The triumph of bad-girl culture (National Post, June 9)

Sexual modesty is an inborn, self-protective reflex in girls, especially at the threshold of puberty. "Good girls" were not suppressed; they were shielded from emotional injury at a critically vulnerable time of life. Shalit's research provides abundant corroborative evidence that girls are unhappy in their so-called "liberation." She cites mounting statistics of anorexia, self-mutilation and depression, persuasively linking them to the unnatural suppression of girls' intuitive modesty.

Furthermore, Shalit blames premature co-ed sex education for the lack of respect, hostility and downright aggression girls often experience from boys today. Before, modesty and the mystery of difference legitimated sexual rejection in boys' eyes, and put control over the sexual timetable in girls' hands. Without that impersonal psychological buffer zone, boys now experience No as personal rejection. Girls tend to avoid confrontation, so unwelcome advances often end in the girl's faked compliancy and secret shame.

Our girls' innocence and sense of self-worth have been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Feminist Sally Cline concedes ideological defeat in what she calls the Genital Appropriation Era: "what [women copying male behaviour in the name of equality] actually achieved was not a great deal of liberation for women but a great deal of legitimacy for male promiscuity; what it actually passed on to women was the male fragmentation of emotion from body, and the ... schism between genital sex and responsible loving."

"It's high time sexual modesty came out of the closet," Shalit declares, claiming she wrote A Return to Modesty "to restore the lost moral vocabulary of sex."

Sadly, Shalit's determined contrarianism is virtually unique today. Few girls can be modest in a cultural vacuum. Without the support and protection of parents and educators for the option to say no to premature sexual experience, girls will go with the polluted social flow.

In 1711, Sir Richard Steele wrote: "When Modesty ceases to be the chief Ornament of one Sex and Integrity of the Other, Society is upon a wrong Basis." Hear, hear.

 

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