Shalit has made a career of cataloging the degradations of our culture while championing crusades of virtue. Her first book, A Return to Modesty, argued that chastity was hot--and informed readers she intended to remain a virgin until her wedding night. Shalit says she was inundated with letters and e-mail from girls dismayed by cultural pressure to be bad. She began a Web site, ModestyZone.net--there are at least a dozen similar ones toddyand started collecting information from 3,000 e-mail exchanges between 1999 and 2006. There s a dawning awareness that maybe not everyone participating in these behaviors is happy with them, so let s not assume everyone doing this is empowered, she says. She blames the usual suspects: media, misguided feminist professors, overly permissive parents. Sharman also points a finger at Moms Cone Wild. It used to be that moms would control the way their daughters dressed. But now we have this Desperate Housewives culture, and the moms are as influenced by the media as the kids, she says. They ve lost the sense of encouraging their daughters to be ladylike. Pure Fashion, which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic organization Regnum Chrisri, aims to help young ladies make better choices, say Sharman.
This not the first time women have been asked to make these choices. During a century of tumult over the roles and rights of women, fashion and sexual expression have remained lightning rods for controversy. The forward-thinking women of the 1920s who cut their hair, threw out their corsets and dared to smoke in public were the Britney Spearses and Paris Hiltons of their day, says Joshua Zeitz, author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex,Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern . Everything is relativegirls weren t wearing thongs or getting bikini waxes, but they were coming to school in knee-length skirts, wearing lipstick and smoking, Zeitz says. The concern at the time was that the culture was sexualizing young girls. The backlash came during the Great Depression, when you see a movement to get women back into the home, in part to correct this culture of licentiousness.
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