Reviews for A return to modesty

The average rating for A return to modesty based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-03 00:00:00 Sanford Minuk Shalit's book offers encouragement to women who are unhappy with the way the sexual revolution has buried the concepts of chivalry and courtship in an avalanche of low expectations, leaving women more vulnerable to sexual pressure, harassment, and objectification. She calls both conservatives and feminists equally to task. She wants conservatives to take the claims of feminists about the modern sufferings of women (anorexia, date rape, harassment, etc.) seriously, but she wants feminists to consider that these sufferings may not be the result of the "patriarchy," but of the attitudes born of the sexual revolution. She wants them to consider that "patriarchy" and "misogyny" are not synonyms, and that when the concepts of female modesty and male honor are toppled, the effect may be that misogyny actually has freer reign. Conservatives, Shalit says, want "women to be ladies while still getting to do whatever they [the men:] want." On the other hand, "Feminists hope to change the behavior of men without the women having to change…They want the men to be gentlemen without [women:] having to be ladies." Kudos to Shalit for saying things many women believe but are afraid to say for fear of being called sexist or submissive. Those who adorn the altar of sexual choice rarely seem to understand that the sexual choices individual women make DO collectively affect the reality of how men on average treat women on average. Women, with a "cartel of virtue," can influence how the majority of men approach sex and relationships. In the absence of that cartel, however, women are subjected to increased ungentelmanlinke behavior and experience more difficulty finding men who are willing to offer any level of commitment prior to sex. "When women, as a group, forsake their natural power, it becomes difficult to reclaim that power individually." Older feminist tell young women, "You have a choice to be abstinent, why should you care what other women do?" But women of my generation didn't choose the world we live in, the world the architects of the sexual revolution created for us before we were born, a world where most men expect sex of women long before marriage and where natural modesty is often called a "hang up." We would have voted for the right to equal treatment under the law, but who's to say we would have voted to be asked for sex on the first date? Unfortunately, my generation never got a vote in the sexual revolution, and now the "guardians of the status quo" grow indignant when any of us suggests we don't care for the results. Shalit has an interesting take on how harassment laws and dating codes developed. When society treats sexual differences and sex itself as insignificant, sooner or later, unchivalrous behavior becomes more common. If women are offended by the way men approach them, then, they must be the ones with the problem: they are prudes, or they are "uncomfortable in their bodies," or they are too intense. While the feminists don't think a man has a right to make a woman feel uncomfortable for any reason, how can men take a woman's discomfort seriously in the world created by the sexual revolutionaries, where sex is nothing special and any talk of female vulnerability is synonymous with "oppression"? So what do feminist do when they discover that a lot of women _don't want_ to treat sex with as much detachment as men? Do they encourage women to reinstate the "cartel of virtue"? Of course not. That's sexist and unthinkable. So instead they turn to written laws and regulations and codes of dating and sexual harassment, trying to enforce from above decent behaviors and attitudes that society once merely took for granted, and the result is a web of intimidation, condescension, and double standards. Instead of telling men they are sexist if they think they owe women special treatment merely because they are women, instead of inviting everyone to believe sex is trivial and then prosecuting men when they behave as if that's true, wouldn't it be so much easier if more people just taught their sons a sense of honor and their daughters a sense of modesty, so that having sex with inebriated, half-conscious college girls and inviting strippers to your frat party and telling dirty jokes to your female co-workers were simply unthought of? So, is Shalit advocating women be forced to wear burqas? That's not he point. Her point is that a voluntary return to modesty (which has more to do with expectations and attitudes about sex than specific dress) would be good for women, and that women benefit when the society they inhabit supports the concepts of modesty and male honor. I agree. So why only three stars? Because of several flaws in the way she presents her argument: * She makes sweeping generalizations and speaks in frequent hyperboles. For instance, she repeatedly suggests that women can't feel safe walking alone on the streets. * Overall, I think she gives men a raw deal. I sometimes get the sense that men are being condemned for their sexual behavior while women are merely being pitied. She tends to speak of indecent male behaviors as though they were typical, as if the losers she dated in college were entirely representative of the American male. She often speaks in a condescending way about men. For example: a return to modesty, she says, "invites men to consider, 'What's fun about forcing someone into sex in the first place?'" Now, perhaps she doesn't _mean_ to imply that most men haven't considered that rape might not be fun, but, really, how would your average man feel upon reading that sentence? This book was written shortly after Shalit graduated college, and I think she had a somewhat insular view of the world. Her view of "men," it seems, has been largely informed by college frat boys, liberal male philosophy professors, the rantings of anti-male feminists, and articles in Cosmo. I don't think a woman who had been married ten years and given birth to one or more sons could possibly write this book the way she wrote it. * As in Girls Gone Mild, Shalit relies mostly on anecdotal evidence, using extreme examples as though they were normative. When she does use statistics, I am often skeptical of her sources, because the numbers are often suspiciously high. 78% of men have cheated on their wives? 65% of teenage boys in a Rhode Island study said they thought it was "acceptable" to "force sex" on a girlfriend after six months of dating? If your goal is to convince women that their desire for true love and commitment is not unrealistic, then it probably doesn't help to imply that the overwhelming majority of men are adulterers and rapists. * She tends to treat her own personal experience and observations in the very liberal parts of the country in which she has lived as indicative of national and generational trends. Although I was born the same year as Shalit and attended public schools my entire life, my own observations and experiences are different. I don't recall the boys ridiculing the girls by the lockers in 4th grade after being taught how to masturbate in sex ed. My 5th grade teacher most certainly did not keep a stash of condoms in her desk drawer to distribute to 11 year olds when they asked for safety pins. Casual "hook-ups" occurred at my college, but I never had the sense they were the norm (dating was). I had never even heard the term "check up" before I read this book. I never had a female friend assume I wanted "many men" or advise me to show more skin. I'm not sure if Shalit realizes that her experiences may have been atypical of the nation at large. * Shalit tends to blame society for all individual choices, allowing limited room for personal responsibility. At one point, she even says that the murder of a woman by her stalker should be on ALL of our consciences. I'm sure there are, as Shalit has said, women who do not know their feelings of modesty and their desire to link sex and commitment are normal. I understand that adolescence is a time where everything is dramatic, and that many young women do fear being alone and so say "yes" to sex when they don't really want to. Yet ultimately, they do have a choice to follow their feelings instead of what they believe society expects of them. Being counter-cultural isn't easy, but nor is it _quite_ as hard as Shalit makes it out to be. It's difficult to strain against the expectations of your environment, but, to some extent, people choose their environments by choosing their friends, their colleges, their extracurricular activities, and their religion. As I read Shalit recounting how she used to pretend to be more sexually experienced than she was to "gain approval," I often found myself thinking—-why don't you just find better friends who don't tell you to show more skin so you can have "many men"? Why don't you look for men to date in synagogue instead of in your Liberal Indoctrination 101 class? Shalit is lifting her voice to make the alternatives to a sex-saturated culture clear and to defend modesty and sexual restraint in a society that too often mocks them. I hope her voice will reach those young women who suppress their feelings and consciences in order to "run with the boys." Yet the final responsibility for sexual choices must ultimately rest with the individual.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-31 00:00:00 Hirofumi Naito A like-minded individual would love this book and question none of it. But as one of those "feminists" Shalit refers to somewhat derisively in her book, I could not help but notice Shalit's casual tossing of completely unfounded statements into the core of her arguments. She has some interesting solutions to a problem that is in fact all-too real, but her solutions fail to take into consideration 1. historical fact (for example, her oft-repeated assertion that rape, sexual assault, and harassment did NOT happen prior to the Sexual Revolution....which is blatantly false), 2. a perspective other than East Coast white elitist (Shalit seems to not be aware that modest cultures do in fact exist in the United States today, in certain immigrant communities, in certain poor and/or rural communities, in certain places in the Deep South, etc., or for that matter, all around the world), and 3. the hypocrisy of what she proposes (if we were to catapult back to a modest society such as she proposes, Shalit may have been educated, but the likelihood that she would have been allowed to employ herself outside the home, to write and publish as a woman would be decidedly slim). Shalit likes to pick and choose the aspects of modesty that appeal to her: gentlemanly behavior, chastity, conservative dress....but fails to admit that the good also comes with the bad: inequal pay, lack of opportunity, inferiority, lack of rights.... I was intrigued, but ultimately disappointed. It saddens me how many people question absolutely none of her arguments, or the feasibility of her proposals.