By Rashika Fazali
Image Credit: Free Pik
This is how I plan to start my TED talk one day; Let’s begin with an exercise. There are two women: One doesn’t drink or smoke and is hard-working while the other drinks and smokes occasionally and parties once a week. Here’s the catch: Candidate 1 is a head covering woman (headcover is most commonly known as a hijab), while Candidate 2 is a non-head covering woman. Can you figure out which candidate does what? This exercise was inspired by Todd Ronnei’s famous address on trusting and electing world leaders based on their characteristics. The census is that we are often wrong about what we believe is true based on association.
Most people will choose Candidate 1 as the person who doesn’t drink or smoke because of a generalization we have made: a head covering woman is a god-fearing, pure woman, and shockingly, does no wrong. But what if I told you that Candidate 1 is the woman who does smoke and drink. Can you accept that? The truth is it is difficult to believe this because this game has been played out for millenniums. A head covering woman (almost always likened to a Muslim woman) is seen as someone who cannot commit any wrongdoing because 1) her religion says so and 2) her modest dress says so. It’s almost saying that all head covering women in the world do not have any bad habits or could ever make a mistake, all thanks to their clothes. You cannot base someone’s personality, traits, habits, values, or morals on their dress. But that’s exactly what we have been doing all this time.
Look at it this way. What is independent of our mind, like rivers, weight, and color, are things we know exist, but imagined reality is a conceptualized belief – something that we have learned to believe for human cooperation as stated by historian Yuval Noah Harari. For example, money was created for trading, but it would lose its value if we all stopped believing in it. Likewise, negative depiction of women based on their clothes is something we have learned to think about, and that too is for patriarchal cooperation.
What do clothes say about women?
And that’s precisely how we, women are here today, judged mainly by the clothes we wear. Funny how a piece of cloth can be a matter of life or death for a woman. It’s just a piece of fabric, but it is a vital tool in deducing if a girl or a woman is good or bad, pure or impure, dominant or submissive, slutty or innocent. Each piece of clothing tells the patriarchy a story of who she is. For example, men initially wore heels to improve their stance, and later on, women adopted heels to appear more masculine. When heels made a comeback in the 19th century, they were slightly redesigned (by a male) to slow down a woman so that men could look at them a little longer. The pornography industry later adopted these shoes; pictures of naked women with only heels were photographed, and since then, high heels have been considered an erotic accessory.
Additionally, there is a lot of literature on how attire influences a stranger’s perception, on how it can reveal one’s personality and communicate one’s social class, success, and even ability. The assumption doesn’t correlate with every woman’s attire and the idea that men should govern women’s clothes that don’t sit well with women. A woman who likes to wear revealing clothes does so, maybe because she wants to dress that way or it could be the weather. Whatever the reason, it’s not an invitation for anything. We say so, but the majority do not believe that.
Authors Lenon, Adomaitis, Koo, and Johnson studied empirical research on dress and sex and found that both men and, surprisingly, several women believed that women wore revealing or sexy clothes to show sexual interest. However, another study showed a disparity in men’s and women’s thinking: Men thought that women wore sexy clothes to tempt and seduce them while women believed they did so merely to gain affection or look attractive. Other research has shown that both genders think that women wearing the color red were seen as more attractive, more receptive to sex, and even worse, led women to question another woman’s sexual fidelity based on the color red. We can thank the countless number of people who have linked the color red to lust and sex. The authors also found another research that revealed that women perceive other women who wear sexy dresses as insincere and indicating a lack of morals and values, which correlates with another study that revealed that women who wore conservative clothing were seen as more intelligent moral, and traditional. The provocative dressing may be seen as sexual openness and as means to not conform to societal norms.
The false link between dress and rape
However, sadly, in many cases, people have believed and yet continue to think that women’s clothing is the reason for rape and even robbery. In 1986, Edmond and Cahoon carried out a study to understand perception and attitude concerning dress and nonsexual and sexual crime. They found out that both male and female subjects rated a female wearing sexy clothes as more likely to be raped and robbed, more likely to provoke an assailant to commit rape or robbery, and more likely to be held responsible for the attack.
The first problem is what we believe or perceive about clothing and its correlation to sex, sexual interest, morals, values, and even crime. What I choose to conceal or reveal about my body doesn’t concern anyone, and neither does it send a message. Feeling or looking attractive is a human principle.
The second problem is the idea that women provoke men through their dresses to commit rape. Self-control exists in every human. I am not responsible for your lack of control. Why is it that we don’t teach men that if they don’t like a woman’s dress to lower their gaze? Look away. How simple is that solution? That brings us to the third problem: reducing women to just sex objects because of their dress or enforcing a certain standard of clothing for women due to patriarchy’s lack of self-control.
Are men insecure?
The patriarchal system of governing women’s dress has resulted in marginalizing women to control them by placing their dignity, honor, and character on the female attire. And that is why when a woman is subjected to rape, the first question society asks is: What was she wearing? It doesn’t matter if she was wearing a short dress or a shalwar kameez. People rationalize and find some way – maybe her shalwar was too tight, perhaps she wasn’t covering correctly, or perhaps she provoked him – to blame the woman for what happened. It all boils down to insecurity. We have somehow got this idea that her dress conduct maps out a woman’s entire life and her family’s honor. While men want to entice women, they are also insecure about them. Dressing down is a nod towards a more open character susceptible to sex while dressing up shows a more closed-up, traditional character. The patriarchy believes that the more the woman covers up, the more submissive, ‘pure’ and good she becomes. The fewer clothes she has on her, the higher the level of impurity. And apparently, you can decipher all of that with the clothes you have on.
Negative perception based on female attire is possibly discerned more in Muslim and Asian countries than in western countries. A survey conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found that 7 Muslim-majority countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) preferred women covering their hair (hijab), but not their face. But strangely, four countries, including Saudi Arabia (47%), believe that women should be given a choice to decide their attire.
In North Korea, one man’s fear of loss of control urged women to wear traditional outfits in an attempt to enforce uniformity and deindividualize them. In another study conducted at the campus of the University of Dhaka, the author reported that the majority of the men wanted women to cover their bodies according to religious and social traditions. They also believed that their idea of modesty derives from their mother’s attire. In the case of this study, their mothers wore the burqa most of the time.
Look at what’s happening in Afghanistan. After the Taliban’s capture, women feared for their freedom and lives in anticipation of changes that were most likely to occur to their dress, studies, and work. The Taliban recently mandated a hijab requirement for all university students, staff, and academics following sharia law. But that didn’t stop women from adhering to these absurd laws; Afghan women protested this ban by showing their colorful traditional cultural dresses and using hashtags such as #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghnistanCulture.
But western countries also have clothing problems…
For a country closely associated with sexuality and fashion, it is a shock that educators have also sexualized female attire, adding that tank tops are vulgar and show too much of the neckline. The French Minister of Education stated that everything should be all right for females as long as they usually dress, undoubtedly implying that sexual violence and harassment occur because of how females dress. This statement suggests that women should wear fit for the patriarchy.
This ongoing battle between wearing revealing and concealing clothing is a contradictory war. While the patriarchy fantasizes and masturbates to celebrities and pornstars who dress in little to no attire, they also have an aggressive streak in not allowing their real-life women to reveal any part of their body in public. What is considered shameful in public is quite alright in one’s head. And there lies the hypocrisy. It is often this hypocrisy that lays the foundation for a cheating husband. God forbid a man has a provocative wife in bed, so for one night, only he finds it in a different company because the truth is told, wives should not possess the provocativeness trait.
But the male gaze, is that okay? Admiring a woman for her sense of clothing and objectifying them are two different things. We know so few men who appreciate a woman’s dress or how she wears it, but we know so many men who look at a woman hungrily as if by gawping, one can be undressed.
On the other hand, the patriarchy also has a problem when a woman covers up. France has always been opposed to the headscarf, even going as far as to ban the burkini (one-piece swimwear with a headcover) and approving amendments to a bill prohibiting girls under the age of 18 from wearing the headscarf as well as mothers wearing the headscarf from accompanying their kids on school trips. This is not only hatred towards one particular religion that promotes the wearing of headscarves, but it’s also gender discrimination. For decades, France has been controlling what women can and can’t wear, often disguising this discrimination in the name of security and the French identity. In 2013, France overturned a 200-year ban, finally allowing women to wear trousers. This rule was in place for decades to stop women from dressing like a man resulting in limitations for women in taking up certain occupations. If one wants to wear trousers, local police permission must be obtained.
It’s ridiculous. What a woman chooses to wear or not to wear should ultimately be her choice regardless of religion or anything. She should have the right to decide for herself. We are not defined by our nakedness or by our clothing because a real woman is skin deep. Get to know the real her.