Introduction

What determines a woman's worth? Is it her achievements, her personality, her beliefs? Is it her conscientiousness, her open-mindedness, how kind and generous she is to others? Or is it what she shows, or doesn't show, of her body that determines whether a woman is valued and respected by society?

I pose these questions not only as a woman but also as a 'naked feminist', someone who views my body, alongside my brain, as a means of advancing feminism. Rather than being afraid of the female body, and keen to repress femininity and sexuality, naked feminists respect those who make use of their body, their brain, or both. As someone who has, among other things, delivered public lectures, attended a Royal Economic Society gala, and appeared on national television, all while wearing no more than shoes and a smile (albeit accompanied by my trusty handbag), there is little doubting my commitment to the naked feminist cause. Yet not everyone agrees with my approach; below are a select few (of the many thousands) of comments I have received:

Good God she single-handedly took feminism back to the Stone Age!

There's nothing more anti-feminist than having to strip naked desperate for a man's attention.

A woman's body is a work of art . a gift from God to man. My wife would wholeheartedly disagree with you on flaunting it for this purpose. Thanks for sullying the sanctity of women whose bodies are private to them and their significant other.

Being trashy is never classy and you certainly are quite trashy.

You're a disgrace to all women!

One person even reported me, via Twitter, to the Cambridge police department. Unfortunately for them, they were foiled by their poor understanding of geography: as they discovered, the Cambridge P.D. in Massachusetts has no jurisdiction over Cambridge, England (not that I had, in fact, committed any crime).

You might of course be questioning why it matters if I receive a torrent of abuse for revealing my body. After all, haven't I asked for it with my actions? Don't I deserve my comeuppance? Yet it is this 'asking for it' mentality that sometimes on a more subconscious level pervades so much of society's attitude towards women. Explicitly or implicitly, and inside as well as outside feminism, women's respect still hangs on their bodily modesty - on the degree to which their body is 'unseen' and 'untouched'. As a result, crimes and inappropriate behaviour committed against what society judges to be 'immodest' women are trivialised, with women who 'show off' their bodies, along with those who are deemed 'promiscuous', being seen as 'fair game', and deserving of punishment.

By imposing bodily modesty as a perceived virtue on women, society actively prevents the equality of the sexes. In other words, what I will call 'the cult of female modesty', the belief that a woman's worth, value and respect depend on her bodily modesty, inhibits equality, rather than furthering the cause of women. As we will see, this modesty cult not only shuns and devalues the women it categorises as 'whores', it hurts all women - modest as well as immodest. No one escapes its wrath.

In some countries, the modesty cult could not be more clear. In Egypt, Morocco and Palestine, more than eight in ten men think that their honour depends on how their female relatives dress and behave, and more than a third think that the victims of honour killings 'usually deserve such punishment'.1 A study of male preferences in regard to female partners found that 'sexual inexperience' was valued highly by men in Indonesia, Iran, India, China and Taiwan.2 Measured in terms of attitudes to virginity, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestine, Turkey and Egypt, where 90 per cent or more of people consider premarital sex unacceptable, would surely top any modesty ranking. Other countries that also display high levels of disapproval of premarital sex include Nigeria (77%), India (67%) and China (58%).3 As Tang et al. write, '[n]owadays, Chinese people typically hold more open and positive attitudes towards sex than in previous decades, but its citizens are still not as open as Westerners'.4 In the West, the proportion of people who deem premarital sex unacceptable stands at 30 per cent in the United States, a mere 13 per cent in the UK and only six per cent in France and Germany, which rank as the most 'promiscuous', or least judgemental, of all countries. Attitudes towards birth control, which capture the degree to which people think that sex can and should be divorced from reproduction, also help us to reveal where the modesty cult is most apparent.5 The countries that rank highest in these terms are Pakistan, where 65 per cent find birth control unacceptable, Nigeria (54%), Ghana (52%) and Malaysia (40%). In the United States only seven per cent of people take the view that birth control is morally unacceptable; in the UK it is even lower at three per cent and in Germany it is a mere one per cent.

But, on a personal level, the reaction that I have faced to my naked feminism has made clear to me that, even in supposedly liberal countries, too many of us still judge women based on their bodily modesty. Delving deeper into embedded societal attitudes and behaviours only confirms this fact and, worryingly, the evidence is that modesty culture is now on the rise. And this is why I am writing this book. I want to explore the history of female modesty; to examine the situations of the women whose lives are most blighted by the modesty cult today; to bring to light the way in which modesty culture is gathering steam; and to raise the alarm as to what lies ahead. I want to make clear that the modern-day modesty resurgence isn't only associated with clerics, conservatives and nationalists; it is also at risk of polluting feminism itself, particularly as we react to the issues raised by the ubiquitous presence of sex and women's bodies in today's 'striptease culture'.6 I end with a plea to all my fellow feminists and liberals - a plea to reject, rather than to embrace, the modesty cult. While today's 'raunch culture' might be far from perfect, we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; as we will see, the modesty cult cannot be our saviour.

For too long, and in too many places, the cult of female modesty has gone under the radar, and that is in large part because modesty culture possesses a secret weapon; it is exceptionally evasive. The line between modesty and immodesty is drawn in a different place in different time periods and in different societies. What one person judges to be modest, another might judge to be immodest, depending on where they live, and in which century. In parts of the Middle East, a woman without a headscarf is considered 'naked', whereas a European woman wearing a bikini would not, in general, be described as such. Indeed, as Monique Mulholland notes in her book Negotiating Pornification, a scantily clad woman can still be considered 'respectable' in Western culture, so long as she behaves in a 'controlled' way in terms of her sexuality. Moreover, within the nudist community, nakedness itself is not perceived as immodest but as humbling, innocent and without vanity, whereas the 'sexualisation' of the body is considered more of a taboo. Bodily coverage (and the acceptance or otherwise of nudity) is, therefore, neither necessary nor sufficient as a metric of modesty culture; attitudes towards women's sexuality also need to be considered. Indeed, history tells us that societies often seek to control not only how women dress, but, more specifically, their sexual behaviour, creating not only an obsession with virginity, but also, at the opposite end of the spectrum, a demonisation of those who might profit from their bodies, such as glamour models and sex workers.

The fact that bodily modesty is multi-faceted, and that there are no universal rules, might make the modesty cult elusive, but that does not mean that we should be fooled into thinking that we have escaped its torment. Any society in which the word 'whore' acts as an insult to women should be considered to a greater or lesser extent to be within its grip. This is because, at its heart, the modesty cult divides women up into 'good girls' and 'whores' and anyone who is on the wrong side of this line is deemed lacking in respect and worth. Whorephobia and slut-shaming are the inequitable, and damaging, consequence.

I admit that I once subscribed to the modesty cult. As a young teenager, while other girls were rolling down their socks and rolling up their skirts, I was doing the reverse: my favourite attire consisted of an almost Victorian-era style of dress, with long socks and a skirt that reached to my ankles. While I was being mocked for my 'prudish' state of dress, I could see how others elsewhere in society were laughing at my boob-tube-wearing peers. They were deemed 'silly tarts' and 'pieces of meat'. When they were harassed or abused, well-mannered society would respond: 'well, weren't they asking for it?' And that is, of course, one of the reasons I covered up. I didn't want to be written off as 'trashy' or 'common',...