The intent of this blog was not meant to be topical. However, here in Canada there has, of late, been wide-spread talk about school dress-codes and how they affect young women in particular. And since my exposure to women's issues comes in no small part from my encounter with art history it occurred to me that my opinions on this patter have been partially formed by art.
I was lucky, in as much as I grew up in a context in which my mother (and step-mothers) were individuals with careers who did not, relatively speaking, fit into traditional women's roles. As a boy it never would have occurred to me that women were somehow less than men or should not receive the same rights and responsibilities in the work-force or in society in general. However, this attitude was, ironically, somewhat naive because I simply didn't realize, for a very long time, the depth of sexism and gender inequality in our society. My first real understanding began, I think, upon reading the work of John Berger, one of the great art historians of the 20th century. Chapter 3 of Berger's ground-breaking book Ways of Seeing, begins with this passage.
"According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man's presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence. The promise of power may be moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social, sexual - but the object is always exterior to the man. A man's presence suggest what he is capable of doing to you or for you. His presence may be fabricated, in the sense that he pretends to be capable of what he is not. But the pretence is always toward a power which he exercises on others.
By contrast, a woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, tastes - indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her emanation, a kind o heat or smell or aura.
To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is waling across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From the earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually." (pages 45-46)
This remarkable passage was a revelation to me when I first read it as an art student, and its significance has grown on me ever since, particularly when I became a father. It made me realize the deep, structural, processes of sexism that are inherent in even our daily, seemingly prosaic actions. And this passage so expertly expresses one of the reasons that school dress-codes are so profoundly objectionable to me. I believe that anyone who imagines that school dress-codes treat girls and boys equally really isn't paying attention. But much more importantly, we must understand that even if school dress-codes were directed and enforced entirely equally in gender terms, their impact is fundamentally sexist. This sexism arises from the fact that, given the historical inequities and the psychological/ideological effects as outlined by Berger above, it is fundamentally different for a young woman to be 'told' what to wear and what not to wear than it is for a young man. For the young woman, such restrictions are a continuation of millennia of physical and psychological control. When a young woman is told that her thighs or her shoulders or her bra-straps are provocative and distracting to men, she is being told once again that she is an object of observation and she once again become an object of her own observation. She is compelled, once again, to survey herself, not as an individual whose presence and power is rooted in her potential for action or achievement, but as an image of gestures and body-parts, and clothes and expressions.
This is not to say that the elimination of dress-codes would magically solve the problems of gender inequality. Young men will, perhaps, always "look" at young women, and it will likely be a very long time before woman are not continually surveying themselves. And I don't believe that there is anything inherently "sexist" about sexual attraction. But if we want our daughters to grow up to be confident women of ability and achievement, we must stop the cycle of observation, surveillance, and control in which they are potentially mere 'distractions' for the male imagination. And this means that we must stop telling them what to wear and how to wear it.
Later in the same passage that I quoted above, Berger writes "one might simplify . . by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." I couldn't think of a better expression of what is problematic about school dress-codes and why, regardless of intent, they continue to be fundamentally a reinforcement of gender inequality.
No comments:
Post a Comment