Rey shared research from brain scientists at Princeton University who performed MRI brain scans on men while showing them pictures of women in bikinis. The researchers then repeated the experiment while showing the same men pictures of women who were dressed modestly. The brain scans found that men responded to immodest woman like they would respond to a thing, whereas the same men responded to women who were dressed modestly as persons.
In response to this research and to other considerations, Jessica Rey has been designing a line of modest swimsuits for women. While not all of her designs are completely modest, she is at least moving in the right direction by raising consciousness about this important issue.
Not everyone agrees that it is appropriate to raise these issues, or to even question the multi-billion dollar Big Bikini industry. Indeed, the video we posted already has numerous comments from detractors, as well as some unpublished offensive comments from angry men who are scandalized that we would even think to question the bikini. One commenter said “What pitiful little cowards you are” and “out here in the real world, 99.99999% of people couldn’t care less what she or you two idiots think about anything, let alone swimwear…. you moron.”
Er…okay.
How the Bikini Objectifies Women
Unfortunately, none of our opponents even bothered to try to interact with the aforementioned Princeton study, which shows that those who champion female modesty now have a growing body of scientific research to back them up. As CNN reported,
New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.
The research was presented this week by Susan Fiske, professor of psychology at Princeton University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science….
A supplementary study on both male and female undergraduates found that men tend to associate bikini-clad women with first-person action verbs such as I “push,” “handle” and “grab” instead of the third-person forms such as she “pushes,” “handles” and “grabs.” They associated fully clothed women, on the other hand, with the third-person forms, indicating these women were perceived as in control of their own actions. The females who took the test did not show this effect, Fiske said.
That goes along with the idea that the man looking at a woman in a bikini sees her as the object of action, Fiske said.
Barely There Modesty
This morning Stacy McDonald wrote an excellent piece showing how modesty helps us to properly honour marriage and exhibit Christ-like selflessness. Her article, ‘The New Barely There Modesty’ raises concerns about the growing defence of bikinis among Christian leaders. Stacy writes,
Modesty isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about legalism, rules, hiding, fear, body shame, or uptight-ism. Since modesty is included in our call to be chaste, it’s about covering our nakedness in public (which the Bible actually does present as shameful), so that we might represent Him honorably before the world. It’s about hallowing His name.
“The nations shall know that I am the Lord,” says the Lord God, “when I am hallowed in you before their eyes.” (Ezekiel 36:23)
It’s about selflessness. It’s about honoring marriage. And beyond that, ladies, it’s about love—loving our brothers and their wives. After all, modesty promotes friendship in women; and, when we remove the awkwardness of sexual immodesty, it promotes a relaxed, comfortable friendship with our brothers as well….
The “barely there modesty” philosophy is not even consistent. How many women would stand around in their “me-oh-mys” in front of an open window where a bunch of construction workers were on lunch break at the house across the street? But these same women will wear the equivalent of their underwear in front of a crowd on the beach or at the pool.
Stacy goes on to explain how modesty helps preserve the sanctity of marriage:
Stacy McDonald
A woman’s naked body is supposed to elicit more than a yawn from a man. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. But, like any of God’s gifts, freely revealing the intimate parts of our bodies to one another is supposed to be enjoyed within the boundaries that God has generously provided—in this case, within the oneness of marriage.
As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; and always be enraptured with her love. Proverbs 5:19
Keep your eyes on your own wife. And women, concentrate on satisfying your own husband…privately.
And that goes for guys too. We ladies aren’t immune to lust or distraction, and nakedness goes both ways. But, remember, it’s not always about lust; sometimes it’s simply about dignity. So keep your shirt on! Literally.
I love exposing my nakedness…to my husband. And I love enjoying his nakedness too! Shocked? You shouldn’t be. But you should be shocked if I decide to take it all off at the beach.
Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled… (Hebrews 13:4)
It is good and right for a man to be excited by the body of his wife. But, if society manages to desensitize him by making nudity and sexuality common place (perhaps even boring), then the attack on marriage is subtly effective. God intended nudity to stir a reaction in us within marriage; we are wonderfully created to be sensitive to it. As nudity becomes common, and sexuality becomes almost mundane, it robs marriage of what is glorious.
I strongly suggest you read Stacy’s entire article HERE.
Modesty and the Malliability of the Human Brain
Still, many people are unconvinced. One person left a commentafter our earlier post saying,
In my experience, when girls and women are topless on a beach, the atmosphere quickly becomes perfectly relaxed and everyone tends to forget about it and accept it, even adolescent boyfriends. So much so that young women will stand up and casually stray to the nearest road to queue at an icecream van, still topless. I can detect not harm in this.
This is an important question. If we become so used to public nakedness that it becomes relaxed, ordinary and casual, without overtly sensual overtones, then what can be the harm in this? In order to properly answer this question, we must again return to the realm of neuroscience.
Recent discoveries have shown that the human brain is in a constant state of flux, a characteristic that brain scientists call neuroplasticity. Put simply, the human brain is remarkably adaptable, constantly adjusting itself to the demands of the environment in which it finds itself.
This neurological fluidity is a good thing because, among other things, it enables people to learn new skills, makes it possible for stroke victims to recover some motor functions, and helps blind people compensate for the loss of sight by strengthening parts of the brain associated with the other senses.
But neuroplasticity also has a downside. In his 2007 book The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge shows that certain types of sexual stimuli have the power to reshape how the brain thinks about sex. Because our brains are so adaptable, the dominant assumptions that a collective culture has about sex can exercise a formative influence on the brains of those growing up within that culture, training them to think about sex in a certain way.
One of these revolutionaries was Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), an early pioneer of the sex-education movement. In Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution, he described the means for achieving a society that would not put any obstacles in the path of sexual gratification. Reich was perceptive. He realized that in order to arrive at the sexual utopia he advocated, people would first have to learn to dispense with their natural shyness and embarrassment concerning sexual matters. They would have to lose their reluctance to expose erotically important parts of their bodies. Reich attempted to facilitate this by conducting psychotherapy sessions in which he would require his clients to remove all their clothes.
Reich would be pleased to see an American or European beach today, which is often more in keeping with his ideal than what is found in brothels. In a brothel, the women have had to overcome the natural shyness surrounding erotically important parts of their bodies in order to sell sex. On a sunny beach, women in various states of undress can be seen to have overcome this natural shyness—with no thought of sex at all. By refusing to acknowledge the erotic implications of revealing attire or nudity, they have so nearly achieved Reich’s goal of overcoming shyness. “Profane” may be the best word to describe Reich’s ideal and its realization, given that the term originally meant “to treat as common.”
This understanding of profanity is hard for many to grasp. Unfortunately, I know many people who agree we should be concerned when a woman undresses in public to advertise her sensuality and arouse an erotic response from men, yet the same people believe it is perfectly acceptable for our girls to become so desensitized that they undress in public without any sense of sexual exhibitionism. The reason we should be as concerned for the later as we are the former, is because desensitized girls will be less likely to guard and protect what they have been conditioned to treat as nothing special.
Moreover, when a society treats a naked body as merely common, over long periods of time this cannot help but change the neurocircuitry of our brains so that we actually begin to perceive the body differently. (On the way cultural influences change the human brain, see my article ‘The Neuro Transformers: Culture and the Maliability of the Human Brain.’)
Understood from this perspective, one of the main arguments in favour of the bikini is actually an argument against it. Bikinis are sometimes defended on the grounds that the women who wear them as swimming suits are not trying to be provocative. While this might be challenged, if it is true it only shows how desexualized women have become if the female body can be almost entirely revealed without the presence of erotic overtones. We are drifting towards being neuter when the signals of our sexuality are treated as anything less.
Modesty and Sex
One person responded to Stacy McDonald’s article by saying “Since getting married I have been shocked by the number of people who assume that if you believe in modesty in public you must never enjoy the physical side of marriage…“
Some women have told me that modesty is important to them, not only because it helps men not to stumble, but also because it helps them place a high value on their own sexuality. They have told me that modest apparel affirms the true importance of a woman’s sexual identity, since it proclaims that her body is not a tame, benign, and commonplace thing. Modesty affirms that our bodies in general and our sexuality in particular are special, charged, even enchanted, and too exciting to be put merely to common use. As Kathleen van Schaijik suggested in a 1999 article, “If we revere something, we do not hide it. Neither do we flaunt it in public. We cherish it; we pay it homage; we approach it with dignity; we adorn it with beauty; we take care that it is not misused.”
In her book A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit argues that modesty is the truly erotic option, since it makes the highest valuation of a woman’s sexual identity, affirming the sacredness of sexuality and displaying a commitment to setting it apart and cherishing it. C. S. Lewis put his finger on the same principle in That Hideous Strength: “when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common.” To dress immodestly is ultimately to reduce our sexuality to something commonplace, trivial, and humdrum.
Precisely for this reason, a modest woman significantly upgrades the significance of what is happening when she undresses in front of her husband. As Havelock Ellis observed (stumbling upon the truth for one of the few times in his life), “without modesty we could not have, nor rightly value at its true worth, that bold and pure candor which is at once the final revelation of love and the seal of its sincerity.”
…Modesty also upgrades sexuality from the male perspective. The anecdotal evidence clear shows that men whose environment is saturated with immodest women (either because of the company they keep or the images they view) are generally not oversexed, as one might suppose, but just the opposite. In Denmark, where pornography is unrestricted, men are often quoted as saying that sex has become boring.
Cristina Odone observed in The Times that advertisers are finding that sex just does not sell products like it once did. The reason, she suggested, is that the advertisers have made sex so banal that it doesn’t entice us any longer. As one 16-year-old was quoted as saying in 2004, “I’m so used to it, it makes me sick.”
Frequent exposure to nudity tends to trivialize the human body, emptying it of its implicit eroticism. As someone said to me last year, when a man is exposed to too much flesh, it lowers the healthy excitement he should feel when he looks upon the body of his wife because (yawn) he sees that all the time. It therefore takes a higher sexual charge, sometimes to point of extreme perversion, to match the excitement that might otherwise be available in a normal sexual encounter. Could it be that the rise of libido-enhancing drugs is meeting a need created by the libido-squashing effects of pornography?
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Oh, you mean by unelected atheist civil servants. I expect another of the symptoms of the ‘dark ages’ is that people become as illiterate as you. Although I do hear the real ‘Dark Ages’ was a time of great learning.
Even by the 18th century spelling was not yet standardised. I don’t think any women wore modest two-piece swimsuits in the Dark Ages ,however, which is more relevant. They certainly didn’t have bathing machines.
In the, so called, ‘Dark Ages’, bathing was actually very rare. In Rachel Herz book The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, Herz writes as follows:
From the Middle Ages in Europe until fairly recently, bathing was actually widely regarded a a health hazard. So entrenched was the fear that submiersion in water led to ill health that during the Black Death, bathing was banned in western Europe. The reason getting wet and soapy was considered such risky business was because it was thought to make the body soft and moist and hence vulnerable to the prevailing unhealthy, ‘smelly’ air, which was believed to be directly related to disease. For most people, cleaning oneself was almost exclusively restricted to washing one’s hands, face, and occasionally, clothes.
Research into the records of coroners’ inquests has shown that half the accidental deaths in Tudor England were caused by drowning, and that does not include sailors who drowned at sea.
Can you give a more primary source than Rachel Herz ?
Interesting then, that I’ve never seen your website promote the campaign calling for the banning of page 3.
This article is talking about modesty, not campaigning about banning anything. None of us here likes the sight of young women behaving immodestly but we have to be careful what company we keep, Jane.
Indeed, disturbing numbers of young people are turning to Islam in reaction to the decadence, moral bankruptcy, licentiousness, drunkenness and ‘unrestrained consumerism’ of modern society. We reported on this phenomenon in an article Islam Growing at Astronomical Rate in UK back in March.
It’s a great pity they don’t appear to see the same stability, the same discipline and the same standards of behaviour in the Christian Church.
It’s the same with a great many old people. They fail to find spirituality in the Christian Church and turn to eastern religions (but not Islam) instead in their search for something beyond modern consumerism, or sometimes to their versions of ancient western religions, or to both at the same time.
In fact, there is a considerable history of this amongst the upper middle class, going back to the time of the Raj, and to the setting up of various “druidic” orders and esoteric cults, even occasionally a fascination with the Arab world and with Islam.
Similar things happened towards the end of the Roman Empire.
See, if Christian Voice really cared about women not being seen as sexual objects, but as people then they would be discussing the ‘No More Page 3’ campaign and the ‘Ban The Lads Mags Campaign’, but they haven’t. It’s not any desire about wanting to protect women from being seen as sexual objects, but a desire to control women.
In her 2024 budget, UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased inheritance tax, starting a land-grab on farms. Is inheritance tax biblical? And who stands to gain?
New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.
[…] Why Feminine Modesty is Important […]
basically what your calling for , is all of us to live in the dark ages , and be governed by unelected religious zealots ?
Oh, you mean by unelected atheist civil servants. I expect another of the symptoms of the ‘dark ages’ is that people become as illiterate as you. Although I do hear the real ‘Dark Ages’ was a time of great learning.
Even by the 18th century spelling was not yet standardised. I don’t think any women wore modest two-piece swimsuits in the Dark Ages ,however, which is more relevant. They certainly didn’t have bathing machines.
In the, so called, ‘Dark Ages’, bathing was actually very rare. In Rachel Herz bookThe Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, Herz writes as follows:
Research into the records of coroners’ inquests has shown that half the accidental deaths in Tudor England were caused by drowning, and that does not include sailors who drowned at sea.
Can you give a more primary source than Rachel Herz ?
Interesting then, that I’ve never seen your website promote the campaign calling for the banning of page 3.
This article is talking about modesty, not campaigning about banning anything. None of us here likes the sight of young women behaving immodestly but we have to be careful what company we keep, Jane.
Well I’d say that bare breasts in a daily tabloid is pretty in your face. Maybe the Muslim women are right with their burqas after all.
Indeed, disturbing numbers of young people are turning to Islam in reaction to the decadence, moral bankruptcy, licentiousness, drunkenness and ‘unrestrained consumerism’ of modern society. We reported on this phenomenon in an article Islam Growing at Astronomical Rate in UK back in March.
It’s a great pity they don’t appear to see the same stability, the same discipline and the same standards of behaviour in the Christian Church.
It’s the same with a great many old people. They fail to find spirituality in the Christian Church and turn to eastern religions (but not Islam) instead in their search for something beyond modern consumerism, or sometimes to their versions of ancient western religions, or to both at the same time.
In fact, there is a considerable history of this amongst the upper middle class, going back to the time of the Raj, and to the setting up of various “druidic” orders and esoteric cults, even occasionally a fascination with the Arab world and with Islam.
Similar things happened towards the end of the Roman Empire.
See, if Christian Voice really cared about women not being seen as sexual objects, but as people then they would be discussing the ‘No More Page 3’ campaign and the ‘Ban The Lads Mags Campaign’, but they haven’t. It’s not any desire about wanting to protect women from being seen as sexual objects, but a desire to control women.
[…] Why Feminine Modesty is Important […]