Modesty and power

After my previous post The Ruin of Joseph, I have been ruminating on the subject of "obscenity" and "modesty," and how these terms relate to the excercise of power within our society. Here are a few preliminary thoughts...

Our definition of "modesty" is by no means fully correspondent with ancient views. The reality is that the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity emerges was far more relaxed in its views about the body than we are, as was the world of ancient Judaism before it. Most people know that in the early Olympic Games the athletes competed in the nude (though only men competed and attended). What is less well known is that the Spartan games had both male and female contestants competing in the nude. Women in Crete went bare-breasted in the summer during the Minoan times. The prophet Isaiah preached naked in the streets of Jerusalem. In the early Church, Christians were baptized in the nude. Jesus Himself is depicted being baptized naked by John in the Jordan (some of the older, bolder icons dispense with the loincloth), and we have no indication that these public baptisms were segregated by gender. St. Peter was fishing naked within shouting distance of the shore (interestingly, E. once saw an Egyptian fisherman fishing in the nude on the Nile in Egypt, a country not known for its liberal tendencies in terms of dress). Simply put, though they may have covered up a little more, people in the ancient world were not nearly as uncomfortable with the sight of the human body unclothed as we are today. Can any one of you imagine working out in the gym naked (that is, after all, what the world "gymnasium" means: a place to "exercise naked")? Or working naked (gives a whole new meaning to the term "casual Friday")?

Sometimes, Americans comment on the "topless beaches" in Europe as a sign of the decadence of European culture. But in reality, every beach is a topless beach; I have no idea why, when we say "topless beach," we mean a beach where women take off their tops, but don't make any reference to men. The fact is that this kind of thinking only reinforces the notion that the female breast exists primarily as an object of male sexual fascination. The female breast is for feeding babies. Our well-intentioned attempts to reinforce "modesty" in this regard lead to women beimg cited in some places for indecency when breast-feeding in public. The female breast is not indecent. It is not immodest.

I think one of the most powerful moments in Frank Schaeffer's novel Portofino is when the narrator, a young teen, sees a young woman on a train in Italy, breastfeeding her baby with her entire breast exposed. The boy stares; he has never seen a woman's breast before. The woman notices him, says something in Italian to her husband, who turns, smiles at the boy, and offers him a piece of sausage. I remember this scene because it is part of a powerful awakening on the boy's part, a recognition that there is a whole world outside of the closed circle of shame that has been his only way of relating to the world up until then.

So a final thought, one that has been percolating in my mind for a long time, and is still mostly unfinished. I think that when religion loses its prophetic quality and its bearings in justice, when it becomes instead an agent of preservation of the status quo, it tends to gravitate towards issues related to sexuality and modesty as primary virtues and vices. To put this in even stronger terms, I think that talking about sex and modesty is really another way of talking about power. In the Gospels, we find the Pharisees trying again and again to engage Jesus in a discussion of sexual morality (the woman taken in adultery, the "lowborn" woman in the house of Simon who washes his feet). The Pharisees derive power and establish their position in society by setting themselves up as the arbiters of sexual morality. But Jesus steadfastly refuses to be drawn into the discussion, insisting instead that there are far worse sins: hypocrisy, abuse of power, exploitation of the weak.

Sometimes "modesty" may simply be a synonym for "discretion," in the Victorian sense of the "discreet affair." The wealthy can afford to be discreet in their vices, to take measures to ensure that their trysts do not have unwanted consequences, while the poor wind up pregnant out of wedlock, "trailer trash" with babies on their hip, and become the target of politicians from wealthy constituencies who attack them as immoral "welfare queens." In this sense, generic talk about "morality," that seems at first to apply to everyone, is really talk directed primarily at the poor (when was the last time you saw a billboard about teen pregnancy in an upper-class neighborhood, as I used to often see in poor Hispanic neighborhoods?). Sexual vices are regarded as the vices of the "lowborn," and are strongly condemned, while the vices of the "highborn" (greed, gluttony, injustice) receive only passing reference. The rich don't need to flaunt their bodies, they can flaunt their cars and their houses, their Rolex watches and their Gucci shoes. And these too are issues of modesty.