From the archives: Modesty. It ain't a city in California.

Another one from the Deep Blue Crap collection, c. 2000.

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One day around lunchtime last week, I was running an errand for my place of employment. The radio in my car was tuned to a country station (it's the closest thing to pop I listen to these days). The station played two Conway Twitty songs in the span of about 45 minutes, "Tight Fittin' Jeans" and "I'd Love To Lay You Down."

I had a revelation at that point, a revelation that smacked me up harder than a mack daddy G being paid five large to drop da bomb on yo ass, yo, beeeee-yatch. (Editor's note: The author has no earthly idea what he just said. Please send tax-deductible contributions for a gangsta-to-English translator to his home address.)

Anyway, if you're familiar with the songs, think about them for a second. Consider how tame (some would say "lame") the following lyric from "I'd Love To Lay You Down" would be in the context of today:

"Standing in the kitchen
In your faded cotton gown
With your hair all up in curlers
I'd just love to lay you down."

Conversely, take the following lyric from one of your more popular records today:

"Shit, Christina Aguilera better switch me chairs
so I can sit next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst
and hear 'em argue over who she gave head to first."

The latter, of course, is what passes for "popular" "music" anymore. Why, then, do I get such a big kick out of the former?

(No, the correct is not "because I've turned into a big flaming prude.")

I reckon that if you pulled out your Funk N' Wagnalls and looked up the definition for "modesty," you wouldn't find Eminem's picture next to it. Then again, being anointed for sainthood by the entertainment media doesn't require having modesty as a virtue. Hell, "modesty" as defined by the gangsta set means having the decency to conceal your 9mm at a get-together or hootenanny or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

Therein lies the answer to the question I posed a few paragraphs earlier, an answer I'll also pose in the form of a question:

Does anybody else miss modesty?

True story: Back when I was first spening about 18 hours a day online before rediscovering my life, something that I used to do (and something I'm terribly ashamed of if I think about it for too long) was write pornographic stories. Of course, they wouldn't be called that anymore - we're big on being an all-inclusive society that likes to erase stigmas and welcome any and all behavior no matter how aberrant, so my stories today would have a nice shiny name like "erotic fiction." Call a spade a spade and a porno a porno - that's what it was, and I suppose I got pretty good at it.

I don't do it anymore, though, for a couple of reasons. One - writing those stories got really old really quickly; I think I exhausted every possible way of saying that he put his ... you know ... into her ... you know. All of the descriptive terminology in the world - for the record, my favorite was "pulsating" - couldn't hide the fact that as far as that type of writing goes, I was writing toward a dead end.

Most importantly, though, my entire value system has undergone a major overhaul since then; my moral compass is so new that it's still under warranty, and I'm still learning how to use it. (It's harder than, say, programming a VCR, which gets a bad rap as far as degree of difficulty goes - read the blasted directions!)

And, yes, this moral compass includes modesty, though you wouldn't know it if you were The Captain and saw me humping the air while my face is contorted into a look of insane lust whenever something like that Jessica Andrews video (the one where she's on the swing) comes on TV. (Don't tell my girlfriend.) But I'm trying.

I don't pretend to know whether a society's entertainment is a reflection of society or a bellwether of a society-to-be. This has been debated to death, and it's one of those issues on which we'll probably never reach consensus. Admittedly, I don't really get out enough to make that judgment anyway.

I do believe, however, that if you're talking solely in terms of modesty or the lack of it, it's more of a case of society aping what it sees and hears in music, movies, fashion (another field on which we place wayyyyyy too much emphasis) and whatnot. For instance, there was an article in April 23's USA Today by Olivia Barker about the rise in popularity of hip-hugging jeans. I doubt that Jennifer Lopez, Carmen Electra or Christina Aguilera, the three females pictured in the article, looked out across America one day and said, "Wow ... a lot of those young girls are wearing low-riding jeans! I think that could be the look for me!" And I defy anyone to tell me different.

Most saddening in the article, though, was the quote of a 15-year-old girl from South Dakota, a girl who really really really really wants to buy a pair of those jeans:

"It's a little more risky, maybe a little more sexy. Most jeans are just for normal wear. With low-riders, they head in a more lascivious direction," she was quoted in the article. (Editor's note from 2006: In light of recent reporting scandals at major newspapers across the country, perhaps we should call writer Olivia Barker on the carpet for this one, because most 15-year-old girls don't know their lascivious from their Missouri Compromise.)

Fifteen years old, and she's got an eye on turning the "sexy" meter up a notch. Roll your eyes, shake your head slowly, and sigh with me. Maybe I'm not in on the joke, but I don't think I care to know what the punchline is.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those nutcase alarmists calling for a return to bloomers (or, worse, a founding member of the near-satirical wrestling faction called Right to Censor): "That girl in South Dakota is going to get knocked up at 16 because she'll end up wearing those jeans!" I'm grounded enough to know that things like low-riding jeans on teenage girls are merely the "effect" in the cause-effect relationship of this particular big picture.

But I dare you to tell me that this sort of decay of modesty isn't harmful. I dare you to tell me that 15-year-old girls slutting around in "fuck me" jeans isn't the least bit damaging. (Isn't that what they really are? Do they serve any other purpose besides making the wearer even more appealing to boys and men alike? Hey, a lightbulb just went off: they're key to the most important element of the human psyche today - self-esteem! "I'll love myself more if guys want to have sex with me!")

Which brings us back full circle to the late Conway Twitty. The things he sang in his songs implied such a great respect and love for our fairer gender, all without bragging about the size of his (use your favorite term for male genitalia here - the default is "Little Twitty"), all without explicitly singing about banging that booty till the break of dawn or whatever. (No, not even in "Red Neckin', Love Makin' Night.")

That, my friends, is true modesty, and it's one of the sexiest things in the world.