Naked Feminism E-Book

Victoria Bateman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Is it right that, despite the promises of feminism, women's bodies remain at the mercy of state, society and religion? Should a scantily clad woman, or a promiscuous one, be worth less than a fully covered woman, or a chaste one? Are being sexy and being smart really mutually exclusive? Can a woman be both body and brain? Victoria Bateman has confronted these questions with actions as well as words. She has appeared naked on national television, on stage, in art and at protests - using her body, as well as her brain, to deliver her message. In Naked Feminism, Bateman makes a compelling case for women's bodily freedom, and explains why the current puritanical revival is so dangerous for women. Illustrating the swinging pendulum of bodily modesty through the ages, she takes us on a journey from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, through the birth of Christianity and Islam, to the lax morals of the medieval period and the bawdiness of Chaucer and Shakespeare; to the clampdowns of the Puritans and later the Victorians and, more recently, to the re-veiling of the Middle East and the purity pledges of modern-day America. She ends with a plea: feminists must unite to challenge the repression of the female body, as only then can women be truly free.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Preface

Notes

Introduction

Notes

1 The Modesty Cult: A History

When the Nude was not Rude

The First Modesty Mongers

Modesty Matters: The Greeks vs. the Romans

No Sex Please, We’re Christian!

Islamic Consolidation

The Chinese Puritans

From Medieval Immoralities to Purity Wars

By George!

Victorian Virtue

Victorian Virtues Go Global

The Great Unveiling

The Sixties Prevolution

The Sixties and Beyond

Conclusion

Notes

2 The Modesty Cult: The Dangers

Education, Work and Politics

Abuse and Harassment

Victim Blaming

Physical and Mental Health

Sexual Pleasure

Conclusion

Notes

3 The Modesty Cult: The Causes

It’s Not All About Religion

The Biological Curse

Kinship

Agriculture

Property

Growth and Inequality

Population Pressure and Pregnancy

Conflict

The Patriarchy

The Matriarchy

Conclusion

Notes

4 Beware Puritanical Feminism

Modesty and Matriarchy

The Suffragettes

Socialist Feminists

Radical Feminists

Naked Feminists

Living Dolls?

Why Modesty is not the Answer

An Appeal for Tolerance

Conclusion

Notes

Conclusion

Step 1: Self-reflection

Step 2: Reforming Feminism

Step 3: Embrace ‘my body, my choice’

Notes

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Figures

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1

Modesty and Education

Figure 2.2

Education and Child Marriage

Figure 2.3

Modesty and Women’s Labour Force Participation

List of Tables

Chapter 2

Table 2.1

Women’s Labour Force Participation and Education by World Region

Table 2.2

Countries Ranked by Modesty Culture

Table 2.3

Physical and Sexual Violence by World Region

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

Begin Reading

Conclusion

References

Index

End User License Agreement

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Dedication

For all women – modest, or otherwise

Naked Feminism

Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty

VICTORIA BATEMAN

polity

Copyright © Victoria Bateman 2023

The right of Victoria Bateman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5608-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946838

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

This book is personal and political. It fuses academic work with the experience of placing my own naked body in the public sphere. It provides a response to all those who have questioned whether being naked can be feminist. And it is a reaction to the numerous times I have been called ‘trashy’, a ‘whore’ and an ‘idiot’. It tells the story of when, how and why societies became obsessed with women’s bodily modesty – whether their virginity or their state of dress – and explores the many adverse consequences that have resulted. It lifts the lid on the battle that has long taken place within feminism: between those who regard modesty as a necessary tool of liberation, and those, like me, who argue that a woman’s respect and worth should not depend on something as superficial as either her state of dress or whether her hymen is intact.

Much of the book was inspired by observation: observing the way ‘scantily clad’ women, as well as those dressing modestly, are stereotyped; observing the way strippers and sex workers are disparaged and talked down to; and observing the way people reacted with judgement towards my own naked endeavours. Throughout the associated judgement, I have been extremely fortunate to have received support from friends and colleagues, including Ruth Scurr, Karenjit Clare, Carolina Alves, Clive Lawson, Lucy Delap, Michelle Baddeley, Avner Offer, Arif Ahmed, Alan Fersht and Natasha Devon, along with my sister Stephanie. I have benefited not only from the published work but also the camaraderie of Deborah Oxley, Emma Rees, Bina Agarwal, Keon West, Philippa Levine, Kate Lister, Erin Hengel and Belinda Brooks-Gordon: all of these, and so many more, deserve a big thank you. I have also been touched by the support offered to me by those who have reached out online (and by post) and have been forever moved by the kindness offered by both the sex worker and the nudist communities.

Polity Press deserves a particular thank you, most notably my editor, Louise Knight, along with Inès Boxman, Emma Longstaff, Susan Beer, Anne Sullivan, Emma Nash, Jim Caunter, George Owers and Pascal Porcheron, and two anonymous readers, who offered not only helpful suggestions but also support when the project was in its first stages. Emma Rees read the full manuscript in great detail and injected punch into the final stage of the project, for which I am very grateful.

The unfailing and unconditional love of my husband of seventeen years (and counting) is something I never take for granted and goes to show that immodest women can – and should – be treated with love and respect.

Preface

This book isn’t a feminist manifesto for nudity – even though I would happily write one. And it isn’t an invitation for every reader to strip layer-by-layer with each passing chapter, though I certainly have no objection if you do so. Its aim is broader: to place in full view what I call the ‘cult of female modesty’ – the way in which, in many societies across the world, a woman’s worth, value and respect depend on her bodily modesty. It draws not only on the personal – the private and public criticism I have received for my own acts of bodily immodesty – but also on the experiences of women who face a much tougher culture of modesty, from forced veiling to virginity testing and honour killings.

As I hope will be clear, my objection is not to modesty – in the sense of what people wear or how they choose to live their sex lives – but, instead, to societal attitudes: to those who think that women’s uncovered or promiscuous bodies are ‘the problem’, and who in turn deem immodest women a threat to themselves, a danger to other women and a disruptive force in wider society. Challenging the modesty cult does not therefore mean that we should all shed our veils or bikini tops, it means that we should respect modest and immodest women alike, resting a woman’s value and respect on much more important things than bodily modesty.

Throughout, I reflect on how modesty culture is affecting women’s lives today, and consider how the past has shaped the present. To provide vital perspective, Chapter 1 offers some historical background, revealing the way in which the modesty cult is deeply rooted not only in the Middle East but also in South Asia, the Far East and parts of Europe. While not all world regions have historically been as tightly within its grip – including parts of Australasia, South East Asia, Western and Southern Africa, and the Americas – we’ll see how colonisation, international trade and religion acted to spread the cult of female modesty into these areas, with serious consequences for women. For the sake of brevity, our historical journey is necessarily a speedy one, meaning that my focus is on covering major trends across large geographical areas rather than providing detailed analysis of an individual society or a specific period. And, precisely because modesty culture is multi-faceted, I try to give a taste of not only clothing customs but also attitudes to women’s sexual activity, including those towards the most ‘immodest’ of all women: sex workers.

Since my focus is on breadth, for a reader who has more time to explore history in greater depth, I would recommend Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness, Ruth Barcan’s Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy, Annebella Pollen’s Nudism in a Cold Climate, Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History, Kate Lister’s Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts, Ruth Mazo Karras’s Common Women, Emma Rees’s The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Stephanie Cronin’s (ed.) Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World, Nikki Keddie’s Women in the Middle East, Barbara Molony et al.’s Gender in Modern East Asia, and Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex, amongst many others.

Much of the book is what could be defined as heteronormative: it discusses policies and practices that are constructed on the assumption that men are attracted to women who are in turn attracted to men. This is because the modesty cult itself is predicated on heteronormative assumptions – that we are cisgendered and heterosexual.1 The feminist critics of ‘immodest’ women, who we similarly encounter in this book, also tend to deploy their armoury (including concepts such as ‘the male gaze’ and ‘objectification’) in a heteronormative way. As the journalist Zoe Williams points out, ‘[t]he rhetoric of objectification relies on the idea that it’s one-way traffic, that only men objectify, and only women are objectified’.2 Since I do not support the modesty cult, it may not come as a surprise that I also do not support the – explicit or otherwise – homophobia and transphobia that almost without exception accompanies it.

As becomes clear in the course of this book, women can themselves be complicit in the cult of female modesty – judging and looking down on those who are either insufficiently covered or deemed sexually ‘promiscuous’. Why this is the case – and whether modesty culture is truly in women’s collective best interest – is the topic of Chapter 4. With it, I consider numerous strands of feminist thought – including the feminism of the suffragettes, socialist feminism, Islamic feminism and radical feminism – to uncover the degree to which they do or do not embrace aspects of the modesty cult. The lines are rarely either clear-cut or consistent. Some feminists reject naked protest, while others support protesting naked but oppose glamour modelling; similarly, some feminists question casual sex, while others view it as a sign of liberation, but condemn those who sell sex; and, some object to compulsory hijab abroad while also disapproving of short skirts and revealing tops at home – ironically, using the same logic as those imposing the compulsory hijab.

It is certainly common for people to ‘pick and choose’, approving or being tolerant of some behaviours which could be deemed ‘immodest’ but not others: for example, life models are commonly seen as more acceptable than glamour models; women who have premarital sex in a long-term relationship are typically seen as more ‘respectable’ than those who also engage in casual sex; strippers are often judged less disapprovingly than women who have sex for money; and, women who have lots of casual sex are judged much more favourably than those who choose to sell sex.

I frequently, however, find myself questioning the divisions that are commonly constructed in our minds between different aspects of immodesty. For example, if I was ever to be paid for delivering a naked performance on the topic of feminism, would that have any overlap with stripping? If a life model sells naked images of herself to artists for artistic purposes, does what she is doing have any degree of overlap with glamour modelling (after all, some of her images may well be bought for pornographic use)? If you model underwear for a high street chain, is there any overlap with posing for a ‘Lads’ Mag’? While there are certainly differences between each of these activities – which many are of course keen to point out – there is also some degree of commonality, and acknowledging this is, I believe, vital to breaking down the divisions between women.

The feminist Robin Morgan worried that ‘the erosion of the virgin/whore stereotype’ would erase ‘the last vestige of (even corrupted) respect for women’.3 But, surely, we can build respect for women on the basis of something other than bodily modesty? Rather than erecting a wall between women, we can – and should – be setting a wrecking ball loose on the very idea of division.

If we truly object to the modesty culture that drives compulsory hijab, virginity testing and honour killings, we should not be slut-shaming scantily clad women and stigmatising glamour models, strippers or sex workers. By breaking the cult of female modesty we have the power to solve a whole host of problems that plague women’s lives across the world – problems that have so far proved intractable. Our ultimate aim must be to ensure that every woman is respected and valued, irrespective of her state of bodily coverage or the degree to which her hymen is intact.

Notes

1.

Indeed, as Brian McNair notes in his book

Porno? Chic!

(2002), part of the present day backlash against the sexual revolution is driven by a homophobic response to the increasing visibility of homosexuality and other forms of sexual identity.

2.

Williams, 2007.

3.

Morgan, 1980, quoted in Paasonen et al., 2021.

Introduction

What determines a woman’s worth? Is it her achievements, her personality, her beliefs? Is it her conscientiousness, her open-mindedness, how kind and generous she is to others? Or is it what she shows, or doesn’t show, of her body that determines whether a woman is valued and respected by society?

I pose these questions not only as a woman but also as a ‘naked feminist’, someone who views my body, alongside my brain, as a means of advancing feminism. Rather than being afraid of the female body, and keen to repress femininity and sexuality, naked feminists respect those who make use of their body, their brain, or both. As someone who has, among other things, delivered public lectures, attended a Royal Economic Society gala, and appeared on national television, all while wearing no more than shoes and a smile (albeit accompanied by my trusty handbag), there is little doubting my commitment to the naked feminist cause. Yet not everyone agrees with my approach; below are a select few (of the many thousands) of comments I have received:

Good God she single-handedly took feminism back to the Stone Age!

There’s nothing more anti-feminist than having to strip naked desperate for a man’s attention.

A woman’s body is a work of art … a gift from God to man. My wife would wholeheartedly disagree with you on flaunting it for this purpose. Thanks for sullying the sanctity of women whose bodies are private to them and their significant other.

Being trashy is never classy and you certainly are quite trashy.

You’re a disgrace to all women!

One person even reported me, via Twitter, to the Cambridge police department. Unfortunately for them, they were foiled by their poor understanding of geography: as they discovered, the Cambridge P.D. in Massachusetts has no jurisdiction over Cambridge, England (not that I had, in fact, committed any crime).

You might of course be questioning why it matters if I receive a torrent of abuse for revealing my body. After all, haven’t I asked for it with my actions? Don’t I deserve my comeuppance? Yet it is this ‘asking for it’ mentality that sometimes on a more subconscious level pervades so much of society’s attitude towards women. Explicitly or implicitly, and inside as well as outside feminism, women’s respect still hangs on their bodily modesty – on the degree to which their body is ‘unseen’ and ‘untouched’. As a result, crimes and inappropriate behaviour committed against what society judges to be ‘immodest’ women are trivialised, with women who ‘show off’ their bodies, along with those who are deemed ‘promiscuous’, being seen as ‘fair game’, and deserving of punishment.

By imposing bodily modesty as a perceived virtue on women, society actively prevents the equality of the sexes. In other words, what I will call ‘the cult of female modesty’, the belief that a woman’s worth, value and respect depend on her bodily modesty, inhibits equality, rather than furthering the cause of women. As we will see, this modesty cult not only shuns and devalues the women it categorises as ‘whores’, it hurts all women – modest as well as immodest. No one escapes its wrath.

In some countries, the modesty cult could not be more clear. In Egypt, Morocco and Palestine, more than eight in ten men think that their honour depends on how their female relatives dress and behave, and more than a third think that the victims of honour killings ‘usually deserve such punishment’.1 A study of male preferences in regard to female partners found that ‘sexual inexperience’ was valued highly by men in Indonesia, Iran, India, China and Taiwan.2 Measured in terms of attitudes to virginity, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestine, Turkey and Egypt, where 90 per cent or more of people consider premarital sex unacceptable, would surely top any modesty ranking. Other countries that also display high levels of disapproval of premarital sex include Nigeria (77%), India (67%) and China (58%).3 As Tang et al. write, ‘[n]owadays, Chinese people typically hold more open and positive attitudes towards sex than in previous decades, but its citizens are still not as open as Westerners’.4 In the West, the proportion of people who deem premarital sex unacceptable stands at 30 per cent in the United States, a mere 13 per cent in the UK and only six per cent in France and Germany, which rank as the most ‘promiscuous’, or least judgemental, of all countries. Attitudes towards birth control, which capture the degree to which people think that sex can and should be divorced from reproduction, also help us to reveal where the modesty cult is most apparent.5 The countries that rank highest in these terms are Pakistan, where 65 per cent find birth control unacceptable, Nigeria (54%), Ghana (52%) and Malaysia (40%). In the United States only seven per cent of people take the view that birth control is morally unacceptable; in the UK it is even lower at three per cent and in Germany it is a mere one per cent.

But, on a personal level, the reaction that I have faced to my naked feminism has made clear to me that, even in supposedly liberal countries, too many of us still judge women based on their bodily modesty. Delving deeper into embedded societal attitudes and behaviours only confirms this fact and, worryingly, the evidence is that modesty culture is now on the rise. And this is why I am writing this book. I want to explore the history of female modesty; to examine the situations of the women whose lives are most blighted by the modesty cult today; to bring to light the way in which modesty culture is gathering steam; and to raise the alarm as to what lies ahead. I want to make clear that the modern-day modesty resurgence isn’t only associated with clerics, conservatives and nationalists; it is also at risk of polluting feminism itself, particularly as we react to the issues raised by the ubiquitous presence of sex and women’s bodies in today’s ‘striptease culture’.6 I end with a plea to all my fellow feminists and liberals – a plea to reject, rather than to embrace, the modesty cult. While today’s ‘raunch culture’ might be far from perfect, we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; as we will see, the modesty cult cannot be our saviour.

For too long, and in too many places, the cult of female modesty has gone under the radar, and that is in large part because modesty culture possesses a secret weapon; it is exceptionally evasive. The line between modesty and immodesty is drawn in a different place in different time periods and in different societies. What one person judges to be modest, another might judge to be immodest, depending on where they live, and in which century. In parts of the Middle East, a woman without a headscarf is considered ‘naked’, whereas a European woman wearing a bikini would not, in general, be described as such. Indeed, as Monique Mulholland notes in her book Negotiating Pornification, a scantily clad woman can still be considered ‘respectable’ in Western culture, so long as she behaves in a ‘controlled’ way in terms of her sexuality. Moreover, within the nudist community, nakedness itself is not perceived as immodest but as humbling, innocent and without vanity, whereas the ‘sexualisation’ of the body is considered more of a taboo. Bodily coverage (and the acceptance or otherwise of nudity) is, therefore, neither necessary nor sufficient as a metric of modesty culture; attitudes towards women’s sexuality also need to be considered. Indeed, history tells us that societies often seek to control not only how women dress, but, more specifically, their sexual behaviour, creating not only an obsession with virginity, but also, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a demonisation of those who might profit from their bodies, such as glamour models and sex workers.

The fact that bodily modesty is multi-faceted, and that there are no universal rules, might make the modesty cult elusive, but that does not mean that we should be fooled into thinking that we have escaped its torment. Any society in which the word ‘whore’ acts as an insult to women should be considered to a greater or lesser extent to be within its grip. This is because, at its heart, the modesty cult divides women up into ‘good girls’ and ‘whores’ and anyone who is on the wrong side of this line is deemed lacking in respect and worth. Whorephobia and slut-shaming are the inequitable, and damaging, consequence.

I admit that I once subscribed to the modesty cult. As a young teenager, while other girls were rolling down their socks and rolling up their skirts, I was doing the reverse: my favourite attire consisted of an almost Victorian-era style of dress, with long socks and a skirt that reached to my ankles. While I was being mocked for my ‘prudish’ state of dress, I could see how others elsewhere in society were laughing at my boob-tube-wearing peers. They were deemed ‘silly tarts’ and ‘pieces of meat’. When they were harassed or abused, well-mannered society would respond: ‘well, weren’t they asking for it?’ And that is, of course, one of the reasons I covered up. I didn’t want to be written off as ‘trashy’ or ‘common’, or to be seen as ‘fair game’. But, the more I thought about it, and the more I collected my badges of academic achievement, the more I wondered whether I was myself complicit in society’s attempt to divide women up into good girls and whores. I started to notice the way in which my body increasingly felt like a liability, one that risked sullying what I had achieved with my brain. Not only was I left feeling uncomfortable with my sexuality, I felt under pressure to choose between my body and my brain. I began to ask myself: why should I be categorised as a brain and by implication not have a body? And why should other women, from models to strippers, be classified as bodies, with their brain ignored? By shedding my own clothes I wanted to question the dangerous societal divisions women face; I wanted to show that behind every body is a brain, and behind every brain is a body and we should celebrate both, and fear neither. I wanted to take charge of both my body and my brain, something that every woman should be free to do.

As I started to realise, not only do we still have further to travel until women are in full control of their bodies, but it is the cult of female modesty that stands in the way. Despite the supposed ubiquity of women’s bodies, body-phobia remains. When Janet Jackson accidentally exposed her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl there was an uproar – along with a $550,000 fine for the network that televised it.7 Around the same time, the topless Spirit of Justice statue housed in the Justice Department of the USA was being draped in fabric at taxpayers’ expense, all so as to avoid embarrassment for the officials photographed or filmed nearby.8 In 2014, Leena McCall’s painting ‘Ruby May, Standing’ was removed from the Society of Women Artists’ Annual Exhibition in London after complaints from visitors that it was ‘pornographic’. The subject was, in fact, mostly covered, but with pubic hair protruding above her trousers. While full female nudes were on display at the same gallery, Ruby May’s more sexually knowing and confident pose was clearly too much for some visitors to handle.9 Even more recently, in May 2022, Adidas launched a sports-bra campaign filled with non-sexualised bare breasts of infinite variety. After complaints from the British public, the Advertising Standards Authority banned the advertisements. Women’s bodies are, apparently, too offensive for public eyes.

Even when it comes to holidays, which should be our period of peak relaxation, the modesty cult rears its ugly head. Going topless for comfort remains taboo for women. Interestingly, according to a 2020 YouGov poll, women are more likely than men to object to other women being topless on the beach. Less than half of British women think that topless sunbathing is ‘acceptable for both men and women’ compared with 70 per cent of men.10 Similarly, a half of British women think that non-sexualised naked protest is completely unacceptable compared with only 38 per cent of men.11 Many women take the attitude that too much female flesh on show serves the ‘male gaze’. To them, what other people, predominantly heterosexual men, might think or feel in response to a woman’s body is more important than a woman being free to use her body as she chooses.

Alongside the body-phobia, whorephobia is ever present. Women still face numerous sexual double standards. The words ‘slut’, ‘slag’ and ‘whore’ are still considered to be some of the greatest insults that can be directed at women, precisely because society deems bodily virtue, or the lack of it, to be a central determinant of a woman’s worth. From a young age, women walk a fine line between being called ‘prudes’ and ‘whores’ and, once that line is crossed, their reputation may never recover. While nowadays, being ‘hot’ can command respect, being ‘slutty’ does not; and, of course, only women can be sluts.12 Revenge porn has, sadly, become a growing phenomenon, used to shame and embarrass women. Adolescent girls are well aware that their reputation is on the line when it comes to sexual encounters and, in the words of two sexual health experts, simultaneously ‘feel less entitled to sexual pleasure from masturbation’.13 Even when it’s solo, erotic pleasure is shameful. Furthermore, women experience higher levels of guilt than men following their first sexual encounter.14 And, while casual sex is a status symbol for men it remains ‘a sign of being a slut for a woman’.15 More generally, women’s sexual pleasure and desire are neglected relative to men’s.16 We rarely confront the fact that one in ten British women experience pain during sex,17 something that can in turn be linked to sex-guilt and to a fear of appearing unladylike or immodest.18 Cindy Meston reveals her struggles in accessing funding for research on female sexual pleasure: ‘[y]ou can talk about wellbeing or marital satisfaction, but talking about sexual arousal or orgasm as an ultimate end point will diminish your chances of getting funded’.19 In the words of Emily Maguire, ‘[y]ou can have orgasms or respect’, not both.20

Slut-shaming is not only common, it has become institutionalised, to the point that it is considered an acceptable form of punishment for girls. In the last few years, stories have circulated of American high schools recommending the distribution of ‘modesty ponchos’ for prom nights, while in September 2019 a high-school swimmer was initially disqualified from winning a swimming competition because her school-issued swimsuit rode up her backside as she climbed out of the pool.21 In their interviews with parents and young people in Scotland, researchers spoke to a teacher who ‘recounted how he had challenged colleagues in his (Catholic) school for their readiness to describe female students as “sluts” on the basis of their clothing’.22 In Ireland in November 2020, students at a Carlow Secondary School were brought together in the school hall and instructed on what was and was not appropriate wear for gym classes. According to one parent, her daughter was told that she and other young women ‘should have more respect for themselves [than to] be showing off their bodies’.23 In protest, a group of students began pasting posters to the school walls with the message ‘[s]top teaching women how to dress. Instead, teach men how to respect women.’24 The school responded publicly by saying that gym days were becoming ‘fashion shows’ and that the talks were nothing more than a reminder of the school’s gym uniform rules.25

The model and actress Emily Ratajkowski reflects on her own treatment as a young woman and how it left her feeling uncomfortable in her own body:

[M]en and women had told me that if I dressed a certain way I wouldn’t be taken seriously and could even be put in danger. A middle school teacher’s comment, ‘You can’t expect anyone to respect you’ echoed through my head.26

In 2018, when Ratajkowski was reportedly detained on Capitol Hill while protesting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, headlines were soon circulating about what she was wearing. In her own words, ‘[e]ven women from the Left, who fully supported the purpose of my protest, made comments about my missing bra underneath my white tank and jeans. In their minds, the fact that my body was at all visible had somehow discredited me and my political action.’27 The body is assumed to detract from the brain, and, in turn, being ‘sexy’ is also assumed to detract from being ‘smart’: ‘[w]omen with brains and beauty are not allowed to use both’.28 Not only are women expected to choose between being smart and being sexy, if they do choose the latter, their choice is seen as somehow damaging to womankind. As Ratajkowski notes, ‘we look down so much on women who like to play with what it means to be sexy’.29

Modesty culture is therefore deeply ingrained, but more worryingly, and despite some feminists arguing that ‘raunch culture’ is now the status quo, it is also experiencing a resurgence, and in more places than one.30 In Israel, gender segregation on modesty grounds has been growing since the 1990s. It aims to ‘“clean” the public sphere from any manifestation, real or perceived, of female sexuality’.31 Elsewhere in the Middle East, the veil has descended, a phenomenon that has become known as ‘re-veiling’32 and, while for many women it is a personal symbol of piety and of religious identity, for others it is a collective tool to fight sexism.33 Gabby Aossey, for example, claims that Muslim women who dress modestly are the true feminists, and that other women should embrace modest dress if they want to be respected in life.34 But the modesty branch of Islamic feminism is not alone. In the United States, ‘purity culture’ has been taking hold in Christian circles. Evangelical Christianity, with its virginity pledges and purity balls, is the ‘fastest-growing segment of the global Christian Church’,35 and it is armed with advice books for women, encouraging them to embrace bodily modesty in all its forms. Lookadoo and DiMarco’s Dateable compares women who lose their virginity before marriage with used cars, asking ‘[w]ould you buy a beat-up, old, used car at a new car price?’36 They claim that ‘every new sexual experience when you are not married puts another ding, another scratch, another scar on who you are. You keep running your car into other people, and then you wonder why no one treats you special.’37 Another best-selling advice book And the Bride Wore White: Seven Secrets to Sexual Purity categorises women as ‘styrofoam, ceramic, or teacup in value’ and goes on to suggest that ‘[g]irls who are teacups do not dress in sexy clothes, because they are more valuable, and girls who are sexy are not valuable’.38

This sort of advice has also crept into sex education. As one author argues, the American government has an ‘official virginity policy’.39 In 1981, it passed the Adolescent Family Life Act, known to some as the Chastity Act. The Act compelled all organisations that were receiving state funding to tackle teenage pregnancy to teach only abstinence-based sex education. This chaste agenda went even further, both with Bill Clinton,40 and, subsequently, with the expansion in programme funding that occurred under the Bush administration.41 As a result, between 1988 and 1999, abstinence-only sex education expanded from representing just two per cent of American sex education to almost a quarter.42 By 2003, almost a third of sex educators in the USA taught abstinence-only, with no discussion of contraception,43 and in 2022 the Roe vs. Wade ruling, which protected a woman’s right to abortion, was overturned.

As we will see in Chapter 1, far from revealing an upward march towards bodily and sexual liberty, history tells us that the pendulum has swung back and forth across the centuries. Today’s resurgence in modesty is on cue; having witnessed the sexual liberalisation of the twentieth century, the puritans are now overdue a comeback.

The first major swing in the modesty pendulum took place four thousand years ago, when an obsession with women’s bodily modesty first descended across the Middle East, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. By Roman times, however, women were not only unveiling their carefully manicured hair, they were also visible in public. The modesty-loving strands of Christianity, Islam and neo-Confucianism soon, though, stamped on this public display. And then, just as modesty culture was spreading from China across East Asia, Europeans were embracing the bawdiness of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The Puritans soon put an end to the parties, the illegitimacy, and the ‘whoredom’: immodest women were burned, imprisoned in Magdalen homes, or whipped by order of the state. And, thanks to the colonial adventures of the Spanish and Portuguese, not to mention the Puritans themselves, this modesty cult was shipped far and wide. Soon the Victorian moralists were ‘saving souls’ at home and abroad, teaching people to feel shame and embarrassment about their bodies in parts of the world that had, until then, no concept of ‘nakedness’. In an effort to inflate the virtue of white European women, whole continents-worth of women were labelled ‘whores’, in turn contributing to widespread rape and abuse.44And, where colonialists faced women who dressed particularly modestly, then so as not to bump European women down the modesty rankings, they were automatically labelled backward and oppressed.

As we will see in Chapter 2, the cult of female modesty continues to impact the lives of millions of women today, causing harm in multiple ways, all of which are ignored by those who claim that what we need in the West is a ‘return to modesty’. Across the world, government policies and social practices are implemented as a means of protecting women’s all-important bodily ‘virtue’. This ‘protection’ can include banning women from travelling alone, restricting where they can work and rest, regulating their dress, performing intimate virginity tests, or removing their genitals. In extreme cases, women are tortured and killed by their family if their bodily modesty is brought into question: in Nangarhar, Afghanistan, it is estimated that one in sixteen families have perpetrated an honour killing.45 Despite the beliefs of its adherents, the modesty cult does not make women’s lives safer, it leaves them exposed to harm, as the high levels of street-based harassment in countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon reveal.46 As we will see, the modesty cult also harms women and girls in more subtle ways: in the reluctance of families to send their daughters to school or university for fear of mixing with men, restricting their opportunities; in a woman’s reluctance to report sexual abuse, for fear of her reputation; in the embarrassment a teenage girl feels when asking for contraception, something that might cause her just to ‘take the risk’; in the vaginismus that can so easily result when women are raised by society to feel that sex is sinful; and in a reluctance to attend smear tests and mammograms, which can have a serious effect on the chances of surviving cancer. Questioning the idea that a woman’s value and respect rest on her bodily modesty is vital to challenging the policies and practices that harm women’s lives across the globe. Rather than welcoming modesty culture, we should be doing everything within our power to break it.

Of course, if the modesty cult is to be broken, we also need to understand what lies behind it. Chapter 3 therefore delves into the effects of religion, biology, geography, climate, warfare, politics and economics. While the modesty cult has existed across time and across place, it has done so to very different degrees. This variation allows us to uncover why modesty culture exists, and what needs to be done to release ourselves from its grip. As we will see, as early agriculture developed in the direction of the plough and pastoralism, as private property replaced a communal existence, and as inequality grew, virginity became increasingly prized and policed. Warfare and population pressure further added to the policing of women’s bodies. All of this helps us to explain the strength of the modesty cult in parts of the world such as the Middle East and North Africa, north-west India, and the eastern Mediterranean. In contrast, western Europe, the Americas, south-east Asia, and western and southern Africa initially escaped some of the worst ravages of modesty culture. But, in Africa, as nomadic pastoralism spread outwards, women’s sexual and bodily freedoms were increasingly regulated. In western Europe, following the population collapse of the Black Death, which decimated the wealth of landowners, society became in many ways more sexually permissive, but, by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, once population had rebuilt and inequality had returned, the Puritans were on the march. By the nineteenth century, industrialisation brought the extremes of both wealth and poverty, a rapidly expanding population, and a growth in heavy industry favouring male labour, leaving women competing with one another for the wealthiest husbands on the basis of their ‘purity’. At this point, even feminists were embracing the purity agenda, for men as well as for women, culminating in Christabel Pankhurst’s demand for ‘votes for women, chastity for men’.47 Today, the same pressures that have in the past precipitated a return to modesty are once again building: inequality, population growth and religious fervour. Unless it is nipped in the bud, modesty culture is on course to expand.

John Stuart Mill, author of the nineteenth-century classic On Liberty, recognised that ‘the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement’. When it comes to the modesty cult, this ‘despotism’ ensures that modesty is drummed into us from a young age, and that those who transgress modesty norms face punishment from the state and society. Precisely because of this ‘socialisation’, immodesty can bring with it intense feelings of embarrassment and shame, along with disgust from onlookers. This explains the visceral and impassioned response I often receive to my naked feminism, based not on logic but on deep-seated and subconsciously driven moral feelings. As Kira Jumet notes, ‘emotions are tied to moral values; therefore shock and/or outrage may arise when there is a perceived infraction of moral rules’.48 Rather than prompting a reasoned response, the violation of our modesty norms elicits an almost instinctive emotional response. But, when emotions run high, we need to stop and question, rather than to dig in our heels. We can, so long as we place logic ahead of emotion, unlearn the shame, disgust and embarrassment that we relate to women’s bodies.49 Resisting the modesty cult, and placing women’s freedom on stronger foundations, requires us to question feelings and assumptions that are so deep within us that they are taken as truths.

In particular, I would ask that every reader stops and asks themselves:

Why should our respect for another woman be conditional on something as superficial as a piece of cloth?

Is it right that women who are scantily clad or who make money from their bodies are judged as worth less than other women?

Should we really be referring to immodest women as ‘disrespecting themselves’ (after all, can’t your self-respect hang on much more important things than your bodily modesty)?50

Does it really make sense to deem ‘promiscuous’ women ‘cheap’?

By asking these questions we have the power not only to change the way we think about ourselves, but to challenge attitudes that affect the lives of millions of women across the world.

In Chapter 4 I argue that, more than any other group, feminists themselves need to be asking these questions. Breaking the modesty cult will involve doing more than tackling religious extremists and social conservatives; it also requires us to rethink feminism. Feminism is in need of a revolution, one which purges it of whorephobia and replaces it with a broad and tolerant interpretation of the mantra ‘my body, my choice’. As we will see, an uncomfortable battle has long been taking place within feminism: a battle between what I term naked feminists and those of a more puritanical variety. In bringing this battle to light, I unpick feminist reactions to women’s bodies – to the scantily clad, to strippers, and to naked artists and protesters – exploring the arguments commonly used by feminists to justify more modest dress and behaviour. While, as we will see, there certainly are valid concerns when it comes to women who are forced, coerced or ‘socialised’ into revealing or monetising their bodies, we must also be careful not to fall into the trap of unthinkingly imposing our own particular modesty norms on other women. According to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, both a ‘half-naked woman’ and ‘a veiled female’ represent ‘an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential … Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness.’51 While I myself prefer to rest a woman’s dignity on something other than a piece of cloth, according to Alibhai-Brown, you can only be ‘feminist’, and only have dignity and autonomy, if you follow her personal dress code (not too little, not too much). This Goldilocks-style approach to modesty, which condemns any deviation from the personal preferences of a supposed feminist intellectual, is in reality no different to modesty requirements imposed through religious fervour or government diktat, and should be railed against by all true feminists.

A similar contempt towards immodest women is apparent throughout feminist writing. Joan Smith’s The Public Woman opens with a multi-page description of the appearance and activities of Katie Price, describing her life’s goals as ‘artificial’,52 and criticising the ‘narcissistic’53 culture she represents. Natasha Walter condemns modern-day women who dress sexily and who turn to cosmetic procedures as ‘living dolls’, while Ariel Levy coins the term ‘female chauvinist pigs’ for women she derogatorily refers to as ‘bimbos’.54 Levy seems disturbed by the best-seller status of Pamela Anderson’s book Star, that the author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, Tracy Quan, spoke at an author event alongside a Chief Justice, that ‘Paris Hilton isn’t some disgraced exile of our society … she is our mascot’, and that a senior award-winning TV executive, Sheila Nevins, makes documentaries about strippers, as well as about the holocaust and war orphans.55 The notion that women they view as less intelligent than themselves can succeed through their looks seems to fill some feminists with fear.

Bernadette Barton, taking a cue from Levy, argues that raunch culture is ‘ruining our society’.56 Her book is filled with images of big-breasted and scantily clad women, taken from bill boards, film, television, and music videos, including everyone from Red Hot Riding Hood and Jessica Rabbit to Pamela Anderson and Miley Cyrus. She writes that ‘[p]eople are having sex before they date, and women make their own personal porn to share on social media … Instagram users measure their self-worth by chili pepper emojis … Hordes of young women prefer the quasi-sex work of being a sugar baby to dating.’57 Emily Channell notes that ‘[m]ainstream women’s organisations and many academic feminists see Femen’s topless actions as simply giving men more of what they want – easily accessible women’s bodies’.58 Muslim feminist Gabby Aossey seems to agree, writing that ‘[h]ip Feminist campaigns like Free the Nipple only encourage a gullible behavior of disrespect for our own bodies, leading to everyone else around us disrespecting our bodies as well’.59 According to Naheed Mustafa, women who protest topless do ‘a huge disservice to the difficult, persistent, long-term work in which feminists are engaged the world over’.60 She instructs naked protesters to put their clothes back on, as if to win feminist arguments a woman has to pretend that she doesn’t have a body. It is clear that feminism has internalised the concept that a woman’s own respect and that of women more generally hangs on bodily modesty.

While these feminist fans of bodily covering claim to be challenging the ‘male gaze’, offering critiques of the constant presence of women’s bodies in society, they are in fact facilitating its dominance: in their view, a woman’s freedom to uncover her body comes second to how men might think or feel in response. In other words, if men risk being sexually stimulated, women must cover up. Naked feminism is, according to this internalised modesty cult, not only illogical, it is oxymoronic; it is sacrilegious to feminism. Theo Hobson, writing in The Spectator, declared my own naked protests ‘unfeminist’, while The Telegraph columnist Juliet Samuel argued that nudity ‘strips my arguments of force’, and is ‘meaningless and hackneyed’.61 One might expect such a response from social conservatives, but to find feminists adopting the same view is more troubling. After all, why shouldn’t women be free to uncover or monetise their bodies as well as their brains? Why should what some men might think or feel in response dictate what we can or cannot do with our bodies? And why should a feminist intellectual elite – able to succeed with an ‘all brains, no body’ mentality – constrain all womankind? Too often, feminism comes across as body-phobic, femme-phobic and whore-phobic.

For millennia, the state and society have policed and regulated what women can do with both their bodies and their brains. Over the last century, women have become increasingly free to make the most of their brains and, while we are a long way from full equality, they can now be found among the educated elite, working as politicians, academics and doctors. But, sadly, women’s bodies remain constrained, judged and controlled. For women to take control of their bodies as well as their brains, feminism will need to break the cult of female modesty. At the moment, by casting immodest women as problematic, feminists are instead encouraging the growth of the modesty cult. My message here is simple: beware puritanical feminism!

As we see throughout this book, challenging the modesty cult helps all women, whether they are modest or immodest. But ultimately this book stands up for any woman who is judged ‘immodest’, objecting to the notion that she is lacking in self-respect and dispelling the idea that she causes harm to other women. Whether or not women cover their bodies in line with the ever-changing norms of time and place, and whether they choose to monetise their body or their brain (or both), women deserve respect. To hang this respect on bodily modesty is not only superficial, it favours the intellectual elite, and it panders to the patriarchy.

In her book The Pornification of America, Bernadette Barton quotes the advice offered to a victim of revenge porn by a group of female peers:

We’ve told her if you want people to look at you differently you have to change what you do. You have to excel academically, you have to excel at everything you do because every time they look at you, every time they think about you, they’re going to think about this video. You have to give them something more positive to think about you.62

For Barton, such advice is empowering and represents the future of feminism. For me, it is deeply depressing, regressive, and steeped in modesty culture. While there is nothing wrong with advising the young woman to excel academically, why not also suggest to her that her worth does not depend on her bodily modesty, and that anyone who thinks it does, anyone sneering or laughing at her, is shallow and misguided? The woman is, after all, the victim of a crime, yet the advice from her peers portrays her as a guilty party. Every woman should be able to hold her head high, rather than live in fear. Feminism will only have succeeded, and women will only be truly free, once we confront and challenge the cult of female modesty.

Notes

1.

El Feki et al., 2017, pp. 83, 137, 215.

2.

Jayachandran, 2015.

3.

Pew Research Center, 2014, p. 9. Also see Adamczyk and Hayes, 2012.

4.

Tang, Bensman and Hatfield 2013.

5.

Poushter, 2014.

6.

On ‘striptease culture’, see McNair, 2002.

7.

Berkowitz, 2012, p. 11.

8.

Ibid., p. 12.

9.

Blundy, 2014.

10.

YouGov, 2020.

11.

YouGov, 2019.

12.

Mulholland, 2013, ch. 7. For the classic Australian text on whorephobia and the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, see Summers, 2016 (first published in 1975).

13.

Hyde and DeLamater, 2020, p. 296.

14.

Higgins et al., 2010; Sprecher et al., 1995.

15.

Hyde and DeLamater, 2020, p. 296.

16.

Keane, 2016.

17.

Roberts, 2017. Also Lloyd, 2020.

18.

Emmers-Sommer et al., 2017.

19.

Quoted in Keane, 2016.

20.

Maguire, 2008, p. 4.

21.

Farzan, 2019.

22.

Buckingham et al., 2011.

23.

O’Riordan, 2020.

24.

Ibid.

25.

O’Brien, 2020.

26.

Ratajkowski, 2019.

27.

Ibid.

28.

Hakim, 2010.

29.

Ratajkowski, 2019.

30.

Levy, 2005; Attwood, 2009, p. xiii; McNair, 2002; Mulholland, 2013, p. 5; Barton, 2021.

31.

Triger, 2013, p. 19.

32.

Carvalho, 2013.

33.

Bullock, 2007, ch. 5.

34.

Aossey, 2017.

35.

Stiller et al., 2015.

36.

Lookadoo and DiMarco, 2003, p. 213.

37.

Ibid.

38.

Gresh, 1999; quoted in Klement and Sagarin, 2016.

39.

Blank, 2007, p. 249.

40.

Under Title V (section 510(b)) of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

41.

Blank, 2007, pp. 239–41.

42.

Fahs, 2010, p. 118.

43.

Ibid.

44.

Hamad, 2020; LB, J., 2021; Levine, 2003, 2007, 2008; McClintock, 1995.

45.

Gibbs et al., 2019.

46.

El Feki et al., 2017, p. 85, p. 139, p. 186.

47.

Bryson, 2016, p. 80.

48.

Jumet, 2017, p. 96. Also see Jasper, 2018.

49.

Górnicka, 2016.

50.

On how people (wrongly) assume that immodest women are lacking in self-esteem, see, for example: Krems et al., 2021.

51.

Alibhai-Brown, 2015.

52.

Smith, 2013, p. 21.

53.

Ibid., p. 28.

54.

Walter, 2010; Levy, 2005, p. 4, p. 20, p. 93.

55.

Ibid., pp. 25, 28, 90–1.

56.

Barton, 2021.

57.

Ibid., pp. 2–3.

58.

Channell, 2014, p. 613. Also see Matich, Ashman and Parsons, 2019 and Rivers, 2017.

59.

Aossey, 2017.

60.

Mustafa, 2013.

61.

Hobson, 2019

;

Samuel, 2019.

62.

Barton, 2021.

Chapter 1The Modesty Cult: A History

Housed in Berlin’s National Gallery is a dark and haunting painting that, despite its moderate size, catches visitors’ attention from quite some distance. You don’t have to search high and low for the title – it is engraved on the frame itself. It is, quite simply, The Sin.