Across the world, government policies and social practices are implemented as a means of protecting women’s all-important bodily ‘virtue’. This ‘protection’ can include banning women from travelling alone, limiting their access to sports, restricting where they can work and rest, regulating their dress, performing intimate virginity tests, or removing their genitals. In extreme cases, women are tortured and killed by their family if their bodily modesty is brought into question; every year, around five-thousand women are murdered for reasons of honour. In Nangarhar, Afghanistan, it is estimated that one in sixteen families have perpetrated an honour killing. Despite the beliefs of its adherents, the modesty cult does not make women’s lives safer, it leaves them exposed to harm, as the high levels of street-based harassment in countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon also serve to reveal. The modesty cult also harms women and girls in more subtle ways: in the reluctance of families to send their daughters to school or university for fear of them mixing with men; in a woman’s reluctance to report sexual abuse, for fear of her reputation; in the embarrassment a teenage girl feels when asking for contraception, something that might cause her just to ‘take the risk’; in the vaginismus that can so easily result when women are raised by society to feel that sex is sinful; and in a reluctance to attend smear tests and mammograms, which can have a serious effect on the chances of surviving cancer. Questioning the idea that a woman’s value and respect rest on her bodily modesty is vital to challenging the policies and practices that harm women’s lives across the globe.

Despite repeated feminist revolutions, women’s respect still hangs on the degree to which their body has been ‘seen’ and ‘touched’. 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. 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’. But, even in supposedly liberal countries, too many of us still judge women based on their bodily modesty. Growing up in the north of England, I witnessed at first-hand the disrespect meted out to teenage girls by authority figures, and the way in which their voices went unheard, based largely on how they dressed. From a young age, women walk a fine line between being called ‘prudes’ and ‘whores’ and, once that line is crossed, their reputation may never recover. Revenge porn has, sadly, become a growing phenomenon, used to shame and embarrass women across the world. At the tip of the iceberg are those considered the most immodest of all women, sex workers, who are persecuted by lawmakers and the police, stigmatised by society, and killed by those who see themselves as “cleaning up the streets”.

Naked Feminism tells the story of when, how and why societies became so obsessed with women’s bodily modesty – whether their virginity or their state of dress – and explores the many adverse consequences that have resulted. It tracks the swinging pendulum of bodily modesty through the ages, from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylon, through the birth of Christianity and Islam, to the lax morals of the medieval period and the bawdiness of Chaucer and Shakespeare; to the clampdowns of the Puritans and later the Victorians and, more recently, to the re-veiling of the Middle East and the purity pledges of modern-day America. It lifts the lid on the battle that has long taken place within feminism: between those who regard modesty as a necessary tool of liberation, and those, like me, who argue that a woman’s respect and worth should not depend on something as superficial as her bodily modesty.

If we truly object to the modesty culture that drives compulsory hijab, virginity testing and honour killings, we should not be slut-shaming scantily clad women and stigmatising glamour models, strippers or sex workers. By breaking the cult of female modesty we have the power to solve a whole host of problems that plague women’s lives across the world – problems that have so far proved intractable.

Whether or not women cover their bodies in line with the ever-changing norms of time and place, and whether they choose to monetise their body or their brain (or both), women deserve respect. To hang this respect on bodily modesty is not only superficial, it favours the intellectual elite, and it panders to the patriarchy. Our ultimate aim must be to ensure that every woman is respected and valued, irrespective of her state of bodily coverage or the degree to which her hymen is intact.

For women to take control of their bodies as well as their brains, feminism will need to break the cult of female modesty.