Friday, December 16, 2005

Fashion News




The radical religious right is not opposed to women's fashions, as long as they are demure and properly dignified. In Bangladesh it means this:

A banned Islamist militant group blamed for a series of bombings in Bangladesh has threatened to kill women, including non-Muslims, if they do not wear the veil, a statement said.

The statement by the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen came hours after Thursday's suicide bomb attack in a northen town that killed at least eight people, the latest of a series of blasts blamed on militant groups in their campaign for an Islamic state.

"Women will be killed if they are found to move around without wearing burqa (veil) from the first day of Jilhaj," the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen said in the statement sent to a Dhaka newspaper office.

Jilhaj refers to the Arabic month beginning early January.

"Women, including non-Muslims, are hereby advised not to go out of home without burqa. Seclusion has been made compulsory for you," said the statement in Bangla language, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters on Friday.

In the United States matters are much more degenerate, natch. This is, after all, the corrupt West. So women can even go swimming, provided that they are demurely covered, like this.

I wonder about the god of all those fundamentalists. Why did he create women so awkwardly that they must always be covered? Or rather, why do the followers of this god believe that they know better than the supposed creator of all those sinfully attractive women? And what about the alternative, and simple, idea of having those men who are bothered by women's bodies avert their eyes as modesty requires?

But then the alternatives in women's fashions stink, too. Not into burqas or Victorian swimwear? Then how about wearing nothing but a corset, a G-string and high-heeled stilettos? If this doesn't look good we can build your breasts up artificially and cut off the toes that stick out of the shoes. Even here it's the female body that is somehow wrong.

Sometimes these seem the only choices:





It's a good thing I'm naturally covered with snake scales.