The Community of Cain

It is my contention that violence is endemic in America because we have lied with our language and pretended with our culture. We pretend to be living in Eden, but our real behavior is in pursuit of Eldorado.

We swing violently between manic moods of Idealism and depressive episodes of Materialism. We hardly know who we are, and the greater world stands puzzled by our "mysterious" shifts between wanting to save the world "Our Way" and wanting to be left alone to play, oblivious to the less blessed cultures outside us.

Wendy Shalit in her book A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (Free Press, 1999) reveals how this instability is evident in the era of the Sexual Revolution. She argues that "the woes besetting the modern young woman--sexual harassment, stalking, rape, even 'whirlpooling'--are all expressions of a society which has lost its respect for female modesty".

She adds that the Sexual Revolution "seems to have failed mostly because it ignored the differences between the sexes--specifically, the importance of female modesty. When it failed, when women began to discover that they were uniquely compromised by a sexual free-for-all, there was an attempt to restore order.

Women's liberation may have been a valiant attempt to restore that order, but it, too, failed because it was reluctant to restore order, such as through sexual harassment legislation." It has been like trying to put a Band-Aid over an amputated limb. Shalit believes that modesty is a natural response to a woman's exposure to men's lust.

"Modesty is a reflex, arising naturally to help a woman protect her hopes and guide their fulfillment--specifically, her hope for one man. . . most women would prefer one man who will stick by them, for better or worse, to a series of men who abandon them."