On The Erotic Baptist

There was once a Baptist camp & conference ground that was obsessed with proper, orderly parking.  Everywhere one looked there were signs dictating where one could and could not park.  Violations of these dictates were regarded as one of the most serious offenses: do not mess with a Baptist and their parking!

Years later something odd had happened though.  The phalanx of parking signs had been surpassed in quantity by a new type of sign, these ones bearing a very different message.  What, one might wonder, could be more terrifying to the Baptists than disorderly parking?  Why, bikinis of course!  The signs all decreed that there was to be "Modest Swimwear Only!"

We can pick on the Baptists, of course, but in truth they are simply reflecting a long religious tradition of opposing immodest clothing.  Western Christianity has long thought it wrong for a woman to show too much skin.

But why has it thought that?  The popular answer - and in essence this is probably the accurate explanation - is that religion has been scared of sex.  Sex was considered evil, dirty, and bad, and thus anything that might relate to sex must be suppressed and covered up. 

God does, it appears, encourage some degree of modesty.  In the New Testament it says:

⁹ I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, ¹⁰ but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

But why?  Why does God encourage modesty?  Is it really for the reason that religion has usually thought - because sex is bad and needs to be hidden?  What if it were not for that reason at all?  What if the reason God encouraged modesty was not because sex was bad and he wanted to diminish it, but quite the opposite: because sex was good and he wanted to enhance it?

That brings us to today's reading, from Elaine Sciolino's La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life.  In western thought there is perhaps no culture more connected with sensuality then the French, so the following excerpt is interesting:

"Nudity is extremely violent to gaze at," [the French super model] said. "I would never walk naked in front of my husband.  Never, never, never."
"So you're only nude in the shower?" I asked.
"I'm nude when I'm alone, and I'm nude when I'm in his arms, but never in a sort of casually stupid gesture of the morning, or whatever.  Never."
"So nudity is not something trivial?"
"Of course not.  But we know that."
...I told her how different it was in the United States, where many women feel liberated and sexy walking around the bedroom in the nude.
...Her motto is "hide to show better," an expression of the French idea that partial concealment enhances the erotic (pp. 14-15, 140)

Letting it be hidden, then, rather than letting it all hang out is what enhances the erotic and makes sex better.  The purpose of modesty, therefore, may not be to suppress sex, but to improve it.  Of course, modesty must be understood relatively here -- the French invented the bikini, so the Baptists still have something to worry about.  In prescribing the principle of modesty, however, those Baptists may have been being more erotic than they realised.