A MODEST PROPOSAL

...Reading passage after passage of lyrical prose celebrating the nobility and promise of courtly love and undying marital devotion, the reader will find it hard not to think of the fluttery warbling of Snow White singing "Someday My Prince Will Come" to the bluebirds and the bunnies...

...damaged their physical and mental health...

...They will always find expression...

...The feminists who first burst upon the scene in the 1960s upheld a view of human sexuality as androgyny: What men and women want from sex, and what they do in sex, are one and the same...

...When the time came to go away to college, Miss Shalit caused an uproar at Williams College by objecting to coed bathrooms, and then arguing in class that men and women might be, well, different in certain key respects...

...According to Courtney, her parents aren't helping her at all by giving her so much freedom: "They let me go over to my boyfriend's house when they know his parents aren't home...

...And to help persuade those miseducated young women to reconsider their basic assumptions about sexuality and gender, Miss Shalit is right to proceed gently, even stealthily...

...It is not clear that the old sexual order—which reached its fullest expression in a lifelong, fruitful marriage—can be rebuilt simply by restoring old-fashioned courtship rituals...

...A Return to Modesty deserves to be given to every young woman who is forced to grow up in today's feminist culture...

...What happens—to use Danielle Crittenden's phrase—when Miss Shalit's prince actually does arrive...

...And the portrait they paint is a depressing one...

...That is weird...

...It's being led by young women looking for romance...

...The feminists may think so, but Jane Austen's heroines know otherwise...

...Contemporary feminists will never—can never—accept her argument, because it would destroy the rock upon which modern feminism is founded: the myth of androgyny...

...In search of customs that celebrate the difference between men and women, Miss Shalit became fascinated by the long skirts and dating rituals of Orthodox Jews...

...Though not supported by much data, this notion of a "girls' crisis" has been embraced by feminists, education bureaucrats, and gender-equity specialists as a rationale for new government programs...

...Miss Shalit, however, does not really complete her analysis of the burdens and responsibilities that go with any restoration of traditional sexual virtues...

...The delay modesty created not only made it more likely that women could select men who would stick by them, but in turning lust into love, it changed men from uncivilized males who ran after as many sexual partners as they could get to men who really wanted to stick by one woman...

...In an article in Glamour, a teenager described the night he took his girlfriend's virginity in a hotel room—to which the pair were driven by her father, "knowing full well what was about to transpire...

...Traditional modesty, writes Miss Shalit, existed not to oppress women, but with the aim of putting them on an equal footing with men...

...Feminists, she says, are prescribing the wrong remedies to restore order to a chaotic sexual landscape...

...It has prematurely robbed girls of their innocence, coarsened their feelings, deeply wounded their self-respect, and Melinda Ledden Sidak is a writer living near Washington, D.C...

...What else do men and women, husbands and wives, bring to a marriage...

...This lack of cultural support is compounded by negligent, often absent, parents...

...Even in the absence of a full-blown crisis, Miss Shalit argues convincingly that sexualizing women early on—sending teenaged girls off into the arms of casual lovers—leaves those women feeling used, anguished, and degraded...

...No wonder, as A Return to Modesty concludes, "our mothers pined for liberation, and we are pining for interference...

...In A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit—a twenty-three-year-old just two years out of college—argues that the sexual revolution has been a disaster for women...

...Will he do his share of the dusting and cleaning...

...Given that a central premise of A Return to Modesty is that young girls should be allowed to cherish and preserve their romantic dreams, there is nothing wrong with this...

...Neither Miss Shalit nor her parents can be described as typical...

...That said, however, it is entirely understandable that Miss Shalit takes her excellent argument only as far as she does...

...The letters to Mademoiselle pour in with the same basic question, "How can I keep a man from pressuring me for sex before I'm ready to be with him...

...And she scolds conservatives for adopting a counterproductive attitude of "boys will be boys" and failing to take the "girls' crisis" seriously...

...And contrary to the darkest fears of some, it is being led not by Bible-thumping fundamentalists or prune-faced matrons with beehive hairdos...

...Miss Shalit describes a fourteen-year-old girl named Courtney profiled in Patricia Hersch's study of teenagers, A Tribe Apart...

...This is the explanation of the great revival of interest in Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and the novelists of manners...

...By the end of the book, through the force of her own analysis, Miss Shalit is led to examine the terrible impact of divorce, the loss of social sanctions against adultery, and other vanished barriers to socially destructive behavior...

...But try as the androgynists might, Miss Shalit argues, traditional feminine virtues and aspirations cannot be completely suppressed...

...I am surprised they let him come over all the time...

...Thus she implicitly concedes the radicalism of her proposal: Restoring modesty means teaching boys and girls a whole new—or very old—set of gender-specific moral and ethical values...

...Will he change his half of the diapers...

...Our culture expects teenagers to engage in premarital sex, it affords them explicit instruction on how to do it, and it provides no reasons not to...

...The sexual modesty championed in A Return to Modesty is not to be confused with a distaste for sex, a prudishness, or a denial of female sexual desire...

...Eventually, she adopted more modest dress herself...

...To the extent she has no social support in her decision to say no," writes Miss Shalit, "when a girl for whatever reason wants to say no to sex today she is always making a personal comment on her date: that he is ugly or in some other way unappealing...

...One complaint about A Return to Modesty might be that Miss Shalit accepts the existence of this widespread "girls' crisis," based on little evidence other than the assertions of feminist authors and the anecdotes and letters in such popular women's magazines as Glamour and Seventeen...

...Miss Shalit's contention is that this androgynous ideal objectifies women far more than did the Victorian ideal those feminists decried...

...And her decision to remain a virgin until marriage became a principle that she was willing to defend in public...

...Though the widely published reports of the crises of young women— low self-esteem, male violence, and all the other afflictions decried by feminists—are overblown, Miss Shalit has no doubt that they spring from a real source: the false notion that a woman's sexual desires and attitudes are indistinguishable from a man's...

...Unlike the baby-boomer mothers and fathers who were either absent or terrified of seeming uncool, Miss Shalit's parents objected to explicit sex-education classes all the way back when she was in the fifth grade—making her sit alone in the library while her classmates discussed questions like "What is 69...

...Perhaps in order to make her book more palatable to liberals, Miss Shalit sometimes presents herself as steering a reasonable, middle course between Left and Right...

...Honor and manliness for men...

...and when their natural expression is curbed, they will make their appearance in pathological ways: We seem to have spawned a generation of girls whose thwarted feminine nature is reasserting itself in grotesquely distorted forms—in food hang-ups (that culturally acceptable way to create social distance), in self-mutilation (often, and poignantly, directed against the feminine, most unacceptable, parts of their bodies), or in charges of sexual harassment and date rape...

...The idea that young women are facing unprecedented psychological problems first gained currency in the early 1990s and has been the subject of several recent bestsellers, including Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia...

...Indeed, the feminist view seems indistinguishable from a deeply held misogyny—a hatred of anything in women that seems different from men and a despising of the marriage, children, and home that most women hold dear...

...If, in fact, Miss Shalit has constructed her "conservative" straw women in order not to seem conservative and antifeminist in every respect, her tactic is doomed to fail...

...Chastity for women...

...But her characterization of conservatives as unconcerned about the plight of young women is wrong...

...Thoughtful criticism of the effects of the sexual revolution on women, children, and society has been well articulated by many conservative writers...

...But, once we grant her this questionable assumption, Miss Shalit profoundly differs from the feminists in her diagnosis...

...At the same time,A Return to Modesty leaves unanswered serious questions...

...Radical indeed...

...As Miss Shalit understands, in the heart of even the most jaded young woman, there lurks a longing for a man who will court her in a respectful way not fraught with sexual pressure...

...The letters, personal stories, and articles that Miss Shalit has culled from women's magazines do seem to reflect something about the sexual and romantic anxieties of the average young woman of today...

...Such measures as date-rape-awareness seminars, sexual-harassment litigation, and "Take Back the Night" rallies are, she says, "a valiant attempt to restore order," even if ultimately they are like "trying to put a Band-Aid over an amputated limb...

...Eventually Courtney "runs out of excuses" and has sex with her boyfriend because "he really kept bothering me about it...

...And salvation, she thinks, lies in the restoration of sexual modesty—the return to a feminine virtue jealously guarded by girls and their parents, and respected, even treasured, by men...

...What does a man get for giving up sex on demand with a variety of women...