September 25, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:You knew I wouldn't be
You knew I wouldn't be able to resist weighing in on tehe Burqa, didn't you?
Aziz Poonwalla, originally picking up on my post about our ability to culturally colonize Islam, is arguing that the Burka and the Bikini are both emblems of male control over women. I can see where he's coming from, though I don't agree with it entirely.
For one thing, the amount of clothing that a culture chooses to believe is necessary for modesty is fairly arbitrary. Mohammed may have been shocked by the display of bare breasts in some of the tribes he encountered, but it's a sure thing that if it really was common, the men didn't think of it as particularly sexy. Ho, hum, breasts. No, really, I'm serious. The only reason y'all are titillated by cleavage now is that it's usually covered. I'm not saying that men wouldn't be interested in them, but if they weren't covered, they wouldn't find uncovered breasts any sexier than you find uncovered ankles.
Uncovered ankles? I'm equating breasts to ankles? Well, your Victorian ancestors were obessed with them. They had a lot better chance of getting a look at a lady's cleavage than they did at her bare ankles. Paens were written to the glimpse of ankle. Yet I bet you don't even know what your girlfriends ankles look like, unless she's sprained one recently. Fat? Thin? Bony? Your Great-Grandfather would have known.
Bikinis are sexual because they uncover what is normally covered. ANd in this climate, a good thing, too.
What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations. I had an interesting conversation with Norah Vincent a little while ago on a similar topic: the way that NOW and other feminist groups have made enemies of the womb. Reproduction is inherently unfair, and there's nothing that can be done to make it fair . . . except giving women the same right to walk away that men have. Doing this requires them to pretend that these are equivalent activities; to argue that failing to take care of a child is morally the same as preventing it from living. In fact, NARAL and NOW, in the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, have elevated the latter choice over the former, approving abortion but disapproving guys who excercise their "right to choose" not to be a father. They've staked out some extremely precarious moral and political ground.
Aziz is, probably without knowing it, endorsing another brand of feminism, the "difference feminists". Those are the folks who set up the speech codes and sexual harassment laws in a futile attempt to excise every trace of sex from all but the narrowest spheres of human life. Can't be done. All the Burqa, or a speech code does, is bottle in a potent force that then explodes in dangerous and unforeseen ways wherever it finds a weak spot. The more you cover up, the more time men are going to devote to trying to figure out what's underneath all that fabric.
Sex is a powerfully disruptive force, and I don't think that any society can survive long without finding ways to control both sex, and its consequences. But I don't think that you can argue that there is some platonically ideal way to do so; that the set of standards you've stumbled upon is best. I certainly don't think that you can argue that you've managed to remove it entirely.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 25, 2002 10:49 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links