The Ick of Modesty Culture
Trust your intuition—healthy communities depend upon a jealous friction between the authority of the parents in the home and the authority of community leaders outside the home.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about why many sensible people intuitively understand “modesty talks” and “modesty culture” to be red flags. It’s an indication to many of us that a community is lacking in some way, dangerous in some way—failing to flourish in some way. I finally figured out that the intuitive “ick” here comes from the source of the modesty talks in addition to their (sometimes/often) questionable content.
When we fail to distinguish between source and content of modesty talks, those of us who object to modesty ick find ourselves drowning in a sea of hemlines and pointless litigation over inanities. Let the following be a declaration that he who wishes to object to the community modesty code shall not be forced to come up with an alternative community code, nor shall he be accused of failing to attend to the virtue of modesty. Rather, it is enough to simply demand that no community code of modesty exist1. For modesty—the true virtue of modesty—is best addressed in the home.
A community-wide, stringent modesty culture is an example of improper usurpation of authority. The parents and the home are primarily responsible for the formation of children. The parish, the church, the school, and all the secondary institutions are essential to human flourishing, but are not the primary institutions in this endeavor, and therefore are not tasked with the primary responsibility for the child.
We must pause here and address the myriad misinterpretations and misunderstandings that arise whenever one wishes to speak about modesty: First, modesty is a virtue. The virtue of modesty is proper to human beings, and therefore is proper both to young women and young men alike. As women must strive to foster the virtue of modesty, so must men. There are no female virtues or male virtues. There is simply virtue, and all of us must cultivate all of the virtues.
Further, as with all virtues, it is possible—nay, likely—to err on one side or the other of the virtue. Virtue is found in the mean, or middle, and humans often miss the mean on one side or the other, because it is difficult to hit virtue just right, on the nose, without years of experience and accumulated ethical wisdom. So for example, the virtue of courage is neither rashness nor cowardice. It is easier to run headlong into battle without thought of self-preservation and it is easier to run away from battle than it is to meet danger head-on with a healthy respect for one’s own life and the lives of others. This is encapsulated in John Wayne’s famous quote that courage “is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” The virtue requires relinquishing neither the desire to live, nor the desire to act honorably.
When we have experienced a failure to attain a particular virtue, we often overshoot in the other direction. It is similar to when we learn to drive a car, and our natural instinct to self-preservation makes us hug the right shoulder. A sudden slip off the road can cause us to jerk the car too far in the other direction—an overcorrection—because we don’t have the skill yet to drive smoothly in the center of the lane. Thus, the recent convert fails to cultivate the virtue of piety by overcorrecting his previous inattention to the divine with a new, slavish zealotry that serves his ego far more than it nourishes his relationship with his Creator. Once we train ourselves to look at every virtue as a central aim, with opportunities to miss and fall into sin on either side, our understanding of virtue is deepened, and our ability to navigate life without falling off the shoulder or veering into oncoming traffic greatly improves.
Thus, with modesty as with all virtues it is possible to be wrong in two opposing ways. In our modern society we see endless examples of an immodesty that is wanton display of the flesh. But the solution to this common immodesty is not to so burden or conceal the flesh that we develop a hatred or an othering of our own bodies. Modesty is rightly pursuant to the proper use of clothing, which is to both conceal and to set off, or to distinguish. A “modesty” that conceals to the point of failing to set off—failing to emphasize beauty or failing to allow distinctions of age, station, purpose in movement—is a false modesty. An overcorrection.
We see overcorrection happen with other virtues that pertain to the body—for example, a proper relationship with food includes feasting and fasting, celebrating both the goodness of the body and the nourishing community elements of food. The proper end to eating is physical flourishing. The solution to gluttony, also widespread in our culture, is not to isolate oneself and eat in private, or starve oneself, or develop other eating disorders. Again, sin (overshooting the mean) happens on either side of virtue. So it is with modesty.
And so, with this distinction in mind, we return to the virtue of modesty as it is inculcated in children in a community. A secondary institution has to balance many goods and many ends of the people it serves into one, common community good. However, the child’s parents are naturally, biologically suited to serve that child’s particular, individual good. This distinction is especially important where that child’s good is in conflict with the perceived or actual good of the community.
Whenever a secondary institution oversteps its bounds and seeps into the home, usurping the rightful authority of the father and mother, (often with good intention/often to make up for a perceived lack of due diligence by the parents) you get “ick” intuition. Listen to this intuition. Learn to identify it! The ick intuition exists to help you navigate your duties as parents in and among a larger community, because you and you alone are the parties primarily interested in the good of your own child.
—President Truman speaking at Memorial Day services at the Amphitheatre of Arlington National Cemetery. 5/30/1948. (by the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum)
We intuitively understand that the community is ordered to goals outside or above our particular child’s best interest—much like the military is ordered to goals outside and above the individual soldier’s best interest—and we therefore understand that a community is all too comfortable sacrificing individual good (our kid) for the sake of the good of the whole (their agenda). Sometimes, as in just war, this is what simply must be done for the sake of the whole community. When this happens, the sacrifice of the individual is honored, sacred, and widely celebrated by the community. The public celebration and honor given to the individual soldier and his family are a healthy recognition of the debt the community owes to them. It is an acknowledgement of the terrible necessity that the community could find no other way to address and therefore had to sacrifice some of its individuals to solve. But make no mistake: mothers and fathers exist to demand that the community find some other way, any other way possible, to pursue its end before it sacrifices individual kids for the sake of the whole.
But often, as with stringent and burdensome community modesty codes, this usurpation is not necessary, and is in fact frivolous. And indeed a sign that an improper or needless sacrifice of an individual for the sake of the whole has occurred is that it is not trumpeted, not publicly honored, not publicly acknowledged, but rather hidden, denied, and treated as a non-event. The denial of sacrifice usually is clothed with language shaming the individual. This is done so that the rest of the community is kept in the dark as to how the individuals are needlessly, recklessly sacrificed to an end goal unworthy of their sacrifice.
For their own sake, children must have that first institution—their own home and their own parents—go to bat for them whenever the community tries to sacrifice the good of the child for the sake of the group. This is really another way of understanding the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. The USCCB, or United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states “The principle of Subsidiarity reminds us that larger institutions in society (such as the state or federal government) should not overwhelm or interfere with smaller or local institutions (such as the family, local schools, or the Church community).”
There is a natural tension here, between primary and secondary institutions, and it is good for that tension to exist. It serves the best interests of the child. You get cult behavior when mothers and fathers relinquish their duty to the child and yield completely to the group or to a charismatic leader of the group.
The needless sacrifice of individuals to a community goal unworthy of their sacrifice is so evil that people will devote all their energy to papering over, obscuring, and inventing reasons to deny that this has taken place.
Where modesty is concerned, a girl’s mother and father are by far the most likely people to have her best interests at heart. It is proper to the father and mother to hold in balance their daughter’s simultaneous interest in attracting and securing a desirable mate, her ability eventually to feel at home in and accepted into a community outside her own, and her interest in avoiding attracting the wrong kind of man. Rules about what to wear, how to act modestly are best instituted in the home, privately, for the sake of the girl and her interest. When modesty talks are done outside the home, a girl’s community may or may not have her best interest at heart.
Often “modesty talk” culture serves something other than the girls themselves. Often, a community’s young girls are used as an outward sign—a distinguishing mark—to testify as to the holiness of the whole community to others. When this occurs, ick is never far behind.
God does not make goodness or uprightness as visible to others as we would sometimes like it to be. Our efforts at holiness and indeed the true states of our souls are hidden, tempting us to fashion outward signs to convey just how holy we are. The temptation to make a public display of goodness affects every religious community, even non-religious communities, as wokeness and virtue signaling are nothing more than pagan “modesty talks,” after all.
But perhaps, Protestant communities suffer more from this temptation, as the success of the individual church and the livelihoods of the pastor and community leaders depend upon successfully advertising a visible sign of the community’s holiness and set-apart-ness. Protestant pastors must be entrepreneurs, and must advertise the success of their flock, whereas Catholic priests and parishes enjoy (often to their detriment in other ways) institutionalized support independent of the conversions and tithing of the local parish community. Yet holiness is often interior and hidden, and religious “success” is very difficult to advertise. In lieu of soup kitchen and poorhouse photo ops, many religious leaders instead draft the best human billboards available to advertise the holiness of their community: their young, beautiful girls.
And therefore, you get increasingly fringe “modesty codes” that are more about conveying the particular character of a community and less about universal or objective standards of modesty: cultish hairstyles that have nothing to do with modesty and everything to do with the personal fetish of the community leaders, for example. Girls in boxy, almost purposefully unattractive and out-of-date clothing meant to convey holiness of the mind to the detriment of conveying the health or superiority of the youthful body. In reality these are artificial, forced, and unnatural human inventions that serve the interests of the pastor or whomever is looking to secure a very visible, public sign of his effectiveness as a leader. It’s not in the interests of the girls themselves. One suspects, also, that the inability of young women to convey the relative health, fertility, and attractiveness of their own bodies also serves the interests of older, jealous community matrons who in fact are often the loudest proponents and enforcers of community-held “modesty standards.” Attire proper to young women is different than the attire proper to older women, and any community that bans distinction between the dress of these two groups is working to paper over their natural differences. Why? Who stands to benefit from this?
When a father instructs his daughter in the privacy of her own home what she may and may not wear outside the home, there is an end to it. When each household attends privately to the interests of its children, there arises a general community observation of objective precepts of modesty while still allowing for individual interpretations and artistry in dress which are indeed the sign of human flourishing. A diversity of creative iterations while somehow still conforming to a universal, unspoken standard is kind of a hallmark of flourishing in the natural world, when you stop to think about it.
When policing modesty takes on a community role, and when the community usurps the responsibility of the father2, there is no end to the community obsession over it. Indeed the entire energy and force of community activity can devolve into an endless oneupmanship and shaming ritual centered around what the women are wearing. We can rest assured that when the majority of community energy is spent on something as superficial as clothing, the community has overcorrected, and swung from erring on one side of modesty to erring on the other. It is also interesting to observe that, despite this vortex of human energy and effort, such communities never achieve artistry or ascend to creative heights of dress or fashion. It always ends in unimaginative, dowdy Communist-like conformity or a erroneous and laughable reinterpretation of past sartorial customs.
When individual artistry, diversity of interests, occupations, geographic and climate variables, history, and human flourishing are no longer represented by the way people in a particular community dress, but instead their attire is outdated, culturally apocryphal, and entirely disconnected from the shared human experience of our time, we may safely conclude that an effort to avoid the wanton immodesty of our time has overcorrected and landed, bonnet-first, into the other side of the sin.
When this happens, the community’s girls are forced into a kind of odd parade, intentionally alienated from the wider world and incompatible with communities outside their own. This of course further serves the interests of community members to the detriment of the girls, as isolated and culturally incompatible females are less likely to successfully venture outside their own community for spouses. Hence the ick. Listen to the ick—it is there to guide you.
Community modesty codes are distinct from company or school dress codes insofar as a dress code prescribes acceptable dress pursuant to the end goal of the company or school. But when dress codes creep into modesty talk, the community is attempting to usurp the proper duty of the mother and father in the home. It is worth thinking a long time about whether or not the community should usurp this parental duty when mother and father have vacated it. Simply stating that parents are not sufficiently addressing modesty is not a good enough reason for the community to take on this role, and we see this principle more clearly when we say that public housing or school lunch programs are not unqualified goods simply because we can point to parents who fail to provide these things. Just because we can identify parents who fail to instruct their children in modesty does not mean it is in the best interest of the community itself, or indeed these children, for the community to assume the responsibility of instructing and policing modesty.
The primary institution shouldered with the pursuit of the good of children is the marriage of the father and mother, roughly, “the home”. However I have shortened this to “the father” here because I do think it is one of the main instances where the “headship” (as protestant communities like to say) of the father is on display. It is interesting to consider that call to “headship” and the much-debated call to wifely “submission” in terms of the authority of the household when in conflict with secondary institutions like the Church, schools, cities, etc. Once the headship of the father is contrasted with the authority other human establishments have over us, a less “icky” and more comfortable understanding of male “headship” emerges, as the father of the household is seen as its sentinel, its guardian, of the family, the wife, the children AGAINST the institutions that want to draft our children as foot-soldiers for their various causes, just and unjust. The father as defender of the family members’ individual interests against the onslaught of society is similar to the role male animals in nature display in defending their young against outside threats. It is also fascinating that communities who fail to observe and maintain the natural and just tension between head-of-household and head-of-church or head-of-institution are also those communities most likely to be obsessed with the headship of the man, and the submission of his wife. One wonders if the goal in these communities is finally the submission of both wife and husband to the goals of the community leader, with the husband relinquishing his duty to his family in exchange for the community’s aid in keeping his wife in line.
I grew up attending a small, geriatric Protestant congregation. As a result, I missed most of modesty culture and the modesty talks. My parents would say “You’re not wearing that” and that was it. I rarely remember a mention of appropriate attire from the pulpit, but now it makes sense since the median age had to be 55.
Some good food for thought here!