Read Online The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin
Ads: Link
30-foot palms of
aluminum.
This is the Gonetoofar. The Great Slot. A 3-D spectacular, Moses meets Bambi in the technicolooliah desert yes Lord! where pyramids tangle with hiltons, 4/5-size towers of eiffel or possibly lego crouch under condos and blu-blu skies scraped clean of all cloud, except for the yellowish forestfire smoke from the mountains up yonder, actual mountains,
5/5-size,
burning (but nobody’s worried). Arable plains, or the lowlands, my Spanish dictionary says it means, but not to the lady
who crouches
hour after hour after hour in front of the videopokergame inhaling the yellowish smoke of her camels, burning (but nobody’s worried), not to the lady who poledances, not to the lady who lugs in the bucket and mops. No: maybe to her, once. Not any more though. Lasvegas are not any more in a language, is not what it says it is, has nothing to mean. After lasvegas you have to go into the desert for a long, for a long, for a long time. Years. Generations.
Envoi: to Lot’s Wife
Salty lady dry your tears
nothing worth your sorrow
Salty lady don’t look back
don’t look back tomorrow
“THE CONVERSATION
OF THE MODEST”
O UR WORD
MODESTY
COMES FROM Latin
modestia
, which is the opposite of
superbia
, pride: the moderate as opposed to the overreaching, the overweening. To the Romans modesty wasn’t a negative, passive avoidance of pride, but an active virtue requiring self-control and an intelligent realism.
But it had a secondary, narrower, gendered sense. For a woman, modesty meant quiet deference to one’s male superior/father/husband, plus a retiring manner designed specifically not to attract the attention of other men.
This gendered connotation continued to encroach on and weaken the larger meaning of the word. Most men, and many women, don’t consider a virtue supposed to be proper to women to be praiseworthy in men. And when Christianity came along, though Christian moralists called pride a cardinal sin, its opposite wasn’t modesty, but humility. Humbling oneself is quite a different matter from avoiding arrogance. Humility is drastic, and often highly visible. Modesty is nothing like so sexy as humility; inherently non-extreme, it consists largely in realistic assessment of one’s gifts and prospects, respect for probability, and distaste for swagger and boasting. You can show off your humility in quite dramatic ways, but modesty, by definition, doesn’t and can’t show off.
In the last century, the word went right out of fashion. It’s seldom used now in a positive sense except as an adjective meaning unpretentious, mostly turning up as a euphemism for small or poor—a modest house, modest means.
Its direct opposite, immodesty, came to be applied mostly to female behavior and dress. I’ve never heard the word “immodest” applied to male costume, not even to something as preposterously boastful as a codpiece or as uncomfortably bulgeful as a ballet dancer’s tights.
When women began to rebel against the gender hierarchy, the womanly virtues assigned by the hierarchs—silence, deference, obedience, passivity, timidity, modesty—of course came into question, and women began to disown them all with scorn. This process was well under way in the late nineteenth century, went on all through the twentieth, and continues now. Again a gendered interpretation overwhelmed the idea of modesty as a general attribute. As an admirable quality, as a human virtue, modesty is, at this point, pretty well dead.
This seems a pity.
So long as modesty was an unreasonable or humiliating demand for female self-suppression and asexual behavior, women might well scoff at and refuse it. But where is it now so enforced? In Islam, and in some conservative Christian sects and other religions, I suppose. Certainly not in Western society at large.
In the area of women’s clothing, the notion of modesty as a kind of limit to sexual flaunting and deliberate provocation exists mostly as an imaginary
aluminum.
This is the Gonetoofar. The Great Slot. A 3-D spectacular, Moses meets Bambi in the technicolooliah desert yes Lord! where pyramids tangle with hiltons, 4/5-size towers of eiffel or possibly lego crouch under condos and blu-blu skies scraped clean of all cloud, except for the yellowish forestfire smoke from the mountains up yonder, actual mountains,
5/5-size,
burning (but nobody’s worried). Arable plains, or the lowlands, my Spanish dictionary says it means, but not to the lady
who crouches
hour after hour after hour in front of the videopokergame inhaling the yellowish smoke of her camels, burning (but nobody’s worried), not to the lady who poledances, not to the lady who lugs in the bucket and mops. No: maybe to her, once. Not any more though. Lasvegas are not any more in a language, is not what it says it is, has nothing to mean. After lasvegas you have to go into the desert for a long, for a long, for a long time. Years. Generations.
Envoi: to Lot’s Wife
Salty lady dry your tears
nothing worth your sorrow
Salty lady don’t look back
don’t look back tomorrow
“THE CONVERSATION
OF THE MODEST”
O UR WORD
MODESTY
COMES FROM Latin
modestia
, which is the opposite of
superbia
, pride: the moderate as opposed to the overreaching, the overweening. To the Romans modesty wasn’t a negative, passive avoidance of pride, but an active virtue requiring self-control and an intelligent realism.
But it had a secondary, narrower, gendered sense. For a woman, modesty meant quiet deference to one’s male superior/father/husband, plus a retiring manner designed specifically not to attract the attention of other men.
This gendered connotation continued to encroach on and weaken the larger meaning of the word. Most men, and many women, don’t consider a virtue supposed to be proper to women to be praiseworthy in men. And when Christianity came along, though Christian moralists called pride a cardinal sin, its opposite wasn’t modesty, but humility. Humbling oneself is quite a different matter from avoiding arrogance. Humility is drastic, and often highly visible. Modesty is nothing like so sexy as humility; inherently non-extreme, it consists largely in realistic assessment of one’s gifts and prospects, respect for probability, and distaste for swagger and boasting. You can show off your humility in quite dramatic ways, but modesty, by definition, doesn’t and can’t show off.
In the last century, the word went right out of fashion. It’s seldom used now in a positive sense except as an adjective meaning unpretentious, mostly turning up as a euphemism for small or poor—a modest house, modest means.
Its direct opposite, immodesty, came to be applied mostly to female behavior and dress. I’ve never heard the word “immodest” applied to male costume, not even to something as preposterously boastful as a codpiece or as uncomfortably bulgeful as a ballet dancer’s tights.
When women began to rebel against the gender hierarchy, the womanly virtues assigned by the hierarchs—silence, deference, obedience, passivity, timidity, modesty—of course came into question, and women began to disown them all with scorn. This process was well under way in the late nineteenth century, went on all through the twentieth, and continues now. Again a gendered interpretation overwhelmed the idea of modesty as a general attribute. As an admirable quality, as a human virtue, modesty is, at this point, pretty well dead.
This seems a pity.
So long as modesty was an unreasonable or humiliating demand for female self-suppression and asexual behavior, women might well scoff at and refuse it. But where is it now so enforced? In Islam, and in some conservative Christian sects and other religions, I suppose. Certainly not in Western society at large.
In the area of women’s clothing, the notion of modesty as a kind of limit to sexual flaunting and deliberate provocation exists mostly as an imaginary
Similar Books
