This is an open thread. Post whatever you like, including links, including self-links. Discuss what you want.
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But to get us started: Holly of The Pervocracy writes:
I don’t think there’s much difference between our culture telling women to cover their breasts and other cultures telling them to cover their hair.
(Via.)
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- In the US Civil War, hundreds of women on both sides disguised themselves as men and joined the army.
- Life with a closeted, dying boyfriend. Heartbreaking and sweet.
- Radley Balko interview: To improve the justice system, we need to stop using statistics to measure how successful cops and DAs are.
Or, for that matter, any culture telling us to cover anything. 150 years from now, nudity will probably be socially acceptable. To which I say: meh.
Human societies seem to require one or another nonsensical taboo as an outlet for those who yearn for forbidden fruit. If you take away our taboos we become despondent and listless. I don’t have to see bare breasts, but it’s vitally important that I be allowed to yearn to see them.
But you’ve just made this gender neutral, and it isn’t.
So, this means I as a man may run around naked in public in America? Where’s my flight ticket?
the new face of blackface: looking at yet another ad where white people “act black.” (heavy irony and sarcasm in the quoted part).
a shoeologist?? my thoughts on a local milwaukee ad where a little girl imparts her wisdom on all that is “shoeology.”
Fuzz Therapy and call for submissions follow the link for pics, and info on submitting your own fuzzy (and not fuzzy) pets.
Maze,
You’re being disingenuous. I think you’re aware that most of the taboos regarding modesty fall harder on women, in patriarchial cultures, than they do on men. We both have to cover our bottoms, but only women have to cover their tops too (in most localities).
OTOH, there’s a big difference between a culture that gives you a ticket or a minor fine for doing such a thing and a culture that encourages either governmental authority or your own family to beat you to death if you don’t comply.
It seems to me that I’ve read a couple of stories in the last year or so of women who have walked topless in public parks and gotten a ticket only to have it thrown out because local laws in fact DON’T differentiate between men and women on this. There are places that do, certainly, but it’s apparently not universal.
I was in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. My sister-in-law decided that it would be the best place to celebrate her 50th birthday, and her stepson and the mother of his child decided to get married at one of the hotels in the bargain. That made for an interesting few days.
The hotel I stayed at found a unique way to make money off of this phenomenon. One of their pools was declared a “European pool”. At this pool, surrounded by a fence (that was already there to prevent balls from the nearby tennis courts from bouncing into it), women had the option of going topless. Women in any state of dress could enter for free. Men were charged $20 to enter. Pictures were forbidden, but a guy I was sitting next to while I was playing 3 Card Poker showed me a couple he took of a young woman using his cell phone. He claimed it was with her consent and in one of them she did appear to be looking straight at the camera with a smile on her face.
I find the sex equality element more important than the substantive issue of which body parts are to be covered. If men in Iran and other theocratic societies were required to cover themselves as much as women are required to do, the covering itself wouldn’t really bother me: I’d conclude that the nation had come to an agreement that a very high level of modesty in all citizens was desirable. Of course, laws that are applied to everyone are less likely to be abusive, because the groups with more power will have to live under them as well.
The impetus for this seems to have slackened, but in the 1970s-early ’90s there seems to have been a movement toward challenging sex-differentiating laws on public nudity as discriminatory and unconstitutional, particularly in states that had passed Equal Rights Amendments to their state constitutions.
We shouldn’t limit the discussion of exposing breasts in our culture to simply walking around topless. Nipplegate. Disgust expressed toward breastfeeding women, leading some of them to feel very constrained in being able to go out and about with their babies.
And agreed with PG that the issue is the gender discrepancy in the standards and the way they get used to control women.
I am posting this here and in the Iran thread: A really good of why the election in Iran was most almost certainly stolen.
And Ron, there are plenty of Muslim countries where the hijab is not enforced legally and the social penalties are not on pain of death.
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And Ron, there are plenty of Muslim countries where the hijab is not enforced legally and the social penalties are not on pain of death.
Yes, and I’ve had a chance to meet and talk to people from those countries – and not in America, either. I wonder why you think you needed to tell me this?
If nudity was legal tomorrow …
1.various pople would be doing it full force to get the fun out of the initial shock reactions.
2.Very shortly the shock value is gone and most people would be dressed.
Except for the religious BS there isnt that much going for nudity.
Try -20 chill factor. Try +130F bright sun. Try getting into you pockets!!!
The nudity rules are in place for the same reason most BS is in place…
to allow dickhead morons to control everyone (especially women).
Just imagine most evangelical preaches nude…you could stop laughing long enough to be able to listen to them.
Ron, because you wrote:
I read that as you putting the breast-covering culture in the first category and the hair-covering culture in the latter category. But perhaps you just meant that some cultures more heavily enforce their standards (whatever those standards are) than others.
This is why I feel so strongly that women who *choose* to wear head coverings should be allowed to do so without flack. I know that there is no difference between a man being shirtless and myself when it comes down to any practical concerns, but the amount I would feel exposed would be astronomical.
Pretty weird little story in the Advocate about some group calling itself the Christian Civil Liberties Union that has filed a claim against the city of Milwaukee for carrying a novel about a gay teenager in its public library. They also want permission to burn or otherwise publicly destroy the book (the library’s copy of the book). They say making it available to the public constitutes a hate crime against Christians.
I’m wondering if this is a hoax or a political stunt. By hoax here meaning this isn’t really a Christian group. It’s like that movie The Yes Men where those guys pretended to be from the WTO to criticize globalization. And by political stunt meaning it’s a group opposed to hate crimes legislation who either thinks or wants others to think that such legislation will make it a crime for libraries to carry books that upset people.
Cause there already is a CCLU – the Thomas More Law Center – and this isn’t them.
(Jake Squid had asked for an example of a liberal getting taken in by a hoax or a parody. I just might be it. I spent about five minutes being really outraged and thinking “don’t these guys know what civil liberties are” before having that “wait a minute” moment.)
Jake Squid had asked for an example of a liberal getting taken in by a hoax or a parody.
Wasn’t there a case where a town was going to ban styrofoam cups on the grounds that they contained dihydromonoxide, which was bad for the environment? I seem to think that someone let them in on the joke and they then banned styrofoam cups anyway but on a more solid basis. They really are not so good for the environment, but it’s not because they contain water.
chingona,
No hoax: Robert C. Braun’s CCLU has been around the Milwaukee area since at least 1990. It’s an artifact of the early ’90s culture wars that apparently has come back with a Democrat in the White House (kind of like assaults on abortion providers — there’s nothing about Braun’s CCLU in Google News from 1997-2007). If you search his name on Google News, you’ll find articles from the early ’90s about his petitioning to keep Christian symbols on government seals, and petitioning to have cities withdraw proclamations regard Pride Week.
Thanks, PG. See, this is the problem. It seems like it ought to be a joke, but it’s not.
This is why I feel so strongly that women who *choose* to wear head coverings should be allowed to do so without flack.
The funny thing is that here in the U.S. within my lifetime attitudes towards head coverings for both men and women have changed drastically.
Look at pictures from the ’50’s, the decade I was born in. If you’re looking at a picture of people outdoors everyone is wearing a hat, and in most cases (especially middle-class and up) it’s a hat with some kind of brim completely around the crown. Men and women both, married and unmarried. Look at pictures of people indoors – the women might still be wearing their hats – especially in church, a woman would never think of being in church without her head covered – but the men would universally have their hats off.
I remember when the Houston Oilers started playing in the Astrodome. Their coach was famous for wearing large cowboy hats on the sidelines. Much comment was made when he appeared on the sidelines hatless. His response was that his momma taught him not to wear a hat indoors.
Now women almost never wear hats. Men either go hatless or wear baseball caps, which they don’t bother to take off indoors. Catholic women younger than, say, 60 don’t wear a head covering in church.
My point being that it’s changed before and it could all change back. Or not. But in our case, it’s all a matter of either utility or custom. I wear a broad-brimmed hat when I’m outdoors, mainly because I’m damn near bald and I want to prevent sunburn and skin cancer without smearing SPF 1,063,334 sunscreen on my head all day. I don’t wear it because the State will beat me if I don’t.
Women who choose to wear head coverings should be able to do so without flack. The question then becomes, how much business is it of ours if a woman is wearing a head covering because someone in her family will abuse her if she doesn’t?