The Shaming of Shame, Conclusion
I can already hear the catcalls from the feminist bleachers: Propriety, indeed! Propriety would have us back in menstrual huts for a week out of every month. Propriety is just a polite taboo. I am woman! I bleed. Get used to it…. So the chant resounds. But propriety is more than “keeping up appearances.” It is, as Edmund Burke once said, “the soft collar of social esteem” – a necessary act of repression that makes civilized life possible; it is the expression – often hypocritical, no doubt – of a moral and aesthetic order which we discard at our peril....
