#75 — Learning to be Modest in an Immodest World
Let me tell you a story of bare bodies in an overdressed land
modest
mod·est
(mŏd′ĭst)
adj.
1. Having or showing a moderate estimation of one’s own abilities, accomplishments, or value: was too modest to talk about his success.
2.a. Having or proceeding from a disinclination to call attention to oneself; retiring or diffident: a quiet, modest demeanor.
b. Observing conventional proprieties in speech, behavior, or dress, especially in the avoidance of arousing sexual interest.
3.a. Free from showiness or ostentation; unpretentious: a house with modest furnishings. See Synonyms at plain.
b. Moderate or limited in size, quantity, or range; not extreme: a modest price; a newspaper with a modest circulation. — The Free Dictionary
Learn humility for your own sake. Learn modesty for others.
In a world where those with the biggest ego are the ones in the limelight, how does one get by with humility alone?
And in a world where those who show the most bare skin are seen to get the best prize, how are we supposed to choose modesty?
That was a question I pondered when I first set foot in India back in the mid-nineties. Coming from a culture such as ours, with the lure of the naked hippies of the ’60s and ’70s who had created the “hippie trail” through India, we had to learn the hard way.
We were the generation ‘tween naked freedom and digitally filtered perfection.
When I landed in that beautiful land, the stragglers from the ‘70s were still there with their dreadlocks and embroidered clothing, still smoking their Lucky Strike cigarettes — or dismantling them to make something stronger — and drinking their banana lassies. That was all we needed to fit in and we thought we knew it all.
It turns out we were wrong.
Eighteen years old, skinny but tanned, with long ringlets and short block-print skirts, I was at home in a land where I had no one to answer to and nothing to be responsible for. And so were my little group of travelling buddies.
There was Matt, my boyfriend, and there was Lisa, my bestie. We also welcomed Binnie, an English-born girl of Indian descent into our group, since she was alone and a little scared to be making her way in this country so familiar to her yet so strange at the same time. It was quite something else to be in India with family from being a “western wanderer.”
And Binnie, she was well and truly an embodiment of a nineteen-year-old western girl, pushing the boundaries of Indian conventions and in search of the rave party lifestyle.
The main thing was that we had all fully embodied the values of the free and naked hippies of the ‘70s and, within the boundaries of our shared rooms — which we often all piled into as a group — we were more than happy to wander about, stark naked.
Matt, the only guy, bisexual, and fairly effeminate with it, was perfectly comfortable to be surrounded by bare boobs belonging to a variety of women. And we, the women, felt a certain power in outnumbering the one man.
It was one thing to hang out on the beaches first colonised by the topless hippies of the western sexual revolution but it’s another thing when you leave those party scenes behind.
Traditional India is not the place for naked boobs if there’s any chance that they will be spotted by a local. One evening, while Binnie sat topless on her bed next to some curtained windows, she glanced aside to spot, through a little slit in the curtains, a man jerking off while eyeing her with red-eyed lust.
Neither was India the place, at least not then, for sleeveless tops or shorts on women, or women simply travelling alone in vulnerable places. One night, Lisa was staying alone in a guest house by a bus station, and found herself using all her strength to hold the locked door closed while holding her penknife for protection, as a group of men tried to break it down. Luckily for her, the door held, and the men went away, but not before leaving her traumatised by the experience.
And Binnie, when she finally arrived in New Delhi to stay with her relatives, was immediately covered up in traditional wear and told to stop wearing her hair down. To them, she resembled the immodest western women who showed too much flesh and too little respect for the culture.
I guess there was a good reason why the hippies all hung out revealing too much bare flesh together in groups, far from towns and cities. If not to spare themselves, to spare the locals and their customs and conventions.
Some years later, I was living in France and swimming naked in the local lake with my friends — both women and men. It was what we did.
We were, after all, the ‘tween generation — the generation who still held onto the naked freedom of the ’70s hippies yet lived in the more prim 2000’s.
We could skinny-dip freely in this lake for almost the full three years that I was living there, for no one who worried about bare bodies came near there. And then, one day, one of the local women began running horse-riding tours around the lakes and had to ask us to cover up.
The modern modesty eventually caught up with us, the ‘tween generation.
In the whirlwind of parenting, disintegrating relationships, family feuds, deaths of loved ones, and more, the idealism of my naked youth somehow was snatched away. Here I find myself, in my forties and all grown up, apparently.
Goodness only knows where those days of feeling free and easy in nothing at all went. We closeted our nudity and found our places in conventional society.
And, well, England is too cold for that kind of thing. Or perhaps I’ve just grown older and feel the cold more, along with the self-consciousness of my not-so-youthful-anymore body.
I also wouldn’t forsake my clothes in this very conventionally English little town, given the gossip I hear in passing. Gossip in a broad Devonshire accent always sounds that much more raw and…naked.
I may have been young and stupid in India but I don’t have that excuse to test out the boundaries of convention any longer. These days, I’ll just accept being worryingly normal instead.
And, meanwhile, I’ll keep working on my ego.