In class today I was explaining how Franco’s dictatorship imposed a very strict dress code on women.
“The kind of dress I’m wearing today, pants, short shorts, sleeveless blouses, open-necked shirts – all that was considered indecent by the dictatorship,” I say. “Now, why do we wear short skirts and dresses and shorts?”
“To look pretty and attract men!” a male student blurts out.
Female students roar with laughter.
“Believe it or not,” I smile, “I don’t come here to look pretty or attract anybody. That’s really the last thing on my mind when I come to teach. But let’s ask our female colleagues. Women, why are you wearing T-shirts and shorts today?”
“Because it’s +92 degrees F,” a female student explains.
“Ah!” says the male student who had advanced the “looking pretty” theory. “That. . . makes sense.”
I’m always happy to challenge the worldview based on the idea that women exist to look pretty and attract men and for no other purpose whatsoever.
Why do men wear clothes? Because they lost the vestigial garment of an ape, his cape.
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I was taught as a child that women dress to be fashionable and never to attract men, which they have no interest in doing, ever.
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Both extremes are too extreme, of course.
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That’s an amazing story.
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Franco imposed a very strict dress-code on women. Islamists want to expose a very strict dress-code on women. And they call anti-Islamists fascists…
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I think that burqas, etc. are absolute barbarity and have blogged about it extensively.
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Women should be gratuitously naked and exhibit .
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I’m guessing from this comment that not a single woman in the world cares about your opinion as to what she should do. Sucks to be you, man.
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I feel that if I covered myself in Islamic garb, I would be inclined to behave very badly. Anonymity removes a level of shame (at least for me), so with my entire face and body veiled, I would probably curse like a sailor, drive like a schizophrenic and possibly (if it was a really demented day), use my burka as a handy shoplifting accessory!
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