lavendersparkle

Every so often, usually in a discussion of sex education or sexual health services for teenagers, I hear someone come out with something like "Abstinence isn't always feasible" or "we need to be realistic: not everyone can control their underwear". Obviously, the fact that some teenagers will be involved in sexual acts which they have no control over is trivially true because some teenagers get raped, but I don't think that that is what people are referring to when they say these things. Usually these kinds of views are expressed by Good American Liberals as part of an explanation of why abstinence only education doesn't work. I wonder where this idea comes from. I've never felt that I didn't have control over my sexual behaviour. Maybe in retrospect I'll think "Knowing what I know now that wasn't the best thing to do", but I think I've always done what I felt was the best thing to do in the situation at the time. I guess it comes from a hideous compromise. We know that most teenagers have sex, even if you hand out tacky jewellery in return for them promising not to. However, in the popular consciousness teenage sex is still viewed as a Problem. So people say "Obviously I don't approve of teenagers having sex but it's going to happen no matter what we do we better give them condoms." These conversations seem to treat teenage sex like a unpreventable natural disaster.

I think that there are three things which people don't want to acknowledge when they claim that teenagers can't control their sexual behaviour.

1) Some teenagers engage in sexual acts because they enjoy them and the benefits of them outweigh the risks of them in their judgement. Sometimes it's easier all around to frame teenagers as helpless victims of their libidos than people who just don't want to do what you want them to do. I think people also like avoiding this idea because if teenagers are in some way rational rather than automatons driven entirely by lust, then you'd have to admit that, yes, providing access to contraceptives may tip the balance for some teenagers from not having sex into having sex or from engaging only in less risky sexual acts into coitus. That behavioural switch is going to be hugely outweighed by the decrease in sexual infections and unplanned pregnancies, but if you care more about whether teens have sex than the consequences, it does make sense to keep them away from condoms.

2) Some teenagers are engaging in unfulfilling and/or unwise sexual behaviour because they live in a culture which tells them that to be happy/successful/of any value as a human being you have to be rubbing your genitals against someone else's. However, I'm not holding my breath for the day that people realise that if you don't want teens to fuck each other, maybe not raising them diet of films in which the female characters' happy ending is to be sexy and submissive enough to get a man's attention would be more effective than not letting them buy the morning after pill.

3) Some teenagers are raped. Often by other teens. In fact, several studies have found that abuse, including sexual abuse, is more common in teenage relationships than in older age groups.

Point 3 brings me around to why I really hate people claiming that teenagers have no control of their sexual behaviour: it contributes to rape culture. If you spread the idea that people can't control their sexual behaviour, it promotes the idea that maybe it wasn't the perpetrator's fault that he raped someone. And if it wasn't his fault maybe it was his victim's because she excited his uncontrollable lusts. Our society is already more than willing to find any excuse to excuse poor ickle rapists and blame their victims. Let's not add to it. Teenagers have sex because they want to or because they are coerced or forced by someone else who wants to. They don't trip and end up with their genitals inside each other.

A while ago a friend of mine, who is sort of patrilineal, possibly matrilineal and either way planning to convert, asked whether I ever thought that being a Jewish convert was oddly like being transsexual. There's the feeling that ones internal identity doesn't match the way one was originally perceived; trying to convince big important gate keepers of the validity ones identity; holding oneself to behavioural standards far beyond those of people who had your identity from birth; trying to 'pass'; getting into pointless counter productive hierarchies over who's a 'better' Jew/woman/man based on (among other things): being a bit Jewish to begin with (based on ancestry), who was a bit male/female to begin with (based on hormone levels/physical characteristics), who's frummer, who's more feminine/masculine, who was younger when they made the decision; and finally, for some, there's the genital surgery.

Another way in which they're similar is in the importance of accepting and respecting people's identities and the labels they use for themselves. Every so often you get someone in a queer/progressive/feminist circle declare that gender is just imaginary and doesn't really exist and ze is going to only use gender neutral language from now on and anyone who thinks they're a particular gender is just a schmuck to patriarchy and actually reinforcing it through their actions. This tends to be responded to by a transsexual pointing out that she wouldn't have gone through all of the cost and pain and hassle and side effects and loss of cis-privileged of transitioning if gender didn't fucking matter.

Sometimes, in discussions of religious matters, I feel like the pissed off transsexual woman. Sometimes during cuddly, cotton candy, 'we're all the same really' interfaith dialogue I feel like screaming "No, no actually. We're not all the same. I wouldn't have gone through the expense, hassle and exposure to antisemitism of becoming Jewish if all religions were the same really and it didn't really matter. It matters a fuck load to me."*

Things get a bit more complicated because there are some people who are genderqueer/intersex/don't really care about gender, who have been really hurt by a binary system of gender. They need to advance a concept of gender which is more fluid and muddy and liminal. Similarly, there are people who come from interfaith families or have an interfaith religious identities who find the binary of Jew/non-Jew limiting and advance a more fluid concept of Jewish identity and claim for themselves identities such as interfaith/multifaith and half-Jew.

Ideally, this shouldn't cause problems. The fact that one person is genderqueer doesn't mean that another person isn't a woman, even if she wasn't identified as female when she was born. Just because one person is interfaith doesn't mean that another person isn't a Jew, even if she was born to gentile parents. The problem comes when that in our attempts to assert our own contested identities we can over step a mark and start denying each others identities. A Jew with a non-Jewish father might assert "You're either Jewish or you're not Jewish and I'm as Jewish as fucking Tevyeh". People campaigning for acceptance of interfaith and half-Jewish identities may sometimes claim people as the one of theirs regardless of how those people identifies themselves. I'm sure you can imagine equivalents for gender. It's further complicated because, simple as it should be to understand that people with similar backgrounds often have different identities, inevitably we're going to get labelled with each other's labels, even if we don't do it ourselves. That doesn't stop being mislabelled smarting. And of course there's the age old problem that we're all arguing over the scraps from the master's table and it's really tempting to try to get up the ladder by treading on each other's heads.

I don't really have a solution other than to appeal to us all being a little bit more careful and considerate with each other. I'm not perfect in this because my approach to Judaism is really binary and I struggle to fit half-Jews into it. I'm just saying that I'm not interfaith or multifaith or half-Jewish or Jewish identified or both, and I'm going to get pissed off if you call me those things. I'm a Jew and I'm a convert. I'm a Jew-by-choice but I'm going to get pissed off if you use that term and then go on to refer to Jews-by-birth as just 'Jews'. Now to the deliberate mistake in the title. Lots of women who are perfectly open about being transsexual get pissed off by the term transwoman because almost everyone who uses it doesn't use the term ciswoman when referring to women who aren't transsexual. If your fluid concepts of identity are contesting the identities of people whose identities are already marginalised and contested, more than people whose identities are reinforced by existing power structures, you're probably making a mistake somewhere along the line.

*There's a whole n'other issue about the way that so much interfaith dialogue relies upon ignoring differences between religions. Ignoring the ways in which I differ from you is no more accepting than ignoring the ways in which we're similar.

Lots of people on my Facebook feed are complaining about Theresa May being made minister for women and equality. Part of this complaint seems quite valid, in that she voted against gay rights legislation in the past. I think part of this problem stems from the fact that women, queers, talking animals etc. are all lumped into one portfolio. As there are more openly women people than there are openly gay people, it would not be politic to fill the role with a gay man. This means that the Conservatives were stuck trying to find a woman they were willing to give another cabinet position to to fill the role. If you restrict that to someone who has a good record on LGBT rights you've got pretty slim pickings. According to a quick skim of The Public Whip, the only female Conservative MPs with vaguely good records on gay rights votes are Theresa Villiers and Eleanor Laing.

The thing which is annoying me, however, is that one of the things being held against Theresa May as Equalities Minister is that she voted to reduce the gestational age at which abortions could be performed upon foetuses who are not disabled and do not pose a serious risk to their mother's health, to 22 weeks. This annoys me for several reasons.

Firstly, abortion has nothing to do with the equalities minister. Changes in the legality of abortion are always free votes and the everyday administration to do with the availability of abortion is the responsibility of the minister for health. So her views on abortion in themselves have nothing to do with how she will execute her role as equalities minister.

Secondly, a couple of people seem to be completely conflating LGBT issues with abortion, which is odd because I'd image queer people tend to have a below average demand for abortions. There seems to be an assumption that if you're in favour of gay rights you must be in favour of liberal laws do with abortion. Same sex marriage is legally recognising the union between to people for purposes of immigration, financial claims, tax status, next of kin rights etc. Abortion is killing humans. Not that similar. There are lots of queer anti-abortion people and we get pissed off when people lump it all together.

Thirdly, voting for the gestational age at which abortions could be performed upon foetuses who are not disabled and do not pose a serious risk to their mother's health, to 22 weeks. Doesn't strike me as that great a shibboleth of someone's feminist credentials. Even if the vote had passed and the limit been lowered to 22 weeks, the UK would have been almost the only country in Europe where it is legal to kill a foetus at 22 weeks on purely social grounds. What is going on in the world when we declare a politician unfit to represent women because she wanted to lower the abortion limit so that it would be only 4 rather than 6 weeks later than it currently is in Sweden?

People often talk about criminals' and defendants' rights and victims rights as being in opposition. Actually, I think that are a lot of things which could make things better for both victims and defendants or make things better for one without being to the detriment of the other.

I get the impression that the courts are overloaded. This leads to long waits before things come to trial and that's bad for almost everyone. Firstly, memories get muddied over time so the chances of getting the correct verdict is decreased. The victim has the case hanging over her for month, during which time she can't really get closure and move on. The defendant also has the case hanging over him and bail restrictions. The only people who benefit from the delay are criminals who hope to scarper or harass witnesses into not testifying and sadistic bastards who want to use the court to string out the suffering of their victims. I don't think that we should be running a justice system for their benefit.

Even of we have to manage with overloaded courts, they could at least communicate better with the people involved in cases. Expecting a victim of a serious crime to just call up the court listings everyday to find out if her attacker's case is going to start the next day does not seem reasonable. Not bothering to tell her that it definitely won't start for a couple of days because the defence barrister is busy with another case, also not good.

I think a lot of victims of crime, rather than wanting longer sentences, just want their lives not to be even further fucked over by the trial process and not be treated as an inconvenient peripheral figure in the trial of their attacker.

I've been thinking about this for a while. To be honest, I don't know if it's a serious suggestion or a bizarre satire.

I think I took things a bit too much to heart as a child when they taught us about sharing. I'm so lucky to have everything I have and I get the urge to share it with people who weren't so lucky. An example of this is that I get the urge to share my husband. I'm so lucky to have him and he's so wonderful that whenever I hear of female friends having difficulty finding a nice male partner I get the urge to say "Look, I found a great one. We could share." Now this is a non-starter because Alec has a say in things and he is deeply monogamous by nature and took the message from Big Love that three wives means three times the nagging and more than three times the arguments. He also claims that if I talk about this to much with female friends they'll start avoiding me.

From a less personal point of view, I notice that there seem to be more good single women than good single men. When I think of my friends, there are lots of women who I can't understand still being single because they seem like such perfect girlfriend/wife material but not so much so with my male friends. I'm starting to think that there just aren't enough good men to go around.

From a more political perspective, I think polygamy could be like political lesbianism lite. I can see the logic of feminist separatism on statistical level. Women with male partners are more likely to be abused by their partners and their children are more likely to be abused by their partners because men are much more likely statistically to be abusive toward their family than women. Sometimes I get infuriated by the way feminism is always having to make itself palatable to men and sometimes I think that logically we should just up and off and set things up without them. On the other hand, I like some men and I don't want men who act kingly and righteously to be excluded from this utopia. I'm also aware that for some women, all the feminist theory in the world isn't going to stop them liking cock.

I think political polygamy could bring some of the advantages of political lesbianism. Women might be safer in polygamous marriages because they are sharing their partners and their living spaces with other women who could be more likely to see and act to protect each other and their children from abuse. They could also help to screen potential husbands for each other. Women could see how a man acted with his current partners to see whether he had abusive tendencies which only came out when he was living with a partner. So one side of the benefit can be summarised as women who share husbands would be able to protect each other.

The other side of it is that if you practise polygamy you don't have to have as many married men as in polygamous society. You can skim off the least sexist/abusive x% of men to have relationships with women and not have to expose women to the rest of them. Furthermore, the very real risk that if they don't sort themselves out they'll not be able to get a female partner, could force men to stop thinking that they're G@d's gift just because they have a Y chromosome. If a man doesn't want to do his share of the housework, he knows that his girlfriend could leave him for a man whose wives will confirm that he does. I suppose it's a similar argument to those saying that popular schools should be able to expand their intake. Good husbands will have more wives and all men will have to be better husbands if they want to have a wife.

Like I said, I'm not sure if this is a serious suggestion or a parody. Just some thinking out of the box.

Or rather, upon closer inspection of her wikipedia page, she's a militant secularist attempting to restrict other women's freedom of expression whilst styling herself as a "human rights' advocate.

She was on Womens' Hour today actually advocating the criminalisation of wearing a burqa in England. I am actually almost shaking with anger at such brutish intolerance to attempt to turn the potentially violent force of an institutionally racist and sexist police and criminal justice system upon women who refuse to show enough flesh for the majority's liking. Let's explore some of the arguments used to justify such a move.

1) Immigrants should conform to our ways.
This argument always fits a weird paradox in Western Europe. Among the many vague values which get mentioned when you ask people what they like about the values of their country are often tolerance, freedom and (particularly in England) room for eccentrics. What could be more British than letting someone wander around wearing a tent with eye holes if they want? What could be less British than banning certain items of clothing? We're a nation who developed a police turban. I don't want us to lose that. I also have a sympathy for the women who must exist who want to wear a burqa and aren't immigrants. Should we drive our daughters into exile if they want to dress in ways we don't approve of?

2) People shouldn't have to see religious clothing.
I really don't understand the delicate little flowers who are likely to faint at the sight of a burqa. It's not that scary. Every day I walk past lots of churches. I occasionally see the odd monk or nun. I frequently see clergy wearing dog collars. Despite this constant onslaught I manage to both survive and remain non-Christian. If seeing a burqa is all it takes to magically achieve your reversion to Islam, maybe you should be a Muslim.

3) It's a security risk.
I think these sorts of issues should be dealt with empirically. When we worried about Sihks carrying their kirpans in public we looked into it and found that kirpans had almost never been used to commit crimes. How many crimes have been perpetrated by women wearing a niqab or burqa in the UK? I hesitate to say that because it will incentivise members of the BNP and the National Secularist Society to wear burqas to commit crimes just to prove a point. If one needs to identify a woman a female attendant can ask to to step to a secluded place to see her face. Airports should have female attendants anyway to frisk and search female passengers. Face recognition technology is currently piss poor at identifying people.

4) Now we've gotten past that lets get to the one people who think that they're liberal like to trot out. Women aren't wearing burqas voluntarily, they're being forced by their fathers and husbands who are also abusing them and restricting their freedom.
We could get into a very long conversation and coercion, consent and embedded decision making, but unless we're also going to put on the table wearing make up, heterosexual sex and full time working hours let's pretend that these concepts are as simple as most people pretend they are. Some women freely choose to wear a burqa or niqab. I know this to be true. I do not know what proportion of British women who wear burqas do so because they want to. Let's assume, for the sake of argument that the majority are being forced, what would criminalising burqa wearing achieve? At best you now have abused, controlled an threatened women, but now you can see their faces. You still can't tell whether they're being abused and you're still not doing much to stop them being abused, but you've made them look like everyone else so you don't have to think about it.* Men aren't going to magically stop abusing their wives and daughters. Their faces being seen in public doesn't stop non-Muslim men abusing their wives. At worst what you've got is abused and controlled women who are allowed out of the house less. You've got abused controlled women who are at risk of prosecution. You've got abused controlled women who have much less ability to escape their situation and access services to help and protect them. Not an improvement.

I cover my hair for religious reasons. No one forced me. My husband is neutral about it. My family finds it odd but tolerates it. My religious community see it as an eccentricity. I was born in England. I can beat almost anyone in a "whose ancestors have been here longest" contest. However, because I refuse to let men other than my husband see my hair:
I am excluded from serving as a judge in Denmark.
I would not be allowed to work for a French state school or hospital and would not be allowed to attend a French state school.
I would not be allowed to be a teacher in 8 out of 16 German states (even though nuns are allowed to teach wearing habits).
These are abuses of women's human rights.

If that's all made you too angry and depressed, here's a great treatment of the issue which might inject some sense into the people who think legislating over what women wear is a great way to liberate them.


*And before people chime in that you'll be able to see the bruises if they're not wearing a burqa, I know a woman who dresses conventionally and was beaten by her husband and no one had an inkling of what was going on. I saw her the day after she was thrown down the stairs and I never suspected. There are lots of ways to hurt and control which don't leave marks.

For full disclosure, I cover my hair. I've covered my hair since I got married, just under eight months ago. I really like covering my hair. I like having parts of my body which I keep private for myself and those I choose to show them to. I like the way my pretty scarves look. I like the way the scarf can pull together a whole outfit. I like being able to fall out of bed and rush out of the door without having to brush my hair. I like not having my hair blow in front of my face when I'm cycling or falling into things I'm doing. I also come from a background where this is unusual. I am white. I was raised in an Anglican family where hair covering was not practised. I go to a synagogue where one other woman covers her hair. I am married to a man who has no expectations about how I should dress and very much takes his lead from me. When I am pooteling about people probably look at and think 'hippy' rather than 'danger to democracy'.

This all, I am increasingly realising, gives me a very different approach to head scarves than an awful lot of people. When I see another woman covering her hair I think good on her.* I project onto her my feelings and motivations and assume she's happy with what she's wearing. I'm sure that there are some women who are forced to cover their hair, legally required in some countries. This is not nice, but actually, in the big scheme of things, I doubt that being made to cover their hair is the main problem facing these women, in the way a lot of the media makes out. Generally, violence and the threat of violence and economic disempowerment are far greater threats to women than any dress code. A burqa (contrary to what my nearest Amnesty International book shop might claim) is not violence, the threat of violence to a woman who does not wear one is. Generally, it just baffles me why anyone would be so concerned about what other people choose to wear.

I was rudely awoken from my benign view this morning. I vaguely remembered that some employer in the UK had commissioned staff hijabs for their hijab wearing staff to wear, in the company colours.** Now, I think that this is just a bit of fun. Most employers are perfectly happy with women wearing hijab in black or white or he company colours and have no need to make a special corporate hijab. I wanted to show pictures of the hijabs to someone so I Googled a bit to find web pages about it and was really saddened by the results. As well as Ikea, the Metropolitan police an the Lincolnshire fire brigade*** have introduced uniform hijabs, that's a good thing in my book. What saddened me was the number of Google results which saw these innovations as the end of Western civilisation. I just can't for the life of me understand their point of view. Usually I'm quite good at understanding views I don't agree with but I just can't understand why people would object so strongly to police woman covering her hair in a way that matches her uniform. Part of the sadness is that this is slightly personal in that, in the unlikely event I ever joined the Metropolitan Police, I'd probably end up wearing the snazy police hijab. However, more it saddens my to think that hijabis, and muslimahs in general, have to face this constant barrage of negativity from the media. It makes me think of how I feel whenever Israel is involved in conflicts and why I don't read the Guardian anymore.****

Muslimah Media Watch is a blog which comments on this sort of thing. I was struck by one story she was dissecting, the BBC coverage of yet another "I was raped and beaten by my evil Muslim family but then I fled to the West, took off my hijab, abandoned Islam and became free!" stories. Now, there are women who are beaten and raped and escape to the West and abandon Islam and feel better for it and they deserve to be believed and have their voice heard. The problem is, call me cynical, but I don't think that these stories get lots of coverage because of the media's deep concern about violence against women. These narratives serve a nice purpose. They make non-Muslim Westerners feel good and allow them to think that their hatred of Islam and Muslim countries is based upon honourable concern for their poor women-folk. Rape is endemic in every country on Earth. Lots of women are raped by their Western secular step fathers. Lots of rapists are successfully prosecuted in Muslim countries. I'm sure there must be a woman somewhere who was repeatedly raped by her Western secular step-father, was ignored by the Western authorities, escaped, converted to Islam, married a Muslim man and moved to a Muslim country where she now happily potters about feeling free in her abaya. You'll never see that story published and if you did it would be spun as crazy brain washing Muslims preying on a vulnerable woman rather than as a indictment of the whole of Western society. The bias comes from choosing which stories to report, which stories can be made to fit into a particular narrative.

This is very, very bad. It's bad because it confirms prejudices. It's bad because it breed complacency and denial about the violence against women in Western societies. However, it's worst effect is upon Muslims. It sets up the discussion that either you're for rape or against Islam, you can't support one and not the other. This paralyses attempts to combat violence against women in Muslim communities because it closes off the discussion if the possibility of being both against rape and for Islam is denied so strongly. The obvious defence is denial and there is a terrible temptation to deny the experience women like Fatimah and call them liars to protect Muslims from the threat of Western Islamophobia. Even more cruelly, it causes Muslim women to silence themselves to protect their communities. Would you seek help from domestic violence from the authorities if you knew that your suffering would be used to discredit your religion? If you knew that you might be exposing your friends and family to police violence and more state intrusion against your community? When you use women's experiences to serve your own agenda, sometimes the only defence women have is to keep silent.

*I'm far too white to be able to get away with thinking like "you go girl".
**It turns out that the employer I was Ikea as you can see here.
***Before we get into 'political correctness gone mad' the fire brigade hijab is for wearing to school visits etc. not for fighting fires, when I presume they wear helmet and such like.
****Referring to funding organisations who have in their charter that they want to kill people like me as 'anti-war activities' is a good way of getting me to stop reading your paper.

A couple of days ago I came across these videos which are mighty entertaining.

http://current.com/items/89019993/target_women_suffrage.htm

http://current.com/items/89365020/target_women_number_two.htm

http://current.com/items/89638578/target_women_lessons_2008.htm

OK, they are sort of political in that they're very amusing ridiculing of the portrayal of women in the US media.

Why exactly is Radio 4 allowing people on it's programmes who don't just believe in but have actively participated making education and employment conditional upon stripping for real women and talking to him as if he's a normal rational human being rather than a racist shit bag?

I have one thing to say to all the people who very calmly intellectually discuss how they have a lot of sympathy for the French policies which would exclude me and my children from education and almost every job I've ever held:
Fuck you!

I must say that being a big grown up grad student and a married old lady lead to me frequently looking at undergrads and thinking that I was like that once and one day they'll learn like I did. These moments frequently occur when I read the student press. This week was no exception. There was a feature in the TCS magazine called 'women discuss g@d' (notice the lower case letters, how edgy). The conversation got onto the topic of standards of women's dress. Generally I found the whole tone of the discussion problematic. The women who tended to cover more generally justified it in a 'we should help our brothers avoid lustful thoughts by keeping our sexy bits covered' which the no-religious women reasonably responded to with 'maybe men should develop some self control rather than changing my dress'. Generally, I think that men tend to get turned on regardless of what women wear. Sexual and erotic cues vary from person to person. I find people being barefoot rather attractive and my husband finds me particularly attractive when I have smudges of flour on my forehead from baking. There's also a problem that men's idea of what is lascivious is dependent upon what they see around them. If all women covered their thighs, knees would become the new erotic delight. Cover the knees and it'll become ankles until eventually women are 'asking for it' if you can make out their eyes through the gauze of their burqa. There are lots of reasons I dress a certain way, but protecting men from their libidos isn't one of them. As my husband once put it "For you, modest dress isn't about men, it's all about you".

Anyway, I digress from my main point. One of the exchanges in the conversation went:
IE (Catholic): What is it that one trying to portray by dressing in a more revealing way?
HT (happy atheist): I actually feel it is to do with confidence, I wear what I feel I look nice in, I show off the parts of my body which I like.

and later:
KN (practising Christian): Certainly, sometimes I would like to wear revealing clothing because I would feel confident. But for me it's not about how I feel in those clothes but about what kind of image I'm giving off.

Twice on a page different women made the showing lots of flesh=confident connection, which I can't quite understand myself. I wondered whether it as just a young thing. There's definitely something exciting about being able to dress in ways your parents wouldn't approve of. Maybe the women in this piece were experiencing the joy of young rebellion and mistaking it for confidence. However, as I was listening to Women's Hour this morning a piece about a new Gok show:

The ultimate in body confidence?

In a new television programme called Miss Naked Beauty, Gok Wan sets out to help women feel good about their bodies in their natural state: free of fake tan, cosmetic surgey and make-up. Increasingly, women are taking their clothes off on television programmes in the name of liberation and confidence boosting, but how much can this actually increase a woman's self esteem?

So grown women seem to also be making the less clothing=more confident connection. It just makes no sense to me. I doubt that someone who met me would think that I lacked confidence, despite my long skirt, high neckline and headscarf. I can't see how there is any correlation between amount of clothing and confidence. I can see that some women have such bad body image that they can't bear to be seen naked, but once you've established to yourself that this isn't the case for you, why would you feel the need to show flesh on a regular basis? On the other hand, maybe some women are wearing revealing clothing to distract attention from their personality which they're less confident about. It can go both ways. Now, call me a paranoid feminist, but I suspect that this might be one of those 'patriarchy convincing women that they're somehow liberated by actions which actually conform to men's desires' things. What do you all think?