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Wendy Shalit is the new darling of American neoconservatives. As a sophomore at Williams College, she published an article in Commentary called "A Ladies' Room of One's Own," arguing that her dormitory should include a single-sex bathroom. The article got a hostile reaction on campus. But when Reader's Digest reprinted the article, Shalit received scads of letters from college students across the country: "Thank you for writing this," they said. "I thought I was the only one who felt this way." Shalit's first book, A Return to Modesty (out in paperback this month), argues that the sexual revolution was bad for women, champions modest dress, and urges sexual abstinence until marriage. The book has been assailed by critics from the Left but has found an eager reception among young Christian women who are no doubt delighted to have a champion for modesty who is actually young and hip.

You suggest in your book that if people truly understood the value of modesty, they would want to return to a modest way of life. What are some of the misconceptions people have about it?

There are a lot of myths concerning modesty. One of them is that modesty is Victorian. But, in fact, it dates back way before the Victorian era. It's in the Bible. As long as we've been human we've needed modesty, because as humans we don't just have sex; we also have emotions and vulnerability. Modesty prevented us from being vulnerable with the wrong people. It also protected deep, erotic connections between the right people. When you're young, modesty protects innocence, but when you're older it protects profound connections.Second, modesty is not about prudery; it is about the opposite of prudery. When people are promiscuous, they can't be moved by anything. So, prudery and promiscuity actually have a lot in common: neither the promiscuous person nor the prude can be moved or touched by anything. The modest person can be moved by something and wants to be moved by something in the right circumstances.Third, modesty is not, as the academy would have us believe, a social construct. Modesty is natural. Consider the behavior of our generation, twentysomethings. We are taught that we aren't supposed to have meaningful, long-term relationships with one person that eventually culminate in marriage and sex, but that we are supposed to have casual hookups, where you meet a person at a party, have sex, and then never see the person again. That people get drunk before they do it is significant—it's a concession to modesty. In our sober, natural state, we can't do this. So we have to drug ourselves in order to pretend otherwise.

How does modesty protect women?

There's a 1948 song, "Baby It's Cold Outside." It's about a man and a woman, and the man wanted the woman to stay over. His argument was, "Baby, it's cold outside"—if she didn't sleep over, she could catch pneumonia and die, and that would cause him lifelong sorrow. The woman has her own reasons for not staying over, which include, but are not limited to, "My father is there at the door. My maiden aunt's mind is vicious, and there's bound to be talk tomorrow."There are two ways you can look at this song. You can say, "Gosh, women were oppressed in 1948 because their fathers were waiting for them at the door after their dates. How patriarchal was that society?" But if you actually listen to the song and the back and forth that's going on, you appreciate that the woman was made strong by those excuses, because that father waiting at the door gave her ground to stand on.Back then, this social support for modesty was a kind of armor for a young woman. In the absence of that, in the absence of all of those excuses, a woman who wants to say no to sex is all on her own—that choice becomes a personal thing. It's personal precisely because society has abdicated responsibility for these decisions, and the ground has dropped from under women and men. They can't depend on society anymore for these excuses.

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January 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 1