I was watching one of Christiane Amanpour's stellar reports on CNN the other day, this one on "God's Warriors," her effort to take stock of tensions between modern Christians, Muslims and Jews.

I was struck by something that a young Muslim woman said about wearing hijab. It refers to modesty in dress for both men and women, but is more notable for garments, such as the burqa, that cover a woman in a sheet to cloak her body.

The woman was quite proud of the dressing ritual, and almost defiantly posed this to Amanpour: Why would a woman want to offer herself up to the eyes of men like a slab of meat?

It's easy for an American woman to be outraged by the notion that it's somehow her responsibility to avoid inflaming the animal instincts of men. If you were to turn that argument on its head, then men, incapable of controlling themselves, should be forced to wear blindfolds everywhere or keep their eyes downcast whenever women were present.

Neither seems a rational response, and yet there are women walking around in burqas.

It isn't that I don't understand or admire principles of modesty that come from religion. I'm a secularist who happily agrees that there are aspects of modern women's "fashion" that are out of hand.

There's nothing wrong with highlighting your assets, and the curves of a woman look great in jeans, shorts, skirts, tanks. But if you've got sentences scrawled across the seat of your pants and your underwear's on the outside of your clothes, you're not making a bold statement of self-expression so much as you're screaming, "For Hire!"

Maybe that's unfair, but some modesty is needed so we're not jumping each other's bones all day long.

It isn't an either-or proposition, after all. But finding accord between the two is increasingly hard to do.

The difference between the burqa and the G-string is not just a matter of taste, but also of what society allows. Fortunately, we in the West don't have the extremes of hijab. But women are treated differently when it comes to dress in our society. No one thinks twice about a man wearing a tight shirt to the office, while it's not the same for, say, a curvaceous woman.

Or, then again, maybe not. Maybe these days a tight shirt seems comparatively tame against the barrage of flesh to which we're becoming more accustomed.

Still, I'm amazed by the belief that wearing anything other than a head-to-toe wrap would somehow make you instant fodder for unwanted sexual attention.

That just doesn't show much faith in man, does it?

Reach Christine Strobel at cstrobel@honoluluadvertiser.com.