BY IGNATIUS TSURO
“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” (Mary Wollstonecraft English feminist A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)
The understated beauty of Wollstonecraft’s words came to my mind as I sat in at a university graduation recently.
The takeaway from the ceremony, for me, was the dressing of the young ladies.
Most wore dresses that were either short, tight fitting or both.
Many were pitiable as they wrestled inconclusively with the sophistication of high-heeled shoes.
But one young lady, in particular, clearly stood out.
She for some reason chose to wear a dress with a slit at the front that reached virtually up to her crotch.
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For the brief moments that she was in the limelight, as she walked to and from the dais, she was the talk of the day.
Most were aghast that she had overdone it. I was disappointed.
The issue here is not that ladies should not dress the way they want, but why should they dress like this?
I could not and still cannot understand why an intelligent accomplished young lady should want to draw the attention to her body and not her intellectual acumen on her graduation day?
Graduation day is gender neutral.
It wasn’t about the beauty of the young ladies graduating, it was about their intelligence and abilities that had allowed them to graduate in IT, business and engineering.
Society was viewing them as such.
A number of the female graduates received academic prizes.
There was neither mention of, nor a prize given for their beauty or bodies.
So why should our young ladies feel compelled to put their bodies on display on such a day?
The incident above highlights the extent to which women are becoming prisoners of their sexuality.
It seems women feel compelled to put their bodies, to varying degrees, on display.
I remember a CNN article on fashion that spoke about a dress meeting the needs of woman to show some skin and look/feel sexy.
This perplexed me somewhat: why in the 21st century should a woman need to look and feel sexy?
Why must sexuality be a primary consideration for a woman?
This style of dressing has been foisted willingly or unwillingly on women.
It is not a biological imperative but a gender one that women reveal some parts of their bodies or at the very least reveal the shape and features.
It’s as if a woman’s body is some perishable commodity that needs to be on display constantly lest it spoils before it is enjoyed.
This is sad. The saddest part is that women seem to acquiesce readily to this.
The problem herein is that it puts so much pressure on women, especially the young and impressionable about their looks in general and the “quality” of their secondary sexual characteristics in particular.
Young girls fret over the size of their breasts, hips, buttocks and length of legs because these utilitarian parts of their anatomy are expected to be on show, inspection and by extension, approval constantly.
Where they fall short, not of a standardised measurement of quality or size, but really of the arbitrary predilection of even the lout at the street corner, they are met with opprobrium.
The roots of this are lost in antiquity.
The fact that even our children’s dressing seems to follow this social dictate shows just pervasive and powerful this unwritten code is.
Our daughters, even the toddlers are dressed in tights, teeny shorts and tops that leave their midriff exposed.
It is socialised into girls that they have to walk around in various stages of undress. As mentioned earlier, this begins at frighteningly early ages.
By the time they grow up, this has been internalised.
How many times does one see some young woman covered in goose bumps all over her exposed flesh or standing shivering in a miniskirt?
Or the poor women fighting intermittent battles with items of their dressing that are perhaps doing what they were cut to do a little to enthusiastically.
It is the burden of genus femininum to dress thus, sometimes against decency, sometimes against the weather and sometimes against common sense.
This has the effect of shifting the girl child’s focus to her body and sexuality in an unhealthy manner.
Ultimately women are almost exclusively defined in terms of sex and sexuality in most societies.
An interesting though oxymoronic fact is how this type of women’s dressing has been framed as a sign of a woman’s independence and sophistication.
Dressing like this is taken as the most feminist thing a woman can do i.e. dress how she wants.
But the question is just how independent is it when it is so subordinate to male sexuality or sexual interests?
Surely, it is no coincidence that this dressing seeks to expose only those parts of the body that are erotically relevant.
The empowerment of women must start with how women dress.
After all, the most powerful women in the world are not coincidentally or incidentally conservative dressers, but it is because the stories they script daily on the world stage have got nothing to do with sex or sexuality.
They deal with them as people not women.
Women need not feel the need to put their bodies on show.
The insinuation here is that women need men and therefore they must make themselves attractive or marketable to the same.
When we see our toddlers and preteens walking around in miniskirts and tights, we must ask ourselves why the girl child and not the boy as well?
If we do pose this seemingly innocuous question, I am sure a serendipitous moment will follow that should begin the process of emancipating women in effect, the world over.
As Wollstonecraft observed women are in a gilt prison, because of the admiration, attention and for some material advantages that this purchases. They do not notice that they are actually in prison.
Can a prison with walls of gold be that bad?
It is still a prison: claustrophobic, controlling, demeaning and curtailing.
The dressing itself is not the prison but the gender role and stereotype that it reinforces is.
Society needs to launch a quiet revolution that begins with how we dress our daughters, we need to set them free from their bodies and the overwhelmingly sexual undertones that seem to follow them.
