Tuesday, July 7

Conservative Clothing on Women

Sarkozy's mean comments I read here reminded me an analogy that suddenly occurred to me as I passed two women yesterday, one of whom was wearing an outfit that completely covered her face and the shape of her body.

Touch.

I feel private about most people in the world knowing, from experience, just exactly what it's like to feel me. And I think many people in my social circle have met people who don't even like a brief hug. Who feel like they want most people to have even less directly experienced idea of what they feel like.

But neither I nor those people want to be anonymous human beings in the world at large. We want people to know who we are! We do want people to know what we sound like! The more opinion-sharing of us want people to know what we think! When people's senses detect us, we want people to recognize who we are and what we sound like and all those things we've shared about ourselves (like what we think). It's just to certain ways of sensing us that we want to be unknown to most people.

And why? I can't speak for everybody, but for me, it's because I associate a certain amount of potential for inappropriate sexual vibe with people knowing what I feel like to the touch.

Maybe I can somehow make people like my mother (who's made mean comments to me about some women's conservative clothing) and Sarkozy get that just because someone also associates a certain amount of potential for innappropriate sexual vibe with people knowing what they look like to the eye doesn't mean that they're trying to be unknown and unrecognizeable/unrecognized to people's other senses.

(And with respect explaining to the gender division of people's clothing choices:
I think there's a sexual behavior double-standard in my culture that is wrong, and that men should be expected to be more sexually conservative than they are. But holding that belief myself doesn't mean I'm going to go out and act the way I see men expected to act. I'm still going to act as I think is best for all (men and women). So Mom, Sarkozy, etc: never assume presume to know a woman's ideas about the appropriateness of her culture's gendered clothing assignments just because she happens to wear more conservative clothing than men in her culture are expected to wear. Not unless you'd like to see me start sleeping around just to prove a philosophical point.)

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