The Thinking Housewife: Why Immodest Dress is a Form of Aggression
IN the post on Valerie Trierweiler, the live-in girlfriend of French president François Hollande, I referred to the outfit she wore to his swearing in — a dress that allowed full view of her upper thigh — as a form of “sexual aggression.”
This idea that women display aggression by their choice of revealing clothing is foreign and preposterous to most Western women, who believe that clothing expresses merely personal taste and that male psychology can be molded – and should be molded. If they dress like a whore that does not mean for heaven’s sake that they are a whore.
Their denial that the most basic sex differences exist grants them a sort of innocence about the effects of revealing clothing, and in many cases this innocence is entirely genuine. At the same time, they acknowledge their acute awareness of sex differences by drawing attention to their bodily attributes. Since they have been taught endlessly that there is no such thing as an aggressive woman and that men can turn on and off at will their reactions to female flesh, they are ignorant of their own aggressive instincts and the effects these instincts have on others, creating an environment that is hyper-sexualized and, paradoxically, emasculating.
Below a perceptive female reader expands upon this point in response to this post on immodest dress.
Arete writes:
Immodest dress is analogous to male violence. Men who flaunt their muscles and crush beer can’s with their fists (not that I have seen much of that lately) are telling the weaker world around them, “I could crush you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.We’ll see. Depends how much you annoy me.” Women are stronger than men in this one way – the sight of their women’s bodies is overpowering to men. Immodest women are saying to men, “You could have sex with me, if I let you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It depends how much you annoy me.”
Both behaviors are flaunting the power that one has over another weaker being and both behaviors used to be considered uncouth.
But as the myth goes: only men have ever been violent towards women not the other way around (women have no power over men whatsoever – don’t you know!) and so now that we have entered the great age of woman – when she will get her revenge for all the injustices against her by men through the ages – both real and imagined — she has decided to take her “pound of flesh.” But instead of a swift cut right above the heart like Shylock she wants to get men where it really hurts– tease and taunt with the sight of her own body, forever reminding men of their weakness before female power.