Wednesday February 18, 2009
Bothered by bikinis
Spending a week on a beach in the tropics is hard on the eyeballs – at least for a male.
Most of the women wore bikinis, even if they shouldn\’t. Some of them had much more flesh than a bikini could cover.
A few women didn\’t bother wearing the whole bikini. That was even harder on the eyeballs.
The men with them, however, wore mostly baggy shorts that hung down to their knees. Most of the men had rather unappealing beer bellies spilling over the waistband of their shorts.
I found myself wondering who determines these fashions.
Initially, I thought that this difference in treatment of bodies reflected a patriarchal bias. Certainly, Honduras remains a strongly patriarchal culture. But the people wearing the beachwear at this resort were not Hondurans. Most came from Canada, some from the U.S.
The few European men typically wore Speedo briefs. The European women were more likely to sunbathe topless.
Unwritten standards
I don\’t think there\’s a fashion police who dictate what men and women should wear on the beach. Certainly no one issued instructions that the women must wear skimpy bikinis and men must wear baggy shorts. But any culture develops unconscious concepts of what\’s appropriate and what\’s not.
Clearly, the North American collective unconscious believes that women\’s bodies should be displayed, and men\’s should not. Women play beach volleyball in bikinis; men don\’t. At formal occasions, women\’s bodies are exposed as much as possible; men\’s bodies are covered from necktie to socks.
That might imply that fashion choices are determined by males.
Many men will immediately protest that women have the upper hand. They get into the lifeboats first when a ship sinks. They have doors opened for them. They generally receive lighter sentences from juries.
Indeed, there are organizations that insist that men consistently get shafted in divorce settlements, custody battles, spousal abuse cases, etc.
I don\’t buy that rationale. I think it\’s more likely that the special privileges accorded to women – mostly a leftover from Victorian times – were intended to reinforce the notion of women as helpless creatures who needed male help to open doors and balance chequebooks.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Charlene Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
If women were in charge, would they design an economic system that pays them roughly two-thirds as much as men for the same job? (In macho Honduras, women get paid about one-third as much as men.)
In a world run by women, would nations pay out $18 billion in holiday bonuses to Wall Street bankers, while slashing $5 billion from funding for prevention of AIDS, TB, and malaria?
Or spend a trillion dollars a year on arms, when one per cent of that could provide clean water and sanitation for every family on earth?
For sure, no woman would have invented mammography. If men had their testicles examined in a vice…
Even beaches might be different. I\’m guessing, of course, but if women ran things, I suspect they might prefer segregated beaches, where women would wear nothing at all.
But I also suspect that even on segregated beaches, many men would hesitate to expose their shortcomings to public scrutiny.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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