Sunglasses (very popular in Western countries) can be seen as a sort of veil—they prevent onlookers from gazing into one's soul. Reflective sunglasses reflect the gaze; tinted ones absorb it like a black hole. The gaze never escapes; it is never returned. The power of sunglasses to reflect, refract, absorb and protect has not been lost on non-Western cultures. Robert Murphy explains:

Sun glasses and tinted glasses are almost badges of office among West African emirs and Near Eastern potentates, and they have also become items of prestige in other parts of the world. They are commonly used in Latin America, where, indoors and out, heavily tinted glasses are the hallmark of the prestigeful as well as those aspiring to status, for they bestow the aloofness and distance that has always been the prerogative of the high in these lands (1272).

Modesty is also concerned with shame. "Have you no shame?" is a question a person will ask of someone whom they consider to be indecent or immodest. In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza is horrified by what she perceives as her mother's lack of modesty and shame:

Tereza's mother blew her nose noisily, talked to people in public about her sex life, and enjoyed demonstrating her false teeth. [. . .] Her behavior was but a single grand gesture, a casting off of youth and beauty. In the days when she had had nine suitors kneeling round her in a circle, she guarded her nakedness apprehensively, as though truing to express the value of her body in terms of the modesty she accorded it. Now she had not only lost that modesty, she had radically broken with it, ceremoniously using her new immodesty to draw a dividing line through her life and proclaim that youth and beauty were overrated and worthless (46).

According to some Christian and Talmudic scholars (Shapiro 1990), hair is an expression of shame. In the New Testament, St. Paul says, "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering (I Corinthians 11: 14-15)." Thus according to the Christian Bible, men are required to uncover their heads (that is, doff their hats, turbans, etc.) when praying. For women, however, the opposite is required. They must cover theirs. For men it is shameful to have long hair; for women it is a glory. Before god one must be humble and cover (or uncover) accordingly.

Thus it seems that modesty, far from being a peculiarly feminine trait, is a feeling or emotion that all genders are capable of expressing. It is also a feeling that can be expressed with or without clothing. Modesty has little to do with nakedness or nudity and everything to do with doing what is "right," what is "decent," and most important, what is socially acceptable. And what is right, decent or socially acceptable is entirely dependent on one's culture. Modesty, then, is not feminine, but it is relative.

January 15, 2002

Notes:

† The Manyoshu is an early anthology of Japanese poetry. This poem, "Modesty," appeared in The Literary Review 33 (Winter 1990), 192.

‡ There are problems with using terms such as "the West" and "Western society." James Clifford elaborates on the issues, saying: "When we speak today of the West, we are usually referring to a force—technological, economic, political—no longer radiating in any simple way from a discrete geographical or cultural center. This force, if it may be spoken of in the singular, is disseminated in a diversity of forms from multiple centers—now including Japan, Australia, the Soviet Union, and China—and is articulated in a variety of 'micro-sociological contexts [.] It is too early to say whether these processes of change will result in global cultural homogenization or in a new order of diversity. The new may always look monolithic to the old. For the moment, in any event, all dichotomizing concepts should probably be held in suspicion, whether they be the West-rest ("Third World") split or developed-underdeveloped, modern-premodern, and so on" (1988, 272-3).

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