The human person acquires knowledge of the material world via the senses. Sound, taste, sight, touch and smell relay messages between people, so the words that we speak and the way we act give others an understanding of who we are. The role of the senses in communication is fundamental to understanding the importance of modesty in the Christian moral life.

Before Original Sin the concept of modesty had no application – Adam and Eve “were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen 2:25). This was the male-female relationship that God intended for all humanity. After disobeying His command and eating from the tree, Adam and Eve’s first reaction was a shameful awareness of their nakedness, each feeling for the first time the lustful gaze of the other and towards the other, so they made loincloths for themselves from fig leaves (Gen 3:7). Original Sin did not suddenly make the body dirty or bad. Rather, it fractured the purity and harmony of human relationships and inclined man and woman to look at each other as objects rather than subjects, creating what Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) has called a “fundamental disquiet” in human nature.

Innate Differences between Men and Women 

Since a woman only experiences life as a woman, it is difficult for her to understand that what stimulates male sexual interest is different to what stimulates female sexual interest. Likewise, a man has difficulty understanding what women find sexually stimulating. Understanding these differences is essential to understanding modesty, since specifically male and female characteristics extend beyond the physical. As Wojtyla observes: 

“Since sensuality, which is oriented towards ‘the body as an object of enjoyment’ is in general stronger and more importunate in men, modesty and shame – the tendency to conceal sexual values specifically connected with the body – must be more pronounced in girls and women. At the same time they are less aware of sensuality and of its natural orientation in men, because in them emotion is usually stronger than sensuality, and sensuality tends to be latent in emotion.”[2] 

Thus the dominant sexual attraction for men is bodily (sensual) and the dominant sexual attraction for women is psychological (emotional). This is why the pornography industry markets its products predominately at men whilst ‘romance novels’ (which are often described as ‘pornography for women’) are targeted towards women. The shame that arises in a woman is primarily a “reaction to a reaction”[3] – something experienced because of a real, perceived or potential occasion to be viewed as an object and be reduced to her sexual values. Man’s experience of sexual shame is different: it is an internal shame of his natural reaction to the sexual values of the woman, and a shame of the sexual values that are connected with his body.[4] He is ashamed of the lustful desires that arise within him. 

Dietrich Von Hildebrand explains that men and women represent “two different expressions of human nature”, which are, at the same time, complementary.[5] This means that men and women must acquire and foster modesty in different ways, based on their different ‘ontologies’ or 'essential natures’ and work to understand the sexual dimension of the other sex. If men struggle with the inclination to view women as objects of enjoyment and are more drawn to the physical, then the physical must matter. Suddenly a woman’s actions and clothing take on a new and important meaning, and by concealing her sexual values she does all in her power to prevent herself from being reduced to an object of mere pleasure. The woman who observes modesty knows that her personal value includes her physical and spiritual values, because she was created a unity of body and soul. 

Concealment of the sexual values does not mean hiding all semblance of the feminine – an extreme best illustrated by the sombre, tent-like Islamic chador. Since the body is a good, the virtue of modesty arms the Christian woman with the capacity to shun those fashions that reduce her body to a mere object, while at the same time she embraces the physical differences between the sexes. There are in fact situations where nakedness or partial nakedness is necessary, such as at a doctor’s examination or at a swimming pool. In such contexts nakedness is not the problem, but the desires of the heart can be, if, for example, a male doctor objectifies his female patient or a voyeur frequents a pool or beach to objectify female patrons. Equally, a woman could abuse the context of a public swimming pool by wearing bathing attire that is specifically designed to illicit arousal from the opposite sex rather than created for the practicalities of swimming. As Wojtyla explains, “immodesty is only present when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person, when its aim is to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment”.[6] 

Modesty and Fashion 

Since modesty is connected to the physical, it inevitably has a relationship with clothing. The contemporary fashion industry, understanding that clothing is an important visual communicator, has adopted the philosophy of the ‘shifting erogenous zone’, which creates styles that focus on various female ‘secondary sexual characteristics’ such as the legs, décolletage, derriere, back and midriff, and adjusts them each season. Since male sexual characteristics are not diffused like women’s, the erogenous zones play little part in men’s fashion, which, if anything, is getting looser and covers more of the body. 

The power of fashion was a concern of early ‘first wave’ feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, who believed that its purpose was to enslave a woman, “not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as prey to male desires; thus society is not seeking to further her projects but to thwart them”.[7] The ‘second-wave’ feminists of the 1960s-1980s also believed that the dominant fashions objectified females. They reacted by embracing masculine clothing such as man-style trouser power suits, complete with shoulder pads to give the impression of broad, manly and powerful shoulders. Yet ‘third-wavers’ or ‘New Feminists’ such as Natasha Walter tend to view their feminist foremothers as being somewhat puritanical, alienating a woman from enjoying her body: 

“Many women who resist demeaning stereotypes of their bodies do so not through withdrawal from decorative physical culture but by openly enjoying their bodies on their own terms. Women like…Madonna, who used her swagger and costume-changes to demonstrate not her powerlessness but her sexual and financial independence. She played directly into the joy women take in their own bodies and sexuality, without screening it through the approval of men.” [8] 

Despite ‘third wave’ feminist attempts to overtly sensualise the woman’s body without letting it become hostage to “patriarchal constructs”, many women’s experiences support Wojtyla’s observation that women are uncomfortable when they are seen as bodies (objects) rather than people (subjects). Increasing numbers of elite athletes, for example, are posing “in various states of undress, ostensibly for the purpose of arousal” for popular magazines in order to raise their profiles and subsidise their living. One athlete who posed in this way with members of the US athletics team in a calendar prior to the Sydney Olympics was subsequently ashamed of her role, stating: “I made a mistake. I’m a married woman. My body is something that should be between my husband and me, and, by posing like that, I discredited him. It’s not something either of us was comfortable with.”[9] Further, after interviewing Playboy’s CEO, Christie Hefner, journalist Ariel Levy concluded that most women posed for the magazine because they were paid to, not because they were “taking control of their sexuality”, and that, in the end, all it did was commodify them.[10] 

The contemporary Christian woman is wedged in a culture where looking attractive is considered synonymous with looking ‘sexy’, a situation that poses the dilemma of whether the latest fashions are consistent with the chastity for which she aspires. Historically, Christianity played a major part in reinforcing respectable female attire in the West. It was not until the 14^th century that new sewing techniques such as the use of buttons and laces were invented to alter previously flowing and draping garments, while public displays of décolletage emerged for the first time since the birth of Christendom. In subsequent centuries, women’s clothing underwent many metamorphoses, but as Aileen Ribeiro observes, fashion from the 1960s onwards, with its “often unashamed concentration on the sexual characteristics of the body”, reflected the moral abandon of the sexual revolution, conveying the signals of “use me, throw me away”.[11] Modesty does not require a return to the fashions found in the early Church, the Middle Ages, or the Victorian era; but the respect of the body that women’s clothing manifested at other points in history does give us cause to reflect on the messages that much contemporary clothing communicates.  

Modesty and Charity 

In the Summa Theologica, St Thomas Aquinas explains that it is a mortal sin to intentionally provoke another to lust, while it is not always mortal but sometimes venial to invite another to lust by frivolity, vanity or ostentation.[12] Christ added to the command “Thou shalt not commit adultery” the New Law that “anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:27). This passage calls for custody of the eyes, which is generally a greater struggle for men than for women, whose struggle for purity tends to be emotional. 

Since man is part of a society, and his actions send messages to those around him, charity demands that those actions should never knowingly provoke another to sin. The cardinal virtues, including modesty as a manifestation of temperance, are understood as ‘hinge’[13] virtues, ordered towards the theological virtues.  The greatest of the theological virtues is charity, which loves in deed and truth, not just word (1 John 3:18). Christian women must understand the mixed messages they send to men when they pledge to be chaste and refrain from sexual relations until they marry, while at the same time they dress in a way that speaks the language of ‘eye candy’, and ‘use me, throw me away’. Archbishop Fulton Sheen advises women to “shrink from a precocious or too ready surrender from her secret”,[14] and to resolve never to use her sexual power until God has given her a husband. This purity of body and soul is not prudery: “It is not the abjuration of desire, it is the culture of the desire to love; it refuses to allow material signs and symbols to be prostituted of the holy content and meaning with which God has given them.”[15] 

Finally, the application of modesty cannot fall on the shoulders of women alone. As St Augustine explains, a chaste woman can still be the object of unchaste sexual desire from an adulterous man.[16] Men must assume responsibility for their own purity by curbing their lustful desires and working to appreciate women as imago Dei (made in the image of God), not objects to be used and abused. Just as the modest woman acts out of charity and self respect, the man who controls his carnal desires also performs an act of charity towards women. As Sheen explains, by controlling lust, men honour “the mystery” of human sexuality through “chivalry to women, not because they believe that women are physically weaker but because of the awe they feel in the presence of mystery.”[17]