The morning after, I called my friend Alison. “So, what did you think of Monica’s performance?”
“That girl is a shameless hussy,” she replied firmly. “A shameless hussy.”
It had been so long since I’d heard anyone use that word that I actually looked it up. A hussy, according to my dictionary, is a trollop or strumpet–or, in less charmingly archaic words, a whore.
We don’t hear words like that much these days. In the wake of the sexual revolution, we’ve grown skittish when it comes to making value judgments about other people’s sex lives. Yet as we watched, stupefied, as Monica Lewinsky giggled and simpered her way through her primetime exhibition, it became clear that the pendulum has at last reached its limit. Short of posting her photo-illustrated gynecological records on the Internet, it appears that Lewinsky has taken the contemporary virtue of complete self-disclosure to its furthest possible extreme. And in some ways, we may owe her a vote of thanks, for so graphically demonstrating how shamelessness got such a bad rep in the first place.
It has taken us a while to embrace (however gingerly) the lost concept of shame. For too long, we were brain-washed by the self-help movement’s vision of shame as the ultimate toxic emotion. We were treated to a massive display of soiled family linen, aired by a small army of adult children intent on healing their psychic wounds by publicizing their once-shameful secrets. When we expressed any embarrassed queasiness about hearing intimate details shared by strangers, we were even made to feel a bit ashamed of ourselves.
Now, however, shame is enjoying a new, positive, spin. Listeners roar with delighted approval when radio maven Dr. Laura Schlessinger ferociously pins back the ears of some hapless “sperm donor” who doesn’t understand why he should pay child support if he doesn’t like the mom any more. Politicians compete with each other to heap steaming piles of blame on President Clinton’s still-unbowed head. Pundits are turning out reams of neoconservative prose celebrating the lost virtues of the Victorian era.
Chief among these pundits is 23-year-old writer Wendy Shalit, author of the provocative new book, “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.” Shalit believes women have placed their bodies and souls in grave danger by abandoning the tenets of maidenly modesty. According to Shalit’s argument, men are naturally sexual predators; without the shield of modesty, women are their helpless prey. By reclaiming sexual modesty, she believes, women can reclaim their lost power to control men’s otherwise unbridled lusts.
Shalit first came to national attention as a college freshman, when she wrote a somewhat blushing account of her embarrassment at her dormitory’s coed bathrooms, titled “A Ladies’ Room of One’s Own.” In her new book, she calls on women to recreate the feminine mystique by dressing modestly, behaving discreetly, and–most importantly–espousing a new code of premarital chastity. To a world grown weary of the Monica Lewinskys, the Pamela Andersons, the Sharon Stones–the endless daisy chain of scarlet, self-publicizing women–the virginal Shalit’s modest proposal may sound like the soft, sweet voice of reason. Yet if we heed Shalit’s girlish call for a return to virginity (an impractical aspiration for most of us), we run the risk of sending the pendulum swinging madly to the opposite extreme.
As we seek to reaffirm the value of shame, we need to remember how it became so toxic in the first place. The relentless conformity of the ’50s left millions of people ashamed, not of their sins, but of their differences–their skin color, their income, their sexual orientation. So much shame was spattered about, we lost the ability to discern who deserved it and who didn’t. Instead, we just threw up our hands and declared the dawning of a new and shame-free age.
That was a huge mistake. Now, as we enter the (hopefully) post-Lewinsky era, we must take great care to avoid a zig-zag cycle of social extremism. We had the wrong rules before. We desperately need the right ones now.
So we can’t follow rigid codes of conduct, such as Shalit’s, based on narrow and mostly outdated visions of men versus women. We can’t expect women to take on the heavy task of reinventing civility, nor should we let men off the hook on the grounds that they’re all just cavemen at heart. Instead, we should reconsider the thoughts of one 18th Century philosopher, who claimed that modesty was the “chief Ornament” of one sex, while integrity adorned the other.
In reality, integrity and modesty are two sides of the same coin, a currency available to men and women. The word “integrity” is rooted in a Latin word meaning wholeness. Modesty (enforced by shame, when necessary) helps us to protect our wholeness, our completeness. We need to cherish the solid cores of our inner being, and to turn our heads in reflected shame when people lacking any modicum of modesty publicly chisel off tiny bits of their essential selves, to titillate a few million television viewers or to send a social shockwave around a dinner table.
Last Wednesday night, we saw what happens when anyone, male or female, abandons all notions of integrity for a few extra bucks and a few minutes under the klieg lights. It was a real shame.
