Wendy Shalit's modesty-colored glasses

What do rape, online bullying, hookup culture, MTV, child trapeze artists, and feminists all have in common? According to Wendy Shalit, they are all enemies of modesty.

Shalit’s new preface to the 15th-anniversary edition of her book A Return to Modesty gives the impression that she spent the last 15 years collecting anecdotes she believes prove her point about our culture’s shocking lack of modesty. Then she drew on the most vivid ones to convince us that, the first time her book came out, she was “attacked not for being wrong, but—paradoxically—for being right.” 

I do not question that modesty—broadly understood (against Shalit’s reading) as including economic choices and choices about how to assess one’s own place in the world and choices about how much attention to draw to oneself—is a virtue. So are patience, lovingkindness, and gentleness.