So the Modesty Survey has been making the rounds, and my perspective is, oh, good, here's something I can have an opinion on.
Now, I had a culturally Christian upbringing, which means my family celebrated Christmas and Easter, and at the age of fourteen I independently devised Pascal's Wager, and that motivated me to calling myself a Christian for a couple more years. Not that anybody asked.
These days I don't claim any religion, for three reasons:
1. I don't feel the need to associate myself spiritually with one denomination or another,
2. Speaking the name of my Bloody-Handed Empress would call down a plague of rot and ruin to the Earth, and
3. Again, nobody's really asking.
So I don't share a lot of spiritual DNA with the respondents to the Modesty Survey, which is a set of questions gathered from "Over 200 Christian girls" to which "over 1,600 Christian guys" responded. It's obvious, just by looking, that the survey was done with the best of intentions, and that the respondents were answering in good faith. Well, that, or that everyone involved is a troll and they're all just trying to incite cultural backlash, because, you know. Internet.
If you look at the periphery of the survey's website, you'll see that the sponsors of the survey, Alex and Brett Harris, are avowedly not trying to get any laws passed, or start ordering women around. They are, in their own words, "not telling you what to wear -- we're just telling you what we, as guys, have to guard against."
That's what it comes down to, really, in the Modesty Survey. The purpose of modesty, respondents seem to agree, is to prevent men's passions from becoming aroused and inflamed and veiny. Here's an excerpt from an exceedingly typical response:
"I find it so much easier to respect and talk to a girl who is dressed modestly. To see a girl dressed in a low-cut blouse or a tight-fitting shirt looks like she's inviting you to sin. At best it's inconsiderate of her brothers in christ. At worst it's deliberately tempting men who are trying to be righteous."
Now, I can't win any arguments with these people by arguing that sex and sexual thoughts aren't sinful. What I hope is a bit more negotiable is the question of responsibility.
Here's how I see it, survey respondents: you're asking these women to cover up something natural: their bodies. Your sexual thoughts, when you see those bodies, are equally natural. And yet you refuse to take full responsibility for keeping those thoughts under wraps. To hear some of these guys talk, that's an enormous burden. I don't see what the big deal is, personally; to me, sexual desires aren't troubling, any more than my natural desires to do things like eat or sleep or pwn noobs or txt whl drvng. Sure, those desires can be distracting, but I've long since learned to deal with them. The survey respondents, clearly, have not.
So where does the anger and frustration go when these men succumb to their desires? Here's what a typical respondent had to say about how immodestly dressed women make him feel:
Saddened; disappointed; sometimes angered. They're distracting good men, dishonoring God and marriage, and offering themselves cheaply--which makes me desire even more strongly a girl who is modest, who is valuable.
Really, dude? You got all that from a sports bra?
And that's a very, very typical response. Not all the respondents said that they were disgusted with immodest women, or that they didn't respect them, or that they tried to distance themselves from them. But a hell of a lot of them did. These men have so much indignation, such a feeling of betrayal, because the women they see on the street won't help them stop thinking certain thoughts. And that indignation, apparently not ugly enough on its own, spills over into all sorts of assumptions as to how she's "offering" herself.
It so happens that I was reading Persepolis when the Modesty Survey came to my attention. I mean literally while I was reading Persepolis, I glanced up at my laptop and checked some blogs, because apparently my attention span is so shot-to-shit that even a comic book can't hold me for very long. Persepolis, for those who don't know, is the true story of a young woman growing up in Iran in the 80's and 90's, where, among other things, headscarves were mandatory and revealing clothes were forbidden.
In one brief sequence, the author, Marjane Satrapi, is walking down the street, dressed just as modestly as the law prescribes, drinking a Coke. A Kuwaiti immigrant - a new arrival, after the then-recent Iraqi attacks on Kuwait - pulls up to her and asks her,
"How much? How much?"
because, you see, he thinks she's a prostitute. She explains to us, as her uncle later explained to her, that "[In Kuwait] women are so lacking in rights that for a Kuwaiti, a girl who walks outside while drinking a Coke can't be anything but a prostitute."
My point? Not that an online survey is tantamount to the dictates of a fundamentalist government. My point is that the appearance of a modest woman and the appearance of a prostitute are cultural inventions, and western culture no longer conforms to the perceptions of evangelical Christianity. Maybe you assume that tight jeans and a low-cut top signify that a woman has no morals, no empathy to the feelings of men around her, and no respect for herself. And you'll be just as wrong as the guy who looked at a young woman, covered head to toe in dark, concealing clothing, noticed the Coke in her hand, and was dead certain she was a hooker.
