Unraveling Catholic Purity Culture, Part 4: Modesty and Female Disembodiment

It's hard to believe the female body is made good when you continually make inhabiting it a crime.

Taking a big, deep breath for this one.

Of all the purity culture topics I’ve explored and personally experienced, modesty is perhaps the one that disturbs me the most. To me, it’s the most tangible place of the scapegoating I began to discuss in the last installment–which, as I published it, I realized needed to be parsed out like this anyways. There were too many ways women were villainized in purity culture, and still are…beginning with the bodies we inhabit.

In my research on this topic, I conducted a survey of Catholic women who had experienced purity culture. A few questions about their experiences had overwhelming majorities, but the ones on modesty left the others in the dust (except for the ones about virginity…incoming). When I asked if women believed, whether formerly or currently, that they “must dress modestly, otherwise they are causing men to sin,” almost 87% answered yes.

This broke my heart, and it disturbs me still.

Don’t take my disturbance as an advocacy to throw modesty out the window. It’s a virtue, after all, and a valuable one–but one that’s been collapsed solely into appearance, which strays from its true definition. For the record, the Catechism says the following about modesty:

#2521: Purity requires modesty, an integral part of temperance. Modesty protects the intimate center of the person. It means refusing to unveil what should remain hidden. It is ordered to chastity to whose sensitivity it bears witness. It guides how one looks at others and behaves toward them in conformity with the dignity of persons and their solidarity.

#2522: Modesty protects the mystery of persons and their love. It encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships; it requires that the conditions for the definitive giving and commitment of man and woman to one another be fulfilled. Modesty is decency. It inspires one's choice of clothing. It keeps silence or reserve where there is evident risk of unhealthy curiosity. It is discreet.

#2523: There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.

#2524: The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person.

There’s a lot in these quotes, but contrasting them with the resources that 87% cited as one they encountered in their experience of purity culture reveals the loaded messages surrounding women that have burdened them in their approach to their own bodies for decades. For example, Jason and Crystalina Evert’s How to Find Your Soulmate Without Losing Your Soul says that modesty helps “invite boys to be men,” and encourages women to ask the question about our God-given beauty: “Who will you be for men?”