erotic in our lives.
With humor and piercing insight, Shalit invites us to look beyond the blush and consider the new power to be found in an old ideal. She maintains that the sex education curriculum forced on those of her generation from an early age is fundamentally flawed, centered as it is on overcoming reticence -- what we today call "hang-ups." Shalit surprisingly and persuasively argues that without these misnamed hang-ups there can be no true surrender, no richness and depth to relations between the sexes. The natural inclination toward modesty is not a hang-up that we should set out to cure, but rather a wonderful instinct that, if rediscovered and given the right social support, has the power to transform society.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Shalit has done a brilliant job of exposing some of the underlying myths and assumptions that prop up our culture. I could not sum up her book in the 1,000 words Amazon allow for reviews, but here are three particular gems of quotes:
"In this post-sexual revolution era, a young woman may freely cohabit, but she may not choose to wait. If she does, there must be something wrong with her." (p.188)
"Which, really, is the more misogynist view: the view that for all of world history women have been idiots, or the view that gives women more credit, and thinks we have only gone overboard in the blip of the last thirty years?" (p.216)
"I'm struck by how similarly everyone behaves and sounds. It's fascinating, but also a but eerie, because ours is supposed to be a time of great freedom. And yet most people have **ended up letting the culture they live in dictate our choices**" (p.220)
Some will be offended by Shalit's book; but this, I would suggest, is because she has hit a nerve. Her call is not so much for a return to modesty but for a call for women (and men) to take a stand against the heady rush of popular culture and say, 'wait a moment, I want more than *that*'.
I cannot recommend this book more highly; it deserves a wide audience, and it deserves to shake many of us out of our complancency.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is such a brilliant book I really hope Wendy Shalit writes more books in the near future. She is an incredibly witty writer and thereby manages to expose the confusions of libertarianism, political correctness and radical feminism without in fact being too rude to any individual proponents of these views. Sadly the converse is often not the case due to the insiduous philosophy that 'the personal is the political', which has given many radfems the 'right' to make very bitchy attacks on people with more conservative views rather than arguing seriously with them. Shalit is far, far more perceptive and intuitive than so many contemporary writers on women. Indeed, she has a very intuitive and feminine style of writing which is reminiscent of more old-fashioned Puritan feminists, and is a real breath of fresh air. By means of simply interviewing a range of people on their opinions and personal experiences of the sexual revolution, she is able to untangle all the strings that are attached to libertarian attitudes. There is no judgmentalism or finger-pointing in this book, and that is because it is securely based in essentialist views of gender which hark back to the Enlightenment (and possibly to the author's Jewish background). In other words, the author is secure in herself because her views are objective and not 'personal politics'. There is a problem here though. The author mentions Rousseau as one of the proponents of this essentialism. For all his talk of political freedom, Rousseau propounded a very restrictive education for girls, as did other French 'revolutionary' thinkers. (Liberty, equality, fraternity but not sorority.) His ideas are inadequate as a basis for a modern ethic of gender relations, not the least as he himself gave away his five illegitimate children to an orphanage - hardly the sort of behaviour the author would approve of! Neither is there much discussion of sociobiological views on the topic of modesty, i.e.that it was evolutionarily advantageous, in this book. Seeing as modesty is a social device for restraining men and avoiding unwanted pregnancies, one would expect such a discussion. Then again, her chapter on Male Modesty is a gem; there is so little writing of this kind around it's a pity. There are lots of women who would just melt at the way she says that 'to be a man is to be gentle around a woman'. Plus she makes the honest point that feminists fail to understand, that male modesty has never been valued or praised officially as much as female modesty, and indeed needs to be elicited by it. All in all, a funny, readable book and worth keeping for all the interviews and quotes.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a brilliant, brilliant book! The cultural and educational etablishment - and those whose behaviour and mindsets have been formed by them - will be outraged ... which is good evidence that Wendy Shalit is right on the money. She shows the devastating effect that late-twentieth-century promiscuity has had on young women: almost unheard-off afflictions from anorexia and bulimia to self-inflicted injuries are now commonplace. So too are psychological problems. And the remedy that culture offers them: loosen up further on your sexuality; be 'comfortable with your body'. Shalit points out that natural embarrassment, when it is not rooted out by a culture that makes war on modesty, exists to tell us something, and that that something is important. A society which bares all (whether literally or metaphorically) is a society in which nothing is sacred and nothing is safe - particularly not women. Modesty makes dignity and 'self-esteem' possible ... without having to try and teach them or build them in after they have collapsed. I mean, isn't all this obvious anyway? How the heck do we imagine our ancestors managed for all these millennia without self-esteem classes to prevent them from cracking up? Answer: they didn't keep throwing their dignity and modesty away!
Of course, all of this is very upsetting for our cultural elite. If Miss Shalit is right - and she is - we will all have to live rather differently. We will recognise the majority of the output of our media and educational systems (to say nothing of the attitudes of government) for the harmful and pitiful trash that they are. Rather a lot of people have an awful lot invested in Wendy Shalit being wrong. Yet she shows, with example upon example upon example, the facile nature of 'pop culture's' concern with our 'self-esteem' whilst incessantly urging us to do the very things most likely to destroy it. Hence she cites a popular magazine in which a woman confesses to needing "constant reassurance from my lover that he really loves and wants me", whilst a few pages later telling women they should sleep around "just like men do".
Wendy Shalit's arguments are formidable indeed. What makes her wittily written debut book even more impressive is the fact that this young lady (and she would welcome that epithet) produced it while only one year out of college at the age of 23. Depressing for those of us with lesser talents, perhaps, but: read it! read it! read it!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The core is true but the argumentation flimsy
This book is unique: you never see sumptuously-written books about sexual modesty in print. Therefore it is a really good read even if you don't agree with everything. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2002
Fantastic but some flawed philosophy
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and still dip into it a lot because the author is so witty, and she manages to keep the reader's interest by including lots of interviews and quotes... Read more
Published on 12 Jan 2002
Every feminist should read this book!
Wendy Shalit has done us all a favour by exposing and explaining the results of hard-core feminism. This is a brilliant and challenging portrayal of what's needed to right the... Read more
Published on 8 Nov 2000
We Must Never Go Back
Miss Shalit makes many generalistic statements about women and sexuality,as though all women have a vulerable feeling and attitude toward sex, and as though all women view men as... Read more
Published on 26 May 1999
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