In a closely-argued chapter in her book, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism (HBI Series on Jewish Women, Brandeis University Press, 2007), prominent feminist scholar Tova Hartman explores the concept of tzniut and what she terms its “radical ascendancy in prominence within the discourse of contemporary Orthodox Judaism.” She draws similarities between the objectification of women in Western culture and in this discourse. As she says, “exiting religion does not necessarily equal an exit from the oppressive male gaze it channels; yet she suggests that the “concept of modesty, properly formulated, may ultimately be helpful in countering this gaze and its ill effects” on both men and women. The chapter, “Modesty and the Religious Male Gaze” should be read in its entirety. Below are a few extracts with the permission of the author.
p. 46
A plethora of books have been published within the last ten years that deal extensively with the issue of modesty (tzniut) from both Jewish legal (halakhic) and philosophical perspectives. Conventional wisdom within the Orthodox Jewish community has assigned a simple explanation to this trend: the recent fervor surrounding tzniut represents a necessary response to the progressive erosion of even the most basic standards of modesty within contemporary Western culture. According to this logic, the spike in the discourse is a gesture toward making sense of a rapidly changing world. Most important it is an act of resistance: a stopgap attempt to protect their communities from the corrosive effects of an exhibitionism that in modern secular culture has become more or less the norm.
pp. 48-49
Why is the vast majority of the literary output dealing with tzniut addressed to a female audience and marketed almost exclusively to a readership of women? And finally, why in the vast majority of cases, are the writers of these publications not women?…
…Foucault (The History of Sexuality, 1980) suggests a compelling explanation for similar trends of heightened cultural output, expressing amusement about a society that spoke endlessly, floridly, and provocatively about its sexual repression. Orthodox women can perhaps detect a similar (if inverted) irony in the case of religious men speaking incessantly and with great specificity—down to the finger, at times even the joint—about which areas of a woman are most arousing and why—all in the name of decrying the insidious inroads of prurience and lasciviousness into their communities. In one recent book, the subject of tzniut is broken down into chapter headings, each of which takes the name of a different female body part to be explored in meticulous halakhic detail (Aviner, S, Am Klavi, 1983; Ellinson, G, The Modest Way: A Guide to the Rabbinic Sources, 1992). Another contains illustrations of problematic body parts—collarbones, for example—in increasing states of undress: methodically mapping the halakhic status of the neckline’s progressive plunge. (Falk. E.P., Modesty: An Adornment for Life, 1998) As Foucault writes: “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret”(1980, p.35).
Following Foucault, one must hold out the possibility that to speak so stridently and ceaselessly of the need to cover itself reflects a kind of fervent immodesty that may well be a symptom of the very “problem” it proposes to address. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that the current discourse is being defined by men—both rabbis and laypeople—in whose tone can be detected a heightened level of stimulation that reflects, one suspects, not only an antagonism to Western immodesty, but an implicit surrender to its corrupting effects.
pp. 59-61
Given the plight of women’s bodies in Western culture, traditional society may in fact muster a nostalgic appeal. Better your body be plastered over and cast to the margins, one might argue, than stripped down and laid across a Bed of Sodom. Far from marginalizing women’s bodies, however, the Orthodox male gaze has of late placed it front and center on the cultural stage. This trend of religious men speaking incessantly about women’s bodies with great passion and specificity (this discourse being carried out under the pretense of “modesty”) evokes with very little nuance Freudian ideas about sublimation, and the cultural irony so aptly noted by Foucault…
…It seems clear that an affinity between Orthodox and Western perspectives, despite the air of ecumenical achievement, raises the specter of new, potentially menacing threats to the minds and bodies of women and men. The heart of what is held in common by the sexual discourses of Orthodoxy and the West is that the discourse itself is shaped almost exclusively by males, and accepted by women as if by divine fiat. This lopsided disconnect itself would appear to be the source of all the various forms of corruption to which the different systems of gender give rise—ultimately as harmful to men as it is to women, and ultimately serving neither. The fact that the male gaze travels in only one direction—and the way that this solipsism allows and encourages men not only to see women, but to see themselves, as well as the way in which it causes women to hypersexualize both their own bodies and their ideas about men—is itself an essence of immodesty, a paradigm of promiscuity and coercion from which other distortions arise.
In fact, the Biblical imperative that serves as the source for the Jewish paradigm of tzniut speaks directly in opposition to this imbalance: hatzne’a lechet im elohekha (Micha 6:8: Walk modestly with your God). The choice of preposition here is telling and precise: not under, not behind, but with. Clearly implied here is that inherent to any true model of modesty is an equality, a “withness,” between the partners involved. And if indeed we are, as men and as women, given the condition of modesty, fit to walk with God, is it possible to conceive that we are unfit to walk modestly with each other? Men and women are here enjoined equally in the responsibility to view themselves not according to the images of each other that we have generated through generations of cagey anxiety and misguided notions, but in the far more fearless and forgiving gaze of the divine. Thus we must open ourselves to the possibility of a modesty discourse that is not solipsistic and top-down, that places limitations upon an encompassing male gaze, and takes into consideration the implication of a female gaze that does more than simply respond to male needs. Instead of blithely accepting that women and men are from two different planets—and then suiting them up as babies in their little pink and blue space suits, assuming that this is simply the natural course—we must examine the ways in which we are responsible for what has happened. We have been outfitting our sons and daughters for different journeys to different atmospheres—some of which make it very hard for them to breathe (See Bordo, S. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, 1999). We must consider how, in our well-intentioned attempt to equip them for survival, we often unintentionally send them throttling off into dizzying orbits that serve neither their own deepest spiritual needs, nor the personally meaningful, practically expansive, and communally redemptive imperatives of tzniut. In short, we must create another cosmology, wherein men and women inhabit the earth together—our synagogues together—not as two different species, but as one holy community, together embodying the directive of walking with God.