How you doin' ?
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
How you doin' ?
But only a real man would promise to always put the seat down after he is finished!
;)
It's just ludicrous to think that women didn't suffer from these exact problems fifty years ago*--the difference was that men were expected to harass women in the workplace, date rape was something women were made to feel ashamed of, and things like self-mutilation were hushed up (women didn't get the care they needed when they suffered from that sort of thing).
The nostalgia conservatives are (as always) operating from a false view of the past.
* with the possible exception of anorexia, I'd think that would happen more when women feel the need to be skinny. But I'll bet there were plenty of anorexic women in the '20s.
Well, they all have to do with using sex to manipulate men into doing what women want - not exactly the same thing.
That reminds me of an incident back in 1985. My wife sent me to the grocery store for a few things for our newborn daughter. There was a very well endowed woman behind me. You can guess how I felt after looking at her tee shirt. This is what was on her shirt, centered over her breasts.
Yep, I almost had my nose between her boobs trying to read the small print. The "damm" was in letters about three inches tall and the rest was like 12 pitch print. Talk about being embarrassed...
It's just ludicrous to think that women didn't suffer from these exact problems fifty years ago...
The writer doesn't claim that these problems are new, rather that they are more widespread and more extreme. Human nature doesn't change. What does change is how well social sanctions, including the law, curb sin. Today's society glorifies rather than discourages uncommitted men and sexual licentiousness. To pretend this comes at no cost is folly indeed, as most people well understood fifty years ago.
Now that you have deduced one of the great mysteries of life will you:
1. Spread the word widely to new generations of women?
2. Decide on new window treatments?
The power is all yours.
Personally, I much prefer Wendy to the bimbo below her. But then I've always gone for demure and cute over buxom bimbshells. To each their own, your mileage my vary.
My experience, basically, is that "all show" equals "little or no go" in the intimacy department.
Michael
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