Fashion Week: Bangladesh

Fashion week is particularly hardcore in Bangladesh, where an outlaw militant Islamist group has vowed to murder any woman not wearing a veil. These unpleasant godbags--who are also implicated in some of those bombings you always hear about on NPR while you're getting your coffee and never think about again--are the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. The Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, afllicted by vulgar delusion as are all godbags, are some ugly, mean-spirited fucks. They've bombed 21 people to death in the last two weeks, and, pleased with the success of this marketing strategy in promoting their deity's brand, now prepare to take it on home by imprisoning the females.

“Women," announced the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, "will be killed if they are found to move around without wearing burqa from the first day of Zilhaj. Women, including non-Muslims, are hereby advised not to go out of home without burqa. Seclusion has been made compulsory for you."

Note how similar the sentiment of this threat is to those warnings that we little ladies here in the free world are always getting from helpful male authority figures on how to avoid getting raped. "Just do what us dudes say, and nobody gets hurt, except when we decide to kick your ass anyway."

Comments

[emjay]

Here, wear this ugly, hot, uncomfortable sack and no one will want to rape you. Unless, of course, someone just wants to rape a woman. In which case, it's your fault for being out in public. Or just being a woman. Or something.

[wordgirl]

Confucius say: Men with tiny genitals mostly threatened by women with big brain.

[Josef K]

I've just come back from Christmas shopping, where I saw a woman in full burqa, only her eyes and hands showing, shopping for teensy-tiny girly underwear. There's something about seeing a woman in burqa picking up a sequinned G-string with "Eat Me" written on it. Something that makes me go "WTF? WTF?" and knock over yet another display rail.

[joolya]

These people are sick fuckers. Maybe we should send every woman in Pakistan a handgun . . . Oh wait, I'm in favor of gun control . . . No, in this case I make an exception. you could hide an uzi in a burqa.

[BC]

> I saw a woman in full burqa, only her eyes and hands showing

A friend of mine works with some Saudi women. He says that they spend enormous amounts of money on lingere (more than most Western women). He seemed to think that their taste for sexy clothing is a result of their constant wearing of drab external clothing, and said that they're usually wearing some of it under all that clothing.

And let's not forget about the acid attacks:
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1908/context/archive

[Arun]

WordGirl, A woman wearing a burqa of her own choice you should see as an expression of freedom. It is the other case that you should worry about.

[Steph]

WordGirl, A woman wearing a burqa of her own choice you should see as an expression of freedom. It is the other case that you should worry about.

Why is it that women's expressions of freedom seem to be originally designed by men?

I shave my legs=my freedom to choose=my freedom to choose to participate in a practice devised by the patriarchy to make me more sexually attractive and to spend more time worrying about my appearance so that I won't be using my brain to let's say devise a smite-o-matic 3000 to assist women in Bangladesh get rid of godbags.

I get that women have only so many choices, but I'm for widening what constitutes free choice.

[Adrian Griffis]

WordGirl, A woman wearing a burqa of her own choice you should see as an expression of freedom. It is the other case that you should worry about.

Actually, I think it's much more reasonable to see such things as manifestations of Stockholm Syndrome. While in theory, such a free choice is conceivable, in practice, I think it just doesn't make sense. Frankly I doubt that it is ever a truely free choice at all (outside of misguided make believe and dramatic efforts), even in those cases where the women say it is a free choice.

Adrian

[CafeSiren]

Regarding the burqua --

My work occasionally calls for me to spend large amounts of time in a major Mediterranean city. I learned pretty quickly never to go out wearing a short skirt, and to always wear dark glasses, no matter what else I donned that day. It's hard to explain the dark glasses, except to say that they make it impossible for the local agents of patriarchy to know if they're making that proprietary "you're-mine-to-ogle" eye contact with you. And that was where my revalation came: they weren't interested in ogling me unless they could see that they were getting a visible reaction out of me.

All in all, it would be better if I didn't have to deal with these jerks at all. And I do have a good enough command of the local language to give them a serious harangue, but such things only garner me patronizing smirks, which are even more infuriating. So, dark glasses: my optical burqua.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

"I shave my legs=my freedom to choose=my freedom to choose to participate in a practice devised by the patriarchy to make me more sexually attractive and to spend more time worrying about my appearance"

It is very true that we men choose what women do to look more attractive. In fact, long before leg shaving we have been selecting for relative hairlessness for perhaps millions of years. We like "skinniness" because a 0.6-0.8 waist-to hip ratio was the norm of our less reliably fed ancestors, and lipstick and blush (some of us; I'm not a fan of makeup) because reddening of the cheeks and lips is a sign of sexual receptiveness. I could apologize for our ancestors, but it would be inaccurate to blame the patriarchy because that's much more recent.

[Arun]

Someone might think that a woman who feels she must always look sexy is a victim, if not of Stockholm Syndrome, then of something else, perhaps not yet named. I'll also bet bulemia and anorexia are not problems of the burqa-wearing class, and to me, it seems these disorders arise because of one's excessive worry about one's image - which is what other people see and thus a form of social pressure.

Freedom is about individual choice, and not about some norm - whether it be "wear burqas" or "don't wear burqas".

[Hot for XH]

"We like "skinniness" because a 0.6-0.8 waist-to hip ratio was the norm of our less reliably fed ancestors, and lipstick and blush (some of us; I'm not a fan of makeup) because reddening of the cheeks and lips is a sign of sexual receptiveness. I could apologize for our ancestors, but it would be inaccurate to blame the patriarchy because that's much more recent."

Judging from your own rather heightened color and full lips, as well as your relative hairlessness, I think you're ready to be fucked too! Nice butt, by the way.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

Thanks!

[xavier Harkonnen]

That's great. Now I don't have to worry about doing all the stuff men do to attract women, like working out and buying a hott car I can't afford.

[zuzu]

We like "skinniness" because a 0.6-0.8 waist-to hip ratio was the norm of our less reliably fed ancestors

Nope. Waist-to-hip ratio is not a factor of weight. I'm a rather large woman, and I have the "ideal" waist-to-hip ratio.

The theory is that the .6-.8 w-t-h ratio signaled that the woman had never had children before.

Skinniness is valued in this culture, but not in others. In cultures where food is scarce, fat is a sign of good health as well as an indicator of wealth. In cultures such as ours where food is plentiful, thinness is prized because it means that you have adequate leisure time to spend maintaining your body.

Same thing happened with suntans. At one point, white folks considered suntans a sign of coarseness, since only farmhands got tan. Once labor-saving devices gave middle-class people leisure time, a tan was a sign that you had enough wealth to spend time lolling on a beach.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

That's why I put "skinniness" in quotes. We don't actually go for the unhealthily thin.

[wordgirl]

Arlin-

I was not speaking about women who wear the burqua because they choose to. My comment addressed the threatened male mentality behind all fundamentalist hysterics who seek to repress women through methods such as the mandatory wearing of a dusty canvas bedspread.

However--given our topic of conversation, how would one go about determining WHICH women were wearing it because they WANTED to? Wouldn't answering such a question posed by a stranger such as yourself spell certain death for a woman in that culture? Assuming you're a man, that is.

[CafeSiren]

We like "skinniness" because a 0.6-0.8 waist-to hip ratio was the norm of our less reliably fed ancestors

Ack! Biological determinism!

I always cringe when I hear people blame current gender politics on something people did sometime in the prehistoric past (10,000 years ago? 20,000? One million? It's never precisely stated). How do we then explain the fact that, at different times in our own past, and in different cultures and subcultures in our own present, people have set different standards for women?

Biological determinism has been used to justify male infidelity, rape, keeping women out of the workplace, and any number of other cultural ills. ("Sorry: my Y chromosome made me do it!") But to buy these arguments, you also have to swallow the considerable proposition that, after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, we just somehow *stopped* at sometime in the distant-yet-conveniently-vague past. And only in certain strategic areas of our development.

Sorry, XM, but I ain't buyin' it.

[Ronald Brak]

Why on earth would my genes want me to mate with someone with a certain waist/hip ratio or someone who has never had a child before? I could understand if the average caveman was interested in large behinds, but why worry about the ratio? Also, why would I want to mate with someone who hasn't had a child? A woman who has had a child has proven that she is fertile and is less likely to die giving birth in the future. Also, the older a woman is, the more evidence there is that her genes are strong simply because she has managed to survive so long. Then when you consider that the life of a hunter gatherer is hard on your skin and can make you look 20 years older than you are, if biological determinism were true it would probably result in more people frequenting Grannyporn.com.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

Our male ancestors didn't want to mate with people who had been pregnant because once upon a time, women (teenage girls) were often perpetually pregnant once they started their pregnacy "careers." You can't impregnate someone who's already pregnant. And as to the age thing, you can't get someone pregnant if she's gone through menopause, and fertility declines before then.

Actually, Cafesiren, the beauty standards for men and women have been fairly stable across cultures and throughout history, with minor variations. Even in cultures where rich women are fattened up to demonstrate their social status the people rate thinner women as more attractive physically.

I'm not trying to justify any sort of social treatment. We may not be able to help who we are attracted to, but we should still treat everyone with respect. I expect women to respect me as a human being, but I can't fault them if when they aren't attracted to me. Therefore, I will do what I can to be more attractive, just like women do.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

To quote myself and cover my bum,

"Our male ancestors didn't want to mate with people who had been pregnant because once upon a time, women (teenage girls) were often perpetually pregnant once they started their pregnacy "careers.""

I realize that SOMEONE had to be interested in recently pregnant women to impregnate them again if they are going to be pregnant for most of her fertile life. It's just that they weren't the first choices.

[LMYC]

I was not speaking about women who wear the burqua because they choose to.

I am so fucking sick and tired about this apologist horseshit about how women who CHOOOOOOOSE to do stupid things or else risk getting beaten with chains are actually doing like, something that's all feminist and stuff cuz like feminism is about CHOICES!!!!!! Footbinding is, like a CHOICE! And we should CELEBRATE choices! Especially ones that cripple women because if they don't make them, they wind up starving on the street! Like, let's all fly our girl powah flag!

That has got to be the most pathetic example of ideological jerrymandering I've ever heard, and I'm fucking sick and tired of it being used to justify everything from footbinding and breast implants to fucking BURQAS. I, like, totaly celebrate a Jew's right to wear a yellow star in Germany in the 1930s! It's like, such an expression of freedom!

CHRIST! When the mutawa in the capital city of Saudi Arabia (Riyadh, y'all) carry fucking electric cattle prods and in all other cities there are mutawa whose stated purpose is the street harassment of women who show a fucking ANKLE when they bend over, then you just go the fuck over there and walk around without a black bag over you and then try to tell me that you CHOOSE to wear it, like you choose to get honey mustard dipping sauce for your chicken mcnuggets as opposed to barbecue. A choice that you make because a bunch of powerful people will make you fucking miserable and hound you clear off the streets if you choose something else is not exactly a free choice.

Christ, I am SO SICK of that intellectually bankrupt fucking HORSESHIT. Will you please THINK before you say garbage like this? I cannot fucking believe that Twisty links to a story about women who are being threatened with DEATH for not wearing a giant bag over them and we're fucking being derailed with discussing about how like so totally liberating it is for women who CHOOOOOOSE to wear a giant bag. This is fucking morally bankrupt.

I realize that SOMEONE had to be interested in recently pregnant women to impregnate them again if they are going to be pregnant for most of her fertile life. It's just that they weren't the first choices.

Horseshit. You've realized that you left a big, fat logical hole in your argment and just tried to stick a bandaid on it before you shipped enough water to hit the ocean floor. You failed.

Okay, I have NO patience with bullshit tonight, evidently.

[Xavier Harkonnen]

It's not a logical hole. Men might have preferences about who we bone, but we're not that discriminatory.

[Ronald Brak]

You know, when I fantsize about being a caveman I always have a wide choice of females to choose from, with a variety of hip/waist ratios, bust sizes, etc to choose from. However, I doubt the average caveman had access to such a sexual smourgasboard.

Since sperm is cheap and starvation common amoung our ancestors I think the best strategy for a male to pass on genes would be to mate at every opportunity and if you are lucky enough to have a choice, go for whoever has the most meat on their bones and who isn't your sister.

Frequent periods of semi starvation made it impossible for our female ancestors to be in a state of perpetual pregnancy. That requires something like an industrial revolution which enabled my great-great aunt to have 23 children. I have no infomation on her waist/hip ratio. Suffice to say, my great-great uncle was probably very successful at spreading his genes despite apparently not having a preference for young women who haven't had children.

[Arun]

Let's put is this way - X is a Muslim woman observant of her religion; always dresses modestly and wears the hijab (head-scarf). That didn't keep her from coming alone from her native land to attend an American university and studying climatology and going on a Antarctic expedition. What "Stockholm syndrome" is this?

In any case, there are freedoms very much more important than what one wears - can one go to school? see a doctor? travel alone unmolested? choose a profession? take a job or run a business? Have equal right of custody of children as the spouse? Notice that if all these things exist and persist, the dress code will also settle itself. Instead, the manifestation of freedom of you all is - clothing!