c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ At age 23, Wendy Shalit has burst onto the American public scene as the newest Rorschach test. Reactions to her book promoting sexual modesty range from raves to withering dismissals.

George Will, in Newsweek, turned in a rave: “Think Katie Couric with Edith Wharton’s mind.” Fellow Gen-Xer Katie Roiphe, whom Shalit raps for her sexual adventurism, sniffs in Time magazine, “I find it strange to be condescended to by a 23-year-old virgin.”

Shalit argues that the sexual revolution of 30 years ago has bequeathed a wasteland of meaningless carnal hook-ups on all the old hippies’ unhappy daughters _ a contention that so infuriated one caller to National Public Radio that she suggested an old-fashioned book burning.

The author of “A Return to Modesty, Discovering the Lost Virtue” insists all this huffing is milder than she expected.

While still a teen, Shalit entered the culture wars, writing for the neo-conservative Commentary magazine a blistering critique of coed bathrooms at Williams College. She is also against tarty clothes, the pill, and sex education in schools. And although she appreciates Will’s grasp of her arguments, she laughs at his characterization of her as “effervescent and almost petite.”

“Almost petite?” she asks over the telephone from her sublet in Manhattan. “That’s pretty funny.”

Shalit, pronounced “Sha-LEET,” is interested in weightier matters. And with her contemporaries flocking to Jane Austen movies and ballroom dancing, she thinks she has company. She begins her book with two excerpts from Genesis and picked out an Albrecht Durer rendering of Eve in her fig leaf for the cover.

“With the fall comes knowledge,” Shalit said, “and modesty protects that knowledge. Modesty is fundamentally about knowing, not, as we tend to think, about ignorance. You cover up because you know this is a precious thing.”

Shalit underscores this point with a passage from Genesis in which Rebekah sees Isaac approaching, dismounts from her camel and covers herself with a veil. “Rebekah covers herself because she likes Isaac, she’s interested,” Shalit said, noting sex and modesty are ancient concerns, not the quaint leftovers of 19th-century Victorians. And by covering up, Rebekah was signaling something much more alluring than, say, Madonna.

“Shalit’s book is important for two reasons,” said Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, author of “The Divorce Culture.”

“First, she offers her report from the front lines of a culture that few older adults understand or recognize. Baby-boom parents who cheered the sexual revolution can now contemplate its impact on their daughters. Second, she is one of a small but growing band of twentysomething women writers who are disenchanted with the sexual revolution … bent on telling the grown-ups where they went wrong.”

Raised the third of three daughters in suburban Milwaukee, little Wendy was perplexed when a strange woman arrived to instruct her fourth-grade class not to be embarrassed by sex. The instructor invited questions, and found herself stumbling to answer “What is 69?” Wendy’s mother, an interior designer, was appalled and pulled her daughter from the class. Wendy grew up to argue that such instruction was wrongheaded, stripped kids of their natural modesty and gave little boys carte blanche to ask, as she witnessed, “Hey, Erica, do you masturbate?”

Shalit says she was the only one in her Reform family to insist on a bat mitzvah. Still, it came as a shock to Shalit, who describes herself as “a bit of a know-it-all,” to learn that Orthodox Jews practice tzniut _ laws of sexual restraint and modesty.

“Why do these women then have that undeniable glow about them that is absent, for instance, in our modern anorexic?” Shalit asks. “Fundamentally, they do not seem to be missing anything for not having had a series of miserable romances under their belts. They seem happy.”

And it is the profound unhappiness of her peers _ the eating disorders, the self-cuttings, the Prozac prescriptions _ that Shalit blames on a culture that places so little value on young women that it promotes casual promiscuity. In one section, she describes a Midwestern father driving his 18-year-old daughter in their Volvo to a hotel to lose her virginity with her boyfriend. “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,” Shalit said.

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Take Monica Lewinsky. Here, Shalit sees an old pattern: a young woman signaling she was “ready to play,” only to fall in love and then despair, partly because she sees herself so far from her desire for marriage and children.

Shalit tends to dismiss her critics as “exhibitionists,” and stands by her arguments in the style of the old high school debater she is.

But Dafoe Whitehead said the young author fails to consider that modesty tends to be strongest in cultures that marry women off very young, hardly the solution in contemporary America.

“Modesty can be misread as passivity or stupidity,” Dafoe Whitehead said. “Girls with downcast eyes are sometimes overlooked or underestimated. And modesty can lead to misplaced shame and silence. When I was about 12, I went to a dentist who frequently and vigorously wiped his hands across the bib on my chest. I was too shy and embarrassed to yell at him or to tell my mother. This is not an argument in favor of immodesty, but it does suggest that modesty is a frail defense against male sexual aggression.”

Susannah Heschel, religion professor at Dartmouth College, agreed. And Heschel said that tzniut, the Judaic modesty laws that charm Shalit, focus on female modesty, not male.

But Shalit said the real problem remains a society awash in immodesty.

“Because of the onslaught on childhood today, because of the intrusion of sex educators and condoms and obscene lyrics into our earliest days, or because of parents who have abandoned their kids, many of us feel as if we never had a chance to be young,” Shalit said. “Sexual modesty is a virtue for us, and, I predict, will become a virtue for increasing numbers of us … I don’t see why our parents should get to have a monopoly on sexual revolutions.”

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