It is just another battle in the culture wars, one might say. And one would be correct, but one would not be right. Actually one would be as wrong as one can be.
It is one of the fundamental promises of the enlightenment, if you want to read it as pompous as it can be written, or simply one of the tenets of modernity, that individuals should and will be emancipated from the weight of enslavering traditions. In that continuous development, in the always ongoing emancipation process, women emancipation is crucial, because it does changes pretty much all aspects of our societies, and our relations with each other. And I would say, a crucial gain of women liberation is the recognition that a women has the right to wear whatever she might possibly want. And I would have believed that this is well recognized, since a very long time, in The Netherlands.
And I would have been wrong.
I don’t even know where or when it started. It has not been much more than a couple of weeks, perhaps even one. I suppose that some idiotic public male figure said something about it, but it might have been a woman for all what matters. The thing is that suddenly there is a whole tidal wave of disgusting males declaring in all sort of media that girls at school should not dress provocatively.
Just as you read it. Almost as if supported by another anacronism, with a beard and thundering from between the clouds to them submissive ladies here below: “thou shall not dress those skirts when you are studying!”
As those things go, when those idiots explain themselves, things get worse and worse. Because they are actually very willing to explain themselves. And they have been telling, to whoever wants to hear, that young women sitting at high school, with all this provocative clothing, do not let them concentrate in the sacred task of enlighten them. I mean, c’mon! we are made of flesh too, I hear them saying.
So of course, I would go and review all the traditional arguments against such unbelievable level of idiocy in The Netherlands año 2021. I could say, for example, that if you are a man that get easily distracted by some skin shown by a young women, teaching high school is not the wisest career choice. Or I could say that you are a bloody pedofile, since that is pretty much the definition of getting aroused by underage women. Or a long etcetera of reasons that actually, you can imagine yourself even better than me.
The one that I really like, though, is that all these misters, all these defenders of the public morals, good costumes and proper behavior, should anytime now receive a condecoration from Saudi Arabia, or from Iran. At least given by the embassador in some sort of formal act. I suppose that Saudi Arabia and Iran have those things, as many other countries do, this thing of recognizing a foreigner for services to the country. Because it is us, here in the west, that continuously finger those countries by their backward religion, the Islam. It is us that keep on saying that the great tragedy of the european islam is that it will reverse the hard fought emancipation of women, with all those head dresses forced upon the ladies. So it is us that defend our liberal existence from the existencial threat of the Islam, the religion that gives a man the right to decides what a women should dress. And under which argument? under the argument that women should not tempt men.
Interesting that given the chance, we do exactly the same.