If you browse through the “women and girls” category of the NY Times website, you’ll always find an article about the “freedom to dress,” usually in the context of Islamic rules concerning modesty. In recent years, it seems that the main human rights concern in the American media is this new human right, which surpasses freedom of religion, free expression and even the most basic of all: freedom from slavery.
Perhaps it is because it is overwhelmingly men who are victims of violations of the traditional human rights that women’s right to define modesty as they please is now of a higher order of importance. The Ines Sainz controversy is a case in point. Feminists across the nation were outraged that a woman who walked into a men’s locker room in painted-on jeans with cleavage prominently displayed was mocked and razzed by NY Jets athletes. How dare those men shame her for shoving her tits in their faces in a men’s locker room? Why, the behavior of those men was disgraceful. There’s certainly nothing indecent about women slutting it up and prancing into men’s locker rooms… It’s “equal access” after all.
Oddly, however, when strange men expose themselves to women, it is still considered a crime.
Different societies have always had different standards of modesty, and in the context of a New Guinean tribesman, a penis sheath worn by an otherwise naked man is considered sufficient. Likewise, many animist tribes require only that women wear a grass skirt. For some, absolute nudity is perfectly acceptable. Personally, I don’t see this as my business. It isn’t a human right, but rather a matter of custom, and following one’s customs is arguably a more important human right than dressing in any manner one pleases.
Although it doesn’t really matter all that much to me how individual women dress, there is some danger in allowing these childish concerns to override issues of real importance. For example, the Afghanistan war is often justified simply on the basis that the women are required to wear a certain type of clothing. That people are being uprooted, enslaved, massacred and forced to submit to one sect or the other is of secondary importance. Even the practice of “bacha baz,” in which boys are purchased and made into concubines for warlords and wealthy men is considered less of an affront to our values than the burqa (perhaps feminists see some value in the transgender coercion inherent in bacha baz).
In the most recent article in the Times, the return of traditional Chechen dress, supposedly enforced by “men in jeeps,” has become the focus of feminist attention. Evidently, women who dress “immodestly” (i.e. like hookers) have had paint thrown on them and have been confronted by Muslim men in the streets. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has supported the return to traditional standards of modesty, and has denounced female human rights workers who have been criticizing the effort.
Tanya Lokshina, who works for New York-based Human Rights Watch, characterizes the freedom to dress as one pleases as a matter of freedom of conscience and right to privacy. I’m not sure why the freedom to expose oneself in public is a matter of privacy, but “privacy” has been proven to have a very elastic definition in US courts, so perhaps it is a fallback right.
The problem is that there is no freedom to dress as one pleases in an Islamic society — immodesty is an offense against the faithful. So, in this case, freedom of religion would appear to conflict with freedom to expose oneself. Islam and Christianity simply are not the same in this regard. Christians have definitely gone through various periods of restrictive dress, but there is nothing in scripture that explicitly forbids nudity. In fact, the late pope John Paul II stressed that nudity is perfectly acceptable when accompanied by purity of mind and intent.
Western society emerged from Christian civilization, so the so-called right women have to dress as they please is no more than a feature of the civilization they have inherited. Furthermore, Islam and Christianity emerged from entirely different social contexts; the former from a tribal, clan-based society, the latter the Roman Empire. To maintain clan cohesion, consanguineous marriage is encouraged — so much so that the overwhelming majority of marriages in many Arab countries are cousin marriages. Christianity explicitly forbade those relations, so obviously the two societies have an entirely different dynamic regarding female sexuality and where it is appropriate for women to flaunt their assets. In Christian culture, it was acceptable and proper for a maiden to display herself to wider society, whereas in Islam this was a recipe for disaster. Having young women consort with unfamiliar men violates the sanctity of the clan and has a tendency to lead to blood feuds, which can be bloody indeed.
Although many things have changed over the years, this fundamental difference remains deeply rooted in the respective cultures. Therefore, unless our goal in interfering with Islamic societies is to force them to abandon Islam, efforts to thrust women’s sexuality into the public sphere can only be viewed as a cynical means by which to foment bloodshed in Muslim societies. So I think these women who are human rights workers in Islamic societies ought to come clean and let us know what their true goal is. Is it to destroy Islam in some new, feminist crusade, or is it to plunge Islamic societies into chaos and murder?
Perhaps it’s neither. In all likelihood, these human rights bimbos are thoughtless and stupid, and don’t have a clue what they are doing. In fact, they are so dumb that they don’t even realize that the so-called rights they harp on are a legacy of thousands of years of effort on the part of the “patriarchy” they have been so busily denouncing in our institutes of higher learning. If anything, they are making a joke out the entire concept of human rights, and therein lies the greatest tragedy of all. When the definition of human rights has expanded to the point where it includes anything some contemporary urban, Western tramp feels is her prerogative, the concept will lose all potency and become a joke around the world.
Who would have thought that the moral authority the West earned through generations of struggle and effort could be squandered by solipsistic girls whose highest priority is simply to display themselves to all the world?
