Interview - Midge Decter and Lauren Winner

Midge Decter is a writer, editor, and social critic whose essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Harper’s, The Atlantic, the New York Times, National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard. She is the author of five books, including, most recently, An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War and Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait. She has served as an editor at Harper’s, the Saturday Review, and at Basic Books. For ten years she served as Executive Director of the Committee for the Free World. She has also been a distinguished fellow at the Institute on Religion and Public Life. In 2003 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Lauren F. Winner, the former book editor for Beliefnet, is the author of three books: Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and Christianity Today. Her essays have also been included in The Best Christian Writing 2000, The Best Christian Writing 2002 and The Best Christian Writing 2006. Winner has degrees from Columbia and Cambridge universities and is currently at work on her doctorate in the history of American religion. She is a visiting assistant professor of spirituality at Duke University.

We met with Ms. Decter and Ms. Winner in New York in October 2005.

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In Character: When you were both growing up, what was considered modest behavior?

Midge Decter: When I was growing up, which was quite a long time ago, I don’t think modesty was even an issue. It was a given. It was the way people dressed. But in fact there was no question about modesty. In my school there were girls who dressed very immodestly and we knew what they were. They were the tramps and they were the ones who ultimately got in trouble and left school. But I don’t remember parents ever saying, “That’s not proper.” It just was a given.

Lauren Winner: Modesty didn’t come up much in my childhood, I think for the opposite reason. Although I do think things have gone to a further extreme since then, so there must have been tacit norms. There were nominal school dress codes, no midriffs revealed. It was post–sexual revolution, and modesty wasn’t on the table.

IC: Give us a sense of the decades we’re talking about. When were you both teenagers?

Winner: In the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Decter: When I was a teenager? In the 1940s.

IC: Did either of you ever find the unspoken norms about modesty unduly restrictive growing up?

Decter: No, I didn’t find them unduly restrictive because there was a whole different code and a whole different set of signals. They worked well, but they were more subtle. You carried yourself in a certain way or you held yourself in a certain way or you spoke in a certain way and you gave the signal, without having to prance around. And it was much better that way because there were girls who were very beautiful and had very beautiful bodies and then there were the rest of us (laughter) and the differences were not quite as obvious.

IC: So the norms had a leveling effect?

Decter: They had a leveling effect and were productive. It wasn’t that nothing went on and it wasn’t that we were all so perfect and wonderful, but it was out of sight, out of public view.

IC: Lauren, what about you?

Winner: Well, I don’t think the question even really applies. There weren’t many norms or restrictions any longer. Ironically, I think we’re now in a place where we have norms, but they are set by the market. The fashion industry – particularly when you look at more affordable clothing – primarily provides clothing that is quite revealing, so I think the marketplace has taken over and sets those norms.

IC: What about the modesty double standard for men and women? What impact did this have on your understanding of modesty when you were growing up and do you still see a double standard at work today?

Decter: I don’t think that modesty was an issue of the double standard. The double standard was something else. I don’t think the boys were being immodest. They were just being boys doing what they were allowed to do and girls, many of the girls, were quite immodest but they were doing as much as they could get away with, or not.

Winner: Well, in contemporary evangelical communities modesty is a huge hot-button issue. I would say there is absolutely a double standard, and that the onus falls upon young women to dress modestly. This is problematic for a few reasons. One, it really lets men off the hook. It implies that men can’t control themselves. Women have to be entirely responsible and not arouse men and lead them down the path of temptation. Two, I think it reinforces incorrect and unhelpful assumptions about the differences between men’s and women’s sexuality. I hear a lot that men are visually stimulated and women aren’t, and so therefore it really matters that women cover up. So it’s not supposed to matter that I live in a college town and I see all of these shirtless twenty-year-old men running around all of the time? I’m not saying I am experiencing that identically to the way men might experience the inverse situation, but if we are talking about bodies as stumbling blocks on a path of chastity, it would be ludicrous to say that all these hot men jogging past my window don’t have some impact on my visual life. So I actually find the double standard in modesty quite disturbing, and I think unless we also include the market as part of what is responsible, then we are not getting to the heart of the issue.

Decter: The market. Of course.

Winner: Right. So it’s not just women making decisions. It’s women making decisions in a particular landscape that’s constrained by forces that are larger than themselves.

Decter: Well, I think I am going to annoy you with what I am about to say, but I do think that it is not a fifty-fifty deal because men pursue and women determine whether this pursuit will be successful or not successful. Some women pursue. But it’s not the same kind of pursuit. How do women pursue? They get all dolled up. They make suggestive conversation. They do things like that. But when it comes to matters of sex, many women may have equal weight, but they do not play the same roles. It isn’t an even exchange. It just isn’t. And this is the power that women have and in my opinion, they are very stupid to give it up.

Winner: I’m not sure that is an accurate description of, say, the current high school scene. I’m not a parent nor am I a high schooler, but what I read and what the folks I talk to who are parents and teachers in that situation say is that at the moment there’s a culture of sexual and social aggression among teenage girls that is quite different from what we saw even fifteen years ago.

Decter: I know something about that because I have a granddaughter who tells me all about what goes on. There is a kind of female aggression but it also isn’t really aggression as that word is properly understood in connection with sex. There is this new tradition called “hooking up,” and you might imagine that this would be an exchange in which the girl has the power. But what kind of power is it after all? There’s something really terrible on both sides with what is going on.

IC: Speaking of girl power, I’d like to hear your thoughts on what role you think the twentieth-century feminist movement has played in our understanding of modesty?

Decter: I don’t think it has much of a role. The women’s movement issued a series of complaints against men, many of which in my opinion were entirely misplaced, but in doing so they really put a stumbling block in relations between the sexes that I think is now finally wearing away. I don’t see much of that old kind of feminism around anymore. I see a number of women in their forties desperate to find a husband – women who had not been desperate before because they thought, who needed men? Then they discovered they needed them. Why? The babies, that’s why. But it’s a transaction. If you need a man, you have to give him something if he is going to give you a baby. But I think the fashion industry and music industry have had more to do with changing notions of modesty than feminism has had.

Winner: I agree that it is important to distinguish these influences and not totally blame feminism and the sexual revolution – which themselves need to be distinguished from one another and treated as related but discrete phenomena. And trying to describe feminism as a movement today is very difficult because there isn’t much of one in the classic sense of a political movement.

Decter: I don’t think current sexual mores have anything whatever to do with any movement – feminist or anti-feminist, or anything else. They are about something else, something very bad. These kids are so jaded that it’s hard to imagine what excitement there will even be in their lives by the time they’re fifty-five.

IC: So what do you think will happen?

Decter: Well, it’s possible that a terrible wave of puritanism will set in and then here we go again (laughter). I don’t know. I’m no prophet.

IC: Let’s talk a little bit about something you’ve both touched on – the culture’s role in this. Both of you have mentioned marketing, television, and the music industry. We mimic what we see in the culture. Do you foresee greater restrictions placed on these forces, perhaps by parents or by the government?

Decter: Well, you could say with the evangelicals that it is godlessness that has been working its way, all the way, to utter extremes. I wouldn’t quite say it that way, but I think there’s something in it. I could find a more complex way of putting it but that would take two volumes.

Winner: I think your question names a group that we are all hesitant to address and that is parents. Easy for me to say because I don’t have children. With that caveat, however, it does seem that there is an abdication of responsibility going on which may have begun with television but has morphed into other forms of technology. An article last year in the New York Times Magazine described a teenage Internet hooking up culture and made what I thought was an excellent point about cell phones. If your child is being called by a girl or boy on a cell phone that means that it is happening outside of the parental domain.

IC: This brings us to another issue: If parents are abdicating some of their responsibilities, who are potential role models for the next generation?

Winner: Midge!

Decter: Oh God, I’m no role model.

IC: Well here’s the thing. Modesty doesn’t pay these days. Politicians are no longer modest. We now have academic celebrities. We have an active celebrity culture. How has this challenged the notion of modesty? Can we be modest in the public sphere any longer?

Decter: I think we can. I think that if some politician came along and made a very modest gesture, the whole country would stand up and cheer. I really do. I think that we have gotten to the point where virtues of a certain kind – these public virtues – are so rare that I think people would cheer. I don’t think it’s impossible. And that leads me to the other side of modesty, which is not in dress and demeanor, but in self. I know that that’s not exactly popular. I don’t suppose it ever was popular. After all, there have been celebrities in every age. There is a spiritual quality of modesty that occurs about as frequently in one time as in another. Don’t you think?

Winner: I don’t know that the culture of celebrity is new. What may be new is that celebrity culture is where we are supposed to learn what kind of people we are supposed to be. And celebrity is commodified and broadcast and made widely available at a time when we are not investing time with the people we actually know. So we find replacements for parenting and friendship and church life, we replace quantity time with quality time and there is a void of real interaction and relationships, and celebrity culture is one of the things that fills the void.

IC: So virtue begins at home?

Decter: Virtue certainly begins at home. Where else? Where on God’s earth would it begin if it didn’t begin at home?

IC: What about the role of the schools? Do you think there is a place for virtue education, including teaching virtues such as modesty?

Winner: I think it’s putting a band-aid on a corpse. But insofar as we do see schools as places for “values curricula,” it is interesting to note the areas on which we focus. Sex education, for example, but not financial education, which seems an odd omission to me. But I think virtue can’t come from curricula so much as from a community forming people in the way that they should act.

Decter: Absolutely right. If anything should be taught in the school that isn’t taught in the home it is manners. You can teach manners. When I went to public school, every morning we had to stand up and show the class that we had clean fingernails. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood, you understand, not a slum, and it was full of predominantly Scandinavian children because I come from Minnesota. We also had to show the class that we had a clean handkerchief. We had to say “yes” and “thank you.” It was a public school. No one would have thought of addressing a teacher by her first name and no one would even have imagined saying anything sassy to her. That would have been the living end. So I think schools can teach manners.

Winner: I think there is also a role for public schools in the formation of civic identity. That’s why we have a public school system; it is not that formation and values are not a part of what happens in education ­– values and formation are, in one sense, the essence of education. But it does seem an absurdity to think that you are going to teach Sex Ed in a context where sassiness doesn’t even begin to describe the relationship between students and teachers.

IC: Do you think any of this can be attributed to the different style of education that we pursue both in public and private schools now – one where every child is a winner? Modesty develops in part by realizing that you might not be as good at something as the person sitting next to you. Do you think that might play a role in the contemporary lack of interest in encouraging modesty?

Decter: That’s a very interesting thought. Yes, nowadays, everyone is a winner. It makes life a lot easier for teachers. It makes students very happy. It makes students’ parents very happy. And everything is fine except that when they get to Harvard they are not literate.

Winner: Even if we were to accept therapeutic culture, it doesn’t seem obvious to me how that relates to a lack of deference for hierarchy. I suppose therapeutic culture is by nature leveling, but the allergy we seem to have to hierarchy and deference is inimical to education.

IC: Where do you see the greatest need for modesty in public life?

Decter: In the literary community – because there have been great writers among us but one is not produced every single Sunday. It would make the whole business of literary life a lot truer and more interesting if there were not such inflation in everything.

Winner: It’s interesting that it seems to be the case that editors are unwilling to edit big names. I mean actually edit – they’ll acquire and publish, but not do much editing. And so you have this phenomenon where someone’s third or fourth or fifth book is really lousy because it is, from the publishing house’s point of view, more about getting the commodity out there and not worrying about editing it. I believe that Toni Morrison said after Paradise came out that it would have been a better book if it had been edited.

IC: Since we are in the realm of books – you both have written memoirs. Your memoirs are distinct in that they are modest in their revelations and in the choices you each made about what to talk about. This is a refreshing change from the spate of Prozac, alcoholic, “I was abused” memoirs. Could you comment on the choices you each made when you wrote those memoirs, as well as the memoir culture and the immodest culture of exhibitionism more generally?

Decter: I wrote a memoir thinking that, having lived through a number of significant periods, I wanted to write about the things that I experienced and the things I did mostly in a public way, to provide a record. I don’t know why anyone would want to know my deepest feelings. Why would someone read someone else’s memoirs? Only if you thought that something happened to them or they went somewhere or knew somebody that was of some interest. Who wants to know what they ate for breakfast? You know what I mean.

Winner: I wrote Girl Meets God when I was twenty-four. And people ask me – a legitimate question ­– what was going on in your ego structure that prompted you to write a memoir at such a young age? When I teach memoir writing workshops, I make two distinctions. One is that yes, a lot of autobiographical writing has a cathartic or therapeutic purpose and if, in revision, you don’t move beyond the cathartic, fine – leave the manuscript in your desk drawer. But it seems to me that what distinguishes good memoir from narcissistic navel-gazing is the ability to illumine something other than yourself. And that might not be a public life. It might also be something closer to the interior of life. Vivian Gornick, who I think of as sort of the grande dame of American memoir, has said that in memoir “you are the narrator and not the plot.” And I think that’s a very helpful summary of memoir that works.

Decter: That’s perfect. You are the narrator of that which you’ve seen with your own eyes.

IC: Let’s talk a little bit about the future of modesty. Does it have one?

Decter: I think the future of modesty depends on the future of religion. And by religion I don’t mean Evangelicalism, Catholicism, Protestantism, or Judaism. I mean the sense that life is real, that it’s important, that rules are given for it by God, or by nature, or whatever you want to call it. And that happiness resides in being able to live within those rules.

Winner: The opposite of idealism.

Decter: Yes, the opposite of idealism. And is that going to happen? I don’t know. It looks like there are the beginnings of motions in that direction.

IC: Lauren, would you agree?

Winner: Yes. But I think we live in a moment and a culture where we think that each person is going to have to discover whatever this is in his or her own experience. Yet that assumption wasn’t present at Sinai, nor was it the governing assumption in most families for most of human history. So I guess that is why I feel not pessimistic so much as unimaginative. It is hard for me to imagine how we get there.

Decter: We have seen explosions of something like this before. In England, after things had become so corrupt and there was this explosion in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. But I see there is the sense that something is missing and I know Jews who are looking for this and some of them become Orthodox and I know many people who have converted to Catholicism.

IC: Both of you have referenced faith in one form or another as a potential source for modesty as well as other virtues. Do you see that as the hopeful future place where we might revive virtues such as modesty or are we going to go the way of Europe and become more secular?

Decter: I don’t think we are going to go the way of Europe because there is too much vitality in this country that might come together and become something. Europe is dead. It’s really dead. They’re not even having children, let alone anything else. And I don’t know what form it might take, but I’m more hopeful than you are, Lauren, that something will happen.

Winner: Well, it’s hard for me not to recall that what we were told to do after 9/11 was go shopping. And I wonder if Americans are capable of making the kinds of sacrifices that were made fifty years ago.

Decter: Years ago, at the height of the worst demoralization in this country, when New York was dead, and Chicago was dead, and the country was dead, my husband Norman [Podhoretz] and I took a driving trip across the United States. We had never done this before and we were only going to go to places neither of us had ever been. So we drove through places like Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska. And believe me, there were communities of people. There was vitality. Just at the time when everyone thought the country was dying, there were all these people nobody knew about out there going about their lives. They are not gone. The whole thing is not completely gone. It’s not completely the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Winner: I do think that religion, in contemporary America, remains one of the few seedbeds of communal life with the ability to enforce communal norms. Religious communities are one of the few places to go to find something other than admiration. And although I obviously do feel some real pessimism, I think the truth of these virtues we have been discussing is real. I think people yearn for them, though we rarely know what we are yearning for. We don’t know what we want. So I guess if I feel optimism it is because, as removed from reality as we sometimes are, and as distorted as our understandings sometimes become, I don’t think it is ever the case that at the deepest level we yearn for false things. What we do with our real yearnings then becomes the question.