“In both cases, we are talking about sexist oppression”

Last week scientist Matt Taylor wore a shirt covered with scantily clad women for a live interview. When women called this out, one individual responded by creating a shirt covered with burka clad women, which he dubbed it feminist approved.

Reader timberwraith responded to the burka shirt as follows:

I’ll share an observation of the burka vs. skin dichotomy made by many feminists long before this particular this gent’s clothing issues reared its mediocre head.

It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about expecting women to cover up from head to toe in service to “modesty” or you are talking about expecting women to wear as little clothing as possible in service to sexual gratification. Both instances revolve around cis het men’s sexual desire and the expectations that arise around them. In the first case, women are expected to adjust their clothing choices i n deference to avoiding the titillation of men’s sexual desire. In the second case, women are expected to adjust their clothing choices in deference to enhancing men’s experience of sexual desire. They are both two sides of the same coin: patriarchal societies expect (and often demand) women to constrain their clothing choices and more generally, their lives, in deference to cis het men’s perceived sexual needs and desires in accordance to the ways that men’s needs and desires are constructed and filtered through an all pervasive sexist, misogynistic cultural matrix.

In both cases, we are talking about sexist oppression. In BOTH cases.

So, the continued juxtaposition of widespread, over-sexualized images of women as symbolic of sexual and gender liberation in contrast to burkas and similar restrictive clothing as representative of sexism and misogyny run amok is bullshit.