Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Female Nudity & Modesty

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Why is the naked body of a life model more respected than a glamour model? Why has there been a resurgence in virtue policing? And why was Kate completely naked during the interview with today’s guest?!Today we’re casting off our clothes and slipping Betwixt the Sheets with academic, feminist, economist and naked protestor, Victoria Bateman.Hear about the cyclical nature of modesty culture in Ancient Egypt and Babylonia right up to now, and find out about society’s hypocritical attitudes towards women’s bodies.You can find out more about Victoria’s book here.Produced by Charlotte Long. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, Charlotte. Right, hello. Hi, how are you? I'm fine. Yeah, I'm very glad that I'm not working in the office. Yes. How does it feel to log on and do this interview without any clothes on?

It actually feels quite exciting, you know. It feels like a kind of like a naughty, like, you've got no clothes on. And I don't know why. that just gives me quite a giddy thrill. How do you feel? It feels expensive with turning the heating up to full whack. Yes, I've got my heating on too. Now it feels quite normal.

It's so weird, but it's so weird, but just like being naked is just, it's really funny. Because you just don't do it, even though we've all got naked bodies. It is weird. I've got a blanket on my chair because it's quite abrasive material. Fair enough. So I thought, I'm dedicated to this. There are a little. limits. And also, I've got a horrible feeling at the Amazon delivery guy.

So that was me, your host. Talking to my producer, the wonderful, fabulous and amazing and completely naked, Charlotte. That's right. We were both in our birthday suits, as you do. Actually, we do have our reasons. We weren't just trying to increase ratings. We were waiting for the video call for our very special guest today, who is none of it than Victoria Bateman. Academic, feminist and economist, and the woman who has appeared naked to protest all kinds of things from Brexit to misogyny. And we felt that it was only right that we joined Victoria in the nip for this episode, which is all about female modesty and the standards of modesty all throughout history, starting in ancient Egypt and Babylonia, right up to the Puritanical Revival.

That's kind of happening right now, kids. And of course, you're obligatory. Fair do's warm. Morning. Fair do's. This is an adult podcast with adults speaking to other adults and in this case, the adults are naked. So we will be swearing. We will be using naughty language and we will definitely be talking about rude subjects. And you just might not want to listen to that today, in which case this is your opportunity to get out now while you still can. Well, today we are slipping out of our clothes and betwixt the sheets as naked as the day we were born to find out all of this and more. Why should the naked body of a life model be more respected than that of a glamour model? Because it is, isn't it? Why has there been a resurgence in virtue policing? And what can

we lovely betwixters do about it? What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the button. Does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society,

with me, the stark, bollock naked, Kate Lister. Oh, the things I do for this show. And as you heard, today we are doing an interview in the All Together and, my lovely Betwixters, if it is safe for you to do so, maybe you would like to hit pause and join us in the All Together. If it's safe for you to do so, if you're listening to this on a bus or if you're listening to it on your way around Tesco, this is not the time to join us in the bollicky buff. But if you were just alone on your sofa or maybe lazing around on your bed, I'm just saying, I'm a game if you are.

My incredible guest today is none of them Victoria Bateman, who has just released a book called Naked Feminism, where she has exposed the cyclical nature of modesty culture over the past centuries. and society's hypocritical attitudes towards women's bodies. Right up to now. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Victoria Baitman. How are you and happy International Woman's Day, which is the day we are recording upon.

I am so excited to be here. Let us crack the patriarchy together, Kate. I'm so excited to talk to you for many reasons. huge admirer of your work, but we should mention to the listeners that we are both sat here in the nude. And actually, we've gone full out for this because my producer, Charlotte, who's also on the call, is also sat in the nude. She's not in shed office, she's working from home. But we thought, this is what you do. This is what you explore.

So we are going to do it with you. It feels quite liberating and quite giggly for me. How does it feel for you as somebody that protests by being nude? Well, we are team no shame today. You know, why as women should our respect and worth depend on our bodily modesty? You know, my book that we're going to be talking about today asks the big questions. You know, why is it as a society that we think that a woman's respect hangs on something as superficial as a piece of cloth? Why do we have to bail our bodies in order to be taken seriously, in order to be listened to? Why are promiscuous women deemed cheap by society? And why are we expected to choose between our bodies and our brains?

You know, often I'm told that I'm showing off my body, but to quote one brilliant feminist from way before me, I'm not showing off my body. I am my body. This is the body that you have, absolutely. It is, absolutely. It's one of those many things. When you actually sort of press pause on it and stop, think about it, it is weird that we've all got a naked body. Every single one of us has a naked body.

And yet us, just as we are, is such a taboo subject that attracts so much stigma and shame. And in some places it's illegal. It's just illegal to be out and about. It's so bizarre. For thousands of years of human history, of course, we didn't wear clothes. And it wasn't the act of removing clothes that rendered human beings naked. It was instead the act of wearing them. It's once we started to cover up. But then the body, when it's uncovered, becomes a naked thing. You know, there was no concept really of nakedness for thousands of years of human history. And, you know, for those thousands of years of Hunter Gather. are societies, people spent hours carving away little fleshy nude ladies such as the Venus of Wholefell that's almost, I think, 30,000 years old or something, six centimetres tall carved out

of a mammoth tooth. So, you know, bodies were a normal, normal thing. And you know, there's a scientist that argues that the reason why we first started wearing clothes was actually climate change. It was a response to the climate. I mean, that makes sense, doesn't it? That somebody way back when, actually, it's a bit freaking cold around here, lads. I'm going to put something on. That's right. But then from that point, from that point on, the human body,

and particularly the female human body, becomes, you know, full of cultural meaning surrounding, you know, shame and lack of respect and so on. It's a gritty history out there. Isn't it? And your book, which I've got right here, I'm just holding it up. And I was reading it last night again. Is that your torso on the front? It is, I will admit to that.

Of course it is. And when did you start being naked in public as a form of protest? What was the first one that you did? I bet it took everyone by surprise. Well, let me take you back to, you know, I grew up, a teenage girl in Oldham in the 1990s, single-mom household, two younger sisters. We had some pretty difficult poverty-ridden times.

And in the community in which I lived, it was pretty common for teenage girls to be written off as little haws, you know, to be treated like dirt, to be ignored by authority figures that were supposed to be there to help you. Because, you know, you were as a working class girl. You were written off as, you know, scantily clad, promiscuous woman that, you know, you're not going to go anywhere. What's the point of listening to you? what's the point of taking you seriously? And you were seen as to some degree the kind of temp tresses, the cause of male misbehavior. And, you know, I think as a result of that, because, you know, as a teenage girl,

I desperately wanted to be heard. I wanted to have my voice heard. I wanted to be taken seriously rather than treated like dirt. And I kind of really felt that for that to happen, not only did I have to, you know, get my head down and do well at school, I had to acquire respectability, and that respectability meant in large part kind of covering up my body. And so the more I collected my badges of academic achievements, whether it's a string of GCSEs, A levels, and then Cambridge and then Oxford, the more I collected those badges of academic achievement, the more I felt I had to cover my body. And the result was by my late 20s, I'd fallen out of touch with my own.

body, you know, because my body felt like a liability. If I was going to an academic conference, I'd be worried about, you know, would my skirt ride up when I sat down? Would my top go see-through as I'm at the front of the room about to give a presentation? Would my buttons pop open? And so you find yourself worrying about, you know, your clothing rather than what you're saying. And as I say, I felt increasing me out of touch with my own body. And I don't think that was good for my health. So in a sense, I started to see the disadvantages, the downsides of, you know, at quite personal level, the way that we divide women up in these dangerous ways, the way we put so much focus on a woman's, you know, respectability and modesty. And, you know, I think by my late

20s, it was almost like this epiphany. And I thought, why as a woman, you know, should my respect, my worth depend on my clothing, essentially. You know, aren't there much important things to value people on? Your generosity of spirit, your open-mindedness, your kindness and so on. Why do we write women off on the basis of something as superficial as their bodily modesty? And, you know, in some ways, quite haunted actually by not only what I'd seen as a teenager, but by the fact it seemed to be getting no better for young women, and actually, I think probably even were, I thought, in a sense, am I being complicit having acquired this kind of position of privilege in academia? Am I being complicit now in this division of women into good girls and haws or bodies and brains?

And so, you know, I don't want to be complicit in that. And so why not, you know, shed my clothes along with my qualms about respectability and start using my body to subvert the idea of female respectability? to show that behind every scantily clad woman is a brain and every brain is housed in a body and that women are both body and brain that we shouldn't have to choose. And so that's in a sense why I had no qualms by my 30s about embracing naked protest.

And I've protested naked about lots of different things, from Brexit to economists' neglect of women's issues, in defense of my body, my choice, anti-the-Trump presidency. And so I protest about lots of things. And people ask, well, why do you do it? But I say, well, why not do it? You know, ultimately, I don't think that as a woman, my respect should depend on my bodily modesty.

And I'm happy to confront, stand up to anyone who thinks that it should. And I think really through doing naked protest, it has further opened my eyes to the extent to which people do judge women in those superficial ways. And also, because I've been doing it for some years now, it was 2014 when I first stripped off for a nude portrait. And then I went from two dimensions to three dimensions by using my body as a protest tool. And over those, it's best part of a decade now, it has opened my eyes to this bubbling puritanism behind the scenes. And I think probably as we'll get on to discuss later, that how that puritanism isn't only associated with social conservatives and religious zealots,

but also, I'm sad to say, with some feminists too. We've got to get into the history, although I could just sit here for hours and just talk about what it's like to be naked and how that feels. And it's a really curious point that you're making a really important point of we're so uncomfortable with it and the meaning we attribute to it. But we have to talk about your book because it's amazing. because you go right back in this book, as far back as records can take us. What are some of the earliest narratives, examples, cultures that you found?

How are they talking about naked bodies? Because obviously we still have some groups of people, cultures, tribal people, who viewed nakedness an entirely different way to the way that we do and would be frankly baffled by the fact that we get so upset about it. But let's talk about Babylonia or ancient Egypt and what you found there. The wonderful thing about Babylon, I mean, it's kind of iconic in our memory. I mean, Babylon is seen as this kind of hive of promiscuity. It really is, isn't it?

Even the word sounds kind of slutty like Babylon. It does. It doesn't. You know, there used to be a myth that every woman in Babylon prostituted herself at the Temple of Venus. And, you know, it was later discovered that historians had mixed up the word sex worker and the word woman. Easily done, obviously. in the records that we have from Babylon when they were talking about, you know,

the Temple of Venus was the place for sex workers to ply their trade. They'd read that every woman was at the Temple of Venus, plying her trade as a sex worker. So Babylon acquired this reputation for promiscuity. And, you know, generally women were out there. They weren't veiled. They were out in the marketplaces. They were working as weavers.

They ran bars and pubs, as we'd call them. So they were out there and there really wasn't much of a problem in terms of women's bodies. And actually early times in ancient Egypt as well, you know, goddesses in ancient Egypt were depicted naked, were uncovered. And, you know, you think of, I know, Cleopatra is a bit later on, but still Cleopatra there, bobbed hair, you know, she's not failed. You know, Egypt back then was very different to Egypt now, which is, somewhat more modest place. But there are debates about, to what extent Babylon, ancient Egypt were the exception of the rule. There is a debate about that. But what we do know is that by around about the second millennium BC, a veil of modesty descended across the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. And so, for example, in the 12th century BC, Assyrian law codes, there are rules that set how which women should fail and which women shouldn't fail. Now, basically, women should fail unless they are sex workers, slave girls, or poor women. And so there is this distinction written down in law. You know, the modest, respectable women must fail and everyone else should

unveil. And there were strict punishments. So if you were a sex worker and you were caught in a veil, then you would be publicly stripped, you would be caned and you would have pitch poured over your head. If you were a slave girl and you were caught veiling, you would have your ears chopped off. And so these punishments were all to try and reinforce this dividing wall between women. There are the respectable ones and the unrespectable ones. And the unrespectable ones, they need everyone to see that they're unrespectable through, you know, the type of clothing that they do or don't work. So that's 12th century BC. Now, interestingly, the ancient Greeks were some of the worst offenders when it comes to this obsession with female respectability. The ancient Greeks,

let's all go to the gym in the nude. Let's all have our statues in the nude. Them. So long as you were men. Of course. Yeah. Men could be bodies and brains, you know, to be respectable. It wasn't conditioned on their bodily modesty. But the Greeks were obsessed with female modesty, you know, nothing more typified civilisation for the ancient Greeks than a chaste and modest woman. Now, there was one woman who tried to challenge this. Fourth century BC, friny, she stripped naked on the beach, walked into the sea at the festival of Poseidon, and, you know, it landed her a job as nude model for one of Greece's top artists, but it also landed her in court on the charge of impiety for which the punishment was death. That is a steep sentence for a skinny dipping.

It is. So that was the ancient Greek. So interestingly, the Romans were somewhat less modest. Now, I'm certainly not saying they were perfect. But relative to the ancient Greeks, in the Roman world, women didn't have to veil and they could be out mixing with men in public. And actually, certain Victorian writers argue that this is the reason for the decline of the Roman Empire. that basically women's morality deteriorated to such a point that the Roman Empire couldn't continue. Nothing to do with the invading Goths. No, that's right.

Or man-made problems or anything like that. It's women's bodies. Too much cleavage on show. Women's bodies have been blamed for everything from earthquakes to warfare and even the downfall of the Roman Empire. Actually, when you said that, that just made me think of the Garden of Eden myth

because nakedness plays a part in that, doesn't it? And they're not in a state of shame. when they're running around in the balicky buff before Eve goes, I'm a bit peckish, I'm going to have this apple. So then there's a definite clear distinction there, isn't there, between this kind of like almost paradise childlike cavorting in a garden in the nip and something else. Absolutely.

So once the Romans that stopped persecuting the Christians, then the Christians were at the ready to rescue morality from immodesty. And we have this saintly trio who were Paul, Tertullian and Augustine, who took things in an increasingly modest direction for women. So Paul castigated women who were unveiled in the Roman Empire and argued that all married women in particular should veil. And then Tertullian, who came a century later, so he was second century AD,

he wrote a whole book called The Vailing of Virgins, arguing that all virginal women should veil, and that the sight of the unveiled body of a virgin was tantamount to rape. You know, it sullied her soul. So this was Turtulian. That leaves a lot of weird wiggle room. I've just got an image of like lots of virgins hanging out together in the early Christian world. And then suddenly one of them turned up without a veil on and everybody just being like, Tracy, what happened?

Well, do you know, he also spoke out against hair dye, against makeup and against hair pins as well. So, yeah, party pooper. That's right. Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, the third member of our Christian Saint-Nie trio, Augustine. Now, for Augustine, the original sin committed by Eve, sex is so sinful that even within marriage, you're not supposed to have sex, according to Augustine. So Augustine invented this idea of what became known as the Augustine marriage, and that was a sexless marriage. becomes seen as the ideal. So now not only are pious women today, we see them as nuns, supposed to be chased, even once you're married, you're not really supposed to have sex. And if you are having sex within marriage, then even that is sinful. And so the Virgin Mary becomes the icon,

the thing that all women should aspire to. Now, of course, this creates a problem for the human race. I was just going to say, what do you do about it? It's very clever, but I've spotted a problem with this particular plan. Yeah, if we'd all abided by his teachings, we wouldn't be here today during this podcast, would we? So the way the Greeks solved, the problem created by female chastity was to give the Greek gods life-giving powers. So men could create life. So Venus herself was created, or Aphrodite, was created from the severed genitals of one of the Greek gods that were kind of thrown into the ocean, and there she erupts from her shell from the ocean. So the Greek solved it that way, whereas the Christian solved it with the virginal birth.

So you can be a virgin, you can still have kids, and so we've solved the problem of human reproduction. Done, fixed. Fixed. Anyone that's having a baby and isn't still a virgin is frankly not trying hard enough. Yeah, absolutely. So those were the Christians. And then we have a few centuries on,

so as we get into kind of seventh century, we have the development of Islam. Now actually in early Islam, women had... a lot of rights. And, you know, Muhammad married women who were big landowners, big bosses, and they probably bossed him around quite a lot as well, I expect. I didn't know that. That's a fascinating detail. But then once Mohammed passed away, there were a series of successors. And one of his wives, Aisha, objected to one of these successors. And so she took to her camel in what became known as the Battle of the Camel, and she literally raged war with this successor of Muhammad,

and she lost. Her camel was hit. She, you know, came off her camel. And sadly, that was when things changed for women, because she becomes then the scapegoat that the patriarchal strand within the Middle East at that time could use to turn on women. And so whereas, for example, the Quran was quite ambiguous when it came to what women should do about clothing and veiling. Really what happened after Ayesha was that, you know, this more patriarchal elements started to argue that women are trouble. And Ayesha is an example of this, that really we should all just get out of the way and cover up,

remove ourselves from the public sphere, to stop the disruption that we bring about. And then, you know, centuries on, we're in around about 1,000 AD in China, we see Neo-Confucianism taking off, and that pushes modesty even further. So now, if you're say a man and why, if you're not supposed to share the same cutlery, you're not supposed to share a hairbrush or a wardrobe. And of the 10,000 sins, according to the Neo-Confucians, the worst sin of all was sex. And so, you know, you have, whether it's within Christianity, within the Middle East, within China, you have these obsessions with female virginity, with covering female bodies that develop. Confucianism then spreads into Japan, into Korea. By the 17th century in Japan, as a woman, you're not allowed to perform on stage. By the 18th century in Korea, you have to veil. And so until the 20th century, Korean women veiled.

For the past, you know, a couple of hundred years, Korean women veiled. And actually, the traditional Korean woman's dress, a big skirt, a big overcoat, that was modified to create veils. So the skirt, as you do at primary school, you know, you take your coat, you put it kind of around your head to create some kind of capeish, veilish type thing to run around the playground. you can do simply with the skirt, and particularly if it's a big puffy out skirt, put the waistline of the skirt around your head and you've got this puffy headdress. But what's interesting is that, you know, as this modesty is taking off out in the Far East, Christians in Europe are becoming a little bit more lax. So in medieval Europe, there's the kind of theory of the Bible and then there's the practice. And by medieval times in Europe, even the Virgin Mary's virginal claim was starting to be

questioned. Writers from Chaucer to Mallory arguing that the idea that Mary was a virgin is just ridiculous that casting doubt and pilgrims at that time would go out on their pilgrimages and souvenirs included walking, flying male genitalia alongside female genitalia on their souvenir badges and say Christians are starting to go a bit wild. But before we know, the Puritans are ready to stamp on all of this. I'll be back with Victoria after this short break. March 2020-3 marked 20 years since the start of the Iraq War. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end marred in controversy.

So why did the Iraq War go so badly wrong? And what legacies has it left behind today? Well, I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history. We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq, and could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind?

But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the US invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare Podcast from History Hit, as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. Can I ask you, were there similar sanctions for male modesty in these religions? Not to the same extent, obviously, but were there similar sanctions around male modesty? Not particularly, no. I think certainly within Christianity, there was this idea that it was the penetration

of a woman that created a problem. It is penetrative sex that creates a problem. And because a man is not penetrated by a woman, then that according to Christianity, spells the difference. So in a sense, women can lose their virginity, whereas for men, it's a completely different thing. Now, I think the real purest Christians would argue that everyone should be chased. And of course, you see more and more male monks, you see the Catholic Church starts to turn against the idea that priests can be married. And so, you know, priests go from a situation where they can be married to then, as is the case today, can't be married. So the real kind of purists thought, you know, chastity was just important for men as it was for women. But in reality, it was women's bodies that were

the ones that demonised. And as you say, Kate, you know, that goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve. It's women that are the tempteresses. Bloody, bloody women in their apple-swiping ways. So tell me about the Puritans. So the Puritans were having none of this. I mean, they were not happy that, you know, the theory of the Bible and then the practice in terms of how people live their lives, that there was this big gap between the two. And, you know, I do think in part because people were becoming more liberal, the economy started doing quite well. And as the economy started doing quite well, population started to grow. But with it, inequality starts to increase. And so you get,

you know, more and more wealthy people, but also more and more poverty. And what's happening is the church authorities are responding to that poverty. They're seeing greater need to do something about poverty. It's, of course, costing the church money to do that. And so they're looking for a way to resolve all this welfare state spending, essentially. And they come up with a solution which is to crack down on sex. That makes perfect sense. I don't think we should say that too loudly, Victoria,

because if the Tories get whiff of that, they might go for it. Oh, I mean, my goodness. 20th century, you know, welfare state policy and, you know, attitudes that it's taken to single mums, for example, it's Borant, and it was there with the Puritans in the 17th century. And so Puritans are on their march. Of course, they take the reins of power in Britain with Cromwell in the middle of the 1600s. They close down pubs. They close down theatres. But more than anything else, what they clamp down on are immodest women. So single mums are being whipped by the 1630s. Abortion is made punishable by death. Of course, you have the whole wist.

witchcraft trials. So the biggest sin of all is sex with the devil. And so you have across Europe tens of thousands of women who are literally killed on the charge of no sex with the devil. So the Puritans are on their march. And I think eventually this goes too far for the Brits. And so, you know, Cromwell and his whole crowd are eventually booted out. Some of those puritans head off to America to take their puritanical ways to the American shores. And then we end up turning into the 1700s, which is quite a liberal age relatively. I mean, some might say this was the first sexual revolution, actually, the Georgian age. So now we have bouncing bosoms that are revealed. We have the icon of the French Revolution at the end of the 1700s is a bare-breasted woman.

You know, we think of Bridgeton. We think of these fluttering, see. through bits of cloth over ladies' bosoms that are kind of pushed up almost in a push-up brass-type fashion. And, you know, the ladies' magazine started to argue that this was a health hazard for women. So that was the kind of 1700s. So the pendulum of female modesty is kind of swinging in a very different direction in the 1700s. But those Puritans, as ever, are going to be back with full force in the Victorian era. And, you know, for the Victorians, better demonstrated your respectability than to go after a modest woman. So you see all these charities set up and all these homes set up for fallen women. And actually when you look at the figures in 1860s

in London, about 40% of charitable institutions are dedicated to saving fallen women. They were obsessed, weren't they? This was their big thing. Do you have any sense of what causes the pendulum to swing the other way. Is it just that human nature is very cyclical and a period of relative liberalism and kind of freedom and sort of sexual, okay, let's give it a go. It tends to be followed by a much harsher clampdown, or is there something else going on there? So I think that is in part true. I think when we look at why there is this obsession with women's virginity, with women's bodies, sociobiologists would tell you it's the fact of paternity uncertainty. It is the fact that when a woman gives birth, she knows she's the mother. But the father doesn't know

whether he's the true father. And so sociobiologists argue that in an evolutionary context, this has created this driving men to jealously guard what they consider to be their females. Now, the problem with that explanation is, you know, as we've been talking about, the pendulum of female modesty swings across history. And some countries are much more obsessed with it than others. and yet biology is pretty fixed. So we have to look at other factors. And I think that there are other things I talk about in the book, but let's talk about three main things.

Firstly, private property and particularly inequality that comes out of the development of private property. So, you know, in early human societies, we're all communal, we're sharing land, resources and other things. But eventually people put down routes, they start to take ownership of the land and resources. And with that comes the question of inheritance. you know, passing on the things that you own.

Fatherhood then becomes a more important thing, because now if you're worried your wife is giving birth to children who are not your own, you're passing on your inheritance to someone who is not your own offspring. And so, you know, the introduction of private property, of ownership, and particularly as that brings higher and higher levels of inequality, and so what you pass on can be of significance, then perhaps, that, you know, perhaps that plays into it. And also, particularly if you've got high levels of inequality between men, it creates this competition between women for the richest husbands. And, you know,

if as a woman you don't have access to wealth, you don't have financial independence, then really you are, sadly, valued just for your life-giving capacities, a vessel for the production of the next generation of your husband's family through which this inherited. can pass. And so, you know, there's this competition to signal that you will be a pure vessel, you know, that you're not going to be getting married already impregnated by another man. And so virginity becomes more of an obsession. And so the more unequal societies become. And also the more population pressures build, because as population pressures build, people are in a sense in this fight for food, this fight for survival. I mean, we're seeing rising food prices now,

which doesn't give me much hope. And so what happens then is societies want to control who's reproducing and with home to make sure that there aren't all of these extra mouths being created that are adding to this fight for survival. And also warfare, you know, with warfare as we start fighting one another, group identity becomes more important, promiscuous women, risk, you know, forming connections with people outside their own community. and that would break this group identity.

So, you know, there were a number of factors. So I think when you look at the swinging pendulum of female modesty, what you tend to find is these Puritans make their comebacks in periods of rising inequality, rising population pressure, and periods of warfare too. I mean, that was the Victorians, wasn't it? It absolutely was. And what fascinates me about the Victorians as well

is that we think of them as very buttoned down, buttoned up, I should say, frumpy, like nothing's on show, horrified at the merest mention of sex. And I was definitely part of their culture. You can see, and this obsession with we must rescue all the fallen women. But also, these are the people that invented pornography and photograph pornography. So there's a real cognitive dissidents and tension in this particular group of people. Yeah, in a sense, as there was with those kind of Christian communities, that there's the theory and then there's the practice. But I think what's interesting is, you know, no one was more obsessed with respectability in the Victorian period than feminists,

because feminists built their reputation on their respectability, so much so that they ostracised women within their own movement. I didn't know that, you know, when I read that in your book, I was quite shocked about that. I was like, oh, guys. It slightly makes me cringe every time I see the suffragette trickle law today, because those three colours of the suffragette movement, the green, the purple and the white. white, the white is there for purity. So the white stripe in the suffragette trickle law is to indicate that we feminists are pure. So there was this obsession that if we were unrespectable, you know,

if we were seen as promiscuous, as scantily clad, that we would be bringing feminism into disrepute. And, you know, this sadly hurt a fellow Mancunian feminist, Elizabeth Walsdenholm-Elmy in the 19th century. She was from Eccles. And she was the first woman to be in paid full employment of the suffrage movement and did an amazing job. She could regularly be found walking the corridors of parliament, holding male politicians to account, pushing for changes in the law to try and better benefit women. And she got pregnant outside of marriage, the age of 40, and you can understand at the time, she objected to marriage, because at the time, if you were a woman and you got marriage, you lost all rights to your earnings and your property. But, you know, she fell in love with this man, Ben. Baby Frank

comes along. And the movement is up in arms, you know, Fawcett thought that she had committed a great injury, she called it, to the feminist cause. And so she was told to resign from her post. She was pushed out of the movement. And, you know, when she died, there were obituaries of her, but they were mostly anonymous because, you know, feminists wouldn't stand up for her. If I'm feeling very generous, I suppose what I could say is that I do understand an urge in those early movements in order to try and get their voices out and to be heard. They had to attempt to distance themselves as much as possible from anything even remotely, even the vagus sniff of anything improper. Because the sanction and stigma was so severe, that could be used against

them. So I suppose they internalised that. I think that's true. I mean, I think at the time, whereas before the Victorian age, women were seen as sexually impure, as the active rather than the passive creatures, you know, we were the ones that tempted men, that without us, men would all be behaving, you know, perfectly fine. Whereas with the Victorian age, there begins to develop this view that, you know, it's women that are the pure ones and that we are the passive ones sexually. And that that it is male sexuality that is the problem. And so what happens in the Victorian era is kind of in a sense women get the moral high ground now, perhaps for the first time in history. Women are given this moral high ground that we are the moral creatures and that men need to listen to us.

And so with that, their voice, their demands become conditional on this moral respectability. never build your skyscrapers on foundations like that, never make your worth, your respectability conditional on something as superficial as your oddly modesty. I would love to be able to finish this by saying, but we've fixed all this now, haven't we? That this isn't a problem anymore. We're done, it's fine. This isn't a problem.

But I don't think that you're going to say that. So if I could bring it up to today, do you think that we have made significant improvements in? session around modesty. I mean, in one way, we must have done because you and me are sat here in the nip having a chat. But in the other way, maybe we haven't, because this is still a novelty and quite shocking. What's your thoughts on it? Where are we today with this? So the secret weapon of the cult of female modesty is that it is exceptionally evasive, and it is evasive because we draw the line between modesty and immodesty. We draw that line between the good girls

and the whores in a different place, in different time periods, and different countries. So, for example, in Iran, if you're not wearing a headscarf, you're considered naked. If you're on a beach in the UK, in a bikini, you're not considered naked. So, you know, people draw this line in different places. But wherever we draw that line, wherever we try and divide women into good girls and whores, we have a problem. And so in any society where the word whore is a term of insult for women, we have a problem and that is still here in the UK. And, you know, to quote what one feminist said to me after one of my naked protests,

why do you think women aren't taken seriously or listened to and thought of as sex objects because of silly tarts like you, you're a disgrace to all women? So this is Victorian puritanism. Sorry about that, Victoria, but I had been drinking that day. I wouldn't mind if you're not. said that, Kate. I've had similar things said to me by various people online about, you know, letting the team down. I can imagine. And so that Victorian puritanism within feminism, you know, lives on today. We are still being blamed for man-made problems. You know, it's not male attitudes

that are responsible for women being seen as sex objects. It's what we do with our bodies. And I think that is extremely dangerous. And you're seeing more and more feminists in response to the the post-sexual revolution, raunch culture that we have around us, more and more feminists arguing that what we need is a return to modesty. I mean, feminists are arguing that modesty will be our saviour. And yet, when we look back at history, periods of Puritanism have always had their worst effects on women. You know, what we must do, I think, is as feminists to be pushing the idea that all women are worthy and deserving of respect, our respect shouldn't be conditional on our bodily modesty, that we should be setting a wrecking ball loose to any wall that divides women. Now, wherever we draw that

line between modest and modest women, you know, whether it's having an unveiled head or whether it's being completely naked as we are today, you know, wherever we draw that line, we create problems. And we have a weird hypocrisy with this stuff as well. I worked as a life. I worked as a life. model for years. And that never really raised, well, it raised a few eyebrows. It raised a couple of questions. But I mean, nobody was telling me that, you know, I was a condemned whore. In fact, almost, that's kind of seen as, oh, it's quite interesting, quite exciting. Maybe it's quite a nice thing to do. But then me being naked for money is the same as people on only fans. And yet that is viewed extremely differently. There is so much hypocrisy out there. It's really quite worrying.

And I think when we look at the plight of women in Afghanistan, when we look at the plight of women in Iran, look at, you know, anti-abortion America with its virginity pledges, its modesty ponchos and its chastity balls. Indonesia, which has just made sex outside of marriage illegal, punishable by a year in prison. This Puritanism is descending, you know, across so many countries. And why is it doing so? It's rooted in the idea that immodest women are the root of all problems and that Therefore, we need to enforce modesty, whether it is by pulling girls out of school and the workplace in Afghanistan, whether it's by forcing them to cover their heads in Iran, whether it's by depriving women of access to contraception and abortion in America with a view that we don't want to become a nation of harlots, you know, as the evangelicals there see it. So the demonisation of immodest women, this whole phobia that we have within society, drives policies.

and practices that hurt every woman in one way or another. And it just hurts women in different ways in different parts of the world. Now, here in the UK last month, there was a story of a Merseyside school where girls were being lined up to have their skirts measured. How does that even get past someone suggesting that in the staff room? Everybody should just turn around and go, shut up, Steve. That's a fucking stupid idea. Oh, I know.

Well, do you know, I'm sure there are plenty of schools up and down this country where if as a girl you arrive in the morning, covered in makeup, and in a short skirt, you're thrown out of class. And there I think we have this demonstration that as women, we have to be bodies or brains. You know, you're not even allowed in the classroom to fire up your brain unless you arrive suitably modest in the morning. And, you know, that's certainly something that I've seen in the responses to my naked protests, that, you know, I'm a Cambridge academic and yet take off my clothes and protest naked. and I'm called stupid, I'm called an idiot. Someone even suggested that I must have slept my way to all of my degrees. Because, you know, we're so obsessed with this idea that, you know,

if you're a body, you can't also have a brain. And ultimately, we all have bodies and brains. And, you know, the Greek gods, the male Greek gods, they were wise and they were promiscuous. You know, they were bodies and brains. But when it comes to the female gods, the goddesses, you had a choice. Venus or Athena. So Athena, the goddess of wisdom, Venus, the goddess of love and the body.

And as women, we've always been expected, well, at least for thousands of years, to make that choice. And that's what needs to end. The cult of female modesty puts the power in male hands. It gives men the excuse to abuse and mistreat women that they deem. pause. And if we take that power away, if we change attitude such that every woman is treated with respect, no matter what she does with her body, it would be transformative for women's lives, not just here in the UK, but across the globe. Tori, you have been amazing to talk to today. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more

about you and your work, where can they find you? Do you have a look at nakedfeminism.com or take a look at the new book, Naked Feminism, Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty. And let's do that together. And do let me say that, you know, I'm not suggesting we all have to strip off, you know, dispose of our clothes in order to fight the cult of female modesty. If you don't want to do that, then I believe, you know, women should be free to do whatever they want with their own bodies. I have no problem with women who choose be modest.

What I have a problem with is attitudes. It's when we make our judgments about women dependent on whether, they display modesty or not. And so if you don't want to strip off like us today, don't feel you have to, let's though, you know, in the classroom, in the street, in the workplace, challenge anyone who uses the word whore as an insult, challenge anyone who judges women in these superficial ways. Thank you so much for joining me today. My pleasure. So exciting to be with you here today, Kate. Thank you so much to very much to very.

Victoria and thank you to all of you lovely betwixters for getting to the end of this episode whether you had your clothes on or not. Please follow us along if you enjoyed the show so you never miss another episode and we would love it if you would leave us a review. We do read them all. If you want to get in touch with an episode idea or if there's just something you want us to look into or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can now email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Stay tuned for episodes on Incest, Byron and Sordid Soho, all coming your way. Until next time, lovely betwixters!