Modesty be damned. If you've got it, you've got every right to flaunt it

Shrinking violet or braggart? I know which one I'd choose every day of the week

Julie Burchill

Some are born modest (and have much to be modest about), some achieve modesty (when the nipples go south, the nose goes north and women who would previously disrobe at the drop of a prop get all censorious about younger women stripping off – be my witness, Annie Lennox) and some have modesty thrust upon them (those billions of the world's women lucky enough to be born Muslim.)

From KateGate to the end of "naked" scanners to the banning of men from working in Saudi Arabian lingerie shops, this apparently Victorian value stubbornly refuses to go the way of smelling salts and the antimacassar. Despite the occasional mavericks of I-Love-Meism such as Simon Cowell (who now, I see, is being credited with having a nervous collapse by his biographer, Tom Bower, no doubt in order to rebrand him as less of a show-off), modesty and self-deprecation remain in Britain what mom and apple pie have traditionally been to our American cousins. Who but an ocean-going loony would admit to being against them?

But just think what a boring, bread-and-milk world this would be without the boastful. At worst, they (us) give us (you) something to be appalled by, and to mock, and to feel smugly superior in your self-deprecation to – and at best they are brave, especially if they are women. Modesty, on the other hand, is the bog-standard buzz-kill at the great cocktail party of life.

Look at breasts. Who'd have thought the Duchess of Cambridge had them? Not from seeing her dressed, you wouldn't. (This is a fat broad's joke.) Honestly, if she'd had three, now that would have been a story. When I think about KateGate, I can almost physically feel myself become two people – like nutty Jan in the film of The Brady Bunch, when her good and evil sides vied over whether or not she should scalp her snooty sister. The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps. But the republican side says that this woman is supported generously from the public purse and exists basically to have her photograph taken and raise the profile of this country abroad: business as usual, then.

And the anti-Islamist heckler, which tends to yell the loudest in most of my internal debating groups these days, says that the British people should feel far more aggrieved that she was recently photographed covering her head to show "respect" to a religion some of whose adherents show no respect whatsoever to women, homosexuals, Christians and Jews than over the fact that she was photographed with her kit off. Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

Shame, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. As a frequent flyer, and a fat one, do I feel a burst of sheer molten relief that "naked" scanners are to be phased out and that hilarious image of my roly-poly self may no longer be passed around among airport staff in their tea break for cheap laughs? No, I don't give a stuff and anyone who does is just too precious to live. And certainly too precious to fly to scary foreign countries when they would surely be better employed sitting at home on a silken cushion, sewing a fine seam and being frightened by spiders.

Of course, our old mate A Spokesman For The Muslim Community popped up – who needs Mrs Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge with these curtain-twitching spoilsports among us? – at some point during the trials of the naked scanners and predicted that some Muslim women would be too modest to submit to the shady screen and, sure enough, a few forfeited their flights rather than put the greater good before personal peeves. That's an interesting thing about modest women – they actually seem more up themselves than immodest ones in their insistence that they have something special that no one's ever seen before.

The ever-surprising Saudis' take on this has just been to close 100 lingerie shops that dare to have men on their staff. Last month, the Wahhabi Islamist government announced plans to build the modern world's first women-only city, construction to begin next year, creating around 5,000 jobs in the textiles, pharmaceuticals and food-processing industries. And also creating an awful lot of lady-loving, surely, in a classic own goal by rulers who, like Queen Victoria, must believe that homosexuality is simply physically impossible for women. In seeking to impose modesty upon women by taking the gender apartheid wing of Islam to its crazed, logical conclusion, the Saudis will inadvertently create a colony that will make the isle of Lesbos look like the Playboy mansion.

Modesty used to be like juvenile delinquency; in men, it could refer to a varying array of behaviours – personal modesty, professional modest – but in women, it referred to sexual conduct. In the west, as women have moved out of the home and into the workplace, they have crossed the line and now boast about other things – looks, wealth, talent. When they do, though, they are reviled with a fury that would not seem out of place in ducking stool-era England, as the recent attacks on the likes of Samantha Brick and Edwina Currie have demonstrated. Of course, we are liable to be ridiculed if we see something in ourselves which others do not. But sometimes, especially when we are young and lovely, showing off is simply the correct response to the wonder of being alive.

This is why I am one of the very few old, plain female journalists who consistently refuses to get on my high horse about the modern habit of being surprised by sex tapes. To hear the harpies harrumph, you'd think they'd never looked in a mirror when in their prime and smirked: "Whoah! Get a load of that!" I know I did, to the point of, as a teenager, frequently piping at my reflection before I put on my school uniform: "You're gonna get it tonight!" If we'd have had cameraphones back then, we'd have been plastering dirty pictures of ourselves all over the show.

So I cheer when Tulisa, or whoever, brazens it out rather than running off to cover herself in sackcloth and ashes, as other columnistas seem to believe she should. "Craft must have clothes, but truth loves to go naked," said Thomas Fuller. "Why? Because I'm beautiful," said the young Ursula Andress when asked why she stripped for Playboy. Let us leave modesty to those who have much to be modest about and put our best boast forward in these most fearful of times.