Modesty is a state of mind. It's not about whether the skirt is 13 inches long or 30; it's about what you project when you're wearing the skirt. It's about being comfortable enough in your own skin that no one can make you feel bad about showing it. Ok, and it's also about the reality of how good you look. Fifty extra pounds here, or double-Ds there, can take an outfit from playfully suggestive to frighteningly vulgar.
But still, for some reason it is only young attractive women that are reprimanded about modesty. No one will ever say a word to an obese woman whose breasts, each the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, are making an improbable upward and outward break for freedom. While this image is inarguably more horrifying than the mere suggestion of breasts seen on a slender A-cup in a plunging neckline, it is Miss A-cup with a plunging neckline who will sooner hear the word "inappropriate."
The other night when I was out with the Russian lover, I was wearing an ivory satin button-down which, over the course of the evening, became less buttoned. That's the way of it with the Russian lover; if it's a night out on the town, he likes to undress a woman slowly. I'd lost the bra sometime after the second cocktail; it was stashed in my purse with his tie. Of course, nothing was "showing." There was only the hint that, if I moved this way or that, something might show. Walking down the street on his arm, we passed a group of women. The one who was about 300 pounds spoke up and said loudly "Ma'am! Your shirt is open!" The Russian lover and I ignored this. I heard her behind me again "Ma'am!"
Maybe she thought she was doing me a favor, the way you do when you see a woman who has tucked her skirt into her pantyhose, or who has some toilet paper stuck to her shoe. Women help each other out. But let's be honest, ladies. If Gisele walked out of a bathroom with three feet of toilet paper trailing from her stiletto, you wouldn't say a word. You would gleefully hope for her humiliation. When it comes to the uber-females especially, and the competition generally, we are not motivated by altruism. We'll help those we think are our equals, or extend benevolence to those we think are below us. But the competition higher up? Those we'll sabotage, if only passively. So when a total stranger is trying to "help" me out, I have to wonder about her motivation. Because for a lot of women, assisting strange women with alleged wardrobe "malfunctions" can boil down to "let me help you not give men any more reasons to look at you...so maybe more of them will look at me." These instincts are buried in women's subconcious, whether they will admit it or are even aware of it.
The concept of modesty is about control. Control of the sexually desireable by both those who desire them and those who desire to be them. Let's hide it so other won't want what I have and try to take it; let's hide it so others won't want that instead of this; let's hide it so we don't have to acknowledge how vulnerable we are to our own feelings of lust or inferiority or envy. Let's hide it because we resent that we can't have it, we resent that we can't be it, we're afraid of everything our response to it tells us about who we are. When we can't control how we feel about what we see, let's try to control what we see. Let's make it someone else's reponsibility so that we don't have to do the work of reaching maturity in our engagement with the world.
This attitude is why the middle-east is still stuck somewhere in the fourteenth century; this attitude is why America might stay stuck in the twentieth.
Bringing this back to boobs...I didn't acknowledge that I heard the woman. I didn't smile and wink and say "I know." I didn't turn around and say "Ma'am, your mouth is open!" And I certainly didn't button my shirt up to meet the apparent Philadelphia standards of modesty for petite brunettes. I just laughed as the Russian lover put his hand somewhere inappropriate and expressed his appreciation for shirts with buttons and girls without bras.