Three years ago, I read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, the story that weaves bold knights and chivalry with Richard the Lion-Hearted from history and known characters from the Robin Hood tales. It had only been sitting on my shelf for 16 years waiting for me to get to it. I know it was sitting on my shelf for 16 years, because it's encased in a fragrant leather book cover I brought back from a trip to Riga, Latvia in 1994. When I brought it home, I searched for the appropriate paperback to put in it and chose Ivanhoe; and there it sat in its place of honor neglected until recently.
There are many themes and thoughts I could expand on from Ivanhoe, such as the very unchristian way that the Jewish people were treated during this period of the Crusades. I do want to talk about a Jewish character, Rebecca of York, not as a Jewish woman, but simply as a woman.
As the story goes, she is sexually harrassed and kidnapped by the Knight Templar Brian De Bois Guilbert, a man who is sworn by his order to a chaste life. Rebecca must have feared for her chastity, because, in one of the book's dramatic moments, she threatens to throw herself from a parapet of the castle to save herself from him.
When De Bois Guilbert's crime is discovered by a superior of the Templars, it is explained away as the result of the Jewish woman's witchcraft and evil spells. That is the only thing that can explain this man's bad behavior. Rebecca is put to trial and sentenced to death at the stake for her supposed witchcraft. Of course, she is rescued by Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe who acts as her champion and wins her life back for her in a jousting match.
In the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Archdeacon Claude Frollo parallels De Bois Guilbert in some respects. He falls in "lust" with the gypsy woman Esmerelda. Frollo's feelings cause him to kill his romantic rival, the soldier Phoebus whom Esmerelda loves, and have Esmerelda arrested for the crime. Later, he visits Esmerelda in prison, after she has endured torture, explains to her his feelings for her, saying, "Each night, on examining myself, I found that I was more helpless, more spellbound, more bewitched, more undone."
Frollo states:
"I learned who thou wert; Egyptian, Bohemian, gintara, zingara. How could I no longer doubt that there was witchcraft in the case? I hoped that the law would break the charm. A sorceress had bewitched Bruno D'Ast: he caused her to be burned and was cured. I knew him. I decided to try the same remedy."
Just as Rebecca had Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe as her champion, Esmerelda has the hunchback Quasimodo. He swings down on the ropes from the bell towers to rescue her from the gallows and takes her into the church for sanctuary.
Frollo makes several attempts to win Esmerelda's affection but is rejected each time. In the end, Esmerelda dies at the gallows, and Frollo dies at the hands of Quasimodo. The story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is over all a tragic one. All of its major characters die in some tragic way.
Frollo, like De Bois Guilbert, could not take responsibility for his own actions. If he had feelings he shouldn't have for Esmerelda, it must be that he was bewitched. A psychologist might say that both De Bois Guilbert and Frollo used psychological projection. Unable to accept failure for their own sins, it was necessary to blame another.
Notice that it is two literary men, Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, that write with such sensitivity about these issues concerning women.
Sir Walter Scott
Victor Hugo
Sadly, these examples in fiction make me think of real situations with real women. Another book I have read somewhat recently is the non-fiction Reading Lolita in Tehran, written by Azar Nafisi, a female literature professor, who gives a glimpse into what life is like for Muslim women in Iran.
There is one example in the book I remember where some Muslim girls find themselves in a similar position as Rebecca or Esmerelda. In one chapter, Nafisi describes comforting her daughter Negar who came home from school crying. Negar tells her mother her story.
"That day in the middle of her last class -- science -- the principal and morality teacher had barged in and told the girls to put their hands on their desks. The entire class had been escorted out of the classroom, without any explanation, their schoolbags searched for weapons and contraband: tapes, novels, friendship bracelets. Their bodies were searched, their nails inspected. One student, a girl who had returned from the United States the previous year with her family, was taken to the principal's office: her nails were too long. There, the principal herself had cut the girl's nails, so close she had drawn blood. Negar had seen her classmate after they were dismissed, in the school yard, waiting to go home, nursing the guilty finger. The morality teacher stood beside her, discouraging other students from approaching. For Negar, the fact that she couldn't even go near and console her friend was as bad as the whole trauma of the search. She kept saying, Mom, she doesn't know about our rules and regulations; you know, she just came back from America -- how do you think she feels when they force us to trample on the American flag and shout, Death to America? I hate myself, I hate myself, she repeated as I rocked her back and forth and wiped the mixture of sweat and tears from her soft skin.
This, of course, diverted the whole class [girls meeting in Nafisi's home.] Everyone tried to distract Negar by joking and telling stories of their own, how once Nasserin had been sent to the disciplinary committee to have her eyelashes checked. Her lashes were long, and she was suspected of using mascara. That's nothing, said Manna, next to what happened to my sister's friends at Amir Kabir Polytechnic University. During lunch, three of the girls were in the yard eating apples. They were reprimanded by the guards: they were eating their apples too seductively!"
The picture below is from the graphic novel Persepolis, an autobiography of Marjane Satrapi, depicting her life in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution.
An incredible burden is placed on Muslim women in some nations to guard their own modesty, to what would be deemed in most other cultures as ridiculous extremes. As with Brian de Bois Guilbert or Claude Frollo, if a Muslim man has a lustful attraction to a woman who is not his wife, the woman is blamed. Perhaps, she showed a little ankle or made direct eye contact. Maybe, she bit an apple seductively! A woman might even be blamed in her own rape, and thus victimized twice. Certainly, it is mysogynistic to put the full burden of purity on the woman, even to the extreme of defying all reason.
I confess I don't know how to bite an apple seductively. Perhaps, there are some people who might know how to make an attempt at it. But since what might be perceived as seductive is subjective, my thought is that these girls were merely eating apples with no thought of flirting.
I think I can relate to those apple-eating girls in a scenario from my own life. Once, I was with a friend shopping at a drug store in New York City.
The temperature was stifling hot inside the store, and my friend and I both found cold drinks to purchase which we carried with us around the store. My hair was quite long at the time, hanging halfway down my back. At one point, I lifted my hair and put the cold bottle I was carrying on the nape of my neck. Shortly after that, a man, who was a complete stranger to me, said something to me with a creepy leer on his face. I did not hear what he said. I only know that he made me uncomfortable, and I quickened my pace to hurry past him. It wasn't until months, maybe even years later, that I considered the thought that, perhaps, in this man's mind, my cold bottle to the neck was some sort of attention-getting flirtatious gesture, as I have since seen women on TV do a similar trick with a cold can or ice cube to some part of the body. The creepy leering man was quite mistaken if that's what he thought. My neck was hot, and that's all.
In the U.S. and Canada, rape shield laws have been put in place to prohibit cross-examination of the accuser(alleged victim)in certain areas, such as what she was wearing at the time of the incident. Of course, there have been cases where women have falsely accused men, such as in the 2006 case against three members of the Duke lacrosse team.
So it is hoped, that the truth would come out during a fair trial. Of course, it should be determined if the accusation rings true or not. However, in a case where there is force, not consent, I don't think it is really that consequential what the woman was wearing. Some choices of clothing may show poor judgment on the woman's part, but her state of dress or undress doesn't give license to the man to lose control of his behavior.
Modesty, pornography and related topics have often been a discussion point in my workplace, so I have given it much thought. Where does the burden lie in cases of sexual sin and sexual crime? Does the burden lie with women to guard their own modesty or does the burden lie with men to guard their own minds? I have heard arguments for either side, sometimes with an extreme lean towards one side or another, but I think the answer is more straight down the middle, a little bit of both.
As a Christian, I believe that all mankind descended from Adam and Eve. When sin came into the world with Adam and Eve, so did clothing. Adam and Eve first made clothing for themselves from fig leaves, and then God Himself made clothing for them from an animal's skin. If sin had not come into the world with Adam and Eve, I think it is reasonable to assume from the Bible that people would have continued to live in the Garden of Eden, as strange as it seems, in some sort of nudist colony type civilization. If everyone could be trusted to be pure-minded, nudity would not be an issue.
Nudity itself does not equal lust or necessarily produce lust. People of certain professions -- doctors, surgeons, medical examiners, people in the funeral business -- look at naked bodies repeatedly. We certainly hope that these professional people look at the body with a pure mind, in a professional way, and not a lustful way. Some people I know, who are not coming from a Christian worldview as I am, in debating with me, have taken this point to the extreme, that if we, as a culture, were less prudish about the body, if we were more lax about modesty and more lax about pornography, sexual crime in this country would actually decrease rather than increase. I think the point that my debaters attempted to make was that removing the mystery of the naked human body would remove the unhealthy obsession with it.
If this is the case and that point is valid, then it is only reasonable that cultures where people have traditionally worn less clothing should have less sexual violence.
In doing some research on this subject, I read Chapter 7 of "The Origins of War in Child Abuse," 2010, by Lloyd DeMause. What I found is far too disturbing to share in detail -- Feel free to look it up yourself. The book is online -- but the author made a study of this aspect of life in Papua New Guinea, Australian aboriginal culture and African tribal cultures. His study would certainly seem to suggest otherwise. In fact, some child abuse seems to be encouraged by the fact that some families in Papua New Guinea would sleep close together in the nude. This includes the abuse of boys and not just girls or women.
Clearly, removing the mystery of the human body does not lessen lust or sexual crime. It is true that, to the pure-minded, nudity is not necessarily pornographic. Titus 1:15, "To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure." At the same time, we are a fallen, sinful people, and we need the fig leaves. It is not wise to live as nudists or to wear provocative clothing. The mind can not be trusted to be pure, and we can not trust the minds of others to be pure. This makes modesty a necessity.
But how modest is modest? How much covering do we need? I Timothy 2:9 in Scripture says, "In like manner also, that the women should adorn themselves in modest apparel, with propriety and moderation..." But how do you define what modest apparel is?
Should women wear burkhas, smothering garments that impair both vision and movement?
Should we go back to wearing cumbersome Victorian swimsuits on the beach?
These measures are a bit extreme (certainly in the case of the burkha) but I think it's clear from the modern culture what is considered to be sexually provocative. Otherwise, a prostitute would not know how to dress. To be modest, a woman should not dress like a prostitute. She should not draw too much attention, as in showing cleavage, to the parts of the body that are eroticized.
Though she's far removed from being a theological or moral expert, I like this quote by fashion designer Edith Head.
In closing, yes, a woman should guard her own modesty, but, that said, a man should also guard his mind. "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." Proverbs 4:23
