In an op-ed for the Boston Globe historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg and women’s health advocate Jacquelyn Jackson argue that while women in Afghanistan are celebrating the demise of the Taliban by removing their burkas, women in the United States have yet to fully realize how oppressed they are by the wearing bikinis and other cultural phenomenon that distort women’s body images.
According to the duo, “our war against the Taliban … highlights the need to more fully understand the ways in which our own cultural ‘uncovering’ of the female body impacts the lives of girls and women everywhere.” Their op-ed continues,
Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for “Temptation Island 2” features near naked women. Although we seem to be winning the war against the Taliban, it is important to gain a better understanding of the Taliban’s hatred of American culture and how women’s behavior in our society is a particular locus of this hatred. The irony is that the images of sleek, bare women in our popular media that offend the Taliban also represent a major offensive against the health of American women and girls.
Whew. Who knew the Taliban were on to something in their extreme misogyny? Islamist parties in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have often demanded the abolition of women’s sports on the grounds that sports are unfeminine and tend to showcase women’s bodies in a lurid manner (Muslim extremists in Kuwait, for example, were horrified at the sexually provocative outfits worn by women’s soccer teams during the 2000 Olympics). Many women’s activists in the Middle East pay a high price for fighting such views, only to have feminists like Brumberg and Jackson mimic the conservative argument that, as they put it, “…American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture…”
Brumberg and Jackson go on to indict media images for contributing to “eating disorders, teen smoking, drinking, and the depression and anxiety disorders that can occur when one does not measure up…” For good measure they also endorse the American Medical Association’s unwarranted assertion that there is a link between “violent images on the screen and violent behavior among children.”
Brumberg and Jackson’s finish their op-ed with a flourish that is as absurd as it is audacious,
Whether it’s the dark, sad eyes of a woman in purdah or the anxious darkly circled eyes of a grail with anorexia nervosa, the woman trapped inside needs to be liberated from cultural confines in whatever form they take. The burka and the bikini represent opposite ends of the political spectrum but each can exert a noose-like grip on the psyche and physical health of girls and women.
Source:
The burka and the bikini. Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Jacquelyn Jackson, November 23, 2001.