Burqa 2

Last night I rented a movie called "Swordfish." Ostensibly about a bank caper, the film's real theme was Halle Berry's lingerie.

That is something we might want to think about as we smugly condemn the Taliban's treatment of women and hence implicitly congratulate ourselves on our own. When the topic of Afghan women comes up, discussion almost always starts, and sometimes ends, with the burqa. The clearest indication of oppression seems to be that Afghan women are draped in cloth.

But we would do well to recall the basic feminist critique of the way women's bodies are displayed in our own culture.

The use of the burqa arises from an obsessive sexualization of the female body by men. The use of the female body in American media, and for that matter on the streets of our cities or in their nightclubs, also arises from an obsessive sexualization of the female body.

The burqa represents an extreme jealousy or possessiveness expressed on a cultural scale. The Taliban did not want their wives' bodies to be sexual objects for other men. American men do seem to want that. But in either case, the fundamental ways that the female body is displayed are controlled by the male gaze.

The Taliban drape women from head to toe in cloth. Americans dress women in G-strings and pay them to lap-dance. It is not perfectly clear that one of these is oppressive and the other liberating. In one culture, the female body cannot appear at all in public space. In another, there's a Victoria's Secret extravaganza on ABC. They're opposite in one way, fundamentally identical in another. Both we might say are specular regimes for the control of women's public presentations.

One of the differences between these regimes is that here, women choose their own clothes. That is an important liberty. But in our culture these choices are invisibly constrained by norms, and the freedom one has in the Gap might be experienced as more profound than it is.

The norms that operate on the clothing and body-images of women here are in many ways extremely restrictive. A woman whose body cannot be adequately sexualized in public space faces extreme though informal social sanctions. Women starve themselves, or in a temporary act of rebellion from extreme constraints on acceptable bodies, binge on food.

Whereas a woman draped in a burqa can think whatever she likes under there, American norms work through the minds of each woman. The values that are reproduced in women's magazines - media produced by women for women - are fundamentally about bringing one's body to the norm and displaying it in a sexualized way. The cleavage-babes on the covers of these magazines perforce represent something important about what American women want to be, because they sell magazines.

The oppression to which women are subjected in Afghanistan is in a way extremely direct. And if women could have, say, armed themselves and then clothed themselves, it could have been rejected. But there is going to be no rebellion here because the oppressor lives in your own head and because we evidently believe that women here have already been liberated.

As we give a feminist critique of the treatment of women under the Taliban, - as well we should - we had better not forget the feminist critique of ourselves.

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