Burqas don’t belong on our streets
My new column addresses the libertarian argument against banning burqas in the West. Steve Chapman’s column didn’t make a sale with me, but it did offer good points against which to parry.
Ban the burqa
Belgium has banned the burqa, the face-hiding head-to-toe veil common in parts of the Muslim world. French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to follow suit. What’s a libertarian to think, especially when burqa-wearing is often forced upon women by their men?
The always witty but this time wrong columnist Steve Chapman defends the burqa, or rather, a woman’s right to wear one for whatever reason. He writes that outlawing the burqa “trades one form of compulsion (you must wear this) for another (you may not wear this).”
Not quite. “You may not wear this” leaves a lot more freedom than “you must wear this.” The Parisian options include everything from a tiny tube dress covering just the essentials to long granny dresses and hair-covering turbans.
In this country, Chapman says, modestly dressed Amish women and skimpily clad females who disapprove of each other’s wardrobes can look the other way. No doubt they do. But at least they have a face to look away from. An Amish woman walking the Champs Elysees would evoke curiosity but not discomfort.
Chapman’s worst argument is that, heck, very few Muslim women in the West wear the burqa, anyway. In France, it’s less than 2,000 out of 5 million Muslims.
It would follow that if only 11 out of 8 million New Yorkers venture into the streets of Manhattan stark raving naked, there’s not much of a problem. Police trying to maintain order might disagree.
What about security? Chapman holds that sunglasses and ski masks are also put to sinister uses by “camera-shy bank robbers.” With all due respect, I don’t think a bank guard need admit an individual wearing a ski mask.
Every society gets to make its own rules for conduct, which includes dress. Some cultures require covered heads. Some require uncovered faces. We don’t have to approve, but we have to respect. That’s what real toleration is about.
The “American woman”? Well, a few of them.
Gilden Age women
Wandering the vast Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for the new exhibit, “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity,” I finally asked a guard for directions.
“Go to the naked boy,” he said pointing down a hall, “turn right, and you’ll be there.”
That was the last male I’d see, naked or otherwise, for the next half hour.
The exhibit purports to show how fashion reflected the changing roles, self-image and tastes of American women. Despite the exhibit’s historic perspective, the females were clearly there to salivate over the gorgeous outfits. (Sarah Jessica Parker, who played the bizarrely dressed fashion hound in “Sex and the City,” provides the voice of the audio tour.)
Hey, gawking is why I was there. But let me share some sociological insight:
According to the exhibit’s literature, the lavish ballroom gowns of the Gilded Age were mainly about displaying one’s wealth. The Gibson Girls’ long skirts — bifurcated for bicycling, heavily padded for ice skating — communicated a new interest among women in sport. The fabulous beaded columnar dresses and lace shawls that the “bohemians” wore in the 1910s reflected their passion for the arts.
The flappers of the 1920s were flaunting their sexual emancipation through short hair and form-hiding chemises. And what did the silks and and satins clutching the bodies of Hollywood screen sirens say? More sex, this time with curves.
Naked boy
The great Paris fashion houses outfitted them all. Bear in mind that the fashions on display belonged to very rich women, not the shop girls and housekeepers who also occupied the planet in these periods.
Which brings us full circle back to the Gilded Age and my conclusion: The Newport grande dames were simply more straightforward than their descendants about what they were flaunting.
