Whatever Happened to Modesty?

I wasn't going to write about Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana. Really, I wasn't. I try not to exaggerate the effect pop culture has on kids. Movies (The Da Vinci Code, The Golden Compass), "Harry Potter" (and the is-J.K. Rowling-a-Christian-or-isn't-she? fuss), teenage television shows (The O.C., Dawson's Creek, and MTV's appalling My Super Sweet 16), and Bad Boy & Bad Girl actors (Brittney & Jamie Lynn Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton) - all come and go. You (a parent) remain the most consistent, persistent, and willing influence in your child's life as long as they live under your roof.

I don't fixate on those things because I don't care about them much. Maybe I should care more. Yes, they create culture to a degree. But what makes them frightening - and does make me take notice - is when they actually reflect the culture, when I look at them and see us.

Such is the case now with Miley/Hannah. First she posed for some suggestive photos in Vanity Fair magazine, then it was disclosed that she has posted her own revealing shots on her MySpace page. By "revealing" I mean typical of what one would find on MySpace, and the reason this is news is that it's Hannah Montana for goodness sake, the Queen of Wholesome and Disney and the hottest pre-teen concert ticket around. (Amusing sidenote: hottest ticket for girls, anyhow. Recently when we played a game at our midweek program that asked kids to name a singer, almost every girl immediately wrote down "Hannah Montana". The boys, stumped, finally came up with "Elvis".) We didn't want to believe Hannah/Miley was, you know, like that, which is to say a "normal" or "typical" teenager, which is also to say, "just like everyone else."

Which shines the spotlight uncomfortably back on us and begs the question: whatever happened to modesty?

In case you're feeling out of the loop at this point, a primer: Miley Cyrus is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus whose fame has far eclipsed her father's, as the star of the Disney Channel show "Hannah Montana." She's a far cry from Lindsay Lohan, and in no way am I predicting this is the beginning of a long slide for her. But in this month's Vanity Fair magazine, she appears in a photo spread that, depending on your view of the pictures, you might choose to call "provocative" or "artistic" or "inappropriate".

From there, we've descended into a spiral of who's to blame? and just-how-bad-are-they? second-guessing, all the while missing the bigger picture. That bigger picture, apart from whether the photographer or her dad or the editors of Vanity Fair or Cyrus' agent bear responsibility for her appearing like that, is that she herself wasn't sufficiently bothered by the prospect of nationwide exposure (no pun intended). This fact was doubly evidenced by the revelation this week that her MySpace page features photos of her, for instance, stretched out across a boy's lap, in a bathtub (clothed) with two friends, and wearing far less than she'd ever get away with on Disney.

Cyrus said at first that the photographer was persuasive...then that she was embarrassed and sorry... Whatever. The point is (and the MySpace thing just backs this up) that her standards - our standards - are not very high, and they certainly don't include modesty. Kids, I think, are naturally modest when it comes to baring certain body parts, or seeing them bared on someone else. Somewhere, the "eww" factor always kicks in. But at some young age - and apparently 15 is not now too young - it becomes accepted and even expected to show much more. If maturity is the rush to throw off childish innocence, I would suggest that modesty has been wrongly discarded.

I'm not talking about shame, I don't think. Shame is unreasonable and it is imposed from the outside. Released from the spectre of shame, inhibitions are cast off. I'm talking about modesty as self-control, an internalized inhibition, a willful decision not to present myself in a way that shocks or draws attention or even flatters my own self.

Where did we get this idea that everyone is entitled to every private bit of ourselves - and even worse, that they desire that? So, this beautiful self-restraint might begin with physical appearance but it need not end there. A degree of modesty can be evidenced in the things I say, and in what I choose to talk about (namely, is my favorite topic of conversation me?); in what I own; in how I carry myself; in how I handle successes and setbacks. Immodesty is related to narcissism, self-love that is the fuel of boastfulness. We've all been around self-absorbed, boastful people - they're boorish. So why has our culture come to accept vane self-representations as any more welcome?

The problem is that somewhere along the line, modesty became prudish. Only very conservative religious types favored it, but for everyone else, sexualization and disclosure became the norm. "Being confident in yourself" and "having nothing to hide" got conflated with "letting it all hang out". As a result, we know far more about each other than we probably care to, or need to. Who needs scripted TV dramas when tell-all reality TV psychodramas are proving once and for all that truth really is stranger (and more engrossing) than fiction?

Which brings us back to Miley, in a way, because her MySpace photos are nothing if not representative of the flavor of the whole site: put yourself on display, hold nothing back, and make sure to add a little sizzle. The world is one big party, starring you. She's not leading the pack on anything here, she's reflecting the prevailing teenage social ethic. An ethic which is deeply self-obsessed, engrossed in drama, careless about sexuality, and pretty brazen about broadcasting all of it to the world. Teenagers, guarded and secretive as they are with grown ups, put it all on display on a MySpace page.

And it's all...a little much. And a little troubling. I'll not be modest about proclaiming that.