DRESSED TO IMPRESS
Each person’s face and body is the canvas on which they paint their identities, aspirations, memberships and non- memberships of different groups which are based on age, sex, gender, religion, economic status, class, ethnicity, culture etcetera.
The London street scene is perhaps one of the richest collections of canvases in the world? We have Chavs, WAGs(Wives & Girlfriends of Footballers), Goths, Hoodies, City Gents, City Bonus Boys (a dying breed), Boy Scouts, Barbour Wearers, Guardian Readers, Yummy Mummies, Sloanes, Saudis, Scots, Russians, Toffs and many other species all clearly wearing their badges on their sleeves.
Even those who try to resist dressing to type have to assume some kind of non-conformist uniform…. anonymous anoraks, non-designer jeans, and un-named trainers perhaps for both sexes?
Sometimes we get our badges wrong either accidentally or deliberately; ’Mutton dressed as lamb’…’She’s no spring chicken’….. are some of the derisive remarks reserved for a woman dressing younger than her actual age.
And the travel blogosphere is full of stories of innocent Western males being taken in by Thai or Indonesian ‘lady- boys’…. (’I thought she were a woman, mate, honest I did’).
In England we have a strong tradition of theatrical cross- dressing particularly at the Christmas pantomime season. Why is it that a man dressed as a woman (think Widow Twankey in the pantomime Aladdin; think Edna Everidge anytime) is inherently risible whereas a woman in men’s clothes (Marlene Dietrich, Vita Sackville-West, Annie Hall, the pantomime Principal Boy who is always a girl) has a louche kind of glamour?
Feminist scholars and commentators have written extensively about the ways in which ‘patriarchal’ Big Business with the Media as its hand-maiden have created what Betty Friedan has called the Feminine Mystique in her book of the same name. The Feminine Mystique instills in women the belief that their roles as wives and mothers, and the acquisition of consumer goods which support those roles represent the highest possible good. Those same male-dominated commercial forces are blamed for the pressures placed on women to look a certain way in order to be recognized as an acceptable female.
Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Mythand elsewhere has made the case that although improved education for women has made accessible some career rungs on various corporate ladders the continuing or renewed emphasis on female youth & beauty has meant that not only are women required to be intelligent, educated & competent in order to succeed in their chosen careers but they are also required to be thin, toned, and dressed to kill in tiny skirts and tall heels. The image of the sharp-suited Ms. Condoleezza Rice rising at 4.30 every morning to go to the gym inserts itself into my consciousness at this point.
Wolf has written ‘The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us…as women released themselves from the feminine mystique of domesticity, the beauty myth took over its lost ground…..the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable……..
Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to culturally imposed physical standards, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves”.
She also demonstrates that this is a game that can never be won, in the sense that if women meet the beauty standard they will be accused of having obtained their jobs on the basis of their looks.
Wolf advocates that the only way that women can defeat this system is by stopping “reading each others’ appearances as if appearance were language, political allegiance ,worthiness, or aggression... let us start with a re-interpretation of beauty that is non-competitive, non- hierarchical and non-violent’.
Perhaps this is too ambitious? Or perhaps Wolf overstates the case for women’s exclusive oppression by the requirements of beauty. There is increasing evidence of male use of Botox treatments and tummy and buttock tucks.
Recently most of the public discussion on the topic of female dressing has been on the vexed topic of the hijab: to veil or not to veil that is the question. Hijab means in Arabic ‘to cover’ or ‘to veil’ & indicates the modest dress required of Muslim women, though the word hijab is popularly used in the West to indicate the Muslim headscarf.
Traditionally many Western Feminists have interpreted the wearing of the hijab as evidence of patriarchal oppression of women in societies where this is practised. The pale blue and all- enveloping burkhas of Afghan women under the Taliban are often cited as evidence of such oppression.
France has seen the ‘headscarf’ as an offence to the secular essence of French society. Whereas in the UK which has a relatively good record in accepting different cultural dress codes much of the discussion has revolved around the question as to whether women teachers or other professionals who need to communicate in order to function can be allowed to wear niqab which also covers the face. For more information on and illustrations of sartorial hijab visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sartorial_ interesting news links. Increasingly the voices of the women concerned have brought more nuance to this discussion. The Koran requires that both women and men dress modestly though the requirement is left to personal interpretation. Islamic dress can be a badge not only of religious but also of political identity & many countries in the Middle East show that more and younger women are covering their heads since the start of the Iraq war and some other initiatives in that region now generally regarded as mistaken.
Although most Westerners regard hijab-wearing as not only oppressive but also anti-aesthetic many women wearers point out that there are also fashions in Islamic dress; there are many different ways to wrap and knot the scarf for example, and there is now even a bikini for Muslim women known as the ‘burkhini’ which covers all but face, hands and feet.
One Iranian scholar Valentine Moghadam has defended the veil as being a ‘liberation from preoccupation with beauty’ which gives ‘women physical mobility in public spaces, free from the gaze and harassment of men, and the disapproval of family members’. On more frivolous grounds the headscarf was defended by a young Muslim woman writing in the New Statesman as the ideal solution to a ‘bad hair day’.
Many Muslim women have pointed out that the pressure on many Western women to bare as much flesh as often as possible & remain forever young can be seen as equally or more oppressive and exploitative. And anyone who sees scantily clad young women out ‘clubbing’ in Europe in the dead of winter could concede that point.
Recently a new trend in women ‘baring it all’ has surfaced whereby some women who are not expected to undress in public have been doing so joyously & riotously to raise money for charity purposes. The middle-aged Yorkshire housewives immortalized as the Calendar Girls were the first & best example of this trend in ‘ironic nudity’. Would the author of the Beauty Myth approve of this transformational attitude to the naked female body by the naked females themselves?