my last word on the dress thing

OK, any comments I might make on how young women dress today(as in yesterday's entry) would be incomplete without taking note of the wide difference between how American females dress and how females dress in the Muslim tradition, even in this country. But before I start out, a caution: I'm speaking here of the deeper psychological and cultural implications that I think exist behind the way we choose to dress.

About ten years ago, maybe a bit longer, I gave a talk on being a published writer at my old high school, which is a Catholic school for girls. It's still for girls only, but there have been a lot of changes since I went there in the 1950s. Now you can't tell a nun from a lay person on the staff. The girls still wear uniforms, but their skirts are apparently not regulated as to length -- certain girls had them so short it kind of took my breath away. And they sit on the floor without regard to what we so quaintly called modesty, and not a single teacher so much as blinked. I wonder if that word even exists anymore, or if it does, what they think it means.

Amid all the display of young legs in the room where I spoke, there was a Muslim student. She wore, I suppose, her own version of the school uniform. The colors were consistent, a soft blue-gray and white, and the fabric seemed the same as the skirts. But the Muslim girl wore a white, draping headscarf that covered even more of her face and neck than the wimples the nuns used to wear, her dress reached her ankles (as our old 50s uniforms did, or near enough), and her sleeves covered her hands except for the fingers. When she raised her eyes and looked straight at me, I saw she had an astonishingly beautiful face.

Years later after that visit to my old school, during the time after 9/11 when it was still possible to believe that at least some good might come out of American involvement Afghanistan, and GWB hadn't yet committed insanity on Iraq, I saw on the Independent Film Channel a doctumentary produced by an American woman in Afghanistan. It was about Muslim Afghan women who are forced by their husbands and their culture to remain at home, uneducated, and to cover themselves when they go out of the house for any reason. The Muslim woman who participated kept her entire head, eyes included, covered in a dark scarf the whole time. She showed the film maker the difference in how she dresses when she goes out -- in a voluminous blue burkha (however you spell it) that covers absolutely everything and has a kind of window-screen thing to see out of -- and how she dresses at home. At home, generally she wears dresses that look very much like most women wear anywhere, sleeves and buttons and average length skirts. But when she dresses for an evening with her husband, in outfits that he chooses, it's fantasy time. And his fantasy looks to Western eyes like something out of Victoria's Secret catalogues. The woman, who gave her age as 40-something, had a beautiful body. Even in this slightly grainy black and white documentary, you could tell she took good care of that body.

I thought it was more than just mildly disgusting, the whole concept that her gloating husband would have her dress that way for him alone. That it is his Allah-given right to see his wife's body, which nobody else can see.

I don't need to go on at any length about this -- I think most Americans, especially women, will be able to fill in the blanks for themselves.

As much as I deplore the way the teen girls are dressing now, I'll take it over the Muslim concept. I guess.

But I remain troubled. I think the girls and boys of today may be in trouble a few years hence, if their clothing reflects what I think it does about the values they are growing up to hold.

-- Dianne