Modesty

One day I was in an inner-city neighborhood stopped at a stoplight when a man defying gravity walked across the street in front of my car. He wasn’t floating, but his pants were. They were hitched just below his crotch so that the totality of his underwear was in full review. I could not understand how his pants managed to stay in place, seemingly defying the laws of physics as he sauntered. But then I thought about this man and the message he was trying desperately to convey through the visibility of his undergarment. That understanding evaded me as well.

Modesty is the quality of propriety or decency, especially with respect to the human body. Parts of the body require more adornment than others, and in the example above, this man’s buttocks needed more covering than his underwear provided. He was being immodest, also defined as improper, indecent, or immoral.

Most often it seems that men and modesty don’t go together. They’re a mismatch of sorts. Society commonly positions women, not men, as sex objects that alone have the choice of being modest or immodest. Women who dress or act immodestly make men out to be victims, who as uncultivated beasts have no control over their sexual appetite. Therefore, vulnerable men are prone to fall before the predations of indecent women, which leads to the asinine supposition that immodest women invite their own rape.

Yet modesty is a virtue that extends to both sexes. When a man acts beyond the point of decency, gripped perhaps by his own machismo, he disgraces himself. I’m thinking of public lewdness, profane language in inappropriate settings, inexcusable touching, indiscreet scratching, tugging, and pulling, and any kind of indiscriminate disclosure of private, personal matters. A modest man is a man who exercises discretion in what he says and how he acts.

A well-regarded cultural symbol of the relaxed standards of modesty is modern dance and choreography. This new leniency can be seen during most televised awards shows or dance competitions that showcase body grinding and crotch grabbing by often skimpily dressed male and female dancers whose primary objective is to be as sexually provocative as possible.

Then there’s the trend called twerking where, in a squatting position, dancers gyrate their hips to accentuate their buttocks. This craze is even more repulsive when it’s performed by teenagers and children.

The same slackening could be said about comedy club routines televised by Netflix and HBO. Many of these acts adopt an anything-goes mentality when it comes to the topics that will be covered. These performances seem to be motivated by the sheer shock value of their material and nothing else. The result is a coarsening in entertainment that erodes a societies’ sensibility about respectability.

A few months ago, Beyoncé released her seventh studio album Renaissance. One of the promotional photos for the new album featured her sitting on an electrified horse wearing an outfit seemingly made from one ounce of Christmas tree tinsel. The getup was so scanty in the extreme that nothing about her body was left to imagination. Small silver disks were placed on her breasts to cover essentials, and if she hadn’t been straddling the horse the strands of silver thread around her thighs would have accomplished nothing with regard to concealment of anything.

Recently there was this headline (with a photo) in a fashion magazine: Jennifer Lopez drops a tasteful nude photo for her 53rd birthday. On my Facebook feed there was an ad for a men’s clothing company that featured a man fronting a brick wall in public, presumably urinating, with the caption The jean that stretches so your nuts ain’t crushed. A bisexual actor in a current television series posted an Instagram photo of himself naked in a sauna. In the September 2022 issue of Interview magazine, Kim Kardashian’s cover photo shows her with her jeans unzipped wearing a jockstrap and her buttocks fully exposed. André Lamoglia, star of the Netflix series Elite, seemingly rushed to social media platforms to proudly inform fans that he doesn’t use prosthetics during sex scenes.

Tasteful public nudity is now an accepted form of creative communication, and a nuanced photo of a man relieving himself in public is the epitome of innocent, lighthearted amusement, even if the correlation between the act and his testicles is too obscure to fathom. It’s like fame isn’t legitimate until or unless it’s naked – or at least sexually confrontational. Modesty is so out of step with contemporary culture that it is seen almost as a sin, and sinners who sin like that don’t belong where they can be seen.

Modesty is all about respecting others and the reasonable norms adopted by society to protect individuals and communities from the excesses that come from irreverence. When standards of decency are openly mocked it’s only a matter of time before those standards are reduced or removed. Once benchmarks for decorum are discarded it can take more than a generation for these behavioral signposts to be reestablished.

A modest man is a standard of decency unto himself. He recognizes that what he says, how he acts, and what he wears all point to a decision about how he intends to live his life. He refuses to be seductive and choses instead to be considerate. He rejects the idea that his freedom is so important that he cannot be restrained by other people’s sense of correctness. He understands that modesty is alluring while immodesty is lustful; that modesty attracts while immodesty repels; that modesty creates mystery while immodesty reduces everything to ordinary.

I recognize my views on modesty place me outside mainstream opinions about decorum. Old-fashioned, outdated, obsolete – these are the terms used to describe the cultural incorrectness associated with conservative public conduct. We live in an anything-goes, hyper-tolerating world where making judgments about men behaving badly is as wrong as wrong can get. Label me wrong or even irrelevant, and I will still believe that personal honor is a high virtue and men who aspire to the dignity of decency elevate not only themselves but also the nation in which they live.