An article I posted years ago but is still update with times unfortunately 9/21/06
REASONS
WHY WOMEN EXPOSE THEMSELVES
By
Dennis Prager Feb 17, 2004
You
may have noticed that many young women wear less, and more sexually
provocative, clothing in public than they did a generation, or even 10 years,
ago.
It is easier to notice, however, than to explain.
But explaining it is crucial to understanding what
has happened to men and women in the last 40 years and where male-female
relations are headed. Women exposing
their bodies in public is a big deal. Playing with the sex drive, the most
powerful force in nature, is far more dangerous than playing with fire.
Even if one welcomes this development -- and for the record, as a male I am turned on, while as a man I
am turned off -- it begs for explanation.
I will offer at least five reasons that may be less
obvious but more important than the valid ones usually given -- peer pressure,
women buy what stores sell and the sexual revolution.
The first
is "equality."
By equality, I do not mean the belief that men and
women are equal human beings, a belief that all decent people hold. Rather, I mean the feminist and politically
correct definition of equality: sameness. Men and women have come to be
regarded as the same, not simply as equals.
Thanks to feminist doctrines that pervade education
from kindergarten through graduate school, men and women increasingly believe
that the sexes are largely identical. Therefore,
the arenas wherein women can feel and demonstrate their feminine distinctiveness
have narrowed appreciably.
By showing more of their bodies, women can announce
that they are women. There are other ways young women can publicly demonstrate
their distinct female identity -- for example, by wearing feminine clothing and
other feminine behavior, being a wife, being pregnant and being a mother.
But those ways are increasingly ignored, deferred
and discredited. Among egalitarians, being a wife is no different a role than
that of husband, and motherhood is no longer regarded as distinctively female.
Husbands and fathers are supposed to play identical roles, and because of the
movement for gay equality, mothers have been declared unnecessary -- two
fathers, most well educated people now contend, are every bit as good for a
child as a mother and a father. But children need both mother and father!!!!
So, for the young woman for whom marriage, pregnancy
and motherhood are remote or even undesirable given the anti-traditional
education she has received, her primary vehicle of proclaiming she is a woman
is literally to expose the fact.
A second,
related, reason is the death of femininity.
In the past, expressing one's femaleness was done
through expressing femininity. In addition to the female roles of wife and
mother, there were numerous ways of doing so. One was, of course, dress. But in
the name of equality and comfort, distinctive female dress -- such as dresses
and skirts -- has been largely abandoned. A young woman who wore a dress or
even a skirt and blouse to a college, let alone high school, class would
probably be considered stranger by her peers than one who wore a see-through
top.
Today, instead of women wearing feminine clothing,
they either wear essentially male clothing (such as pants and pants suits) or
flesh-baring sexually provocative clothing. Feminine attire -- i.e., clothing
that is very female but not very revealing -- is rare.
Femininity was also expressed by sexual reticence.
Again, such a notion is laughable in much of contemporary society. The idea
that a man made great efforts to be allowed sexual contact with a woman
rendered women feminine in men's eyes. They are different from us -- they are
feminine. Women who act as sexually available as a man -- through their
behavior or their dress -- are not perceived as feminine, since they are
perceived as being male-like.
Likewise, the myriad ways in which men treated women
as women -- such as opening doors for them -- all declared that women were
feminine, i.e., different from masculine. That is why many feminists opposed men
opening doors for women -- it reinforced notions of femininity, a value that
feminism has sought to extinguish.
So, femininity is largely a dead concept. Ask most
young women -- or men -- what it means, and you will get either a blank stare
or a hostile reaction.
Thus, many women are now saying: "I am a woman.
And I will declare it in one of the only ways left to me -- I will show you my
female body."
