Civilization and Female Modesty: Gone With The Wind

Nothing gets deeper under the skin of feminists and their right-thinking progressive allies than the once- and long-honored notion of female modesty. This, of course, explains why the entire progressive program, from public policy and historical reinterpretation to education and popular moral messaging, has made the debunking of the “so-called differences” between men and women, and the obscuring of the very definitions of male and female, such a central part of its revolutionary mission. It explains the progressives’ infatuation with normalizing sexual freedom and experimentation of all kinds, even from the teen years, and their outright hatred for, and rejection of, “traditional motherhood” and “traditional marriage,” let alone such archaic moral customs as “waiting until marriage.” There is probably no single idea that crystallizes everything feminism seeks to bury forever more completely than the idea of female modesty. It behooves us, then, to ask just what it is that they are seeking to erase from the hearts, social structures, and private lives of modernity, lest we miss, or misunderstand, one of the great pagan spectacles of our time, the sacrificing of the accumulated spiritual wealth of centuries on the altar of an ideological fantasy of justice that just might lead, in practice, to a universal impoverishment of souls.

Recently, a Korean student recounted her impressions upon reading Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. One point of inquiry that arose in her mind, and which was the reason she wished to speak to me about her experience, was the way the characters within the novel, and seemingly the author herself, treated the various sexual intrigues and flirtations of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Specifically, she noted that the general tone exhibited towards Scarlett’s irresponsible behavior was one of reproach and severe disapproval, whereas towards Rhett the story seemed to suggest an air of forgiveness and even admiration, in spite of his own various immoderate actions. She wondered whether this difference in judgment, not merely in the novel but in past societies in general, indicated a double standard in the moral expectations and evaluations of men and women. 

I should note that the student who asked me about this is the furthest thing from a feminist, so I knew her question was an expression of genuine perplexity and a search for help in understanding, rather than an ideological talking point. I mention this so as to explain how my lengthy reply to her questions, which I reproduce below with minor modifications, came into being. As one who takes the role of a teacher most seriously, there is one thing I know all too well about our present-day moral morass, which is that you cannot teach a feminist anything about such matters, and only a fool would try. The essential intellectual characteristic of all activists or ideologues is absolute certainty, and their essential moral attitude is self-righteous indignation towards anyone who dares to question their perfect knowledge. You cannot teach a person who denies on principle that he or she has anything to learn. The defining trait of a soul sincerely seeking knowledge is openness, and if there is one thing that never shines from the soul of an activist, it is openness. As a teacher, I am not wont to slam my head against brick walls; with open doors, on the other hand, I will happily enter and talk all day.

Here, then, is my reply to my student’s inquiry about the implicit moral premises of Gone with the Wind.

You not only raised a specific question, but also various issues related to that question. But the main question was about the possible double standard used to judge the behavior of men and women in that story, or rather in the society in which the story was so popular. Let’s begin in the proper philosophical way, which is to define our terms.

What is a “double standard,” and how is the expression applied to modern reality?

First of all, there is something peculiarly artificial about the phrase, “double standard.” A standard is a basis for judging or measuring something. Double normally means two things of the same type or identity, or one thing divided into two equal or similar parts. From this, we might guess that the term “double standard” has two possible meanings. First, it might mean two identical standards, which would be meaningless. For example, imagine I said, “I judge this song as a 7 out of 10, and that song as a 7 out of 10, but that doesn’t mean I think they are equally good, because I am using two different 10s!” What in the world would that mean? Or a double standard might mean one standard divided into two parts. For example, when I score mini-presentations in my conversation classes, I give a score out of 5 for English language skills, and another score out of 5 for content, which gives me a total score of 10, so I can say I score the presentations out of 10, but in two equal parts of 5 each.

Since the first of these options makes no rational sense at all, it seems that the popular phrase “double standard” must have a meaning closer to the second possibility, one standard divided into two parts. Now, I know that this is not exactly what people mean when they speak of a double standard. The expression is usually used in the context of judging men vs. women, either with regard to performance expectations or moral evaluation. In the case you mentioned, of course it is about moral evaluation. But I just wanted to point out that there is something essentially confusing about the term itself, which is not surprising since it is a modern expression with political roots. Political language is often very misleading or incoherent, because it is usually intended to support a position, rather than to clarify any truths. Such is the case with “double standard.” So, what people such as feminists actually mean when they speak of double standards between the sexes, is that men and women are judged on different standards, which is to say that men are judged on one scale and women on another, in a way that is (they imply) unfair to women.

If one were being strictly rational about this, it would be easy to see that the opinion that using two different standards is unfair to women depends on assuming that one of the standards gives an advantage to men, or shows a preference for men, whereas in truth it would be possible to turn the argument around and say that this same double standard is unfair to men. It all depends on how you view the characteristics or responsibilities being judged by the two different standards. For a simple example, one person might say, “It isn’t fair that men are allowed to go out and work at interesting careers for a living, but women are expected to stay home and struggle with raising children,” while another person, looking at the very same situation, might say, “It isn’t fair that women are allowed to stay in their comfortable homes and raise the children while men are expected to go to jobs and struggle with dull work and condescending bosses all day just to be able to put food on the table for their families.” In other words, if there is a double standard here, it is not self-evident who is on the losing side of it. Or to put it more evenly, it is not self-evident that either side is the loser. The two sides, and the two standards, are just different.

Now, let’s look at an example that brings the issue into the most serious context, and introduces a new complexity. As you will remember, in The Apology, when Socrates is found guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, the trial arrives at the sentencing stage, where both sides – accusers and accused – must propose alternative punishments, and then the jury votes for one or the other punishment. Socrates, of course, mocks the whole process, and assures that he will be put to death, by proposing as his “punishment” that he should be given free lunch by the city for the rest of his life. Aside from his motives for suggesting this, what is the main justification behind his proposal? As you know, what he is saying, basically, is this: Other people have ordinary jobs or other sources of wealth, but a philosopher asks for and receives no pay for his important thinking and his beneficial influence on society, including the young people who are guided by his example. So, since he is doing the most valuable thing, and sacrificing all normal material comforts to do it, shouldn’t the city at least provide the philosopher with basic food to support his life while he does so much good for the citizens?

Of course, Socrates’ proposal is not meant literally – he doesn’t really expect the city to give him free food for life. But his irony also has a serious underlying implication. In a real city, even the most advanced and civilized city (as Athens was), the best men, meaning the true philosophers, are treated unfairly on the standard of material success. That is, human social existence is essentially unjust, in the deepest sense, and there is nothing we can do about that.

Socrates’ proposal, although it is meant ironically, also includes a very important implication, which is that in a truly just society, there ought to be a double standard! In other words, there ought to be one standard of public treatment for non-philosophers, and another standard for philosophers, on the grounds that the philosophers are the society’s truest benefactors, and yet their essential and beneficial activity is not one that receives any material support in the economy. So, if a society really valued its most valuable men, it would find a way to support their activity, rather than forcing them to starve or to give up their philosophy for the sake of mere physical survival. Of course, Socrates was not seriously demanding that philosophers should get free food or payment from the city. But his proposal highlights a harsh reality of human nature, which is that there is not, and there never could be, a society built with the highest human activity as its ultimate purpose. Instead, the philosopher will always be treated as either useless or dangerous, or at best irrelevant, by society in general, even though in reality he has the most to offer, if only most humans could learn to appreciate what philosophy is and what it gives us.

I mention this example to demonstrate something about the concept of double standards that is usually missed today, because we use the expression mostly in a progressive context (feminist, racial, etc.), and with a completely negative sense. In fact, you might have found it weird to read my suggestion, above, that a double standard might be desirable in some circumstances, because the expression is always used to suggest something inherently immoral or unjust today. But whether a double standard is unjust depends entirely on whether the two items being judged on these different standards are in fact the same or different. That is why I used the Socratic example, to show that in some contexts, it might be reasonable to say that humans are different in nature in ways that might logically demand that they should be judged on different standards.

Let us add one more example, to demonstrate the underlying issue of different natures, which is always and intentionally overlooked by feminists and other simple-minded advocates or activists. This is one of the common examples used in modern theoretical arguments intended to explain what it means to say we have “rights,” and what exactly a “right” is. If a man kills someone, we arrest him, take him to court, charge him with murder, and then give him a legal punishment. We do this because we believe that his action was morally wrong, and that he himself is evil, for he has violated another human being’s right to life. And yet if a wolf attacks a man and kills him, we do not arrest the wolf, or say that the victim’s right to life was violated, and we would never say that the wolf is immoral for killing the man.

Why not? The answer is that the wolf, as we say, was just doing what wolves do naturally, by instinct, without any moral intention or understanding. In other words, the wolf is not a rational agent, and therefore we do not hold wolves to the standard of moral judgment, whereas a man is a rational agent, and therefore we do hold him to a moral standard. (Hence, we may conclude that rights are moral constraints that apply only to the relations between humans, which is to say between rational agents who can form intentions and recognize each other’s status as moral agents, property owners, and so on.) So there is a double standard between humans and other species, related to the issue of killing. Both a man and a wild animal may kill a human being, but only a man can be called a murderer, whereas a wild animal cannot. In a religious context, we may say that a man who kills another person is damned as a sinner, or he is “going to hell,” but we would never say that about a wolf who killed a person.

I think we have exposed the complexity under the surface of the overused expression “double standard.” Whether a double standard is fair or unfair, reasonable or unreasonable, will always depend on what the standard relates to exactly, and whether there are any differences between the kinds of beings that we are judging with these different standards. If they are identical in all relevant ways, then we can say that they should not be judged on different standards at all. However, if they are not identical, then we have to ask, “Are they different in ways that are relevant to how they should be judged regarding this or that specific issue?” Let’s look at an example that shows how this question might apply to the special case of men and women.

Most competitive sports are separated into male and female events, male and female teams, male and female records, and so on. Why? Of course it is because we know that in general, men are naturally bigger, faster, and stronger than women, so if we let men compete directly with women, there would be no women in sports at all, because they would know they had no chance to do well, and might even get badly injured in contact sports. So we have separate leagues and events, and this separation allows women to participate in competitive sports, and even become famous athletes, in the same sports in which men participate, simply by creating a double standard for participation that favors women, in the sense of creating a space for women’s events and teams by not allowing men to join at all. This has become a matter of controversy now because of transgender athletes who are competing against biological women, and usually winning. The progressive activists love this and call the other side “haters.” But the other side includes many great female athletes, past and present, who argue that this is just men beating women, and therefore unfair to women athletes. And of course they are right. Progressivism, on the other hand, is all about politics, and has no interest in right and wrong, so the progressive activists on this issue don’t care if biological men are beating up women in wrestling or even boxing tournaments, which of course no self-respecting man would ever condone, let alone do.

Now, at last, we come to the precise issue you raised in connection with the story of Gone with the Wind, which is the apparent double standard used, in that story, in that era, and perhaps through much of human history, to judge men and women with respect to moral behavior, and especially sexual behavior. To address this topic honestly and seriously, we need to determine whether there are actual differences between men and women that are relevant to the specific issue involved, and would therefore justify the use of two different standards in judging men and women. That is why I have spent so much time digging into the definition of “double standard,” what it implies, and how different standards are legitimately applicable in some situations, as background for replying to your very reasonable and important question about moral judgments.

One of the ways you phrased the issue during our conversation was this: It seems that women are held to a high standard of modesty, and modesty is even seen as the most important virtue for women, while it does not seem to be considered as important for men.

That is true, and I like this way of describing the problem, because I think it gives us a reasonable point of entry into the whole question of double standards regarding sexual morality. And the question, essentially, is whether men and women are different in some relevant way that makes the use of a somewhat different standard reasonable in this area. So now we get to the issue of the day: Scarlett, Rhett, and modesty.

Let’s consider the most basic differences between men and women with regard to sexuality. In fact, let’s go one step further back to the real foundation of this issue, which is the most obvious meaning and purpose of sexuality, namely its simple biological purpose, the propagation of the species. Sexual behavior, long before there was any kind of social custom or moral attitude related to it, was a natural drive of the species related to reproduction. Sexual desire at the most basic level is nature’s way of drawing mammals, including humans, to reproduce, which is necessary for the preservation of the species. We hardly need Plato’s Symposium to tell us that, but in fact Diotima’s teaching does begin there, as you know.

Now let’s bring this general animal fact into the specifically human context. In order for humans to reproduce, there must be desire, and there must be action based on that desire. Due to several recognizable factors – the relative size and strength of males and females, the nature of the material that must be delivered for reproduction to occur, the natural method of delivery, and the fact that reproduction requires the female to be occupied with one pregnancy for many months whereas the man has no such physical limitations – it seems to be an inescapable fact that species propagation prioritizes (and requires) male sexual desire, and male sexual initiative. In this process, we might even say, nature (not society, but nature itself) makes the female a necessary but largely passive factor in the reproductive process, while making the male the more obviously active factor. Indeed, in ancient thinking, including the Pythagorean table of opposites, male and female are aligned in the columns that include active and passive, respectively. This is quite understandable, from a purely biological perspective. Or rather, to be even more direct, from an anatomical perspective. Activity and passivity are built into the very physiology of the sexual act, as the male and female elements of the act itself. There is no avoiding this, and no amount of feminist denial or transgender surgery can overcome it. Males penetrate (active), females are penetrated (passive), and without this interaction the human species would not and could not exist. This is just a fact of our nature, and therefore essentially true, and therefore essentially good, if reality is good.

All this tells us, however, is that the survival and growth of the human species, in a natural context, long before there was any form of social structure or moral picture, required men to be driven by physical desire to seek opportunities for sexual behavior, and thus to be the active force in species propagation. This natural male role is further supported by the natural male tendency (due to hormones, let us say) towards aggressive behavior, which is to say initiative and the imposition of their will. Of course, we are speculating here about life prior to the development of social structures, which means before human history. As soon as humans step out of the purely primitive or animalistic way of life, however, and begin to recognize the need for, and advantages of, some sort of social structure with rules and punishments, one of the obvious problems to solve is how to soften male aggression, including sexual aggression, in order to allow people to live together in communities without constant fear, fighting, and death based on the primitive (pre-social) tendency of the strong to dominate the weak and take everything for themselves, which if unchecked would make civilized co-existence impossible.

Here, then, we have the beginning of moral rules, based on mutual agreement about the needs of peaceful coexistence. And among the moral rules to be developed were those designed to limit the aggressive male behavior aimed at propagating the species. That is, a method was needed to compel men to restrain their desires, rather than simply act on them without restraint. This is where the idea of female modesty becomes an essential instrument of social development. The civilization of men begins, we may say, when they begin to see the relative weakness of women not as an easy source of physical advantage (the law of the jungle), but as a moderating influence, a cause of emotional attachment, and a means of softening their natural aggression by converting it into male protectiveness. I mentioned earlier that no self-respecting man would accept the idea of a biological man (“transgender woman”) beating up a woman in a wrestling or boxing match. This fact is proof of the continuing existence of the softening effect of modesty that I am describing. All men know that “You never hit a woman.” That knowledge, which was universal until our absurd era, comes not from our primitive animal nature, but from our rational nature, which means from the part of us that develops through civilization. It is not a biological rule. It is a moral rule.

So female modesty, with everything it implies for the relations between men and women in societies, became, in a way, the lynchpin that made the whole machinery of civilization work, or the glue that holds people together in functional communities of mutually respectful citizens, and mutually helpful individuals and families. From the point of view of civilization, aggression and initiative (controlled but always present) are necessary parts of what men are, while modesty (which is not only a moral limit but also simultaneously a form of attraction) is a necessary part of what women are.

Of course, I am speaking of these characteristics and necessities on a species level, which is to say I am talking about what was normal and typical in the species, and was always understood to be desirable and necessary for the continuation of healthy societies. There could be exceptions, individuals who did not match those norms, without causing any harm, and these exceptions may even have been great individuals who contributed important benefits to society — but they had to remain exceptions. In general, if the majority of men and women more or less matched, and more importantly respected, the norms for male and female morality related to sexual behavior and modesty, society could be maintained in a rational order.

From a philosophical point of view, there may be limitations in being “purely male” or “purely female.” And since philosophy is always aimed at the most complete vision of the whole, it is possible, or even likely, that a philosophical man must transcend the purely aggressive, assertive elements of maleness to also become capable of a kind of reserved or “modest” attitude towards the truth – to lose his innate stridency about reality, for example. Likewise, a philosophical woman will somewhat transcend the purely modest elements of femaleness to also become more openly desirous in a certain way, more of a “clever hunter” for truth, rather than being limited to the strictly passive role of nurturer or helper.

That is to say, the survival of human civilization probably depends on the interaction of a healthy and well-defined masculinity with a healthy and well-defined femininity; but the most fully developed philosophical soul will have not only the highest (most spiritualized) development of its own sexual nature, but also a clear “minority representation” of the opposing side of human nature within itself as well. Remember though, that in the case of the philosophic soul, or philosophy itself, we are speaking of masculinity and femininity not in the sense of physical behavior related to reproduction or sexual acts, but in the sense of the psychological forces within us, the forces necessary for the most complete understanding of the whole of reality, from the most complete human perspective. This more complete perspective is yet another way that the philosopher must always be a kind of outsider in any society, although it is less obvious than the other ways. (Leo Strauss, in a 1963 lecture on Plato’s Gorgias, remarks that there is something that we might, in ordinary language, describe as womanish in Socrates, in one sense. For when a society’s men go off to war to fight, what do the women do? They sit in their houses and talk. Likewise, when the men go off to participate in the “real man” activities of politics and public life, what do the philosophers do? They sit in their houses and talk.)

All of this leads us back to the question of double standards and modesty. Given the differences between male and female that we have seen here, and the opposing but complementary roles that men and women play, not only in propagating the species, but ultimately in the formation and development of civilized societies, would you say that we have enough evidence of real difference to justify the use of slightly different standards for judging men and women with regard to modesty and sexual behavior? And of course, if different standards are legitimate at all, I would say they should not be too radically different, because that would mean exaggerating the differences between the sexes and their social roles, which would be immoderate and therefore essentially unjust. (I would describe the more extreme elements of Islam this way, in which men simply oppress women completely, almost denying them any human existence, in the name of supposedly enforcing modesty.) But if the roles of men and women really are different in both natural and socially beneficial ways, which I think we can hardly deny, then could there be room for a slightly different view of how we ought to judge the behavior of men and women with regard to these issues, at least for the sake of maintaining a healthy social order?

And, following that question, there is this one: If there is an understandable and socially beneficial place for a double standard in how we judge the youthful indiscretions of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, but if this double standard fails to meet a purely rational standard of justice, in the sense of equality of conditions, expectations, or opportunities, does this mean it should simply be discarded? Or might we have to accept, as Socrates suggests in The Apology, that there is no pure justice on this Earth, and never will be, so the reasonable hope is to find what justice we can, and to realize that there is a higher form of spiritual justice, achievable to all thinking beings, which is the justice of knowing – knowing what is, knowing what is materially possible, knowing what is practically necessary, and knowing, above all, that this knowledge itself is the ultimate good, and hence the pursuit of this knowledge the ultimate human good?