{"id":3304,"date":"2013-06-25T11:55:52","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T18:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3304"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:27:32","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:27:32","slug":"a-new-approach-to-modesty-17-the-generation-of-modesty-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2013\/06\/a-new-approach-to-modesty-17-the-generation-of-modesty-rhetoric\/3304\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Approach to Modesty 1\/7: The Generation of Modesty Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why are so many bloggers talking about modesty recently?\u00a0 Prepare to know.<\/em><\/p>\n

As a young man writing about human nature David Hume analyzed several common virtues.\u00a0 When he got to modesty and chastity he ran into a problem.\u00a0 On the one hand, society needs healthy families, but on the other, men have a lot of reasons to avoid being good husbands and fathers.\u00a0 What happens when a man finds out the child he thinks is his isn\u2019t?\u00a0 That’s a problem.\u00a0 Hume saw that men won\u2019t be good fathers if they don\u2019t feel reasonably confident that their mouths-to-feed have a biological connection to them (leaving adoption aside).\u00a0 Men need a guarantee.\u00a0 So how do we rest their fears?\u00a0 Hume\u2019s solution is modesty.<\/p>\n

Well, chastity really solves the issue.\u00a0 If women stay virtuous, there won\u2019t be any problems (since women always know who they gave birth to, unchaste men won’t cause them confusion).\u00a0 But Hume was a practical man.\u00a0 People have sex in private.\u00a0 He knew that society can\u2019t constrain lascivious acts done behind closed doors.\u00a0 Hume advised that society should shame women into modesty so that they\u2019ll be more chaste.\u00a0 As modesty increases men will feel more assured that their wives stay faithful.\u00a0 The men will then believe they sired the children the women produce, and the great wheel of social order will continue.\u00a0 No joke.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s not crucify Hume for such an uneven approach to modesty.\u00a0 While blunt, Hume hardly broke new ground.\u00a0 In fact, some readers might applaud Hume\u2019s insight.\u00a0\u00a0 They shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 Using modesty to curtail chastity issues creates other serious problems, which I will come back to later.\u00a0 We can do better with both virtues by unhinging them and reimaging them.\u00a0 In this series I\u2019ll present how.<\/p>\n

This discussion couldn\u2019t be timelier.\u00a0 Mormon modesty rhetoric has exploded in the last decade.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 In the 1990s only three General Conference speakers discussed modesty.\u00a0 In the 2000s that number shot up to twenty-one.\u00a0 The next highest decade after the 2000s was the 60s, with only eight speakers discussing modesty.\u00a0 BYU devotionals show the same trend.\u00a0 Nearly as many speakers discussed modesty in the last decade as the three previous decades combined (ten and eleven respectively).\u00a0 There are also more articles<\/a> in the church magazines now more than ever before, especially The Friend<\/i>.\u00a0 Almost every speaker focused on female modesty, and most of them linked it to sexual purity as Hume did.<\/p>\n

Church leaders have connected female modesty to they way they dress for decades.\u00a0 Brigham Young may have been the first to link the two.\u00a0 Here is a selection of his that modern leaders sometimes quote: <\/p>\n

It is displeasing to the Spirit of the Lord for persons to array themselves in any way whatever that is disgusting to the eye of the pure and the prudent\u2026. If they were to see an angel, they would see a being beautifully but modestly dressed, white, comely and nice to look upon. (Young, 162)<\/a><\/p>\n

Interestingly, though, here is the part of that talk they never quote:<\/p>\n

The present custom of many is such that I would as soon see a squaw go through the streets with a very little on<\/b>, as to see clothing piled up until it reaches, perhaps, the top of the hedge or fence its wearer is passing. (161)<\/p>\n

Brigham goes on to complain about women wearing too much<\/i> fabric.<\/p>\n

Then another fashion is to wear their dresses short in front, walking through the streets, and a long train dragging in the dirt behind. How unbecoming! This is not modesty, gentility, or good taste.<\/p>\n

For Brigham immodesty meant too much clothing.<\/p>\n

Joseph F. Smith was the first speaker to discuss modesty as a way of dressing to protect against sexual immorality.<\/p>\n

\u2026never, I say, within the period of my life and experience have I seen such obscene, uncleanly, impure, and suggestive fashions of women’s dress as I see today. (October General Conference 1913)<\/p>\n

He gave this sermon in 1913.\u00a0 I scoured the internet for the most risqu\u00e9 dress from the 1910s.\u00a0 I think I found it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

And here’s a scandalous swimming suit pic (caution, possibly NSFW):<\/p>\n

\"Vintage<\/a><\/p>\n

(alas, not even the toes are uncovered)<\/p>\n

Even with the fairly exposed chest from the dress, Joseph F. Smith’s position would come across as absurd today.\u00a0 Even so, Smith set the tone for modesty rhetoric that\u2019s lasted for a century.\u00a0 (On a side note, Smith delivered this talk one year before the first commercial bra was invented.)\u00a0 In the next post I\u2019ll discuss current modesty rhetoric and why it\u2019s causing inadvertent harm.<\/p>\n

Why has modesty rhetoric increased so dramatically in the last decade? \u00a0Please speculate.<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> For counting purposes, I only included talks that (a) made a substantive reference to modesty (e.g. if only mentioned as part of a list of virtues I didn’t count it), and (b) treated modesty as a doctrinal topic (e.g. if the speaker said something like, “he had a false modesty” I didn’t count it).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n