I’m comfortable with my sexuality, she said, gyrating to misogynistic tunes in a tight corset and stilettos, eyes darting, ever-hopeful of male attention although she had a live-in boyfriend.
I was thinking about this incident, which occurred at a feminist conference a few years ago, when I came upon Synaptic Cartography’s entry The Clothes Make a Woman that said exactly what I wanted to say, but far more eloquently:
I also grew up in a broader cultural climate where women’s value was not in their knowledge, their more spiritual offerings, or even in their beauty, but in their sex, their expression of their sex, their handing over of their sex. And it was sold as freedom…
Do read it in its entirety. It is, as always, beautifully and intelligently written.





3 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 21, 2006 at 3:36 am
Granny
Yes indeed.
March 23, 2006 at 6:13 am
Hajar
Thanks so much for sharing this! It’s beautiful and encapsulates my feelings exactly.
March 23, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Julaybib
There is a comment in The Guardian: ‘Today’s ultimate feminists are the chicks in crop tops’, by Kate Taylor. I read it with horror, but it also made some poignant points, especially in the light of comments allegedly made by the fundis on trial in London, about ‘slags’ dancing in clubs being fair targets for terror.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1737159,00.html
Wasalaam
TMA