Discussion: Tuesday, August 23rd7:30 pmAlison's new houseThe New York Times Book Reviewby Emily Eakin
March 7, 1999
THIS is a book about an oppressed group that you might not have heard of before: virgins. The idea might surprise you. It might occur to you that being a virgin -- unlike, say, being black or short or gay -- is a universal (not to mention invisible) human condition; at one time or another, it affects every person on the planet. Why would anyone discriminate against virgins? Yet, according to Wendy Shalit, self-appointed spokeswoman for the moral minority and the author of ''A Return to Modesty,'' this is precisely what many of us do.
Once a country that ranked maidenhood among its highest virtues, America, Shalit writes, is now a place where sexual modesty is actively repudiated and the woman who voluntarily abstains from sex is regarded as neurotic, repressed, hostile, socially maladjusted or unhealthily obsessed with her father. And not just by insensitive cads. In their efforts to establish a ''nonsexist paradise'' free of ''all traces of patriarchal rules and codes of conduct,'' feminists, liberals, women's magazines, even well-intentioned parents, Shalit argues, have inadvertently made our culture more misogynistic than ever. ''Today men expect to be able to treat all women like prostitutes, only without just compensation,'' she declares, ''and the virgins are the ones who are now stigmatized, told that no man will have them.''
Shalit should know. At 23, she is a senior veteran of our culture's war on purity. Her battle scars date back to the fourth grade, when a strange woman arrived to instruct Shalit and her classmates in the mysterious properties of the number 69. Stumped by the lesson and the giggles it elicited from the back of the room, Shalit went home and reported the encounter to her mother. As a result, she found herself sitting out sex education in the library, embarrassed and confused but, most important, with her innocence still intact. There were to be other close calls: a fifth-grade teacher who made a desk drawer full of tampons and condoms available to her students; a counselor at high school debate camp who made lewd remarks and stroked her hair; the coed bathrooms in her college dorm; girlfriends who told her she was uncomfortable with her body; boyfriends who accused her of ''hang-ups'' and dumped her because she wouldn't sleep with them.
If Shalit survived these assaults on her virtue positively brimming with self-esteem, most girls, she assures us, do not. She depicts a generation of frightened, unhappy, overmedicated young women having too much sex too soon, and -- worse -- having it like a man, by which Shalit means having sex that is indiscriminate and loveless. ''I see so many young women around me spending half of their time sleeping with all these men, and the other half telling me how heartbroken they are,'' she writes. ''I wonder who gave them the idea that this is what they had to do in the first place?''
For women, Shalit insists, the new sex-equity ethos is exacting a terrible psychic price: epidemics of anorexia, bulimia and self-mutilation; soaring rates of sexual harassment, date rape and stalking. The proof is right there in the pages of Glamour and Cosmopolitan and the other women's magazines from which she so lavishly quotes. Why are there millions of women on Prozac? To make it easier for men to get them into bed, of course. ''By drugging these women, we have accepted the rapist's view of womanhood,'' Shalit concludes. ''Our culture is continually frustrated with women the way they are, and seeks to loosen them up.''
Shalit believes that female modesty is innate (''a reflex, arising naturally to help a woman protect her hopes and guide their fulfillment -- specifically, this hope for one man'') and thus that sexual promiscuity is a violation of female nature. This logic doesn't merely inform her thinking; it envelops her book like, well, a chastity belt, guarding against the kind of nuances, complications and contradictions that might help enliven her prose and even advance her case.
Populated by lecherous men, lovelorn young women and beaming virgins (''Why do these women then have that undeniable glow about them that is absent, for instance, in our modern anorexic?'' she muses), her world has the telltale contours of caricature. Likewise her solution to its ills.
Why, Shalit begs us to consider, are women flocking to Jane Austen movies? And why, she wonders, ''are none of my grandmother's friends anorexic?'' The explanation, she argues, is simple: As far as relations between the sexes are concerned, we were better off a hundred years ago, when dating a woman meant kissing her gloved hand and reading her Keats in the parlor, when sex meant love and marriage meant ''till death do us part.''
THIS is what women really want. (As for men, those boors, it goes without saying: All they want is sex. It's up to women to teach them manners.) Happiness, she declares, is within our reach: ''We must decide as women to look upon sex out of wedlock as not such a cool thing, after all, and re-create the cartel of virtue.'' This, it must be said, hardly has the ring of a winning campaign slogan. (There must be a way to make the cartel of virtue sound less like voluntary house arrest.) But, more important, there is no evidence that women were happier about their sexual lives -- or more free of rape -- in the pre-sex-ed days of Jane Austen. (For all her admirable modesty and her fiction's devotion to the marriage plot, it's worth pointing out that Austen was never rewarded with enduring love. She died an old maid, a fact that some scholars believe accounts for the bitterness of her last novel, ''Persuasion.'')
Still, despite its limitations as historical or contemporary sociology, ''A Return to Modesty'' provides one invaluable service. There is a growing body of scholarly research on young adulthood that may, in the aftermath of Shalit's booming polemic, be more difficult to ignore. Thanks to the work of educators and psychologists like Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher and William Pollack, we are beginning to understand that -- for both girls and boys -- the Sturm und Drang of adolescence can be far from benign. Most of us are grateful to have those painful years behind us, and would give anything not to relive them. But that's no reason not to look back and try to make that treacherous passage a little easier to navigate.
