Clothes and Civilization

One of the things I like about the area where I now live is that people don't dress at all badly. Most of the students come to class dressed very decently and my colleagues always gladden everybody's eyes with beautiful outfits. At Purdue, for example, things were very different. More than once, I saw groups of students marching to class in pajamas of the kind I would be ashamed to wear to bed. Many people on this continent dress in ways that highlight just how much they hate their bodies. We shouldn't be surprised that this self-hatred then pushes them towards voting for crazed anti-carnal Evangelicals or dusty Harper's conservatives. 

And please don't tell me that wearing baggy jeans, pajamas, and ratty humongous T-shirts in public is convenient. Convenience-schmanvienience, people. Civilization is generally extremely inconvenient. The entire human civilization is one huge way in which we inconvenience ourselves on a daily basis. Stopping in the middle of the street to take care of one's physiological necessities would be a lot more convenient than suffering in search of a restroom. Jumping passersby to fulfill one's sexual needs would be so much more convenient than getting to meet people, soliciting their consent, and suffering if that consent is not granted. Brushing one's teeth, dragging oneself to work in the morning, saying "please" and "thank you" are super inconvenient. 

Human beings have come up with the concept of aesthetic enjoyment. Not all of us are gifted enough to be artistically creative, of course. We all, however, have the capacity to bring beauty to what belongs to us: our living and work spaces and, of course, our own bodies. We are taught by our culture to hate and despise our bodies as evil. All too often do we give in to this conditioning and destroy our bodies with horrible food, sexual deprivation, nasty useless medications that purport to cure us from shyness and short lashes. And then, to top it all, we dress our bodies in vile (and usually quite expensive) rags to destroy their natural beauty and make sure that nobody finds us attractive or enjoys looking at us, lest our Evangelical overlords condemn us for enjoying ourselves.

A Ban on Mini-Skirts and Pseudo-Liberals

This sad news from Sri Lanka made me wonder how soon we will see protests against the corrupting presence of mini-skirts on the streets of North-American cities from Sri Lankan immigrant communities:

Sri Lanka was mulling a ban on miniskirts following complaints, prompting the government to set up a panel to prepare a dress code for public places in the conservative country, officials said. “There are individuals and groups representing religious and cultural interests, who have written to us raising concerns that this kind of (mini) dress would corrupt our culture,” minister T B Ekanayake was quoted as saying by the Lakbima news daily.

After a mid-schooler in Canada was allowed to carry a dagger to school because it was ruled a part of his national costume while fundamentalist Muslim and Jewish women lobbied (and almost won) for pregnant women to be prevented from bringing their husbands to secular birth preparation classes in Montreal, I will not be surprised to see any government of a Western country entertain its own ban on "corrupting" women's clothes as a gesture of appeasement to some immigrant community which considers women to be less than human.

If quasi-liberals continue with their tradition of condescending "tolerance" towards each cannibalistic and savage tradition out there, their efforts, coupled with those of our own home-grown woman-haters, will bring something like this to happen here, too. Of course, I am not disputing the right of Sri Lankan people to engage in any kind of barbarity towards the women of their country. I am, however, hoping to preserve the very small oasis of female liberation that came into existence in a very small portion of the world's territory.

In a gesture of a contemptuous dismissal of other cultures, we are schooled by certain groups of pseudo-progressives never to question any of the practices those other cultures engage in. As I said many times before, such an attitude does not signal respect for the Other. Just the opposite. A refusal to question, to judge, to pronounce opinions stems from a profound conviction that representatives of other cultures are not as human as we are. Hence, they don't deserve to be judged according to the same standards as we judge ourselves.

Nothing annoys me more than this quasi-liberal fear of expressing opinions about any group these very pseudo-liberals have labeled (offensively, too!) "disadvantaged." Of course, their self-esteem issues require that every group other than their own be considered disadvantaged. How much that view is shared by the "disadvantaged" and the "underprivileged" themselves is unimportant to such quasi-liberals. All they are interested in is to police everybody who dares to pronounce that the practice of female genital mutilation is barbaric, that a niqab is not liberating to women, and that if we are to respect the Sri Lankans' right to treat their women as less than human, we should insist that when Sri Lankans - or anybody else - come to our feminist countries, they should respect our view of gender roles just as much.

Dress Code for Professors

Every time I attend a departmental meeting, something happens to put me in a vile mood. Today, I discovered that the administration of our university is planning to introduce a dress code for faculty and employees. I kid you not, this is actually being discussed. And, of course, nobody is offering us any wardrobe money to buy the clothes that the administration will deem "appropriate."

Apparently, some administrator has been brought here from the corporate environment and now can't wait to turn us into little corporate robots.

When we were discussing burqas and niqabs, people kept insisting that there is some kind of a freedom in clothing choices in this country. Well, apparently nobody informed my administrators about that. There is no doubt in my mind that burqa wearers at our campus will be let in peace, while people in Western clothes will be controlled and persecuted in what concerns their attire?

This is What a Feminist Looks Like

Today I decided to continue my social experiment that consists of wearing my "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like" T-shirt in different geographical areas. I initially bought it because a friend told me that people always made nasty comments to her when she wore it. Of course, that immediately made me want to buy the shirt and provoke polemics in this way. This hasn't happened yet but I'm still hoping.

In the happy hippie town where I live right now, the strangers' reaction was extremely positive. I have never had so many women smile at me and try to make eye contact before.

In the less relaxed town I lived before, I had to discontinue wearing it because somehow it was seen as a pretext for most men to come up to me and strike a conversation (e.g. "So you are a feminist? I like feminists. Would you like to go out for dinner with me.")

Now I can't wait to try it in Missouri.