Offended by Bikinis
July 1, 2017
STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:
Your recent point that modes of female dress and the depiction of female physicality carry potent symbolic power and reflect a society’s health took me back to a certain desk at a Christian Brothers school at Bondi Beach years ago when the same point was made to my classmates and me by a Brother who had, in the ’60’s, established a school in tribal Papua New Guinea.
He related that one evening he screened a film for the boys and their parents where all of the mothers, quite in keeping with their societal custom, were either topless or almost so.
All was well until a scene appeared around a pool where Western women were shown in what were, for those days, somewhat revealing bikinis, but which of course would be considered quite modest nowadays.
The native mothers did not hesitate but rose as one and ushered their husbands and sons out of the room.
The native ladies later complained that while the women in the movie bared less than they, this was not the point. The Papuan ladies knew from observation of Western women that bikinis of such brevity were not considered modest dress by Western standards and so they took the view that the women depicted in the film, having breached their own societal mores, ought to be shunned.
These Papuan ladies instinctively appreciated the universal truth that physical modesty is tremendously powerful and is an important marker of personal worth and ultimately of a society’s value. These ladies instinctively gave the lie to to the modern Western fable that modesty or restraint in female dress is nothing but an artificial, unhealthy and sexist imposition of the Western patriarchy on women.
One wonders what the ladies would have made of our very latest symbol of female empowerment.** She seems to be standing in the desert right now but no doubt is soon to appear at a beach near you and me.
**[Photo of Michelle Waterson, the “mixed martial artist,” deleted by TTH censorship board.]
