Cuddle Puddles and the New Modesty

This is something of a continuation of the previous post from yesterday. Still reading the Atlantic, still on the culture wars.

I read Caitlin Flanagan's Are You There God? It's Me, Monica. It hit many of the same points as the Laura Ingraham interview with someone behind the piece on the Cuddle Puddle in New York Magazine.

But at the same time that I see evidence for the new decadence, I still see evidence for the new modesty. There is Mona Charen's piece, A Modest Backlash Against the Culture. It refers to a group blog called Modestly Yours in which the issues of modesty are discussed. There is the Modesty page on Ladies Against Feminism.

My interpretation of both trends suggests that the ends of the bell curve are getting further apart. Another dominant culture is fragmenting and womanhood and girlhood are giving way to a series of distinct cultures with totally different value systems. Modesty may only describe a small group (let's suppose somewhere between a tenth and a sixth of females), and decadence may likewise describe a similar small group. In between we might find everything from 50's style petting to serial monogomous sex between teens based on stable (for teens) relationships.

The abstinance movement is real, and the kind of casual sex with strangers and multiple partners (Ingraham described the cuddle puddle as an orgy) seems to be real as well. I suspect that the modesty movement is more a responce to the decadence than what is going on in the middle. There is an ongoing discussion of what 's going on, as these sources begin to link to one another.