THREE DEFENSES OF THE BUTCH MANTILLA: This is not a post about sincerism!

But in my previous vast post on the subject, I said this:

My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity–like ethics-talk!–is frequently appropriate.) If you say, “Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul’s misogyny!”, and I drawlingly reply, “Well hmmm, I’d rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit”… I’ve stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I’d clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

which, understandably, led some readers to say that they were not willing to get on the “misogyny is okay if it’s pretty!” train I seemed to be conducting.

So here are three defenses of my position, in order from least to most persuasive-to-me.

#1. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? In any case where we’re negotiating a tradeoff between beauty and equality, I’ll defend the practice of asking, “How much beauty for how much equality?” In this case the beauty is obvious–those headscarves and church hats are lovely!, and the various kludges women used when they were caught short without their headcoverings (such as bobby-pinning the church bulletin to their hair) strike me as charmingly humiliating and wry. Meanwhile the equality is quite minor and fairly unsettling–neither men nor women would be expected to wear some symbol of their submission to God.

However, this argument does fail to meet a major objection, which I hinted at in the Hamlet (/Ophelia) quote. The mantilla can be understood to imply that women need more signs of submission to God than men do. This is a subspecies of the “outsourcing their spiritual lives to the womenfolk” that I decried here. If we understand the mantilla this way, we oppose its beauty not only to truth but also to men’s submission to God. Both of these oppositions seem to me to be much harder cases than beauty v. equality, and I’d be hard-pressed to take beauty’s side here.

So ultimately I think the “tradeoff” argument fails, though the fact that I consider it a strong argument should give some sense of how I approach these issues.

#2. Spending time, nowadays it’s equal, nice, it’s paradise…. I might be more amenable to ditching the mantilla if it really meant that women would be equal! But it never does, you know? Ridding ourselves of these ways in which tradition beautifies our subordination never ends the subordination (and often doesn’t even mitigate it); it simply replaces beautiful subordination with banal.

I note that the solution is always to ditch the specifically feminine symbols of submission, rather than universalizing them–nobody ever says that men should wear the mantilla. Julia Serano might have some sharp words about why that happens.

#3. The Man-Mary, again. If we look for ways to express both the spiritual equality of men and women, and gender difference, we may find ourselves in dangerous territory! Since I doubt adopting the yarmulke will win many friends among Our Elder Brothers in the Faith, we must look around for specifically Catholic forms of submission which are restricted to men, as the mantilla is restricted to women. Guess what we find?