Well, our country woke up this morning in essentially the same place politically as when we went to bed last night. We may find we have a collective crick in our neck! So be it.
Two weekends ago my wife Ruth spent time with a good friend who is an avid dragon boat paddler. During the summer she competed in Malaysia with her team. Afterward a number of teams spent several days at a resort for some R&R. It was a study in contrasts. Many of the female racers were enjoying the beaches in bikinis. There were also quite a few Muslim women at the resort with their families. These women were swathed from head to toe in the chador, the black dress which ensures the modesty of the wearer. Even when they discreetly entered the water they were well away from the main beach and continued to wear the chador. At one point Ruth's friend watched one of the bikini-clad competitors and a chador-draped Malaysian pass one another on the beach. She wondered what each was thinking of the other.
What do we think of all this? Most religions have traditionally encouraged modesty in dress, although they have tended to be sexist in this directive because the concern has been for the way women look rather than men. A few extreme conservative Christian groups discourage jewellry and make-up and sometimes insist that women dress as though they live in an earlier century.
We do live in a society that claims freedom for women but hyper-sexualizes them. More than once we have wondered aloud what gains have been made in the past forty years toward liberation when TV shows like The Bachelor exist. Who gets to choose the line between modesty and oppression? What about freedom and license?
The majority of this blog's readers are women. Any observations?
6 comments:
I agree with your comment that our society, namely the media hypersexualizes women. It is difficult to raise a daughter to be respectful of her own body and those of others when what she sees in the media are scantily clad women.
There is hope though, there is a movement now of girls who are pushing back at the media and fashion, stating they want to be fashionable and respectful of themselves, not scantily clad. A magazine I have started to receive is called, "Girls Can Do Anything" and it empowers girls to think for themselves, stand up for themselves and to question what they are seeing and hearing re fashion, media etc. I am encouraged.
This hypersexualizing of women and highschool girls breaks my heart. Just at the point where a young woman should be discovering her inner strength she is cast out if she doesn't comply to the standard of outward dress set by her peer group. It's a given these days that in order to gain admittence into the social sphere, a girl must make a decision based on sexuality, when not that long ago a person's acceptablity depended on character.It doesn't leave a lot of room for the development of more useful social skillls. It is now as limiting as it once was liberating. It seems that young girls face social death if they refuse to comply, which has a familiar ring to it. It is almost blackmail. "You can belong as long as you know your place." Only the place has changed really, but the same old cycle continues. Some women claim the chador is liberating for them, and at first glance it seems they must be brainwashed, but when thought about further, assuming the woman has choice, it may be an interesting experience. The anxiety may not be so much about a loss of identity as about discovering a more complex identity than previously experienced.
These are questions I carried with me throughout the day. What women wear seems to be a point of controversy in most cultures.
When I see women in a chador or a burka, I do immediately think of suppression. I see it as one more way for men to control women and protect their "property." But, I hesitate to point fingers. I cannot say the culture that I live within is any better at liberating women. In the culture in which I live, women are also controlled by what they wear, just in a different way.
I disagree with the idea that "a person's acceptability depended on character" at one time. Maybe for men, but I think women and girls have always been hypersexualized. Women have had coming out parties, they were seen as objects of beauty with no intelligence, and if it was even hinted that they were sexually active before marriage, their lives were ruined. Women may have worn more clothing, but they were still seen as sexual objects or property of men.
I think the clothing women wear is only one of the many outward expressions of how they are viewed. Whether women are covered from head to toe or flaunted in the media with very little covering, it shows how far women still have to go to be liberated as sexual objects.
Such thoughtful responses! I hope others will add to what has already been a stimulating addition to my original musings.
Deborah
I agree that we have always been weak on accepting women and girl's on thier character. I think though we have made some progress over the years but that with every progress there is a corresponding backlash. I think it has been a process of one step forward and two back. I think it will be a long time before we even understand what equality entails. It seems we are confused. When women wanted equality in the workforce, it became quickly apparent that nothing would change at home for most, and so women won the right to have two full time jobs. I think social movement of any kind tends to swing on a pendulm and we move back and forth between extremes. I don't know what the social psychology is behind this trend, but it seems obvious to me that this is our continuous folly.
Yes, it can be very confusing. I think sometimes that we want change so badly that it happens so quickly and most of society cannot keep up with the change.
I recently read, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," by Khaled Hosseini. It is set in Afghanistan over the past forty years. I read how the capital of Kabul was a very modern place at one time. Women were working, smoking, wearing heels, etc. These liberties though had not gone into the more rural locations in Afghanistan. When warlords started to move in and then the Taliban, these more conservative values were brought back into Kabul. It was a very confusing time for women and for men.
This was a very powerful story about women in Kabul and I would recommend to anyone.
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