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outlyingthoughts · 5 years

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Trapped in a carnival: Feb 19

According to the Oxford reference definition, a carnival is : “a social expression that often subverts and parodies the conventions of society. Such subversion, parody, and satire, when applied to other realms of everyday life such as literature, is sometimes called ‘carnivalesque’. It exposes and mocks the flawed practices and decrees of officialdom”.

Costumed festivities are and have been a recurrent pattern in innumerable cultures across the globe. Whether it is the Catholic carnival or the Halloween tradition in the english-speaking world (derived from the pageant celebrations of the Gaelic Samhain Eve festival), it appears that costuming is part of basic human traditions and behaviors, regardless of cultures, ages and places.

Couples days ago, my friends and I were about to attend a themed party (basic human behavior remember?). Angels and demons. After agreeing that we’d go all together, we quickly started to rack our brains, trying to figure out how we would dress up for the event and we settled for matching outfits.

A friend and I ended up twinning as demons, both of us wearing bodysuits with coordinated colors. red and black. Hellish colors for what we expected would be hell of a night. But when I got my bodysuit out of the mail, questions were raised. As I tried it on for the first time with two friends, one had a knee-jerk reaction to it, stating that it was a lot and that she wouldn’t be comfortable wearing it. The other one’s opinion was in between, liking the outfit but also unsure about the revealing features of the bodysuit.

Revealing, indeed it was. A red laced V-neck, leaving little room for mystery. And even though questions started to build up into a debate within my styling crew (isn’t that what friends are?) on whether I should pull it off or not, one part of me was clinging onto the idea of wearing it. As I slipped into the bodysuit, I also slipped into the character, making me out of the sudden both emboldened and confident. Frustrating it would have been to not wear it.

Women bodies have always been pointed out as fruits of sin, and this idea is somehow anchored in most of human cultures for a reason I still haven’t figured out. As early as the metaphor of Adam and Eve, women have been branded with the symbolism of temptation but also as temptations themselves. We have been directed by patriarchal society to hide our bodies, one way or another, and throughout history to remain pure: putting on us men’s faults, weaknesses and inability to control their desires and blaming the victims.

As much as desires are also part of basic human behaviors, they are also a peculiar craft of our own. Shaped and reshaped during our entire socialization, they are mirrors molded in the cultures we live in. Human desires are inherently artificial, they are not biological needs and are rarely fulfilled for the sake of specie survival.

Thus the idea of lack of agency regarding one’s desires and the debate on one’s responsibility over her/his desire is a crucial concept. Researches have been and are still conducted to analyze the human brain and its reactions. The results of the first studies of that kind had serious legal implications as law solely relies on them to prove that humans are physically able to control their desires, thus legally binding them for their voluntary and conscious choice to commit an offense or a crime in the pulse of a desire. Such studies highlighted the fact, that it is possible for any mentally healthy human to control its desires and react to them according to her/his will.

Based on this, the almost automatic societal response consisting in blaming male’s lack of control and agency towards their sexual desire over women’s behavior and appearance comes as a proof of the normalization of what I consider a deviant behavior that men are socialized to interpret as normal or at least something they shouldn’t be held responsible for. Funnily enough, throughout history, those same men claimed that women had no will of their own and thus shouldn’t study, vote, work on their own, meaning shouldn’t be responsible of their own lives. For centuries, we have been handled by our fathers, husbands or literally any chromosome Y bearing person on earth, the very same that are rarely held accountable for their abnormal desire-led behaviors while putting a stereotype of irresponsibility on women.

Without meaning to, my red laced top was thrown in the middle of an everlasting debate: should I censor myself or be blamed for other people’s voluntary sexualization of my body ? A lot of weight on the shoulders of an eighteen years old girl who just wanted to party with her friends. As one part of me craved to rock my very own forbidden fruit as I felt enbolded in it and it had been praised by all my very feminist and politically aware friends, the other part of me held all the negative remarks, feeling guilty just at the thought of wearing it, as it would make me the prey of male gaze. If I listened to the remarks I got, by dressing up in such ways I’d justify or worst encourage the behavior I was denouncing earlier. To sum up, I’d become another blamable temptation. This highlights how we still live in a patriarchal society in which the rape culture is still a burning reality, where sexualizing women’s bodies regardless of the context or their intent is still the norm.

After dwelling on whether I should or not wear it, I went against my doubts and decided that I’d wear it for several reasons. Firstly, I know for a fact that if you are going to be sexually harassed or aggressed, the way you dress is just a mere excuse for the aggressor. Hiding behind clothes branded as « safe » isn’t 1) a solution for the societal issue behind the debate 2) going to prevent the person whose mind is set on agressing you from agressing you. It simply strips you from your freedom to dress accordingly to your own will, and that is a fundamental freedom for women. That day, I decided to not let male gaze or any normative patriarchal discourse prevent me from exercising this freedom that has been given to me through the fights of generations and generations of women.

As for the “reputation” side of dressing up in such ways, I sent out to our main groupchat the following text: «so I’m gonna go like that (insert picture) to Angel and Demons, so if you wanna gossip about it, you can start now, because people will see my nipples and I don’t care, if anyone pisses me off, I’ll tell them not to look at me, it’s not my problem if people choose to sexualize a part of my body that is not sexualized on men». I did not want to let slut-shaming get in my way, and quite frankly it’s 2019, if you put words and meaning behind appearances and acts, there is little harm possible to your “reputation”. Everybody understood and accepted my decision, my incentives were praised and others girls told me they had also decided to dress up in -what could be branded- a “scandalous” way. Being mainly surrounded by male friends that are aware of how flawed our society is in terms of sexism and aspire to participate along the side of women in the making of new norms, they also supported my choice of wearing my red bodysuit and I was, then, 200% sold.

From the moment I posted that text until the day of the event, everything went great, people might have been bad mouthing me but for all I knew and I cared, my friends supported me and the party turned out to be a fun event and we danced the night away. I don’t know if it is that I’m surrounded by an amazing community or that I simply got lucky, but no one harmed me, looked at me intensely in that threatening sexual manner that too many of us know. I tried to limit the spread on social media of pictures from that night to websites where I could control them. Yet to be honest, as soon we accept to take pictures or go out in our everyday life, we accept that anyone can find, keep and spread later images of us in public spaces. This bodysuit debate made me come up with a guideline of only wearing and doing things I would and will still be ok with being seen and posted in a twenty years time. This oversharing and ineffaceability that characterizes the internet created something that most of my friends and I have integrated. Living in an overconnected world and planning to have thriving careers, we owe it to our success to own and control every single word, act and image of us that could be, in this digital age, used against us.

But here again, I would willingly show these pictures to my children, and if I ever get lucky enough I’d be proud to explain my decision of wearing such revealing piece of clothing to who ever would try to minimize my professional legitimacy or who I am to a simply piece of scarlet lace. Because that is something that needs to be reiterated, the world has to stop associating women’s worth to their appearance. I find it increasingly shocking as days pass by that a woman can be denigrated on the basis of her clothing only because people have crossed boundaries and sexualized parts of her body regardless of whether she meant or not to sexualize her outfit. I could go on and on about Instagram’s policy regarding the ban women’s nipple while male nipples are seen as non harming to/by the Instagram community, or even something as innocent as hairstyles in the professional life (the fact that black women are often facing troubles within the corporate context because most of our natural hairstyles are considered to be unprofessional or unfit to someone holding a high position in hierarchy): it appears that women’s bodies have been institutionalized as a danger to human kind requiring to be tamed or hidden.

Meanwhile, few days after the Angels and Demons night, one of my relatives called me, fuming after seeing pictures from the party. He said he was ashamed of me, of seeing me dressed up like this, in a way he considered indecent.

But whether it is or not indecent, little do I care. The problem with “indecency” or such terms is that they are socially constructed and vary according to time periods and cultures. One part of me has understood through socialization that indeed nudity or partially nudity is indecent/deviant, abnormal/illegal in public, which makes me understand his point of view and shock, but then another other one looks at #freethenipple movements and many others, that argue that what makes women’s breasts or part of them indecent today is the tradition of blatant sexualization of women’s bodies throughout ages. In my relative’s argumentation, it appeared that a huge part of the issue to him was the vision people would have of me, that men already “disrespect women but that it’d be worst” if people associated me to that lacy scandal. He professed that I’d only meet ‘bad men’ and have a bad reputation if I kept up with that attitude.

And I was shook to my very core.

There was something extremely primitive and backward to his arguments. While I could understand his views on decency, the fact that he supported them using patriarchal clichés, implying that if I hooked up with men and dressed in a provocative way, I could/would only be passivily used by men. Through his speech, he took from me any kind of control over my sexuality or room for my own desires as he was describing the “consequences” of appearing in public in such ways.

This made me realize how women’s desires are often suppressed or disregarded from mainstream discourses and ideas but also the way I was educated by my atheist so-called progressive left leaning family. Within my family context, female sexuality was solely addressed in the context of informing us about sexual reproduction -which I already feel very lucky I received because there is an unbelievable number of women on earth who are not taught about their own selves, thus lacking of any resources to learn how to protect themselves and their sexual life-. But never has any adult throughout my teenage years addressed what pleasure was. Not in sex ed class, not in a family talk on sexuality, never. The thing is that along with not owning the sexualization of our bodies or the link between our reputations and appearance, society also expected us to be hidden whores. You’re expected to meet patriarchal expectations, be a sexual being (remember our bodies throw men “out of control and responsibility”!) but you can’t explore it on your own (outside of a normative heterosexual monogamous exclusive relationship) without being discredited, stigmatized as being a slut or deviant.

As such my relative was afraid that my reputation as a woman (supposed to have standards) would be jeopardiwed because I’d be associated with a provocative piece of clothing suggesting that I’m not a hidden whore but an public one. It felt like he thought I couldn’t afford to not be respectable based on men judgement and standards. Then he suggested that my outfits would increase the chances of me of getting raped or sexually harassed and it felt like he was just re-assessing the entire sexist dynamic of our society: instead of normalizing women’s ability to dispose of and expose their body in the way they want to, it just slut-shames them into covering their body parts.

By saying that he was ashamed, he associated my clothing to a certain type of behavior that he then judged and shamed. Adding to the fact that it is inherently wrong to “judge a book by its cover”, it just shows how even people that know you rarely dissociate people from their appearances and tend to easily forget your initial worth when they interpret negatively the symbolism in your clothing. As he normalized through his discourse the minimization of women to their appearance and legitimized through his meant-to-be educational advices that women are treated and seen as if they were as shallow as the layers they coat themselves into, I felt hurt. Without meaning to, he still suggested that I was acting like a whore. As hurt as I was, still I knew.

I knew that I had slipped into my stigmatizing scarlet bodysuit just the time of a night and I wouldn’t let myself become my carnival costume. And so no matter how bad I felt, I decided that I’d keep on dressing up the way I wanted to. One day this relative might tell me off again and I’ll tell him: I won’t reduce all my intelligence, experiences, dreams and expectations to the way I appear to people that are -sorry if I cross anyone- stupid enough to judge me only in the context of a themed party and choose to ignore the multiple layers a human being can have.

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