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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 5, 2006
Modesty
Am I perhaps a little odd in finding modestly-dressed women attractive? It is hard to tell how odd, for men seldom discuss such things among ourselves. In moments, I’ve suspected this is our best-kept secret -- that we don’t actually like women to be dressed or to behave as tarts. (Not just the clothing, but the vocabulary and demeanour.) Still, few of us would say this aloud, especially in a public forum. For it cannot possibly be “politically correct”.The current premise of Hollywood and the “popular” culture is the precise opposite -- that men and women alike prefer women as tarts, and now, boys as boy-tarts. Look at the models of stage and screen. Then look at their imitators along any urban sidewalk, when the weather is warm enough to make the imitation practicable. We won’t go into forensic details: look at any tabloid, most broadsheets too. A woman is deemed attractive if she can command drooling. A man is assumed to be Pavlov’s dog. Curiously enough, this reduction of women to “sex objects” is the final achievement of a feminist movement that advanced the “Playboy philosophy” of the 1960s, by other means. The attack on what was supposed to be patriarchy proceeds by degrees to an attack on decency in any form. And somewhere along the line of this inversion, abortion replaced motherhood in its claim on apple pie. It goes much deeper than clothing, and crosses the “gender” frontier. A lady of my acquaintance, who used to like movies, showed me pictures recently over tea. She wished to juxtapose popular culture icons of the 1940s and ’50s with the ones we have today. Any starlet aged 22 looks like a woman in the earlier press shots -- and would seem so if all you could see was her face. But today’s thirtysomething and even fortysomething popstars dress, act, and have faces that convey juvenile delinquency. Geoffrey Chaucer explained all this through the Wife of Bath in his Canterbury Tales. This imagined 14th-century woman is one of innumerable proto-feminists in literature and life -- their type is legion. As our great Canadian satirist, Stephen Leacock, observed of the suffragettes and temperance crusaders of his generation, we have known them through the ages as witches and harpies. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue argues for the authority of experience over the authority of scripture and tradition. Yet she quotes the Bible frequently and inaccurately to defend her own many lapses of “conventional morality”. She has gained the mastery of a lot of men, including five husbands, while killing off each in turn; and the one thing she has learned from life is that chastity is not necessary to virtue. She tells a story of a lusty errant knight, thrown upon the mercy of a Queen, who to save his life is sent on a mission to discover “what women want”. And with the help of a witch, he finally succeeds. She wants "to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housband as hir love, / And for to been in maistrie hym above.” Which is an elegant way of saying, a woman wants to have everything both ways for ever. And droll Chaucer, while mocking his Wife of Bath, nevertheless winks at her spirit and candour. The purpose of feminism was to chase that ambition -- not to make women equal with men (an idea that is intrinsically preposterous), but to give them the “sovereignty” over men and nature. However, nature, for its part, gives nothing to people who ask too much. Nearly half-a-century after the most recent renewal of the Battle of the Sexes, women today have achieved nothing, are reduced to walking the streets like tarts, and men don’t even find them attractive. For the males who do find that kind of thing attractive are not lusty knights. They are pimply boys who prefer pornography. (This is just one reason the birth rate has plunged.) I am not arguing for dress codes, incidentally -- any contemporary wild Catholic schoolgirl knows how to deal with those. Fashions in clothing come and go, and all may be adapted. I am arguing instead for the thing itself -- for modesty, and the restoration of the “lady”. Of a woman with sovereignty in her own sphere. Of a woman reclaiming the title of self-possession, assured of her own worth and the legitimacy of her claims. Begin with your daughters the moment they are born, and some day we may have families again. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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