Book Club Part 3 with your {bits & pieces}
Continuing our Lenten book club with Part Three! (The previous discussion can be found in the last two posts. The bolded words are the chapter titles.)
Against the Curing of Womanhood: We need to stop medicating women out of femininity (just as we need to stop “treating” little boys for being boys). Since the time that Shalit wrote this, the “cure” has stepped up considerably, and now includes the attempt to excise the girl right out of her body via puberty blockers and breast removal surgery.
One thing I really want to say is that girls are far, far too stressed out in our culture. The push to achieve is too much. Most people are not meant to achieve in the ways we ask of our children — and the ones who are meant to, will.
Another factor that Shalit just doesn’t address is the effect of contraception on the female psyche. Attacking one’s healthy reproductive system is just never going to end well, psychologically or any other way.
Modesty and the Erotic: Although this isn’t a topic I would delve into too much, I think it’s worth saying that women who embrace their traditional roles really do seem to have a lot more fun being with men and in their marriages. They also seem to have better friendships with other women.
What worries me about the conversations that I read and hear when girls and women are talking to each other outside of the modesty discussion — when they are just “amongst themselves” and assuming certain common factors of modern life — is how terrible they find the very things that ought to be delightful. Ordinary pleasures that women of another era waited for and then enjoyed are totally burdensome to women today. The quiet satisfaction of intimacy between two honorably joined persons is a mystery so deep now that it is simply unknown to most — they don’t even suspect it exists.
Because they are expected to be so sexualized from the get-go, college girls speak of needing to get drunk in order to be able to have (not to speak of enjoy) sex. I know it’s a daring thought, but what if remaining chaste until marriage actually removes this problem entirely?
Even seemingly innocent — yet constant — contact with the opposite sex creates deformations, and I believe that those of us who are committed to modesty on one level need to confront the deadening effect of having to tamp down one’s normal, healthy instincts on our children whom we think we have protected.
The anecdote at the bottom of p. 178 has stuck with me ever since I read it about 20 years ago. It’s the one about the rabbi who cautions the teenagers that it’s “not kosher” to go off together, boys and girls, camping in the wilderness.
When they assure him that nothing untoward will happen, that “We’ve been doing this for years, we grew up together, we went to kindergarten together… we even share sleeping bags” — he responds in a way that is perhaps unexpected — but very wise:
“In that case, you don’t need to see a rabbi… you need to see a shrink. You’re in big trouble.”
What does he mean? It’s like I have said before when I’ve written about purity: It’s a good thing that young people have healthy sexual responses to each other! There’s something very wrong if they don’t! Something so wrong that it will cause mental illness.
And a lot of parents trying to oppose the current madness make this mistake. They are functional puritans and prudes, not lovers of chastity — at least, they have simply forgotten or repressed the knowledge of what it is or ought to be, to be a healthy, attractive, and vigorous young person!
There’s a reason the church opposes co-education, especially as adolescence approaches. It’s not only to prevent liberties from being taken. It’s to ensure that boys and girls will be interested in each other when the time is right. You can see how there needs to be prudence even in families. Cousins are cousins — they are also boys and girls. We don’t want them to be too familiar, but we also don’t want them to shut down emotionally. The best thing is to observe the proprieties at all times!
Ironically, as Shalit points out, young people are rebelling against their libertine parents, “returning to even older rules — often, those very rules of modesty their own mothers once called sexist.” (P. 192)
Pining for Interference: Shalit makes the excellent point that the sexual revolution made it so that there is really nothing to look forward to. Divorce — even the possibility of divorce — takes away hope.
It makes sense that young people want their parents to interfere for their own good (just as it makes sense that there will be what I call “attitude” if only to make the interference seem really legitimate!). What do we want? A happily ever after! How will we get it? By following the rules built up over the millennia to protect us from the many and various forms of evil that the human heart can cook up — and actually, it’s fairly simple: Keep sex for marriage, as something sacred:
“… But more significantly… as a way of insisting that the most interesting part of your life will take place after marriage, and if it’s more interesting, maybe then it will last. And, the hope of modesty continues, if it lasts, maybe then you can finally be safe. Instead of living in dread, feeling slightly hunted, afraid someone will call us to account and abandon us, maybe then we can rest…. Modesty creates a realm that is secure from an increasingly competitive and violent public one.” (P. 212)
Beyond Modernity: For real solidarity with each other — and to protect our girls, we need to return to what Shalit calls “the cartel of virtue.” This concerns not only modesty in dress but also the conviction that sex belongs in marriage only.
I would suggest that we take to heart the danger represented by deadening. One can rein in one’s unbridled passion, but I think we are seeing that awakening normal sexual feelings is difficult, precisely because one has gotten to the point of not caring.
In the time since Shalit wrote, it seems to me, looking at what girls actually wear, that the pendulum has gone way over towards just not being sexual at all — not overtly sexual but also not even sexual in a sublimated way.
One reason that leggings remain a fixture among women who in any other culture and time would be prime marriageable age (here I mean leggings and yoga pants full stop, no skirts or tunics) is precisely that they feel androgynous and yes, safe.
No amount of railing about how their tightness is provocative to men’s imaginations will have any effect, because they don’t feel that way. In a sense, the leggings-and-North Face-jacket phenomenon (and all its offshoots) is the perfect storm of the death of real chemistry between men and women that Shalit laments: It’s un-sexy (or un-flirtatious) to women and pornographic to men.
Fashions (or lack thereof) signal something more serious: An apathy borne of just having to cope with too much stimulation on all fronts. We need modesty and we need it now!
bits & pieces
A gripping story of the bank heist of the century.
John Cuddeback with a thought-provoking post: Make Your Home Like a Renaissance City. (I highly recommend his blog for men, especially. ) I would say — It’s not so hard to understand the connection between music and architecture (or design in general) — this was a standard way of thinking in medieval times. Music concerns harmony, which is a mathematical relationship that can be expressed in sound or in stone or paint. For the best explanation of this vital connection, I recommend David Clayton’s book The Way of Beauty. (affiliate link)*
A lovely recording of an Ave Maria by the Spanish Renaissance composer Francisco Guerrero.
Douglas Wilson on The Greatness of Insignificant Service — C. S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. ~ This is a keen insight from the author of the article, one which I sensed but never put into words, about the main characters in the novel: “Mark is driven by a desire to get in, whatever the cost, and Jane is consumed by her desire to stay out, at all costs.” ~ And Wilson reminds us of an important warning from Lewis himself, which every parent should take to heart, and which forms the impetus for everything I write here, especially on education, and why my standards seem sometimes to be so impossibly strict when it comes to children’s literature: “It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging.”
Take a break from flogging your high schooler over five-paragraph essays, and enjoy this ultimately much more formative tour de force by Flannery O’Connor: Living with a Peacock. Yes, read it together! Yes, this is a way to write!
A New Cathedral for Montenegro – Thoughts on the Architecture — a really breathtaking construction that is both traditional and creative.
A solid meditation on spiritual growth during Lent from Debra Black.
Imagine if you turned on your tap… and wine came out! This actually happened — in Italy, of course!
from the archives
My own musings on that passage on “men without chests.”
*I wrote about David’s book here.
liturgical year
St. Matilda — and next week we have St. Patrick’s and St. Joseph’s! So be prepared!
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