Should the Burqa Be Banned? Many Women Think No, But Others Disagree

By Sarah Seltzer, RH Reality Check. Posted July 13, 2009.

How can so many American feminists have come out against a burqa ban in France (as they largely have this past month) when the burqa, along with other excessively modest religious garb, appears to be a classic tool of gender oppression?

The answer is that singling out the burqa as the only article of clothing patriarchal enough to merit legal regulation -- or even strident criticism -- is racist. Critique of women's clothing, from burqas to cleavage, is often leveraged for other purposes, whether they be religious, cultural or political, and should be called out when it's faux feminism, as Aziza Ahmed argued on RH Reality Check.

But it's also true that almost every cultural or religious group sets standards of appearance that oppress women. Most fashion, from the corset of yore to the bikini to the FLDS prairie dress to the Nike sneaker (made by women in sweatshops, marketed to Western women), tends to hew in some way to patriarchal norms. So the quandary we grapple with, as feminists, is how to acknowledge that fact without alienating, targeting or harassing groups of women for the way they dress.

Remember the Manolo Blahnik pinkie toe-removal phenomenon, which hearkens back to Cinderella's stepsisters in terms of the lengths women go to mutilate themselves on the altar of fashion? Imagine if we outlawed those heels for fear that some women would shorten their pinkie toes.  In each instance of an oppressive custom of dress or beauty, it's right to support those feminists who debate it. It is also crucial to examine the implications for women and for gender roles of dressing one way or another -- it's a clear example of the personal being political. But we have to do that without punishing or shaming women for their choice of outfit, as the French would seek to do.

Rather than single out other people's problematic dress, we should all be engaged in a robust critique and examination of the way gender norms inform beauty standards everywhere. In France, a country that many of its citizen claim is paradoxically so sexually liberated the burqa isn't welcome, American-style short-shorts are still a novelty, for instance, likely to garner stares or catcalls. Women there tend to dress marginally more modestly than they do in America -- except on beaches, where topless bathing is accepted. Evidently, the pressure to cover up, or to uncover, in various contexts may be stronger than we think, even in "free" Western countries.

Here in secular/commercialized America, women try to live up to a prepubescent ideal, buying into a diet industry that's a racket and causes eating disorders, using chemical bleaches on our hair, and undergoing sometimes-painful waxing, peeling or plastic surgeries to look eternally young, slim and buxom. The beauty myth has always been part of our culture, but as feminist commentators like Naomi Wolf and Susan J. Douglas have noted, the craze for ever-smaller female bodies coincided with women taking up a more space in the workplace. Some women claim that restrictive fashion trends, obsessive calorie-counting and makeup make them feel great, but both women who love it and those who loathe it are spending money and energy on their looks in a way that most men simply don't have to. The Daily Show played with this idea last week:

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Sarah Seltzer is an RH Reality Check staff writer and resident pop culture expert. Sarah is a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published in Bitch, Venus Zine, Womens eNews, and Publishers Weekly among other places. She formerly taught English in a Bronx public school.

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