[My mother’s] first bout of Lyme disease was diagnosed at the Bethesda Naval Hospital when a physician discovered three large bull’s-eye rashes on her behind. The physician was so excited at this classic presentation of Lyme that he called in several other handsome young navy doctors for a viewing. (My mother, somewhat of a flirt, loved telling this story.)
“Women,” Mart says with deep disapproval, appearing at Cal’s shoulder. “The pub’s full of women tonight.”
“They get everywhere,” Cal agrees gravely. “You reckon they should stay home and take care of the kids?”
“Ah, Jaysus, no. We’ve the twenty-first century here now. They’ve as much right to a night out as anyone. But they change the atmosphere of a place. You can’t deny that. Look at that, now.” Mart nods at the girl in the pink dress, who has started dancing with one of her girlfriends in a few square inches of space between the tables and the bar. “That’s disco behavior, that is. That’s what you get when there’s women in. They oughta have pubs of their own, so they can have their pint in peace without some potato-faced f-er trying to get into their knickers, and I can have mine without your man’s hormones getting in the air and spoiling the taste.”
“If they weren’t here,” Cal points out, “you’d be stuck looking at nothing better’n my hairy face for the evening.”
“True enough,” Mart concedes. “Some of the women in here tonight are a lot more scenic than yourself, no harm to you. Not all of them, but some.”
I might be in the process of drafting a book that takes place before the Flood. So that is forcing me to tackle this issue. Besides needing to get it settled in my own mind, this post is meant to test the waters and see how you, my readers, react to this concept. If I even bring it up, will I be kicked out of polite society?
So, this post is a historical survey of sister-marrying. And it starts in Egypt.
Royals did it
Marrying one’s sister, or half-sister, was not unheard of in the royal families of Ancient Near Eastern cultures. See the following two links for some hair-raising proof that it happened in ancient Egypt:
The practice of royal inbreeding continued so long in Egypt that, by the time we get to Tut-ankh-amen, he has a myriad of health problems and is rather strange-looking.
This was such an established part of married love, at least among royals, in the Ancient Near East that calling someone “my sister” became a conventional endearment. Here, for example, is Solomon:
You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride,
you have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes,
with one jewel of your necklace.
Song of Solomon 4:9
And why did they do it? The obvious answer is to keep the royal bloodline pure. Most ANE cultures tended to believe that their royal family was descended from the gods (see my post Genetic Engineering in the Ancient World), and to add another layer to this, their myths about the gods also often featured sibling-marriage. Typically, you’d have gods and goddesses all being descended from the same being (Father Sky and Mother Earth, say), and then reproducing with each other to produce all the typically observed features of the cosmos. (Please, for the love of God, take my word for this and don’t read the Sumerian creation myths. I’m begging you–don’t!)
Speaking of Sumerians, here is an article that argues that Abram married his half-sister Sarai (whose name means princess) for the same reason: because their family was some kind of royalty in Mesopotamia before he left on his journey.
My question, however, is this. Did this practice of royals marrying their sisters represent breaking an established taboo for a “good” reason, or was it a case of carrying on a common practice a little longer than most people? My contention is that it’s the latter.
Let’s Go to Genesis
Genesis is, as I have often said, my favorite ancient history book. The more I study all of this, the more I realize that it is by far the most accurate written record we have of really ancient history, and of course it’s the only written record we have for some events that are, nevertheless, corroborated indirectly by archaeology, genetics, and historical traditions from around the world.
So, in Genesis, we have humanity starting out with one single couple. If we take this seriously, we have to conclude that the first generation would have had to marry their brothers and sisters, because there was nobody else around.
Nowadays, this would be an impossible genetic problem, besides being taboo. However, clearly it wasn’t taboo at the time. By producing families, people were obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28) Based on the extremely long lifespans recorded in Genesis, we can infer that the newly created people were much healthier than we are, with a much more varied and robust genetic code. They would have had few diseases as yet, and almost no harmful mutations to inherit. Adam and Eve, who didn’t die until they were into their 900s, could have had literally a hundred or more children in that first generation. Furthermore, these children need not all have looked alike, except in the sense of being human. We have to remember that Adam and Eve had within them the potential to produce every genetic variation we see today (and actually more, since most of the variety was lost during the Flood).
By the time Cain kills Abel, there are enough people in the earth that Cain can complain, “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” These other people that he is worried about would have been his siblings, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and -nieces, and so forth. If we figure that Seth was born not long after the murder of Abel, then the murder of Abel took place just under 130 years after the Fall. (Genesis 4:25 – 5:3) Apparently, that was enough time for the world to be populated.
In this video, starting at about 20:00, geneticist Nathaniel T. Jeansen discusses how our ancestors had to have been more closely related “than we are usually comfortable with.”
A Detour into Evolutionary Theory
“But wait!” you may say. “All this is nonsense. People didn’t all come from one founding couple, we evolved from several different but related species of hominids.”
Actually, if you think that way, you probably stopped reading this article before you got to this section. But let’s dip a toe into natural selection, just in case there is anyone hate-reading or any readers who are intrigued by what I’m saying about history, but are bothered by the science side of things.
Natural selection, in order to work as a mechanism, has to have a population of creatures already in place, with some genetic variation already in their genome. And–this is critical–they have to be already reproducing. That way, natural selection can operate on the subsequent generations of the population, encouraging variety here, stamping it out there, etc.
This creates a big problem if you want to argue that people evolved from (ultimately) one-celled animals. Now, how one-celled animals reproduce is itself a beautiful, complex mystery, but it’s basically by subdividing, producing clones of themselves. In other words, it’s not sexual reproduction.
How did sexual reproduction come about through natural selection? It would call for a wildly improbable series of (already vanishingly rare) beneficial mutations to the genetic code of two different creatures of the same species, such that one ended up male and one ended up female, with their systems perfectly corresponding to each other for reproduction. And it would have to work perfectly the first time.
If you want several different populations of human species, then you need this miracle to happen not once but several times, in different places. If it only happens once, then you’re back to what Genesis describes, which is just one founding couple.
What I’m saying is that introducing evolutionary theory doesn’t make the believability problem smaller, it makes it bigger.
Stephen Meyer explains why beneficial mutations are mathematically impossible.
Back to Genesis Again
We’ve established that in the pre-Flood world, there was no taboo on marrying one’s sibling (or probably, cousin or niece either), and also no health cost to doing so. Also (probably) it would not necessarily mean marrying someone you had grown up in close proximity with, given the size of the families we are talking about.
Then we get the Flood, in Genesis 6 – 9 and also attested in numerous local histories worldwide. At the Flood, the human population of the earth, previously vast in genetic diversity, gets culled down to just four couples, and the men of these couples are all related to each other. It’s from these four couples (perhaps just three of them?) that all of us today are descended. (We are literally just one big family!)
Think about the implications of this. The most distant relationship that any of Noah’s grandchildren would have had to each other would have been cousin during that first generation. Perhaps they married their cousins, and then their second cousins and so forth, but there is nothing to indicate that the possibility of marrying siblings had been closed to them. In Gen. 9:1 -17, God makes a new covenant with Noah and his sons. He reiterates the command to increase in number and fill the earth. He gives them the animals to eat, institutes the death penalty for murder of humans, and promises never to send another worldwide flood. He does not mention any new rules about not marrying your sister.
Next, in Genesis 11 and 10 respectively, we get the Tower of Babel and the Table of Nations. Though the Table of Nations comes before the account of Babel, the fact that we are told which geographical areas these nations settled in hints that the Table of Nations is at least a partial elaboration of where people went when “the LORD scattered them over the face of the earth.”
In the Table of Nations, the peoples are sorted by father. We see the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japeth listed by a paternal line, and we see them scattering to found cities, kingdoms, and peoples. This implies, though it does not directly say, that they were having a lot of children per family, and that they were practicing in-group marriage.
Now we get to Abram, who was a Sumerian basically, or was living in that region of the world and in that culture area. As has been covered, he married his half-sister Sarai, whether because theirs was an aristocratic family or because it was still common practice in Mesopotamia at the time. Later, on two separate occasions (Gen. 12:10 – 20 and 20:1 – 18), he “lies” by telling a local ruler that Sarai is his sister. On both occasions, the local king understands this to mean that Sarai is not Abram’s wife and is fair game for his harem. This shows that, probably, most wives were not sisters at the time, at least in Egypt (Gen. 12) and southern Palestine (Gen. 20).
This would be about 2,000 B.C.
In Genesis 24, Abraham asks his servant to get a wife for Isaac from among “my own relatives.” The servant, guided by the LORD (!), finds Rebekah, the daughter of Abraham’s niece (Gen. 24:15). One generation later, Rebekah herself encourages Jacob to marry one of his cousins, daughters of her brother Laban. So by this time, we are practicing in-group marriage, but with cousins, not siblings.
Finally, in Leviticus 18, we get an explicit prohibition on marrying your sister.
Leviticus comprises the details of the giving of the Law, right after the exodus from Egypt, so about 1400 B.C. If you plop your finger onto Leviticus, it looks really early in the Bible. However, it’s 600 years after Abraham and a couple of thousand years after the Flood, so it is coming rather late from this blog’s perspective on ancient history.
The intended recipients of Leviticus are a large population of tribes who have just spent 400 years becoming culturally Egyptian. Since Moses’ parents were both from the tribe of Levi (Exodus 2:1), we can infer that they are still practicing in-group marriage.
Leviticus chapter 18 begins this way:
The LORD said to Moses: “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘I am the LORD your God. You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices. You must obey my laws and be careful to follow my decrees. I am the LORD your God. Keep my decrees and laws, for the man who obeys them will live [i.e. find life] by them. I am the LORD.
“No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the LORD.”
Lev. 18:1 – 6
There follows a very comprehensive list of close relatives who are off-limits. This list includes everything you can think of, and some things that you perhaps haven’t. It ranges from very sick perversions, to this:
“‘Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere. (v. 9)
“‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.'” (v. 17)
Verse 9 gives us a clue of what types of family arrangements were possible among the Israelites of 1400 B.C. You might have a half-sister who was raised in a separate household. Verse 17 describes a behavior that Jacob famously engaged in with Rachael and Leah (additionally, both women were his cousins). In fact, the two women’s rivalry was how we got the twelve tribes of Israel. Marrying two sisters at the same time (not to mention their respective maidservants) was apparently something that was normal in the age of the patriarchs, but now, giving the Law 600 years later, God forbids it.
Leviticus 18:24 – 29 makes it clear that “all these things were done by the people who lived in the land before you,” but God considers them to be things that defile a land. I gather that this means the wide variety of disordered sexual relationships described in Leviticus 18 were not unheard-of, probably not just among the Egyptians and Canaanites, but among many or all of the many tribes in the surrounding areas.
We have God to thank for this taboo
So, now we know approximately when marrying your sister became taboo. 1400 B.C. And people didn’t come up with this on their own; God had to enforce it.
The overall picture is one where we start off with is marriages taking place among close family, in sort of a wholesome way, before and immediately after the Flood. Then, instead of branching out and marrying more and more distantly related people as the earth’s population increases, we see cultures in the Ancient Near East curving back in on themselves and coming up with more and more perverse ways to approach this. I gather from Lev. 18 that, once an ANE man had bagged a wife, he seemed to feel entitled, or at least have an eye out for the opportunity, for sexual rights to everyone related to her.
The time of the Israelite patriarchs, enslavement in Egypt, and Exodus also overlaps with the Minoan civilization on Crete, which gave us the legend (?) of the Minotaur, the offspring (allegedly) of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. That gives us a clue that such horrifying practices were not confined to the Levant. “Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how that nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled.”
“What would you be talking about, the two of ye?” he asks.
The question startles Cal. “Like what?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. One way or t’other, I’ve never had much opportunity for conversation with women … What would a man be talking about with a woman?”
“Jeez, man,” Cal says. “I dunno.”
“I’m not asking you what sweet nothings you go whispering in her ear. I’m asking about conversation. What kind chats you’d be having over a cuppa tea, like.”
“Stuff,” says Cal. “Like I’d talk about with anyone. What do you talk about with the guys in the pub?”
“Stuff,” Mart acknowledges. “Fair point there, bucko.”
Another funny and poignant book by Tana French, set in the Irish village of Ardnakelty.
The humor comes from the way the residents, especially a certain older man named Mart, use the language. Mart is a talker. He and his friends at the pub love to roast each other, and especially Cal, the American ex-cop who has lived there two years now. For example, when they hear Cal is getting married, they try to convince him that there’s a local custom that the prospective bridegroom needs to carry a torch from his house, through the village, around his intended’s house, and then back to his own house … in his underwear.
The poignancy comes from the plot, which I won’t reveal, but suffice it to say that there is plenty of human tragedy.
French has done an amazing job of portraying a close-knit, gossipy, stifling, eccentric small community where communication is indirect, and becomes even more indirect when the stakes become high. Cal is pretty good at reading, and engaging in, this kind of 4D chess that’s played at one remove, but it gets to even him after a while. “The amount of subtlety around here was pretty near to giving him hives.” I have always wanted to write a story set in such a community, but have been unable to because I am woefully literal minded and don’t pick up on cues. I would never survive in Ardnakelty.
There is a small amount of preaching about climate change, but it’s only mentioned directly once that I remember and does not overwhelm the story. This tale takes place during an unusually hot and dry summer in Ardnakelty, which puts everyone on edge. In this way, the weather contributes to the theme and even drives the plot a little bit.
Finally, one thing I forgot to mention on my GoodReads review is that French deserves props for being able to capture the way men think and talk. Cal is the main POV character, and he’s just the quintessential male, both in the way he thinks, how he handles and solves things, and how he banters with the people in the village and deflect questions and comments and barbs when he needs to. This book kind of reminds me of She’s Come Undone, which was the opposite in that it was a well-written book with a female POV character, written by a man.
But that’s partly my own fault. After all, I had to go and listen to this heartrending testimony …
Jonathan Gass’s story is remarkable for how it consisted of essentially unremitting pain until he came to Christ … and then, for how fast he came to Christ and was transformed.
I say remarkable, but I don’t say unique. Many, many other men and women out there are, as we speak, going through the same unremitting pain. This does not make his story easier to listen to. But look at the peace on his face now.
And then, the same week I listened to Jonathan, I was reading my class of elementary-school students The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I came upon this passage:
For a second after Aslan breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back–then it spread–then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper–then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened his great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn. And now his hind legs had come to life. He lifted one of them and scratched himself. Then, having caught sight of Aslan, he went bounding after him and frisking round him whimpering with delight and jumping up to lick his face.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 184
Aslan turns him back into a lion, and he immediately starts behaving like … a lion.
But not only the individual creatures, but the Witch’s house itself is a picture of a human soul:
“Now for the inside of this house!” said Aslan. “Look alive, everyone. Up stairs and down stairs and in my lady’s chamber! Leave no corner unsearched. You never know where some poor prisoner may be concealed.”
But at last the ransacking of the Witch’s fortress was ended. The whole castle stood empty with every door and window open and the light and the sweet spring air flooding in to all the dark and evil places which needed them so badly.
[And when the castle gates had been knocked down from the inside], and when the dust had cleared it was odd, standing in that dry, grim, stony yard, to see through the gap all the grass and waving trees and sparkling streams of the forest, and blue hills beyond that and beyond them the sky.
Quick! Who do we know who’s a linguist, a former missionary, a gifted writer, and wants to capture in novel form the human condition and God’s grace to us in it?
Who is awkward, reserved, and can come off as rude and abrupt, but actually has passionate emotions, a deep love for others, and a rich inner life?
Who loves nature? Crosses cultures happily, but doesn’t fit in so well in the American evangelical context? Who has a secret desire to be admired, but also suffers from poor judgement about the opposite sex?
Why, Elisabeth Elliot, of course!
Me and Elisabeth Elliot
When I was college and just discovering the things I ranted about last Friday, like the fact that we as a culture could use some guidelines about the how the sexes ought to relate to each other, I came across Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity. I devoured it.
This book was exactly suited for me at the time. I was just starting to grow in Christ. I really wanted to do God’s will. I also, unbeknownst to me, had a lot in the common with the author of Passion and Purity: socially awkward, ascetic tendencies, perfectionistic, a longing for old-fashioned values. This book is basically about the lessons Betty, as she was called at that time, learned during her five years (!) of waiting for Jim Elliot to make up his mind that God had given him the go-ahead to marry her. Their courtship story strikes many Christian young people as really spiritual upon first hearing, and then on a second look, it starts to look as if he didn’t treat her very well possibly. But I bought into it fully.
Anyway. Full of missionary zeal to win other young people over to the idea of an extremely awkward, chaste, long courtship, I gave this book to a friend. She read it, and her reaction was, “There are the Elisabeth Elliots of this world, but I am not one of them.”
That annoyed me at the time (someone had rejected my idealistic ideal!), but from my perspective now, that friend of mine didn’t know how right she was. In fact, not even Elisabeth Elliot herself was one of the Elisabeth Elliots of the world, at least not in the sense of having perfect wisdom and self-control. At the time she was writing this (early 1980s), Elisabeth was enduring an extremely controlling marriage with a man she married because she didn’t want to be lonely. She stayed with him for the rest of her life, despite an intervention by her family. It’s chilling to realize that the woman who wrote Passion and Purity could make such a foolish decision.
Before Passion and Purity, I remember as kid seeing black-and-white photos of Elisabeth toting her small daughter Valerie into the jungle to serve the Waorani people (then called the Auca), a few years after her husband Jim was killed by them. These were the photos taken by Hungarian photographer Cornell Capa. They, and the books Elisabeth wrote about the Waorani, had made her and her martyred husband Jim famous throughout the evangelical world.
Both greater and lesser than I thought
When you think you know a story, you expect it to be boring. I put off for some time reading this duology by Ellen Vaughn, until it finally floated to the top of my reading list. Once I opened the books, I found that I couldn’t put them down. Vaughn is an excellent researcher and a vivid and sympathetic writer, and though I had read a number of books by and about the Elliots, I certainly didn’t know as much of their story as I thought.
Vaughn, aware that she is telling a story the outlines of which are familiar to readers, moves skillfully back and forth through time, as in a novel (though in rough outline, the first book deals with Betty’s early life and the second book with her post-Ecuador years). Vaughn doesn’t try to tell every story–there are too many, many of which have been told elsewhere, and others of which are apparently too private and will stay hidden forever in Elisabeth’s prolific journals. In fact, as I read these books, I felt I was getting to know two fellow woman writers: Elliot and Vaughn.
When you are a former missionary, it’s difficult to read other missionaries’ stories without comparing them to your own. Usually, this means you are reading about people who were far ahead of you in dedication, selflessness, toughness, and in what they suffered. This is certainly true of the Elliots. At the same time, so much of their personalities and stories seemed shockingly familiar. For example, young Jim Elliot was, besides being a great guy, an insufferable holier-than-thou know-it-all, of the “I’m going to go read my Bible” type. Betty, as Elisabeth was then called, was quiet and reserved and often didn’t realize that she was coming off as standoffish. Jim’s family verbally eviscerated her after her first visit to their home in Portland, and foolish young Jim passed all these criticisms on to Betty in a letter. She was devasted, but thought and prayed over the things they had said, and then concluded that none of them were things she could actually change. Later, Jim couldn’t believe he had shared his family’s words with Betty. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon. What an imBAYsill.”
They were just people, you see. Not angels. Which means that “just people” can always serve God.
Jim Elliot, you beautiful dunce.
The things they suffered also rang poignantly familiar. They suffered setbacks that lost them a year of their work–for her, language work; for him, building a mission station. Neat and tidy Elisabeth at some points had to live in squalor, and felt guilty for the fact that it bothered her. Fellow missionaries (not all) and Waorani Christians alike (not all) proved manipulative and controlling. In fact, it was relationship difficulties that caused Elisabeth eventually to leave the Waorani, after spending only a few years with them. This was not Elisbeth’s fault: person after person found it impossible to work with Rachel Saint, her fellow translator. But she took on as much of the responsibility for it as she possibly could, agonizing before God in her journals, because that was the kind of person she was.
Elisabeth the Novelist
Now we are getting into events of the second book, Being Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth knew that she had a gift of writing. She had made so much money from her books Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty that she was able to build a house for herself and her daughter near the White Mountains of New Hampshire (talk about living the dream!) and settled down to become a writer. She really wanted to write great literature, the kind that would elevate people’s hearts and give them fresh eyes to see the great work of God all around them in the world.
If I were writing a novel about Elisabeth Elliot, I would end it there, and let her have a period of rest, in the beautiful mountains, with her daughter, writing her books, for the rest of her days. I wish that was how it had gone. I kept hoping, as I read this duology, for there to come a point when Vaughn could write, “And then, she rested.” Alas, that moment never came.
Elliot was indeed a really good writer. Sometime in the twenty-teens, when I was a young mom who had come back from the mission field hanging my head over my many failures, and had unpacked my books and settled into a rented house to minister to my small children, I found on an upstairs shelf a slim volume that looked as if it had been published in the 1960s or 70s, called No Graven Image. This was the novel that Elliot wrote when she first settled down in New Hampshire. She wished, through fiction, to give her readers a more powerful, truer picture of missionary life than her biographies had done.
This is not the cover my copy of the book had, though it also had an image of a condor.
No Graven Image was not well received when it came out. It was the old problem of marketing. To what audience do you market a genre-bending book? The people who liked to read tragic, worldly novels were not interested in a so-called “novel” about a young missionary woman, probably expecting that it would be preachy. The Christians who liked to read missionary stories were shocked and dismayed by a novel in which the protagonist flounders around, makes mistakes, and ultimately, accidently kills her language informant when he has a bad reaction to a shot of penicillin. And then decides that her desire to have a successful language project had been a form of idolatry.
Some readers appreciated the novel (particularly overseas missionaries), but most found it shocking, even blasphemous. They wanted a triumphant novel, not the story of Job. They wondered whether Elisabeth had lost her faith.
When I picked it up, in the twenty-teens, it made me feel extremely understood.
One thing that killed me as I read of Elisabeth’s later years is that this was the only novel she wrote. She very much wanted to write others, and she got as far as making notes for another novel. But life (read: men) intervened, and she was in demand for speaking and for writing nonfiction books such as Passion and Purity. She wasn’t able ever again to get the extended periods of time to concentrate that it would have taken to gestate a novel. She convinced herself that she just didn’t have what it took to write actual good fiction (and perhaps, that it was selfish to try). I am so sad to watch this dream die. I believe that she would have been a good novelist. I don’t know whether her publisher would have kept publishing her books if she had turned to fiction, or whether she would have had trouble finding another publisher. Spiritual non-fiction was what she had already become known for. She probably would have made less money, perhaps found it difficult to support herself. But still … you know … it’s hard to watch. So many things about the second volume of her biography are hard to watch. At the same time, because of Vaugh’s amazing research and writing, it’s hard not to sit back and just stare at this major accomplishment.
So, I’m reading A Return to Modesty, which I stumbled upon in my dad’s extensive personal library.
This book came out in 1999. I remember hearing about it at the time. I was a Christian girl in my early 20s, just a year away from getting married though I didn’t yet know it. Wendy Shalit, the author of Return, was just a year older than me. I remember being jealous of her (a girl my age who had already published a book!). I also remember that it was rather snippily received. One female reviewer mentioned that it was difficult to take “being lectured to about modesty by a 24-year-old.”
That, of course, is not a coincidence. As Shalit points out in the intro, modern sexual-liberation-niks don’t just disagree with modesty-niks; they actually hate them:
I was fascinated … with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was “obviously very troubled,” and that one seemed to have a “creepy” relationship with her father. Or “Maybe she just had a Bad Experience.” Either way, whatever her problem is, “why doesn’t the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won’t take it all so seriously?”
I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: “They’re sick, I’m telling you! I’ve heard of them with their not-touching, and they’re sick, sick, sick!” Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.
I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks.
ibid, pp. 5 – 6
By writing this book, of course, Shalit put herself among their number. She notes that feminists are often open to what she has to say about women needing privacy, dignity, and romantic dreams of a monogamous relationship … until they find out that she’s an “extreme right-winger,” that is, someone who thinks female modesty (and chastity and reticence and embarrassment and all the other things that come with it) is a good thing.
Shalit first learned of what she calls modestyniks by looking at engagement, wedding, and post-wedding pictures of an elderly couple’s granddaughter, who was following “tzniut, the Jewish laws of sexual modesty.”
In this [picture] the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy–only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. “That’s for the head covering,” her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. “A married woman cannot leave her head uncovered.”
That’s how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat.
ibid, p 4
All the reviewers who in 1999 were reacting to the thesis of Shalit’s book were so excited–or offended– by its serious content, that they failed to convey that Shalit is a terrific writer: spunky, funny, able to move from chuckles like this to very serious and heartbreaking content, and back, multiple times in the same chapter or even on the same page.
When I picked up this book from my dad’s library, in preparation for drafting my own book on the logistics of modesty (a project now shelved), I thought I might just thumb through it. I didn’t expect that it would lure me in, as books do, and prove to be a page-turner. But it has.
I won’t go over all the ways Shalit enumerates that the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, by destroying the notion of female modesty, have opened Pandora’s Box for girls and boys both. I’ve ranted about it elsewhere, and so have many others. You could probably write such a rant yourself, and maybe you even have. I will say that it’s really poignant to read a book like this written in 1999.
The 90s are now officially A Long Time Ago. Cars from the 90s are now antiques (!). I am even starting to see memes that portray the 90s in a similar way that we once portrayed the 50s: a naive, wholesome time, when we didn’t have all the problems we have now. For example, one meme said something like, “The 90s were so problem-free that Kurt Cobain had to kill himself because he had nothing to be depressed about.”
As someone who came of age in the 90s, I cry foul. We were a good 30+ years after the Sexual Revolution and 20+ after Roe. We were deep into the divorce and moms-having-serial-boyfriends epidemic. We had anorexia and bulimia and cutting. Ninties kids did not have one foot in pre-1960s social norms; instead, we were completely unmoored from any kind of consistent or coherent framework for how to relate to the opposite sex, or even how to become a man or woman, except that we knew that both of those things were bad. Shalit’s book focuses on the destructive messages that girls and young women got:
Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him that you’re an independent person.
ibid, p. 94
… but of course, boys got a very similar litany about how they were not supposed to be polite or gentlemanly or, God forbid, protective of women, and in fact they were not supposed to take any initiative at anything.
They also were sadly unprepared for the fact that women have lots of emotions:
“My ex-girlfriends? Well, let’s see … she was a nut, and then she was a nut, and then her … let’s see … yes, she was a nut, and then … yeah, she was a nut, too, come to think of it! It’s strange that I’ve had such bad luck, to date so many nuts. Anyway, then there was what’s-her-name, who was evil. She left me. God, that really sucked! She was really evil! And then there was another nut …”
What makes a man perceive a woman as a “a nut”? And can all women be nuts? A silly question. Clearly all women can’t be nuts. What does it mean, then, when a society judges that a considerable number of its women are, in fact, nuts? Could it tell us something about how we view womanhood?
ibid, p. 163
If I had read this book in the 90s, I probably would have agreed with it, in a slightly superior, glad-you-finally-came-to-the-modesty-party kind of way, like the smug 20-something Christian know-it-all that I was at the time. I also would have missed a lot of the content that is now resonating with me. Because I’ve spent the 26 years since this book was published wrestling with these very issues and going on these very rants.
I might have been raised in a Christian home. I might have come up in a social environment that was relatively traditional compared to the secular one in which Shalit grew up. I even, somehow, escaped the super-explicit sex-ed elementary school classes in the public schools that Shalit was spared only because her mom found out what was happening, threw a fit, and got Shalit a pass to sit out that class in the library. (I’m not sure how I escaped the explicit sex-ed, to be honest. I went to public schools. Possibly it’s because our family moved a couple of times and school districts were on different schedules.)
But even with being–you would expect–sheltered, I still absorbed all the same messages she did, directly from the teat of society, as it were. As a Christian, I did get the message that you were supposed to be chaste until marriage (opposite of the message she got). But on the other hand I received, loud and clear, the picture of the ideal woman as tough, smart, independent, unconcerned about her clothing or appearance, ready to go join the Navy S.E.A.L.s … basically, a woman with a man’s mind and as close as possible to a man’s body. Girls who had their wedding all planned out at the age of 9 and had already picked out names for their kids, and who wore pink and giggled and blushed and so forth, were “stupid.” I’m a 90s kid, after all.
Anyway … the sad thing about reading this book is, almost thirty years later, nothing has changed. Shalit predicted a return to modesty among my generation. We were figuring out, she said, that modesty is natural to us, it protects us, it’s ultimately more romantic and even sensual. That was why, she said, we liked Jane Austen so much. And while I plead guilty on all charges, it turns out that longing for a return to female modesty has not been enough. You cannot just bring back an entire social system that is lying in smithereens at your feet. There weren’t any rules or norms or consensus about how a girl–or boy–should dress or talk or behave, and we didn’t know what to do. None of us knew what to do. And when I look at my kids’ generation, they still don’t.
Well, we have made it through February, when I did a post about something I love every single week. Phew, I’m certainly glad that is over with! What a relief to get into March, and start writing about stuff I hate again.
Just kidding. I didn’t hate this book; in fact, I mostly really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t a perfect bull’s-eye like all the stuff I posted about last month.
This 2024 book is narrated by Jolene, a Canadian woman whose mother is Iranian-Canadian and who works in a regular, that is to say fairly miserable, office. She has social anxiety, a moderate drinking problem, a big cohort of Persian Aunties (her mom’s friends) who really really hope she will get married, and a dark trauma from high school. Oh, and she has a habit of adding passive-aggressive postscripts to her e-mails to her colleagues, hidden in white text.
One day she forgets to turn the text white, and that kicks off her madcap adventures.
If this setup sounds like it’ll be boring and full of self-pity, all I can say is it’s anything but. Jolene, despite her hermitlike ways, is a keen observer of human nature and is mistress of the witty, cunning turn of phrase, which is exactly what makes her e-mail postscripts so devastating, and this narrative so fun to follow.
This little human [baby] doesn’t even realize the greatness of this: the only time in your life when people will simply ignore your public outbursts. The rest of us must cry without actually crying. This child, I learn as Celeste continues to soothe it, is named Thomas. I watch his little eyes dart around the room, taking it all in. Maybe Thomas is just now realizing that eventually he will grow up to spend all his daylight hours under fluorescent lights and water-stained ceiling tiles.
I don’t mean to chuckle at this depressing thought, and I stifle it as soon as I can, but that doesn’t stop a few eyes from drawing my way while I pretend I didn’t just cackle at a technically crying baby.
Then Thomas begins being passed around like a hot burrito. I curl my hands close against my chest and try to back away. When Caitlin takes said bundle, it stops crying in an instant, and her face softens in a way that makes me realize how hard it’s been lately.
“So, how is being a mom?”
Celeste starts describing things that sound dire as sh-t.
Gregory randomly pokes the ——- baby in the belly, and the cries start again in a screeching pitch.
Has anyone ever punched him in the face?
“How was the birth?” Stu for some cursed reason has to ask. I take a step back in order to avoid sticking around for Celeste’s answer.
Rhonda flashes me a disapproving stare. Why is it socially acceptable to discuss a human getting pushed or cut out of a body, yet somehow, it’s unprofessional for me to simply work rather than hold the tiny person I don’t even know?
page 102
That’s a pretty good sample of the writing style — and also a pretty good, lively description of what it’s like to be a woman with social anxiety or maybe autistic tendencies. Very very relatable.
I finished this book very quickly because of the good writing. However, it’s not uplifting or heartwarming. Jolene is engaging in some pretty significant deception throughout almost the entire book, which made it hard to enjoy. She’s under a lot of stress with several different crises bubbling (including one with the Persian Aunties), which keeps the pace fast, but makes the read also stressful. I knock off one star for this dynamic and for the author’s use of the phrase “white-passing.”
Out of Babel Books 