Women's Crossroads

Odd, isn't it, that Western women's fashion errs on the side of semi-nudity and outright promiscuity, while in the Muslim world shapeless drapery that even covers the face is de rigueur? There's seemingly little that emphasizes the difference between East and West more than the fashions our women don.

And yet, how different are these extremes really? In both cases, women wear what men want to see.

Here in the U.S., young girls announce their sexuality boldly, wearing halter tops or spaghetti strap tank tops with their brightly colored bra straps peeking out. Their tight jeans are so low-cut you can see their hip bones and the smooth dip of their backs rising to meet their buttocks. There's very little left to mere suggestion!

In the Muslim world, I don't know how women dress when they're in the confines of their own homes, but out in the world the most pious and admired among them wear the full hijab with the niqab, a head-to-toe black body bag with a black veil hiding all but their eyes and the center line of their nose. In Afghanistan under the Taliban it was those blue one-piece burqas, with a lace grille covering even the eyes.

So in the West we get women dressing as tramps in order to flaunt their sex appeal to the male gaze, and in the Muslim world women dress as walking drapery in order to conceal their sex appeal from all but the particular male gaze of their husband. The story goes that these respective dress codes oppress Muslim women and liberate Western women, who are free to let it all hang out.

Poppycock. In both cases, women are being objectified and used to satisfy male desire in a way that does not give equal weight to their own desires and that does not treat them as equal to males.

There's such a thing as "internal colonization," a term invented by Tunisian psychologist and sociologist Albert Memmi to describe the way colonized people tend to internalize the mind-set of the colonizers, even those aspects that elevate the colonizer as superior to the colonized. A sense of inferiority is in this way implanted into the colonized, generally in childhood, which can be almost impossible to overcome in later life. It's an incredibly effective strategy of indoctrinating a subject people.

I would argue that this process of internal colonization is on display in women's "choice" of fashion. Western men want women on display as sex objects; Muslim men want women concealed. But in both cases, it's what the men want that counts. Women's comfort and sense of dignity is irrelevant. And in both cases, women are trained from earliest childhood, by the media and by watching their elders, to accept these fashion dictates as inevitable and desirable, worth fighting for.

Yes, men too have their fashion dictated by social mores--men don't get to wear high heels, I admit it. But why is it that men's fashion is all about comfort and dignity, while women's fashion either turns them into sex kittens or walking body bags?

Freedom? Liberation? Equality? Muslim women don't have it, to be sure, but Western women have no business thinking we do either. Fashion does provide a window into a society, and for both Western and Muslim women, the view through that window is very depressing indeed.