Posts Tagged ‘modesty’
the clothed and ‘sexually modest’ ape – cui bono?
good ole Christian propaganda
It is illegal, just about everywhere in the world, to walk down a street completely unclothed, above a certain, very young, age. It’s also considered shocking, alarming and generally disruptive to the well-being of society. This truth has fascinated me ever since I was old enough to think muchly about it. Even the religious must accept that their god created humans déshabillé, so why all the fuss? Well, there’s been much philosophical palaver about the Garden of Eden story, the shocking discovery of ‘Otherness’ and how it distracted our ancestors from benefitting from the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and so forth, but from a more anthropological or palaeontological perspective, the question is, when did the purpose of clothing widen from providing protection and warmth to concepts of public decency? Not to mention style, fashion, class and all the rest.
So Wikipedia cites a 2010 study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, on the origin of habitual clothes-wearing:
That study indicates that the habitual wearing of clothing began at some point in time between 83,000 years ago and 170,000 years ago based upon a genetic analysis indicating when clothing lice diverged from their head louse ancestors.
That’s a useful time-frame, but it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get an insight, based on genetics or anything else, about the why of habitual clothes-wearing – that’s to say the mindset of those ancestors. Clearly, need had a lot do with it initially. Even today there are indigenous peoples in tropical climates who go about their business completely naked for much of the time, but climates have varied considerably, both locally and globally, and one theory has it that a very cold period in Eurasia some 40,000 years ago likely wiped out our Neanderthal cousins. A good set of fleecy jackets and ugg boots might’ve seen them through.
It’s more or less taken for granted, though, that we wouldn’t have been so self-conscious about our nakedness when we were as hairy as our chimp and bonobo cousins. On that topic, here’s Wikipedia again:
The first member of the genus Homo to be hairless was Homo erectus, originating about 1.6 million years ago. The dissipation of body heat remains the most widely accepted evolutionary explanation for the loss of body hair in early members of the genus Homo, the surviving member of which is modern humans. Less hair, and an increase in sweat glands, made it easier for their bodies to cool when they moved from living in shady forest to open savanna. This change in environment also resulted in a change in diet, from largely vegetarian to hunting. Pursuing game on the savanna also increased the need for regulation of body heat
We might dispute the time-frame, but there’s surely no doubt that we’d lost a substantial proportion of body hair, over a substantial period of time, before we started getting coy about our jangly bits and crevasses. During that long period, we developed into anatomically, neurologically (and perhaps neurotically) modern humans, being increasingly obsessed not only with proto-clothing but various other forms of bodily adornment, scarification and the like.
Of course, as the human population grew and spread, it diversified culturally. Bodily adornment and dress became a cultural indentifier, as did the treatment of women. The veiling of women can be dated at least to the Assyrians some 3,500 years ago, though it was practised exclusively by the elites. Slave women would be severely punished for such practices. The point being made had to do with women’s ‘availability’, particularly in the matter of sex. Apparently, slave women should be accepted as sexually available as a matter of course, while a respectable woman belonged exclusively to her husband, along with his other wives. And just by the by, the ancient Athenians’ veiling and closeting of women, as well as their economic dependence on slavery, makes as much a mockery of their being touted as ‘the first democracy’ as does the slave-based colony later to be officially called the USA, as ‘the first modern democracy’.
But returning to clothing in general, it is likely that, at least in cooler climates, the change from hunter-gathering, nomadic lifestyles to a more settled agricultural existence in the Neolithic period led to clothing becoming the norm, for adults at least. Perhaps the persistence of hair around the genital region marked it out as special and inviolable. It’s notable that the early paintings and drawings of Australian Aborigines depicted them as naked but for leaf-decorated belts or strings, with attached hides conveniently covering their privates. This may have been whitefella modesty, but it also makes sense that they would have been useful for attaching dilly bags, small weaponry and other items. It also makes sense that the genital area would have been most in need of protection, and so marked out as special, and then sacred.
Religion, of course, has played a role in all this, especially in terms of female bodies, but this of course begs the question of why all the dominant traditional religions are so patriarchal, and so obsessed with controlling sexuality….
All of which makes me want to express my exasperation by paraphrasing Marx – the question isn’t so much to understand this weird sex-policing world we’ve created for ourselves, but to change it…
References
who says women should be modest?
Does my body look too real in this?
The French government is copping lots of flack for its ban on face covering in public, and rightly so, for outright bans are rarely effective, and this one is seen, rightly or wrongly – and probably rightly – as discriminating against Moslem women and the burqas that some of them wear.
However having said that, I’m no fan of the burqa, or any form of dress that sharply divides women from men (I love women in suits, and I wish I had the courage to wear skirts in public – I’m still considering buying one of those kilts I saw advertised on Facebook recently). But the burqa seems particularly regressive, and it’s clearly not a coincidence that it’s an outfit favoured by the Taliban and the Islamist Saudi government. Of course there are many variations of Islamic head-wear for women, but according to the women themselves, from what I’m always hearing, they choose to wear these head trappings as a sign of modesty.
It seems to me that modesty is the ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ term for these women, because modesty’s a virtue, and who’d criticise a woman for wanting to be virtuous? However, given that men and women are equal in intelligence and ability, I see no reason whatever for modesty to be a woman-only virtue. So why aren’t men wearing burqas? It isn’t a rhetorical question – I note that there’s a movement in Iran for men to wear hijabs in support of female associates targeted by the government there for being ‘improperly dressed’. Government imposed modesty.
This kind of modesty is of course highly dubious, it’s about not putting yourself forward – for education, for advancement, for leadership. It’s about knowing your circumscribed place. It’s a shame because the term ‘modesty’ has I think a value that has been demeaned by this more recent cultural usage. The modesty I value is where people tend to avoid trumpeting their achievements, however impressive those achievements might be. This kind of modesty is obviously not gender based and surely has nothing to do with head coverings.
However, this modesty-in-women malarky is about more than just trying not to be seen as, or even not to be, a great achiever. It’s about sexual modesty, and that’s what the covering is all about. One of the key features of patriarchy is controlling women’s sexual freedom. It really is about women as objects which need to be hidden from the lusty urges of male subjects, though women themselves are subjects only insofar as they must effectively hide or cover themselves from male appetites, otherwise they’re blameworthy and need to be punished.
So all this stuff about female headcovering is essentially about female sexual control, which is of course most effectively achieved if females internalise the idea and exercise the control themselves, thereby assenting to and bolstering the patriarchy that deprives them of sexual and other freedoms. Banning these head-coverings isn’t the solution, though it might be necessary in some places for practical purposes. What we need to do is win the intellectual argument against the stifling restrictions of patriarchy, and engage women on the hypocrisy of female sexual modesty where there is a different standard and expectation for males.
men in burqas, not popular in Afghanistan, I wonder why