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Summary
Constantly advising women to dress morally when such advice are not given to men is steep in purity culture aimed to control women.
Many times, an Internet user has gone viral for giving seemingly innocuous “moral advice,” and many people, notably feminists online, have taken offence. Yet, another group of people is left befuddled, scratching their heads and wondering, ‘What the heck is going on? What’s all the ado about? These people are sick, and they’ll be the damn end of our civilisation.’
First of all, nice try. What a clever way to go about misattributing doomsday prophecies to women whose only crime is being women’s rights activists. That sure helps strengthen anti-feminist sentiments in the mind of any logical thinker.
To address the validity of such concerns, if not misplaced, now: feminists are not all amoral, anarchical beings who derive sadistic pleasures in being rebellious beings, fomenting trouble wherever they go (although there exists a rebel archetype, positive and compatible for the cause of feminism, that is a topic for another day). The problem with such advice, telling women what to do, what to say, how to act, how to dress, and ways to think, is that they all too often come from a place of prejudice, cloaked in double standards and bred in a culture of purity.
Purity culture refers to all of the markers of culture, from beliefs to actions to expectations and punishments, which characterises women as saints or places the burden of uprightness or cleanliness (especially in a spiritual and sexual sense) on them. It is manifest in beliefs such as a woman ‘preserving’ her virginity to ‘present’ to a man on the wedding night or in utterances that paint rape victims as ‘defiled.’
It trickles through advice suggesting to women to cover up to be respected or shaming them for exhibiting sexual behaviours. These, as a rule, are standards exclusively set for women, and this is why they are offensive to the sensibility of any critical woman. Aside from the fact that such ideals are preached to police women, and not for the sake of any inherent value some of them have, they are untrue on so many grounds – from conceptual to scientific.
Women’s vaginas, for example, do not get ‘slackened’ after regular periods of sex. There is also no evidence to show a correlation between dressing and sexual assault. All people, women inclusive, are born with intrinsic value, and the state of being sexual or never having had sex does not diminish this inalienable worth.
It is one thing to have an issue with a phenomenon and to preach and live by whatever ideals one deems fit for one’s life, but when the issue with an occurrence is only with women doing or engaging in it, that is quite literally misogyny. Hating women for the sake of their being women or for the fact that they engage in activities that would be overlooked in men.
Being modest or immodest for the sake of “attracting” a man or doing anything at all aimed at disingenuously getting the perks of a human relationship from anyone is manipulative and unfair. Values like kindness, friendship, love, attention, respect, civility and decency in public spaces should be practised for their sake and freely given and received for their mutual benefit and humane function.
The fixation on morality for women, while men are free of such moral responsibility, is a double standard, and this is anti-feminist because rhetoric encouraging and fueling the ideas of innocence, respectability and the likes in women characterises women as being essentially different from men, hence difference in standards of relation.
