Liberation from Libertinism

A twenty-five-year-old book could help us better understand today's gender turmoil.

What is a woman? Not a man. But also, not a child. This seems simple (or should), but it’s a paralyzing question for all kinds of reasons. And not just on the left—also in the center and on the right. Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty turns 25 this year. I think it’s a prescient book that was ahead of its time—and that can help us today find a way to make room, literally and figuratively, for adults who are female. Read my review, originally published at Law and Liberty, below.

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Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty (1999), was raised in a secular Jewish family and became an observant Jew as an adult. In this book, she contends that a culture failing to inculcate broad respect for the sexual modesty that today’s observant Jewish women—and yesterday’s women writ large—visibly put at the center of their dress and lives will be hostile first to women and then to humanity itself. 

Shalit argues that women’s lives and romantic prospects would be greatly improved if we eschewed the sexual libertinism suffusing popular culture and society, and re-embraced traditional mores predicated on sexual modesty instead. 

After the publication of A Return to Modesty, Shali briefly became a conservative darling and anti-establishment enfant terrible. It’s easy to see why. 

Twenty-five years after its publication, A Return to Modesty feels fresher than ever. 

First, Shalit’s once-novel polemic about the negative externalities of the sexual revolution for women has only been reified and reiterated by the past quarter century. Second, her insights about the multifaceted push toward androgyny are quite relevant to today’s debate over gender ideology. Third and finally, her extolling of modesty’s virtues offers us a way to resist those aspects of gender ideology that otherwise defy easy characterization.

The Case for Modesty

The term “sexual modesty,” on its face, conjures for most of us the regressive, didactic notion that women are responsible in a daily and banal way for the sexual morality of men. For example, self-described champions of modesty may appear to be arguing (and indeed, sometimes do argue) that eschewing short skirts and tank tops is the measure of women’s virtue. 

Shalit’s understanding of modesty, though, is much richer and more nuanced than this. It is not a superficial “damping down of allure” but a source of women’s self-protection and empowerment.

At bottom, Shalit is arguing that most women’s reticence about casual sex (in comparison to most men’s enthusiasm for it) is: (1) Natural rather than socially constructed, but subject to social deconstruction at the hands of a society hostile to women’s romantic hopes; (2) Predicated on a protective kind of preemptive embarrassment that makes many women rightly reluctant to be physically and emotionally vulnerable to men in the absence of love and/or commitment; (3) Under assault from a cultural mainstream that tries to make sex “no big deal” and encourages women to dress in a revealing way to accord with this premise; and (4) Actually far sexier and more satisfying for both women and men than either clinical “consent” or mere prudery. 

Per Shalit:

Today girls are generally brought up to assume that they have no special vulnerability, because that would be sexist. … Being as promiscuous as any man is taken to be a badge of one’s liberation … [but] it is precisely denying a woman’s special vulnerability and stripping her of her natural way of compensating for it that is the height of true misogyny.

If we teach women that they are the same as men when it comes to sex, they will feel inadequate when they are unable to treat sex as “no big deal.” But in fact, that female reticence to treat sex casually—otherwise known as modesty—is a protective armor meant to help women safeguard both their bodies and hearts for the “one” lifetime sexual partner most women still claim to want. 

If we encourage women to follow their natural impulses and treat sex as something significant, both they and the men will be better off. Romantically, spiritually—and also sexually. 

“Today modesty is commonly associated with sexual repression,” observes Shalit, “with pretending you don’t want sex though you really do. But this is a misunderstanding, a cultural myth spun by a society which vastly underrates sexual sublimation.” 

Shalit’s defense of modesty rests on the claim that so-called “women’s empowerment” predicated on the sexual revolution has sold women a bill of goods: “I propose that the woes besetting the modern young woman … are all expressions of a society that has lost its respect for female modesty.” 

If we recover a foundational understanding that “a woman’s experience of love and sex is fundamentally different from a man’s,” Shalit contends, we could save young women an enormous amount of heartache. We could also keep them from the pathologies that show up in too many of their lives around adolescence, from eating disorders to self-cutting. These self-harming behaviors, Shalit argues, are ways for girls to regain control of their bodies and their sexuality in a sexually permissive, amoral culture that seems to lay casual claim to both. 

These contentions are audacious and polemical now. But they were far more so in 1999—when it still seemed to some thinking women that “girl power” might not be actively disempowering. This was also before the religious right got its Bush-era moment to push purity culture content into the mainstream. 

Shalit explained to a jaded readership how and why the modern feminist consensus around sex (separating sex from love and marriage) is so unkind to women. She made crystal clear—in a way that cut through all the sacred cows—how the modern feminism that claimed to empower women and improve female well-being had done the opposite. 

Indeed, Shalit’s central argument would be rehabilitated—simplified, streamlined, and secularized—nearly 25 years later in Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. These two books, published nearly a quarter century apart, address the same fundamental flaw at the heart of a fraudulent feminist project that remains sadly and frustratingly hegemonic. 

Modesty and Gender Ideology

If Return to Modesty is enduring in its foundational claims, it is prophetic in its subtle anticipation of a far newer problem: Gender ideology. 

Twenty-five years ago—before Caitlyn Jenner, before “preferred pronouns,” and long before Lia Thomas—Shalit contended that there was a delicate symbiosis between conservatives’ shrugging “boys will be boys” and feminists’ insistence on clinical regulation of sex. Together, she recognized, these perspectives perpetuate an ideal of androgyny, which cuts against a sophisticated understanding of male/female sexual difference. A cultural respect for modesty, by contrast, is a way to avoid intrusive, legalistic regulation. 

When Shalit’s 1990s feminists drafted dating codes to prevent sexual assault while simultaneously proclaiming their freedom from sexual mores, they represented a living paradox: “On so many … modern college campuses, where there was such a concentration of unhappy women, everything was as nonsexist as could be. … We were as far from patriarchal rules as we could get. So, if we were supposed to be living in a nonsexist paradise, then why were so many of us this miserable?” 

Then as now, feminists believe that women and men should relate identically to romance, sex, and love. To the extent that the sexes remain distinct, it indicates to feminists that women need better protection against victimization at the hands of men, and further liberation from “the patriarchy’s” regressive and oppressive expectations of women and their sexuality. 

Meanwhile, when Shalit’s 1990s conservatives snigger at feminist insistence on dating codes and the like to prevent sexual assault, they are in effect rejecting the idea that women are different from men in any way save the obvious, physically self-evident ones. This is one short step away, Shalit sagely implies, from conceding that womanhood is “just breasts and lipstick.” That is, a set of appendages and styles that can be adopted (or not) at will. 

For the libertarian-leaning, “College Republican” intelligentsia of Shalit’s college years (which uncannily resembled today’s less than erudite “bar stool conservative,” Trumpian right in its indifference to sexual morality, and morality generally), women “freed” by the sexual revolution should be expected to take care of themselves. Just like the men to whom they ostensibly want to be genuinely equal. These conservatives of Shalit’s era (which included, in this respect, its “pro-sex feminists”) argued for their part that men and women are, in essence, physically different but intellectually the same. 

When this is the best that many conservatives can do—as it was in 1999 and ultimately remains today—it is easy to see the essential prescience of Shalit’s insight. 

Clearly, the ubiquity of what she terms the “androgynous project” left us with few cultural guardrails, even on the right, against the recent infiltration of transgender identification and its demands. 

Modesty and Freedom

With recasts of Title IX and discussions about “biological women,” we are now trying to justify the prohibition of male intrusion into female spaces. 

Many, myself included, find the notion of men undressing in women’s locker rooms and of women being forced to undress in front of “fully intact” men (as the collegiate swimmers sharing a locker room with trans-woman Lia Thomas regularly had to do) unconscionable. We, the sensible majority, tend to cast our objection as a matter of common-sense physical safety: a basic and time-tested response to the obvious physical differences between men and women. 

Allowing some men, regardless of how they “identify,” into women’s private spaces, endangers all women. Both by opening the literal door to potential predators and by militating against women’s own intuition of danger. This perspective makes it easy for us to advocate for women’s physical protections, without conceding anything in the way of women’s need for any protections beyond the strictly physical. 

Maybe too easy. And maybe not entirely honest. 

After all, even if Thomas posed no threat of sexual assault, and even if he were the only man admitted to the women’s locker room such that no such threat was ever posed, many of us would remain adamant that collegiate women should not be expected to undress in front of him. Indeed, it could be persuasively argued that Thomas did pose no physical threat, given the team environment and the group dynamic attending the locker room. 

But this changes not at all our conviction that forcing young women to undress in Thomas’ presence as a condition of maintaining their standing as collegiate athletes is unjust. And, no, we would not feel similarly if the situation were reversed: men who need for some reason to undress in front of a woman (identifying as male or otherwise) do not evoke on their own behalf any particular empathy, outrage, or pity. 

How can we explain this double standard, once we admit that it’s not purely about risk mitigation? 

Modesty. 

Shalit understands sexual modesty as a mature female adaptation containing spiritual and psychological elements rooted in but not encapsulated by the physical. To be fully equal, women require something beyond deference to just the vulnerability of our physical bodies. We require mores that respect how our bodily vulnerability is reflected in a kind and degree of embarrassment at exposure that is as debilitating psychologically as the exposure itself could be physically.

Thus, the concept of modesty offers us an understanding of sexual difference that goes beyond strictly physical safety, but without addressing ourselves to the faux-progressive emotional “safety” at which conservatives (rightly) chafe.

Modesty gives us a language and a conceptual framework in which to make this admission without fear of excess. Why does the admission have to be forced? What is the excess we fear? I’ll speak for myself and hazard a guess that many of my fellow right-leaning women feel similarly. 

After the vice-presidential debate, there was widespread feminist ire at the fact that JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, had interrupted the female debate moderators. “There was no way that Vance wasn’t going to interrupt and talk over two female moderators,” wrote feminist journalist Jessica Valenti on X. 

Yes, Vance had spoken over the female moderators. After those female moderators had broken the agreed-upon debate rules by (incorrectly) fact-checking him but not his opponent, and then trying to “shush” him when he pointed out their rule violation. 

To call “sexism” after an incident like this one—in which women voluntarily enter the public arena, behave dishonorably, and are called out for it by a man just as another man would be—is to demand special treatment for women. 

This is disempowering, infantilizing, and undermining. For those of us who believe that women are actually adults, not little girls, this “feminist” assumption of “special treatment when it suits us” is enraging. 

It also calls to mind the excesses of “Me Too,” in which women who embraced the freedom to consent to sex one moment regretted their consent the next—and then traded on feminine credulity to accuse their male partners of something between “verbal coercion” and forcible assault. 

Modesty offers us a way to separate circumstances like Thomas’ locker room (in which a woman must be accorded a distinct level of physical deference in order to be made equal) from circumstances like Vance’s debate (in which a woman needs to be held to the same standards of professionalism as a man). 

In between, of course, there remains a private sphere in which men can behave like boors and still be protected by law—but would not be protected from social censure if we embraced Shalit’s tenets. 

Everyone should care about the violation of women’s private spaces, and about men’s socially sanctioned reduction of women to sexual commodities. Our collective inability to articulate this imperative in a broadly persuasive way betrays a culture that is, per Shalit, trying to “cure womanhood itself.” And too often, nearly succeeding. 

After all, even among today’s centrists and conservatives (myself included), the word and the concept of “modesty” is far from top of mind. 

All the more reason why it, like engagement with Shalit’s book, is long overdue for a comeback.