Today I watched the swimsuit video that has gone viral over the past couple of weeks. During this ten-minute presentation, actress and designer Jessica Rey promotes her line of modest swimwear by discussing the evolution of the swimsuit, while she also touches on a study done at Princeton on the effects of less clothing on people's thought processes. Specifically, the study showed that women in bikinis cause men to objectify them and develop attitudes of hostility and superiority towards them. For the record but not to digress, there were flaws in this study, as observed in a friend's blog post titled Whosoever Looketh On A Woman. But besides that, Rey is basically positioning her swimsuits as a way for women to allow men to control their thoughts while looking at them.
Interestingly enough, the tagline for Rey's swimsuits is, "Who says it has to be itsy bitsy?" I find the selling point and tagline incompatible with each other. The tagline accurately establishes Rey's pursuit of female empowerment as her reason for giving women a more modest option. I admire this pursuit, as we live in a society that constantly tells women less is more and that everything about them is only secondary to their appearance, especially when it comes to pleasing men. The tagline suggests we shouldn't worry about how others think we should dress. The selling point, however, contradicts that sentiment by implying that women should dress more modestly so as to control what men think of them. So Rey is replacing one method of pleasing men with another. While the two methods are opposite, the objective is the same, and it's a very dangerous objective that we have been trying heavily to eradicate in the recent years.
My friend's blog post rejects the idea of modifying your attire for the sake of other people's self-control (or lack thereof), in favor of wearing what makes you feel comfortable and not allowing the judgements of others to override your own free will. In this post, my friend makes the following statement:
Though it is indeed objectifying to teach a woman that her value lies in wearing fewer clothes and showing off her body so as to turn on the boys around her, it is also objectifying to teach a woman that her value lies in wearing more clothes and covering up her body so as to keep the thoughts of the boys around her pure.
Most of the 240 commenters agreed with this sentiment, but a good portion of them found my friend's approach to be selfish and immature. They saw it as a perpetuation of the "me first" attitude where we should be able to do what we want regardless of how it affects other people. It's as if they stopped reading once they had read the phrase "Wear what you want" and dissected that. The rest of that same sentence urges women to act, dress, and live in a way that makes them happy and allows them to do good in the world, not to live for others. How could anyone argue with that?
Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of modesty and chastity. But I am also in favor of determining for yourself what is modest and chaste. Some guidelines are black and white, of course, but all too often, we make up our own guidelines and try to enforce them on others. Some of the commenters who criticized my friend's post reminded her that while we all have the freedom to make our own choices, those choices have consequences. They said that if you make poor choices, you can't expect someone not to judge you. Yes, that is true, but 1)We should be allowed to accept the consequences of our actions, and 2)There is a difference between judging someone for their choices and persecuting them for those choices as well as trying to force them to change.
When I meet a woman, I do have the right to judge her. I have the right to judge whether she is the type of person I would want to date and eventually marry. I have the right to judge her intelligence and outer beauty. I even have the right to judge her attire as a measure of her moral standards and values in comparison to my own. But once I'm done judging this woman as a potentially positive or negative influence on my life, I have no more rights. I certainly don't have the right to treat her as an object because I have chosen not to control the impure thoughts that have entered into my mind. With that in mind, the only reason this woman should want to dress according to my judgements would be because one of her purposes in life is to please Matt Andersen. After all, our actions in life should be geared towards our own purpose, not someone else's. If you want to please men by wearing a bikini or help them control their thoughts by not wearing a bikini, go ahead. But don't let others tell you that either one of those should be your purpose.
I have enough faith in humanity that most of us know which of our choices set reasonable vs. unreasonable expectations for the reactions of others. But we can't base every decision on what others might think, especially when those thoughts are often not uncontrollable. People just choose not to control them. If we continuously choose our behavior based on what others think, we eventually stop living. That is what I got out of my friend's blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment