The Modesty Erotic

Cross-posted from sotah

A New York Times article, Rabbi’s Sound Alarms over Eating Disorders, highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in the Orthodox community. Why is there an article about eating disorders in the Orthodox community and why is it one of the top ten emailed articles? It continues to make the news when modest and chaste girls have eating disorders. According to the article “Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size — and her mother’s — and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.”  While the community’s desire to treat eating disorders is admirable, enforced modesty is at the root of the decease. The vigilance over the body which characterizes both modesty and eating disorders is not antithetical to the problem, it is contributory. The modest young woman is self-watching over her body. Modesty transforms her body, which is many things, into a body which one thing – a source of the erotic and an object prohibited to the male gaze. According to the orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, a man cannot pray while seeing a woman’s less than meticulously covered body. She is erva – nakedness.

The claim of what modesty can do for women (aka covering up leads to women not being objectified), has fundamentally bought into the belief that a woman’s body is constantly erotic – modesty is then presented as the cure to her objectification, while in fact modesty is the disease that insists upon the objectification. The cause and effect flows from the theology of modestly to her objectification. The theology of modesty invented the objectification by declaring her entire body erotic. Gila Menelson, the Orthodox guru of modesty, claims in her latest book that the “anecdote” to the very real problem of body-hate is modesty.  She identifies the right problem, but the wrong cure.  The “anecdote” is stopping the body vigilance – demanded both by secular media and theological modesty.

In Menelson’s book, modesty is just the new sexy.

Men appreciate a look that reflects what’s within – at least when they’re seeking a real       relationship. After a young woman I know started dressing modestly, her ex-boyfriend           told her she looked better than ever.

Proponents of modesty acknowledge the modesty erotic.

The secrecy both conveys the intrinsic worth of what is being hidden and challenges and beckons the outsider to prove himself worthy of being privy to it. This is why a concealing manner and modest dress is so attractive and arousing.

Modesty – by keeping her hidden, it keeps her erotic.  And, of course, every woman wants to be pure sex – from head to toe.  I gladly surrender the 24/7  eroticism of my ankles, my elbows, my toes, my cleavage, my thighs – for a body which is many things, for a body that is free because it is seen, but it is not self-watched.  The erotic is mine to summon – it does not reside in my bones or in my skin. The erotic is a performance I choose to enact when it suits me.  Modesty takes that basic choice away, by insisting that no such choice exists.  Modesty operates by demanding that a woman enact eroticism in every moment, and then sanctions her for its enactment by forcing her to hide her skin.

An eating disorder is one way she hides.