Surprisingly, there appears to be a rather thin line between the ideal of women as equals and the ideal of women as sluts. Indeed, it seems to me that in some circles there is no line there at all. This is because for some the celebration of female equality is defined in terms of the freedom of women to be entirely slutty and so to be free of the so-called puritanical hang-ups that used to apply to women. This line of thought is then supplemented by the idea that women should not be ashamed of their bodies, where not being ashamed of one’s body amounts to the same thing as flaunting it in every respect sexually.
Now, as an aside, it is intriguing to me that this is all countenanced as equality. Exactly when has it been the case that men flaunted their bodies in public in an unabashedly sexual manner? They do not do it now. Nor have they done so in generations of the recent past. It is true that once upon a time men were supposed to initiate romance and stuff like that. But that idea, whether good or bad, is quite a long ways from flaunting one’s body in an unabashedly sexual manner. And to this very day, I see no sign of such a thing on the part of men.
To be sure, men are more concerned these days with bodily appearances, and so with looking fit, than they were in years gone by. It is simply false, however, that men are more given to flaunting their bodies in an unabashedly sexual manner. If anything is true, male clothing (in the United States and Canada) has moved in the opposite direction: baggy shirts and pants have become increasingly de rigueur. Moreover, a man in sufficiently tight-fitting attire is much more likely to be perceived as gay (or at least less masculine) by other men; and that, alone, is one reason why such attire is typically shunned by men.
So the rush on the part of many women to display their bodies is not at all about equality, since that is not what men do now or have done in the modern past.
Now, the observation of the preceding paragraph gets me back to my beginning remarks regarding women as equals and women as sluts.
If men went around dressing in such a way that their sexual arousal was apparent to all, I can imagine that a great many women would regard this as woefully inappropriate. Indeed, I can even imagine some women characterizing such a behavior as a form of aggression. The attire would be seen as contributing to men treating women as sex objects.
In the past a slut was understood to be a woman who was primarily interested in being seen as a sex object by men, and so who dressed in a provocative manner to accomplish that end.
The question is this: How has it turned out, with regard to the matter of being sexually provocative in attire, that we have decent and indecent standards of attire for men that are widely embraced, while equality on the part of women is often tied to setting aside standards of decency and indecency in attire for women?
More precisely, the question is this: How has it turned out that equality on the part of women has become so associated with unabashed expressions of sexuality in the attire that women wear?
We can all agree that the idea of a decent woman being clad in an ankle-length dress is absolutely passé. And we can even allow that such a view of how women should dress was oppressive and sexist. But how did we get from the rejection of that view to the idea that all most no standards apply to how women dress themselves? Most significantly, the answer cannot be the desire to be equal with men, since there are now and has been for quite some time clear standards of decency for male attire.
In fact, even with the sagging baggy pants fashion which reveals the wearer’s boxer-shorts there is the simple truth that what gets revealed is a very well-defined part of an article of clothing, namely the waist-band of the boxers and an inch or two more, and not flesh itself. This is as slutty as men are allowed to get in public, which pales in comparison to how slutty women are allowed to get.
But now notice something: If I am right that there is a difference between women and men in terms of decency with respect to attire, where increasingly women are jettisoning the idea of decency entirely, then we end up with the quite interesting conclusion that this time around it is women who are contributing to their being treated as sex objects by men.
I have yet to meet a decent man who did not distinguish between a woman who makes herself a sex object and one who does not. I have yet to meet any man who did not distinguish between “getting some” for nothing and not doing so. Once more, the irony here is that far from obliterating this very distinction so much of what passes for feminism has in fact reinforced it by insisting that the divide between decent and indecent standards for women’s attire is archaic.
Well, the simple truth is that standards of decent versus indecent attire for women will never be archaic for men. And while it may not be politically correct to call a woman a slut and while every red-blooded male may be fixated with the appearance of more cleavage than clothing, men will always mark the difference between a woman who “gives it away” and one who does not.
It is quick to suppose that this is sexism. But no: It is the standard of decency as it applies to women, which is not identical in its application to men. With the male and the female, we have two quite bodily different forms. It would be silly to think that standards of decency and indecency would apply in exactly the same way to both forms. After all, they do not apply in exactly the same way with regard to either all males or all females. Whether we are talking about females or males: decent attire for a young person can be quite inappropriate for a much older person; and attire for one body type may be ever so inappropriate for a quite different body type.
Although it goes without saying that the idea can be abused, the truth of the matter is that, in and of itself, the idea of attire that is becoming and unbecoming has nothing all to do with sexism. Rather, it is inextricably tied to the idea of respect for the self.
So here is the quite fascinating surprise: It may very well be, when all is said and done, that there is an aspect of feminism that has contributed to men having less respect for women generally. Women have missed this because men have learnt to be silent. Alas, silence is a double-edge sword: Silence can certainly mean approval, but it can also mean contempt or resignation. And when in the matter of romance silence means the latter, then the victory has been too costly.
For an interesting post that is related this one, if only obliquely, see:
“It Takes Two Parents to Raise a Successful, Functioning Child”