By Judy Gerstel

TORONTO, ONTARIO – When Wendy Shalit shows up for lunch at a north Toronto restaurant, fashionably but modestly dressed in a long skirt and white jacket, brown haircut au courant to frame a pretty face, she looks no different from other yummy mummies in the neighbourhood.

But Shalit, 31, mother of a toddler and wife of a software project manager, is very different.

So different and so controversial that, via email, she’s slapped with insults, called names, likened to the Taliban and threatened with bodily harm. “When you don’t fit into people’s concept,” she says, “they get very upset.”

An American who became a Torontonian by marriage four years ago, Shalit is the author of two thoroughly researched books about “young women reclaiming their self-respect” and rejecting promiscuity and the hypersexuality of popular culture and fashion.

Girls Gone Mild has just arrived on bookshelves. Her previous book, A Return to Modesty, was praised by Salon, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, which called her “a prodigy at cracking the codes of culture.” Playboy, on the other hand, put it under the heading, A Man’s Worst Nightmare.

Shalit is dismissed by some, including feminist writers Katha Pollitt and Camille Paglia, as anti-feminist, encouraging young women to cover up but not to hook up, and to consider chastity before marriage.

Others see her as an emerging leader of fourth-wave feminism, liberating young women from having to behave, in Shalit’s words, like “adolescent males.”

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