Clothing is covering for the body. But the human body doesn’t have fixed meanings. It has different meanings for different cultures, even different meanings for different people or classes in the same culture. Broadly speaking, male and female bodies, for example, are taken and looked at differently not only because of physical differences between the two but also because of evolved social attitudes towards them.

We find the physical intertwined with the ideological. Why are there more concerns about the female body bordering on anxiety? Why the social obsession with a particular type of clothing for a woman’s body? Such social morbidity has its roots in the male-female relationship that evolved over thousands of years. In the world of nature, we find that the male body is physically stronger than that of the female. We find the same in the human world, but there is hardly any noticeable attempt to control the female body in the animal world.

The never-ending project of controlling women, sociologists, and other scholars have shown us, started with the emergence of private property acquired by men initially because of their greater physical strength and later with the aid of social institutions and superstructure i.e. the system of cultural values erected on the material base. If there was private property, it certainly needed to be transferred. If it was to be transferred, who it would go to? To the offspring of the owner of the property. To ensure that his offspring were his blood the propertied man - all men became propertied compared with women - was forced to control his woman, especially her body which was the receptacle of reproductive power. It was she who could ensure his bloodline.

Rightly or wrongly, men believe that women don’t stop attracting other men with their bodies even they are ‘their women’. So the woman’s body has to be covered, covered more than what’s necessary by way of protecting it from weather extremes. In the evolved situation of social paranoia in misogynistic societies, such covering was expanded resulting in the women’s segregation from men. An all-time attraction between opposite sexes in human society is a product of a long evolutionary process spread over aeons. A female follows a natural cycle; she is in the heat at a certain time driven by her biological and reproductive urges. That’s the time she sexually attracts the male. But with the woman it’s different; she is capable of attracting men all-round the year. And so is with the man; he is ever-ready for sexual contact with a woman. Libidinal energy has been and still is conceived a serious threat that can destabilise the social fabric and create social and cultural chaos. Sexual attraction can violate social codes and push men and women well beyond the perimeters erected by the biases of race, colour, faith, class, and caste. So in the name of stability of social order however skewed it might be, the woman is to be controlled and her life to be regulated as she is considered to be the source of erotic and sexual chaos. The fact is conveniently obfuscated that attraction is mutual. Man is as much a source of erotic and sexual provocation for the woman as she is for him.

But in the longstanding structures of power relations, the woman has been at the receiving end. Since a woman’s body is thought to be endowed with the magic of provocation, it’s to be clothed and hidden so that its magnetic pull could be blunted for men other than the concerned. Hence women’s dress code has invariably been part of all human societies, ancient and modern, dominated by males.

A woman’s dress can be a covering that signifies her class, status, age, faith, societal values, geographic location, cultural context, and personal choice. Whatever its shape or style, it has to indicate that it’s a female dress that shows her what she is. A woman donning a male dress is abhorred and vice versa. The roles are defined. This is stressed not merely for the physical differences that exist between male and female bodies but also because the dress is a social construct.

In our conservative society, women’s wear is generally traditional and modest. But even the most traditional societies change. So does ours. Education, globalisation, penetration of western culture, and above all feminist movements are having their impact on how our women dress. Have you seen recently a mother and a daughter walking together in an affluent middle or upper-class area? Mother would be in traditional baggy trousers and kurta or shirt and daughter in tight-fitting or clingy clothes showing two distinct generations signaling a gradual change in the modes of dressing. The change signifies at least two things on the part of women; a change in the style of dressing inspired by dominant global culture and an effort to regain control over their bodies. Both the aspects of the phenomenon visibly rattle the clergy, traditionalists, and guardians of morals. It seems that our women love fashion like other women the world over but at the same time they make a non-verbal display of their protest against the restrictions imposed on them by our repressive culture which treats the female body not the body of a woman endowed with the agency but as if its managing is a male preserve.

It looks that consciously or unconsciously women have a pact to express their resentment of and resistance against the straitjacket of morals used to control them. Have you noticed that women have been wearing trousers for some years? It’s trousers or variation on trousers, pajama type trousers. Almost all women regardless of class and status cover their lower body with this type of piece of clothing obliterating class distinctions between them at least in the manner of dressing. It unites the hoity-toity with the lowly at a level. Perhaps it is a political statement, a wordless declaration that women exist independent of men and their morals. Maybe it’s an unobtrusive expression of their increasingly assertive sisterhood. Maybe they are learning to use their soft power as a social tool to gradually gain their rights as equal human beings. In other words, they wage their rights campaign through other means; peaceful and subtle. So what looks fashion conceals deeper meanings in its innards. Changes in their style of clothing in our cultural milieu are signs of an assertion of women’s identity. Thus what appears to be a fashion is a thinly disguised language defiant of patriarchic structures that insist on treating women as lesser human beings in need of guidance. Only women can employ aesthetic means to confront the harsh reality of gender inequality to humanise themselves and their oppressors, the men. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2022