A rational view of female modesty

Young Amish women at the beach in Chincoteague, Virginia, USA, Wikimedia Commons

Rationalism is a great idea. I mean, who doesn't want to be rational? But it often makes me disappointed, because rationalists commonly leave about 98,3 percent of all phenomena in the world outside rational thought.

Sexual modesty is one of those phenomena. People, rationalists included, practice modesty every day. People all over the world, as long as they aren't mainstream Westerners, talk about it. But in Western culture it is a somewhat taboo subject. We follow culturally formed, arbitrary modesty norms all the time. In spite of knowing that the norms differ highly between cultures and that they are thus entirely possible to negotiate with, few Western people make any attempt at doing so. 

As far as I have seen, rationalists are no exception. That is wrong, I think. If we are to be rational, we should be rational over everything. 

Why don't humans have sex in public?

Our cousin the chimpanzee is not known for its great levels of modesty. When a male chimpanzee wants to have sex with a female, he simply shows her his erection (like a dick-pic for creatures who lack cameras). When a young female has sex with the alpha male she commonly vocalizes at climax.¹

But that non-existing level of shyness is only for the alpha male. The other males need to seek out copulations in secret. The females, mostly, are complicit. When they mate with a beta male, they know to keep quiet. In Chimpanzee Politics (1982), Frans de Waal writes about a young female who had problems keeping quiet and got detected by the alpha male time after time. She finally learned to keep quiet, but only with a strained grin on her face, like it took her quite a bit of effort.²

So in effect, chimpanzees mate in two different ways: One open, boastful that is unlike anything humans do in any culture. Another sneaky, aimed at avoiding detection. That is very similar to how humans do when we mate. We also sneak away from everyone except the partner and try to avoid detection.

Several scientists have theorized that humans became humans through getting rid of the alpha males. Coalitions of beta males dethroned the alpha males and instead agreed to rule together, the theory goes. Any upstart trying to become an alpha was subdued or killed. 

I think we have the explanation to human modesty right here: We are all betas now. And betas hide their sexual exploits and also some of their sexual resources. That is one of the ways betas have succeeded in cooperating. 

Outrageous indecency 

There is a subset of people, let’s call them naturalists, who think that being ashamed of nakedness and sexuality is unnatural. I definitely disagree. For many mammals, sexuality is the most provocative thing they know. They get so upset by seeing each other mating that they sometimes even kill each other over it. Few other phenomena seem to raise such strong feelings in the animal kingdom as the sight of others mating. 

Among chimpanzees, the alpha male becomes outraged by seeing anyone else mating and usually responds violently when he discovers it. Sometimes he can create alliances with a few other males and allow them some mating opportunities too. But as a rule, alpha males hate seeing others mating. The alpha male’s own conspicuous copulation could be seen as a social marker. He is the alpha and he can do what others can not. Mating in public is a kind of status display, almost aimed at causing envy. 

Not only males get upset by seeing others mating, but also children. Chimpanzee children in general do their best to disturb their mother's mating. They have good reasons to do so. Sharing the mother's resources with a sibling will make their own survival chances smaller. Postponing siblings is a good idea for infant chimpanzees. So they are doing their best to show their discontent when their mother takes up mating again after a few years caring for their child.³

Fundamentally, there was, and is, no solution to conflicts over mating. Other males dislike it, children dislike it. So humans did the second best thing: They pretended that it just didn't exist. If we just don't talk about the fact that others have sex, it at least arouses a little less resentment and conflicts.

The chaste and the chic

The general rule of modesty is to banish everything even remotely associated with sexuality from the public sphere. This is effective for keeping social tensions low. But it is also fraught with practical difficulties. And had it been completely successful it might very well have led to the extinction of our species due to childlessness of epic proportions. 

Therefore it has been necessary to develop some sort of equilibrium where sexual signaling can be toned down without being banished altogether. Different cultures have solved this in different ways, but all cultures have some sort of solution. 

Even very primitive cultures, who don’t even have clothing, have quite sophisticated modesty rules. Especially they have conventions that make sure that no one will have an erection in public. From a certain age, Yanomamö men used to tie their foreskin with a string. They then tied the string around their waists. If the string was undone, that was a great source of embarrassment. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon reported that such a garment was not at all comfortable.⁴ The symboling is something like it is okay to have a penis, but only if you incapacitate it in public, ensuring that it can’t be used. 

Anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr made a great project of contradicting sociologist Norbert Elias, whose hypothesis that humans became more and more uptight as civilization progressed resulted in a bestseller. Now that Norbert Elias is forgotten, Duerr's work is a great dictionary of world history anecdotes on sex, nudity and excretion. Duerr stresses the constant tensions that exist in naked societies because of the strong rules about who is allowed to look at whose intimate body parts and not.⁵

Duerr also explains how females in naked societies go to great lengths to avoid exposing their genitalia in ways that are perceived as indecent. There are elaborate rules for women from naked cultures on how to sit, how to bend forward and numerous other movements that might lead to indecent exposure. Also in Western culture before females started to wear trousers habitually, there were rules and taboos against certain activities like tree climbing for females.⁶

Who’s to blame in the sexual game? 

There are two sides to all sexual relations, one male and one female. It is possible to place the burden of modesty on either side, or equally on both sides for that matter. Despite this, almost all cultures, throughout all of history, seem to place the main burden of modesty on the females. 

There are reasons for this. Due to the strange sexual pairing of humans it is the human male who chooses a human female to invest in. This is in contrast to almost all other animals and it has the strange effect that in humans it is the females who are gaudy. While it is male peacocks who have flamboyant plumages it is female humans who have flashy breasts and bottoms. 

This in turn means that the sexual gaze will be firmly locked on the human females. If anyone should cover up it is the women. This is also what has happened, to differing degrees, in all human cultures. In addition to covering women up, most advanced cultures have secluded women away from male spaces in the name of modesty.

The modest alternative to covering up and locking away women is to force self-restraint among the men. If people can just control themselves into not getting sexual feelings from seeing members of the other sex in various stages of clothing, less clothing can be used and the sexes can work closer together. 

There is a sliding scale between female oppression and male self-restraint. Muslim/Asian societies have traditionally leaned more towards female oppression, while Christian/European societies have leaned more towards male self-restraint. The Christian tradition has helped gender equality enormously, because it showed that women and men can actually interact quite a lot without sexual mayhem ensuing. The increased productivity resulting from men and women working efficiently together might also have helped Western culture dominate the world. To the degree that the rest of the world has copied many parts of Western gender relations.

In the 20th century the principle of male self control was expanded step by step. Women were admitted into previously exclusive male educational settings and workplaces. Males were supposed to handle that due to their great self control. Mostly they did, and they did really well. Even when miniskirts, crop tops and push-up bras raised the demands on male self-control, men largely kept working despite the new distractions. 

Let loose the hounds of female competition 

If the we-are-all-beta-now theory is correct, sexual modesty arose as a way for males to compete less openly and cooperate better. Males stopped mating with their desirable partners in public. Instead they required those partners to act shyly towards other males, so as not to provoke envy, anger and lust in competitors.

The effect of this was that also female intrasexual competition was thwarted. But that happened mostly incidentally, as a side effect to men's efforts to decrease their conflicts. Unlike men, women never had the opportunity to sink the whole boat with their intrasexual competition. When women lacked agency in general, they also lacked agency to engage in savage competition with each other.

When females were relieved of some of the burden of modesty, at first effects were overwhelmingly positive. When females don't need to think about how to be modest all day, they can work among men, dress comfortably and pursue their own interests. That raises the total productivity of society. It probably makes people happier too.

But with agency also comes the ability to gain advantages over one’s competitors. While it is generally the human male who chooses a female to invest in, the females can do a lot to be chosen. They just have to be more attractive than other females. Throughout history, families made sure to advertise the qualities of their females to increase their value on the mating market. But this process accelerated when women got the agency to advertise their own qualities. In the 20th century, when women got both spare time and financial resources with which to increase their perceived value at the mating market, it turbo accelerated. 

Since there is a finite number of high-status males to compete over this is a zero-sum game. What’s worse, it is a race to the bottom. Someone starts to apply make-up. Then others follow, because they don't want to lose out to the girl with the pretty painted face. Someone shows off her ample breasts with a low-cut shirt. Someone else goes to a plastic surgeon to get equally ample breasts. According to Jon Birger's Date-onomics, this phenomenon is especially pronounced in environments where there are more females than males, like universities and New York city. 

The reduced demands for female modesty in the modern world has undoubtedly led to greatly enhanced productivity. Instead of being caught under layers of cloth and cages of steel (yes, a crinoline is actually a steel-cage), women have been able to work more or less as productively as men. This increased productivity has come at the expense of a lot of productive power being spent unproductively. When women and girls spend their time applying and removing make-up, removing body hair and shopping for spectacular clothes, they are spending time and money they could have used for something else.

Toxic femininity 

Hitherto, feminism has done very little to address the issue of female intrasexual competition. To the contrary. Mainstream feminism actively celebrates the female right to compete with other females. Freedom to compete is also freedom. And feminism is obsessed with women's right to freedom. It doesn’t help that the norms that limited female competition were all created under the patriarchy, which today is thoroughly discredited. The result is that open female competition has increased very rapidly and few people suggest any measures to counter it. 

So what is the rational thing to do, then? Should we revive the patriarchal norms for female modesty and force women to dress alike, Amish style? Or would it be more rational to do the opposite thing: Encourage everyone to post nude pics of themselves openly on the internet, so the issue over who looks the best is settled once and for all and we can all move on to more important questions? 

I have to admit I don't know. The only thing I can say is that I think that as a first step, we should all just try to stay conscious of the perils of female intrasexual competition. There is a general rule for distinguishing healthy competition from toxic competition: In healthy competition, people produce a net positive for society while competing. In toxic competition, people produce a net negative. 

Being more aware of toxic competition does not only do a service to society but also to individuals themselves. Jakob Falkovich has made himself semi-famous through, among other things, stressing that people should stop choosing life partners based on the impression people give for the first half hour of conversation. Applying a more long-termist view on self and others will both make competition sounder and make us better at choosing our company wisely.

Shall the religious inherit the Earth?

The cost of the race to the bottom does not only consist of time wasted. A much more serious consequence is the loss of male investment in children. Women not only compete for men by applying make-up and dressing ostentatiously. They also compete by offering no-strings-attached sex. Men are hardwired to accept short-term sexual liaisons when offered. Modern contraceptives have made it possible for women to supply these short-term sexual liaisons with little cost to themselves. 

But even if the cost to the individual woman is miniscule the cost to society can still be dramatic. If some women are supplying men with no-strings-attached sex other women will have to follow or lose out to the competition. And if most women are providing no-strings-attached sex there will be less reason for men to invest in long-term relationships and child rearing. It also opens up the possibility for high-status men to keep several women at once occupied in short-term relationships, leaving a significant number of low-status men with no sexual relations at all. 

Contrast this to the Amish. Among the Amish, the women have in practice formed a cartel that forces men to invest. No investment - no sex, the message is. And it works. People marry in their early twenties and have about 5 to 10 children. Why are Amish women so successful in ensuring male investment compared to Western women? Is it because Amish women use their agency to cooperate more and compete less for male attention? Or is it rather because the Amish follow patriarchal traditions mostly created by men? All available evidence suggests the latter. The lower levels of female competition in some traditional societies is just a side effect of age-old traditions created by men. When those traditions are dissolved, females are fundamentally unprepared for how to handle their internal competition. 

The future is female

For thousands of years, cultural evolution heavily selected for male ability to cooperate. Men who could cooperate formed effective armies, which wiped out societies led by less cooperative men (I wrote more about it here, here and here). The ability to handle toxic masculinity was a crucial component in winning the wars. In effect, cultural evolution has been a struggle won by groups of men who were good enough at putting their arguments over women aside. Male intrasexual competition is a very strong force of nature, also among humans. It took our ancestors thousands of years to develop social structures that could get around it enough to form large-scale civilizations. 

During the long reign of patriarchy, females had limited opportunities to compete. The moves in this competition were largely regarded as socially unimportant or even petty. This view still holds, in spite of the tremendous increase in the power and importance of females.

Parallel to female liberation has been an even more important societal shift: The end of the Malthusian condition. In the Western world, until the 19th century (and until the 20th century in the rest of the world) a society’s success was measured in how much resources it could create or conquer. Societies that could produce more food per land unit and conquer more land from their neighbors became the winners of cultural evolution. In this contest, women’s role was generally to support the men. They mostly married whom they were told to marry and they raised as many children as they could feed. 

When the Malthusian condition eased its grip, cultural evolution suddenly turned from male-centered to female-centered. Nowadays, the evolutionary success of a culture most of all depends on its crude fertility rate. And that rate depends on its females' willingness and ability to breed and raise children and, maybe most of all, on their ability to entice male support for that project. Currently, female intrasexual competition seems to be an obstacle to the ability of modern women to raise male support for childrearing.

This means that female intrasexual competition has finally gained the same crucial importance as male intrasexual competition. The winners of yesterday's cultural evolution were the societies that could suppress male intrasexual competition well enough. The winners of today's cultural evolution are the societies that can also suppress female intrasexual competition well enough. Let’s be rational about it.

1. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, 2000, page 187-188

2. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, 2000, page 41

3. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, page 191-194

4. Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö, 1992, page 69

5. Hans Peter Duerr, Myten om civilisationsprocessen, Nakenhet och skam, page 122-135. Unfortunately, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsproczess has not been translated into English, but three of the five volumes were translated into Swedish)

6. Hans Peter Duerr, Myten om civilisationsprocessen - Intimitet, page 138-144