Thursday, January 17, 2008

A Trend To Modesty? Dr. Phil Doesn't Want to Know About It

I’ve admired writer Wendy Shalit since she wrote her first book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, back in 1999. This was a brave argument for the concept of modesty, which had generally come to mean the same thing as prudish and so-last-century.  A few weeks ago, I read a revealing essay by Shalit in the Wall Street Journal (and recently reprinted with permission on Aish.com about Shalit’s invitation to appear on Dr. Phil’s show to discuss her new book, “Girls Gone Mile: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good.”

After asking Shalit for names of young women who were following her advice, dressing decidedly un-skank-like and even boycotting some clothing companies for their vulgar marketing campaigns, the producer told Shalit’s publicist that the segment was cancelled. Well, that wasn’t exactly true; they just cancelled Shalit, in favor of other guests who revel in the show-it-all couture styles. None of the teens whom Shalit recommended made the cut. As Shalit wrote in her op-ed, “All the teenage models that I had recommended were nowhere to be seen. The show was instead presented as a war between ‘wild’ young’uns who wanted to look provocative and their ‘out of touch’ parents.”

I admit, I have never read any of Dr. Phil’s books, nor seen an entire program. But in the snippets of his show I have seen, he seemed to me to be a guy who had integrity and got on anyone’s case who refused to take responsibility for their lives. So it was particularly dismaying to see that the nation’s eminent TV psychologist could not bring himself to even reveal the truth about what’s going on in our culture today, which is that teens are increasingly rebelling against their boomer parents’ permissive attitudes by reclaiming their own physical privacy and modesty. As Shalit put it, “By omitting all the younger, more wholesome role models from his show, Dr. Phil unwittingly revealed how much distortion is required to prop up this media-stoked controversy. The dichotomy between prudish elders and wild young’uns turns out to be, on closer examination, largely adult dogma. Yes, many young people are rebelling--but today they rebel, increasingly, by upholding high standards in the face of the low ones promoted around them.”

I highly recommend you read Shalit’s article. And I applaud her ongoing efforts, which include blogging at ModestlyYours.net, where other women ignored by the mainstream media have a voice, one that they know will be heard and respected, even though they are fully clothed.