Just in time for Halloween, Ellen Goodman to whom I often turn for her common sensical take on political and cultural matters, has weighed in on the issue of women (in this case specifically, teenage girls) and "choice" of their apparel. As usual, I agree with Goodman – which is to say, this time we are both a bit confused.
".. Yesss. Welcome to the Halloween horror show. This is the time of year when mothers across America get another chance to rant about the culture that pushes daughters directly from Barney to jail bait.
This is when teens can surf the aisles or the Internet for those special costumes designed to help them fantasize about what they want to be when they grow up: "French Maid." And when young women raised on "Free to Be You and Me" find themselves free to be either "Biker Chick" or "Blushing Bride."
Is there anything more depressing than the "Naughty Housewife" ready to go trick-or-spanking? Sure. It’s the number of young women who will tell you fervently that as a post-feminist generation, they are liberated to make choices. And their choice for Halloween is "Alice in Pornland"!
It’s enough to make the average feminist want to bite into that apple with the razor blade.
But first, let us take that "choice" banner, attach it to our broomstick and fly east as far as London where there is another sort of masquerade going on. The story of the hour is not about young women uncovering their bodies. It’s about young women covering their faces.
London has been in an uproar about a 24-year-old teaching assistant and Muslim suspended because she refused to remove the full-face veil.
The young woman, Aishah Azmi, insisted that "Muslim women who wear the veil are not aliens." Then, in one of those wonderful ironies, she unsuccessfully appealed her suspension, arguing for the freedom to wear a garment that would have been imposed upon her in a fundamentalist Islamic country.
Have you noticed how much dress and undress matter? Have you also noticed how many women believe they are making their own choices when they are actually caught in a cultural vise?"
Whom are the women trying to please with their choice of apparel? Certainly not themselves. What is the golden mean between the pressures of becoming a sexless object inside an oppressive and restrictive garment and conforming to impossible standards of female sexuality detrimental to one’s health? Where can women go to find the "choice" to be comfortable, confident and unselfconscious? I have already weighed in on one extreme "choice" – the veil. Let me try to explain myself on the other. I have commented on this subject a couple of times at other blogs but never here.
A woman should not have to subject herself to extreme modesty for fear of being "shamed." So must she not be "shamed" into desperate extremes to measure up to the popular hype of what defines female sex appeal in a multi-billion dollar market of designer clothes, cosmetics and cosmetic surgery.
Goodman touches upon the skewed sense of fashion which makes it acceptable for very young girls to dress up as over-sexed sirens at an age when they do not fully understand their own sexuality and the consequences of acting upon it. I will go a step further than just clothes. Into the realm of surgical and chemical enhancement, anorexia and the psychological scarring that does not permit a young woman to be comfortable in her own skin.
I don’t want to sound like a "back to nature" earth mother who wants to throw away her razor, bra, lipstick and her nail clipper. We are for the most part able to weigh the "harmless" enhancements via perfume, lipstick, mascara and well fitting clothes against drastic steps such as liposuction, breast enhancement and toxic complexion creams.
Apart from the physical hazards associated with surgical / chemical enhancements, there is the pernicious cultural effect of marketing ever unattainable markers of "beauty " so much so that what is "normal" becomes undesirable. What is "functional" is deemed embarrassing in favor of the merely "decorative". A few years ago I came across a news item about a town in Florida which was trying to outlaw breastfeeding of infants in public places. A self righteous council woman had declared,"We can not allow this practice to go on, specially when children are around." I remember thinking to myself that I would be more alarmed if breastfeeding was going on in public places and NO children were around!
We, as a progressive society, have no problem ogling at oversized, surgically sculpted, pneumatic breasts of near naked fashion models and movie stars in shop windows and on magazine covers but are annoyed and queasy when a mother breast feeds her hungry baby (even decorously) in a public place. I am just disheartened that women are still having this debate after the strides they have made in all areas of human achievement. Why are they still caught in this trap? Who is to blame? Men, women or the market? While I believe that a majority of women operate within the limits of reality, there is no doubt that more women than men will go to dangerous lengths to become "attractive."
Just as it is advisable to prescribe sensible sex education for our children, perhaps it will be worthwhile to impress upon them at a tender age that the pursuit of market driven ideas of beauty and social success may not be in their best interest either. How about calling it "Safe Sex and Safe Self Image" education?
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “Between The Burqa & The Bustier: Goodman and Good Sense #4”
A related thread or two has appeared at Feminist Law Professors, here and here. Frankly, I don’t find the images accompanying the earlier post particularly explicit or sexualized, except perhaps in light of the pathetic puns intended to frame them—”Major Flirt,” oh brother!—and the strained poses.
Look at what we’ve done with Halloween, anyway. It was once, in my youth, a day of fun and frolic for kids. Parents enjoyed it vicariously. Then came the unwarranted razor blade and LSD scares, and suddenly we need to protect the kids. Conveniently, that gives parents the opportunity to stroll the kids dutifully through the mall on a weekend afternoon in a mock parade of tricking or treating, after which, during the late night hours, mom and dad get to party on their own terms. It’s an emblematic instance of our selfish failure of responsibility to our kids.
As for your and Goodman’s larger point, I’d like to respond to her rhetorical question, “Have you noticed how much dress and undress matter?” Yes, I think I have, and they don’t. Your remarks illustrate this immateriality. Breasts exposed (or nearly so) on billboards or television ads are tolerable, but a woman breast-feeding in public is transgressive. Same state of dress—more or less—different effect.
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Dean:
I think Goodman, you and I have the same lament – the disappearance of a carefree childhood.
There is something unnerving about a little girl mimicking the mature sexuality of an older woman when neither her body nor her mind is ready to deal with it. When a fashion culture with its eyes only on the bottom line, pushes young girls to leap frog too soon from carefree childhood years into assuming a caricaturish grown up persona which is neither healthy nor realistic, the result goes beyond Halloween fun.
The reason why the Jon Benet murder story held such sway over the public mind compared to the murder of other children, had something to do with the images of a very beautiful little girl being paraded in the coquettish finery of a much older woman. A very unsettling image even if a grisly murder was not involved.
Coincidentally, today’s Washington Post has a story called “Feast, Famine and the Female Form” about a psychologist who takes 9 -16 year old girls on museum tours in order to train them to look beyond today’s standards of feminine beauty. The story is in its Health section not Art.
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Sadly, I believe you are correct about “the disappearance of a carefree childhood.” This story, the others I’ve seen lately regarding Halloween costumes for girls, and the perennially resurrected exploitation of Jon Benet, now that you mention her, prompt me once again to urge folks to read James Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, an on-the-money diagnosis of our compulsion to sexualize children in mass media.
As a corrective to Kincaid’s quite hilarious rant, there’s Teemu Ruskola, “Minor Disregard: The Legal Construction of the Fantasy that Gay and Lesbian Youth Do Not Exist,” 8 Yale J. L. & Feminism 269 (1996). Ruskola writes about “youth,” i.e., kids roughly high school age, where the cynical Halloween costume marketing evidently targets younger kids. But I think they may be related. Perhaps we’re into our kids’ ridiculous sexy dressing precisely because we can view it as make-believe, and as such it serves as a confirmation of the no less absurd notion that kids have no sexuality whatsoever.
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