Youth Speaking up on Behalf of Modesty
A college student, Wendy Shalit, wrote an article entitled, “A Ladies Room of One’s Own”, about sharing a bathroom with male students in a co-ed dorm. What happened next was unexpected. The article was reprinted in Reader’s Digest. If that wasn’t enough, she started getting lots of letters from fellow college students around the country expressing appreciation for publishing her thoughts on the subject. One letter said, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way.” Both men and women are voicing similar opinions.
This came to my attention from an article in my college alumni newsletter, The Principia Purpose, under the title, “Modesty: A new sexual revolution” (Fall, 2008). The newsletter reported that Wendy was invited to speak at the college and high school boarding school on this topic as she has had speaking engagements on college campuses throughout the country after the publishing of her book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue.”
In the book, she explains, “Modesty was seen as just a social construct that we could do away with. But modesty is a valuable thing. It’s about having the right to privacy, the right to set boundaries.” She remarks on society’s message to young people, “For girls, there’s pressure to be ‘hot’ and to present yourself as a sex object. For boys, there’s pressure to be a ‘player.’ But while the promiscuous lifestyle gets glamorized, we never see the pain.” She also comments, “In the 1960s there was a concern about repression of sexuality; nowadays there’s a lot of emotional repression going on.”
Shalit has also written another book, “The Good Girl Revolution: Young Rebels with Self-Esteem and High Standards.” She quotes research identifying “that millennials have different values from baby boomers.” She gave an example of a group of teenage girls that posed a “Girlcott” against Abercrombie & Fitch for offensive sayings printed on a T-shirt and got the store to remove the item, partly because they received thousands of letters from other girls who supported what they were doing. My college alumni newsletter quoted even Harvard Business Review as recently warning, “that marketing campaigns using sex to sell may backfire.” Being in marketing years ago, we were always looking for a message that would stand out from the crowd, sex is so overdone in our society’s sales pitch, I would think a company’s message would get quickly lost in the white noise of it all. A unique approach may better capture attention in an overcrowded media environment.
More importantly, the youth of today are observing broken marriages and many unhappy adults because of their behavior choices in life. Many are searching for solutions to make a better life for themselves. Culture and traditions rightfully change as people grow, but the basic principles of life survive the centuries. Jesus, an advocate for the dignity of man, lived and taught these principles pointing to their divine origin, the one Principle, God. An article in Cosmopolitan magazine, entitled: “Youth and Young Manhood” was written by Mary Baker Eddy in 1907, speaking to the age, old art of successful, common sense living based on following Jesus’ example. An excerpt from the article, “Dear reader, right thinking, right feeling, and right acting — honesty, purity, unselfishness — in youth tend to success, intellectuality, and happiness in manhood.” This doesn’t take a brain surgeon to look around and observe the effect of these qualities lived or the effect of their opposite qualities lived. Is it of value to then have these guide our affairs, decisions and actions? Only each of us as individuals can make that happen in our own lives. Now there is a rebel idea!
Anne Cooling
Co-Sunday School Superintendent,
First Church of Christ, Scientist, Laguna Niguel
