I SUPPOSE you aren't going to let me wear a bikini this summer either," my 13-year-old daughter said. It was not so much a question as a first strike.

I looked past her to the snow on the window sill. "What?" I said, confused as usual.

"I can't believe you still have this thing about me and two-piece bathing suits," she said, her anger rising. "Do you know my friends think you are way overprotective? They think you are so-o-o-o out of it."

"Jessie," I said, "can we wait to have this fight until the snow melts?"

"Do you know I am going to be the only girl at the pool without a two-piece? I suppose spaghetti-strap T-shirts are out, too."

"Jessie . . .," I sputtered.

"Fine!" she said, and stormed out of the room.

It was one of those fights you have with your children that leaves you wondering whether you won or lost.

But it was fair warning that my daughter and I would battle again this summer over her excursions into half-nakedness.

My daughter has a body by God, and you don't have to be a Mother Superior to want to shield it from the prying eyes of young boys whose first experiences with testosterone must feel like cocaine up the nose. I feel like I can read their minds.

But my instincts also tell me that my daughter craves the bikini experience in theory only. I suspect she could not bring herself to step out of the women's locker room wearing one, but I am not spending $30 just to find out that I am right.

The same goes for spaghetti-strap anything. A child who's still adding to a Beanie Baby collection isn't ready to handle some junior version of cleavage. She only thinks she is.

But I am not just being "way overprotective." I am trying to help her develop what my mother would have called a sense of decency, and what author Wendy Shalit would call modesty.

Shalit is a 23-year-old graduate of Williams College, where her discomfort with coed bathrooms caused her to publish a very un-PC essay in defense of female modesty. That essay is now a book, "A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue," a remarkably mature consideration of the history of manners between men and women and how feminism and the sexual revolution threw them all in a cocked hat.

Modesty was not invented by men to chain women in monogamy and suppress their sexuality, Shalit argues. Embarrassment and shyness are not symptoms of crippled self-esteem or fearfulness.

It is just the opposite, according to this precocious young thinker. Modesty and sexual shyness are a woman's way of telling the world that what she hides is worth waiting to see. That she is rare, not common. That she is available to the right man, and he has not revealed himself yet.

Shalit writes that modesty "doesn't dampen down Eros. In fact, it more likely to enkindle it." This is the Victoria's Secret of packaging: The gift wrap hides a surprise.

What modesty does suppress is crudeness. Shalit argues that women can control the behavior of men by withholding their favor from those who offend. Why cast pearls before swine?

Shalit blames feminists who insisted that a woman's emotional needs were a crippling myth, and that there was no difference between men and women when it comes to sexual urgency. And she blames sex educators who teach our children that the penis is the same as the elbow and prevents them from ever feeling the aphrodisiac effects of sexual mystery.

She writes that the popularity among women of movies such as "The Age of Innocence," "Emma" and "Sense and Sensibility" reveals a longing for chivalrous, mannered, scripted interaction between the sexes.

And she says that the societal ills of date rape and sexual harassment are evidence that women have allowed men to believe that they are fair game and any refusal is a declaration of war.

Seduction is OK, Shalit writes. It is part of the dance. But men should not assume the matter is settled beforehand and any hesitation on her part is permission for him to take what he has been promised.

"Modesty is an instinct to protect sexual vulnerability and it also holds out the possibility of enduring love," Shalit writes. A woman's sense that her sexuality is fragile and precious means that she will entrust it only to the right man.

All of which is a long way from 13-year-olds and bikinis and spaghetti straps.

But Shalit gives voice to my gut feelings. As any mother does, I believe mere mortals are unworthy even to touch the hem of my daughter's gown. I suppose I could shadow her with a shotgun.

Or I could instill in her an instinct for concealment, a sense of modesty and sexual aloofness that Shalit describes. I could teach her to carry herself with a self-possession that makes it clear she is waiting for true love with a real man.

Pub Date: 3/16/99