Well now that the New Puritans are winning a few battles there, we have a new front in the war against women getting to choose how much clothing they wear opening up. Again. "Ban the burkha" has now become "We should have a national debate on the niqab". I totally agree with Simon Jenkins who hopes we can be spared such horrors. Absolutely the niqab shouldn't be a "get out of doing anything a reasonable person should be expected to do" card and individual organisations should discuss how it may effect the way they work (as we've seen today with a judge ruling, relatively fairly, on whether a woman could testify in her niqab). But the idea that the Government should help police bans on what clothing someone can wear is not just absurd (though it definitely is that) it is fundamentally disturbing.
I do not understand this urge people have to control what people (mainly women) do with their bodies and what clothes they wear. We need people to stand up against these disgusting campaigns to undermine women's right to choose. Look at this update from a #losetheladsmags/Labour meeting today
Sophie: this is not about individual women's choices, it's about a culture which defines women by their appearance #losetheladsmags
— Josephine Suherman (@Jo_Suherman) September 16, 2013
Wasn't feminism about freeing women from having decisions made FOR them rather than letting them individually decide? Deciding how many clothes a woman must wear before she can be let out of the house should be something we left in the last century. Sigh.
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