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I propose an
express experiment
that you can put into practice any day, the next time
you wear a piece of clothing for the first time.
As soon as someone makes a polite comment like "what a pretty dress," don't respond. Just smile. Or make a comment like "isn't that cute?" You are able? Or will the 'automatic' betray you again and quickly like a megatron the classic "puuuuuf, it's a thousand years old" will come out of you...?
We have this type of behavior so screwed into habit that it is almost impossible to get rid of it. But why? What makes women - because it is a
typically feminine behavior -
have this tendency to downplay any positive comment made about us? Because here
we talk about clothes,
but the attitude extends, and this is more problematic, to the rest of us.
Ana Patricia Botín
already warned in October of last year
that
modesty
could be a real
obstacle
in
women's
professional careers
. "When a woman runs for office she has 120% qualification, when a man does it, many times, it is 50% or 60%," she said during her speech at the last National Congress
of the Family Business.
This same mechanism, or very similar, leads us, for example, to 'lower the volume' of the compliments that others pay to our own children (a friend: "What a handsome boy!". You: "He must have turned out to your father!"); to our house (the same friend: "But what a joke!". You: "Do you think? Don't you see it a little small?"). And so on to infinity.
But let's return to the more everyday level of clothing, which is what this article is really about, that
basic link of 'modesty'
that leads us to
undervalue ourselves
in front of others, and whose examination can help us to know ourselves better in this and others. areas.
Universal... ma non troppo
The first thing to ask yourself is whether this 'modesty' is universal... We asked the stylist and personal shopper
Elena Esteban,
of Ukrainian origin and who has worked for many decades in Moscow before moving to Madrid. "The
Russians
are
very proud of her style;
the
Romanians
, the
Italians
and the
French
, too," she explains, adding: "They are not going to underestimate her efforts to be stylish."
Likewise,
Bela Rodríguez Taravillo,
from Madrid who has lived in San Francisco for more than 10 years, reminds us that, in this universe of
flattery,
American women are 'from another planet': "In the
United States
it is very common for a woman to approach you when When you walk down the street, compliment your appearance without sparing an ounce of admiration, and even ask you
where you bought what you are wearing.
This usage, absolutely common, generates a certain dynamic, assumed by everyone, in the exchange of information, and the compliment is accepted naturally. It is said 'thank you, I'm glad you like it!' and that's it."
A modesty with a lot of 'strategic'
Patrícia Soley-Beltran,
who is a sociologist, writer (in 2015 she won the Anagrama Essay Award with her work
'Divinas! Models, power and lies')
and previously had a long career as an
international model
- which undoubtedly made her familiar with the fact of wearing the most glamorous, valuable and striking pieces of clothing on the market - reveals to us a fact that at first may seem disconcerting: she does the same thing as everyone else when someone
compliments her clothes,
she/he downplays it.
"The other day a friend, a classmate who is an expert in marketing, told me: 'Hey, stop saying this.' And I thought: 'oh man, maybe he's right.'"
We invite you to delve deeper into the phenomenon. "In part it can be a way to
ward off envy,
to say 'you can have it too'; it can also be a way of simply sharing, conveying 'it's in your hand, you can too'. And another way of looking at it is that by doing this we diminish our importance, following a kind of inertia... I remember once, more than 20 years ago, a well-known politician told me: 'Hey, this thing you're wearing...
is it from Armani?'
And I told her 'what's wrong,
it's all from Zara'.
And she: 'It doesn't look like it.' And I: 'Well, that's what my job is, to make it not look like it, to make it look cool.' Not to mention that it actually looked like Armani." Finally, Soley-Beltran opts for the following idea: "I think we do it to
establish complicity instead of competition.
Also as a way of thanking the compliment."
The modest woman, the one we carry so deep inside
The history of women and the history of modesty go hand in hand, and not only in the West. Modesty
,
from the classical to the Islamic world, and of course in the universe of Christian beliefs, has always been considered
a virtue.
A virtue 'highly recommended' for everyone but that has always been especially required of women. Already in the 'New Testament',
Saint Paul
makes it more than clear: "Likewise, women should dress in decent clothing, with modesty and
modesty
, not with ostentatious hairstyles, not with gold, or pearls, or expensive clothing; but with good works, as befits women who profess piety. For the
Romans
,
modesty
became a real
obsession
. Their 'pudicitia' was a mixture of modesty and chastity, which of course also had a reflection in dress: your appearance was, for Latinos, an
indicator of your morality."
In the modern and bourgeois West, Spain included,
feminine modesty
plays a central role as a
tool of social control,
in permanent tension with fashion (which has always tried to circumvent it). In 'The Modest Woman', the Teruel writer, journalist, essayist and proto-feminist
Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer
(1850-1919) wrote: "The
modest woman,
like the firefly, shines brighter in the darkness; like the moon, she radiates faintly and pleasantly. radiance that illuminates without hurting, without dazzling with the brilliance of the king star.
Modesty is the daughter of candor
and
innocence
, and innocence is so nice that it was respected by the pagans: they looked at the innocent virgin as if at a supernatural being, sacred and of divine essence. Modesty has blush as its brother, and blush is the flush that most beautifies a woman."
Modesty by decree
No matter how
outdated
the previous text may seem to us, its long shadow continues to this day, with the aggravating circumstance of a
Franco regime
where the church actively dedicated itself to defending the model of woman that seemed most convenient to it at that time. In the midst of
a totalitarian frenzy,
in 1941, a text entitled 'Warnings to pious women' was published in the Official Ecclesiastical Bulletin of the Archbishopric of Zaragoza (it is collected by the author, uncredited, of 'The model of femininity implemented by the dictatorship and el nacionalcatolicismo', published in 'Asturias Laica') that today makes our hair stand on end: "the
neckline
must not be pronounced in any sense; the sleeves must be long; the skirt cannot reach higher than halfway between the knee and the ankle; it is
a duty of modesty
and
education
that all women wear
stockings from their adolescence;
beach suits do not exist
in
the catalog of
Christian modesty;
for girls under twelve years of age, the same rules apply, and they can "only shorten the skirt, taking care, however, that it always covers the knee (even when sitting)".
Ideology, religion, envy, what?
The idea of
modesty
as
a supreme feminine value
will continue to dominate the top ten of feminine virtues even when the liberalization of customs, the secularization of Spanish society and consumer culture settled among us. Its
early transmission,
from mothers to daughters, 'institutionalizes' it as 'appropriate' behavior, with or without religion through it. That would explain why, at least
among boomers, this
'resistance' to flattery
persists .
But there is more. Something very Spanish and about which Patrícia Soley-Beltrán already gave a clue in her reflection. In 2022, an international survey by market researcher Ipsos Mori published in 'Economic Affairs' revealed that - second only to
France
-
Spain
was the country with the
most negative perception
of the
rich.
No less than 59% of our countrymen thought, according to this survey, that
rich people "are not decent."
These data seem to support the idea, long defended and disseminated - "
envy
is the intimate gangrene of Spanish life," Unamuno said - that suffering for what the other has and you do not continues to be the 'national sin'. For the aforementioned Elena Esteban, the fear of
other people's envy
would have a lot to do with the
sober, 'strikingly discreet' style
, which usually characterizes the way of dressing of the
highest classes.
For this expert,
shrugging off
when someone compliments our clothes would be a way of sending a message of peace, a white flag: "What you see I have achieved in a natural way, without effort, you don't have to be envious. I don't want to be prettier than you, I'm not dangerous."
We devalue ourselves
so that the other person continues to feel good about themselves and with us. "Deep down," explains Esteban, "it is
a way of caring for others.
And, at the same time, a form of flirtation."
Psychology