Sex is everywhere. Everyone is doing it. It is how our society has evolved. Don’t fight it. Just submit to it. If you are in the raging river, swim with it, dirt and all.
In America, a 12-year-old girl is estimated to be exposed to 280 sexy images a day. Imagine how many such images and running videos of similar explicitness our sons are exposed to.
During my time, we were familiar with this 1984 lyrics, “Like a virgin, touched for the every first time. Like a virgin, when your heart beats next to mine.”
Today, it is this by Britney Spears (2003), Don’t really wanna be a tease. But would you undo my zipper please. Uh uh, please don’t talk. Listen. I’ll let you touch me if you want. I see your body rise, rise. And when you come, don’t get too hot.” Are they role models or eroding models?
Last night, I was watching Fatal Attraction, a thriller where traditional family values crashed with a man’s unbridled sexual libidos. It was no doubt amazing acting by Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, as you witness a night of sexual freedom, that is, sex without boundaries, turned into a nightmare, an attempted suicide, and a violent obsession that nearly tore a family apart.
Everything we do have consequences. The choices we make, we live with them. And the life that is lived demands that we either learn our lesson or continue to make the same mistakes until we go to our graves.
Mind you, what we accept as normal in this world will change us for better or for worse. And it is similar to marriage. You break the marital oath, you pay the price. Some oath broken are resilient and they come back stronger. Some is unable to withstand the broken trust and they go their separate ways, with kids struggling for love at different places.
No, I am not talking about marriage today. This post is not about that per se. I am however talking about sexual responsibility. More specifically, I am talking about modesty, the traditional virtue that many have looked down upon as passé, prude, puritan, a prig.
No one wants to talk about such virtues anymore because, I believe, of moral fatigue - for we are fighting a world where sexual abstinence is anachronistic, chastity is for our grandparents’ time, and a good virtuous woman and a chivalrous man only appear in fairy tales or gospel stories.
The raw reality is, the age of first intercourse has dropped from nineteen to fifteen for female. That was a survey carried out more than ten years ago in America. I trust it is even lower now. And oral sex has also skyrocketed in the same survey from 42 to 71 per cent. And it is no surprise that preserving yourself for marriage has become an embarrassing topic to talk about, when in the past, it was something to be proud of.
When anyone talks about modesty, there is always a high chance that he or she will be accused of being anti-feminist, a chauvinist or anachronistic. But you seldom hear the same accusation being leveled on a father when he tells his daughter to dress less provocatively on a date or of a mother warning his son to respect a lady when he goes out with her for a movie.
At home, we were taught to uphold virtues like modesty, chastity and respect for the opposite sex, but in the world, we are constantly told to seek our own pleasure first, race to the top at all costs, and do whatever makes us happy because we only have one life to live.
It is like we have something firm to stand on at home, the values that we strive consciously to protect and pursue, and when we are out there, we are only given a paddle and a dinghy to navigate the vast ocean, the wild tides and the unpredictable storms of anything goes, of you define your own happiness, and of there being no absolute truths anymore (make of it as you grope along).
The president and founder of character and chastity program in America, Elayne Bennett observed this: “When society keep giving a message that (a) you won’t get pregnant and (b) that society doesn’t condemn you (for engaging in promiscuous sexual activity), it really wears down some of the healthy and correct hesitancy on the part of young girls.”
We have thus taken freedom too far. We have allowed ourselves to be free from the chains of traditions, and in doing so, we have thrown the baby out together with the bathwaters. What was meant for the good of our soul and spirit, we have turned it into something that is devoid of soul and spirit.
We view modesty with suspect, a patriarchal scheme to suppress women’s sexual freedom. We view chastity with prejudice because it doesn’t gel with our postmodernist values in a post truth world. And we view monogamy as a romantic ideal that has its head in the clouds and its feet dangling in the air. There is just no practical value in being faithful to one throughout a lifetime because love has to be freely offered and freely accepted. Promiscuity is the result though, but we rather call it sexual freedom to do as thou pleases.
It is no wonder that freedom taken to the extreme is freedom mindlessly drawing us to the repudiation of whatever that gives us hope, meaning and purpose. Here, Edmund Burke puts it pointedly: -
“Men are qualified for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power on will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.”
And returning to modesty is not returning to a time of sexual repression. It is also not a tool used by men to control woman. It is in fact the opposite. A woman of modesty is a woman of integrity. She commands respect because she is not only confident of herself, of her worth, she also has an empowering influence (or injunction) over a man’s desires to seek just an outlet for his carnal pleasures.
When my 16-year-old daughter dresses in a way that exposes her cleavage, as a father, I would tell her to cover up. She is my daughter, and I want her to be valued and treasured not for things transient and superficial.
I say this because I realise when a female colleague bends down in front of me to pick something up, there is a sobering effect on me when she instinctively places her hand on her blouse just below her neck to cover her chastity. The effect on me is one of mutual respect. As a man, I immediately got the message from her. She is someone who protects her modesty because it gives her the freedom to take personal responsibility for her sexuality. And that freedom is what defines her as a woman, a woman of integrity.
But the world would look at that as one being prudish, backdated or repressed. Alas, George Orwell once said, “We have now sunk to the depth that the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
Imagine that, a world where every father restates the obvious to their daughters, reminding them to uphold their modesty as they go out there in the world, and every mother doing the same, reminding their sons to respect and protect the opposite sex, as they would their own mother, sister or even daughter.
In such a world imaginable, the timeless values we impart to our children will not be turned upside down, where promiscuity is sexual freedom, monogamy is monotony and sex-before-marriage is the way to sexual maturity.
Such a world is conceivable because modesty is not a weapon deployed by men to control woman. It is on the contrary an enduring influence a woman has over men to remind them of their first duty, that is, to always uphold that which is “the restatement of the obvious”.
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