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Well, yeah, Wendy's cute . . . But let's be realistic. Who would you talk to? |
Posted on 04/06/2004 7:35:43 AM PDT by Law
Good on Sarah Freeman, the 20-year-old Melbourne assistant store manager who refused to wear the provocative T-shirt her employer provided for her.
Westco Jeans had issued staff the skin-tight, V-neck T-shirts with "Stop Pretending You Don't Want Me" emblazoned across the chest. The accompanying memo instructed: "NO T-shirt equals NO work. Any team member that does not dress correctly will be sent home."
Freeman was sent home last weekend for refusing to wear the T-shirt after a customer made lewd comments and stared at her breasts. "I said, 'Hello'," she told The Age newspaper, "and he said hello to my face, and then he had a good look at my chest and said, 'Well, hell-o', and I ran away."
After a public outcry, the company withdrew the T-shirts. "If you put slogans like that on a T-shirt," federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward said, "you can't expect your staff not to be harassed."
But not so long ago such a statement would have been denounced as politically incorrect prudery. Perhaps Freeman's courage in standing up to Westco, and the support she attracted from the community, signals a shift back to female modesty.
For decades feminism has told women they have the right to wear whatever they like, no matter how sexually provocative, without taking any responsibility for the effect come-hither clothing has on men. Woe betide the male who has mistakenly equated flashed breasts and vast tracts of exposed flesh with sexual availability.
The fashion industry long ago declared war on female modesty, and is relentlessly sexualising girls as young as eight, dressing them up as a mini Nicky Hilton, giving them a jaded, sexually wise image at odds with their dewy skin and innocent eyes.
Last week, in a community where alcohol abuse is a source of much suffering, an Aboriginal girl of 12 or 13 in Redfern was interviewed by Four Corners wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Buy me a drink and I'm yours".
But, far from empowering women and allowing them to "take charge" of their sexuality, this loss of innocence has led to their degradation. It has put them at the mercy of men's basest appetites.
Female modesty in the past forced men to behave respectfully towards women in order to achieve their ultimate goal of having sex.
But with sex available on a platter, on call, why should men bother with the niceties? And how are they meant to calibrate their own behaviour when the signals sent by women are so confusing?
Modesty also gave women an easy excuse to fend off sleazy men and an opportunity to be judged on deeper qualities than sexual accessibility. In her 1999 bestseller A Return To Modesty, young American author Wendy Shalit argued that modesty was a protection device for women and that the public display of nudity destroyed female erotic power.
"From sex education in [primary] school to co-ed bathrooms in college, today's young woman is being pressured relentlessly to overcome her embarrassment, her 'hang-ups', and especially her romantic hopes," she wrote. "Meanwhile, the problems young women struggle with grow steadily more extreme: from sexual harassment, stalking and date rape to anorexia and self-mutilation."
There is a lot of talk about the problem of fatherless boys. But what about fatherless girls? One of the things fathers do better than mothers is protect their little girls from sexual predators.
But instead of being protected, many fatherless girls spend puberty fending off the advances of their mother's boyfriends. Old feminists derided modesty and chastity as patriarchal shackles, but patriarch is just another word for father.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Check out that schnozz yearning to breath free. Must be a streisandian monster.
"Contestants for the Sixth Annual 'Miss Hamas' Contest"
Caption for bottom pic:
"Things were really rockin' at the Islamic Jihad's annual Christmas Party last week...here we see the gals enjoying the tunes of the House band 'AllahBSlammin''. The band, however, only has a two-song set...'Death to the running dog imperialist lackeys of the Great Satan America,' and 'Gloria.'"
they want other mens wives and girlfriends to dress like sluts in public.
But instead of being protected, many fatherless girls spend puberty fending off the advances of their mother's boyfriends.
Much of the responsibility for this lies with courts' built-in bias against fathers in custody disputes.
LOL!
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Well, yeah, Wendy's cute . . . But let's be realistic. Who would you talk to? |
If the magazine covers accurately reflect their contents, the common theme seems to be that the proper way to 'get a man" is to seduce him. And to keep doing so vigilantly all your life so he doesn't trade you in for a younger trophy wife.
I can testify to this. I am a pretty blonde lady. If I go out with a new friend dressed in a provocative way I will get a heavy pass. But if I go out dressed in my Killer Dress, the effects are devastating. The Killer Dress has short sleeves, a relatively high neckline, and a hem that goes down to about four inches above my ankles. It fits my upper body closely enough to show that I have a slender waist and that I am very fit but not stacked. It is white cotton. When I wear this dress out on a date I get roses and poetic love letters. Men open the car door for me, pay for my dinner, confide their dreams, and ask me what color we should paint the shutters on the house we'll buy after we get married.
We do, after all, judge each other by externals, and if a woman wears a shirt that says, "I'm a slut and I go down easily," no man will think she is rare, precious, and cherish-able. He may want to sleep with her but he won't want to fall into adoring love and spend the rest of his life with her. If she dresses like a lady he has to conclude she probably is a lady and thus is at least potentially the sort of woman he would like to fall in love with and marry.
Women are stupid. We say men are stupid, but we are stupider.
Miss Shalit, of course. The other woman isn't interested in conversation and neither is anyone who succumbs to her allurements.
Well, I guess that comment proves that you didn't understand the article the first time. Perhaps you can go back and read it again....?
A couple of years ago the owner of my local pub decided to get standard t-shirts for the staff, all of which were quite attractive young women. One was his 20 year old daughter working for a year before college, and she was a knockout. Well, the "shirts" might as well have been strips of cloth for all they covered and the staff weren't particularly happy about this but all were afraid to say anything to him, but all the regular customers knew. The next time the owner was in the bar I played dumb and asked him to see the new shirts, which he promptly did. Putting my best wild-eyed face on I enthusiastically exclaimed "You're going to make your daughter wear that? Cool!"
We never saw the shirts again, and when the owner left the bartender bought mitchbert a beer ;-)
The smarter one. Your emphasis was on talk, right?
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