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I was in the shopping centre the other day and while waiting for service at a shop I saw something that got me thinking. Ahead of me in the line were two women. I assume they were mother and daughter. While I was standing there waiting three little girls ran up to the younger of the two women and threw themselves around her legs giggling and doing all those sister type things little girls do when they’re out.
Up until then I hadn’t been paying too much attention to the two women fortunate enough to be in front of me. What caught my eye at that moment was that the young mum and her three daughters were dressed in the fashion of many teenage girls these days, short cut off tops and low cut, hipster jeans. Although each outfit was personalised with mum and her daughters dressed in different coloured tops and jeans, scarves and headbands, what made them all similar was their belly buttons, exposed for all to see.
Now, I’m no prude and certainly appreciate a nice tummy on the opposite sex, but when it comes to children aged, in my estimation, five to eight years old, I’ve got a few reservations about them being doled up like little adults. I’ve got kids, young men now actually, and our family has had to deal with the demands of fashions and peer pressure to dress like their friends. On that level I can claim no expertise at trying to keep up with the fashions for young girls. However, what drew my mind to consider the dress of this young mum and her three daughters was an article I had just read in one of the weekend papers.
The Sunday Age article was titled, “The Rape of Justice” and revolved around the case of one women and her, not uncommon, experience of the legal system as she fought for justice to be done after she was raped. Why am I linking these two issues, fashion and rape, together? Because I think they highlight one aspect of the contradictions we accept as ‘normal’ within our society.
For the last twenty years that I can recall, I can’t ever remember seeing an article printed in any press or hearing on any radio program the argument that women who are subjected to rape and then report it to the police get a fair deal. What I can recall reading and hearing is that women who are subject the this form of base terrorism, repeatedly recount a tale of personal trauma and what might even be termed psychological abuse as they negotiate the legal system.
Let me say it now and make it clear that no woman, no matter her age, her race, her style of dress or how she conducts herself ‘deserves’ to be raped. In the article I mentioned earlier a story was recounted of the treatment of a teenage girl who had accused her step father of raping her repeatedly since she was ten. When it came to the trial, the defence barrister (acting for her step father) raised the issue of the way the girl dressed and suggested that the style of dress she adopted was ‘provocative’ and reflected, “this cold girl’s attitude and the way she conducts herself, and which includes (sic) her clothing”. In short, the step father wasn’t really a bad man, rather a ten year old had ‘provoked’ him to have sex with her. How is it that we have lawyers who argue this way and attempt to blame the victim?
Images are powerful things. In and of themselves images are nothing more than collections of not necessarily connected artefacts. However, if these artefacts are grouped together in particular ways, we can then begin to imbue them with meanings and make sense of them. For instance, if I wanted to make a movie and include a character representing a prostitute, how might I present the actor as portraying that character without hanging a sign around her neck? Quite easily actually and I would hang a series of signs around her neck. You know the ones. While it can be argued that all images are open to interpretation and that there may be no ‘correct’ way to interpret them, it is true to say that most images have a ‘common’ or everyday meaning. It is this dominant meaning that allows us to quickly view something and, if we have been trained to see that image in a certain way, accept it at face value, usually without argument.
Sexually available women in films have nearly always been portrayed in provocative dress and only an imbecile would attempt to argue that films and fashion are not intimately linked. Taking this a step further, the image of ‘available’ women many of us carry around in our heads has been shaped, to varying degrees, by the images we have seen in the media. Furthermore, I suggest that for many young girls today the media images they see inculcate them with notions of what is ‘attractive’ and ‘fashionable’. One of the current fashions that is accepted as being ‘attractive’ is the low cut jean matched with a cropped top.
Community leaders decry the ‘falling standards’ of young people. They lament the loss of ‘morality’ and ‘sense of purpose’ among the youth of our nation. At the same time they encourage unbridled consumption and do very little to counter the stereotypes rife within our society. These same leaders shout from the rooftops that ‘the market’ will sort out the weak from the strong and so long as they let go of the ‘levers’ and allow ‘market forces’ to prevail, our society and all of its component communities will be transformed into little kingdoms of heaven on earth.
What this model of how society can be organised fails to recognise is that it is pure Darwinianism. Survival of the fittest. When it comes to rape under this model of society men can be accused of doing nothing more than obeying their genetic impulse to reproduce and if an available woman isn’t ‘available’ then, being the dominant gender, a man has some innate, basic right to take any woman he can. Therefore, if women (or young girls) choose to dress according to a culturally accepted image of a ‘loose’ woman, then she is, due to her mode of dress, letting the man know she is ready to submit to him. Do you agree with this?
Whether you agree or not is a moot point because as far as some within the legal system goes, men are quite within their rights to terrorise women and rape them if the women dresses according to some image of availability. What concerned me at the weekend as I stood in line with the mum and her daughters was how much choice the three children had in choosing their style of dress and how much they understood about the signals their mode of dress was sending out. It seemed to me incongruous that at the same time some within our community want to stone paedophiles to death, shops are selling ‘tot fashions’ to prepubescent children. Actually they don’t sell them to the children they sell them to the parents who then dress their children in them.
Within the combative legal system we have, the Darwinian ethos rules, OK! The strongest wins. But should this be the type of society in which we want young girls and boys to grow up in? With the vast majority of rapes being perpetrated by either family or close friends of the victims I suggest that we need to think long and hard about the type of society we are creating.
I repeat, I’m no prude but I find it astounding that our society, a so called ‘advanced, developed’ society, has so little concern for they ways in which we shape the future for our children. I don’t doubt for a moment this mothers love for her children and theirs for her. What I do doubt is our collective love for them.
No woman deserves to be raped and no man who perpetrates this most gross form of terrorism can be defended by the argument that it wasn’t his fault. The victim blame game has gone far enough. However, so long as we dress little girls according to the dictates of certain images we have to question our societal motivation for allowing such fashions in the first place.