Women, cloths, Normality and freedom

In my post regarding Women and Cloth, I asked a question about the reasons of wearing short cloths. As I expected many of you thought that I am talking about morality, religion, freedom restriction and eventually supporting this idea to force women to wear particular cloths since men can not avoid looking some particular parts of woman's body! I think we usually read something and understand what we have thought about this issue before or interpret it on the basis of our cultural and historical background.
Maybe I have to mention my idea about liberty, morality and politics and religion. However, it is not possible and whenever we read something in a book or journal and recently in a weblog, different opinion may cause misunderstanding!.

My question was simple "Why women wear short cloths?" As I said this question might be strange or unusual. However, it is not like asking about the colour of grass or sky, which are objective facts. I think every cultural matter as a subjective issue has own historical background. In this case, I am talking about Normality. Every society has own norms, which is not necessarily consistent with humanistic values. Justice, humans rights are based on our general consensus. For this reason, we may not accept every normality in our society. In fact human beings' history is the story of fighting for changing these unacceptable normality. Slavery, Apartheid, racism, sex discrimination are some obvious examples. In a tribal community that there is sex discrimination, even though women may accept their role as a inferior sex in the family, it is not acceptable. Why? Since it is injustice.
When you read my question why women wear cloths that may be sexually attractive, I do not criticize this idea why women are free to dress like that.

But we only can say “ they are free to choose their cloths" but this is not my answer. I asked Why?
It is like this question why some Muslim women obey their husbands. Although we can say that they are free to do this , feminists are fighting to change this situation. I do not know if you have talked to a woman who believes her husband's superior role. If she accepts this role and enjoys her life why we criticize such a relationship. Since we try to answer this question why? We dig in the history and culture to find the answer.
Generally speaking, I think every normality is not acceptable and this is a universal role. Thought we cannot test every social theory scientifically, we can try to criticize every injustice or discrimination.
Let me get back to my first question. I think in our world, some men abuse women’s beauty for their own business and sell it to other men who are interested!. A picture of semi naked woman on soap is a simple example.

I think in the East and West, women are abused for their beauty and sex in different ways and it seems that some women help men. Some of them because of financial matter do. Probably some of them like to do it like women in cloths fashions, models (I do not have any idea about prostitutes).

The answer of this question, however, should not have any effect on women's freedom. In fact, apart from using law to restrict men' ability to abuse women, the most important matter is that women should be aware of this issue. Otherwise, we cannot change the world with powerless and ineffective laws!
(posted by Iman)



Posted:Thursday, June 12, 2003 |