According to CK Tan, ‘... female breasts and sexuality did not become strongly connected until the repressive patriarchal age when women were expected to cover more of their bodies.
Is it suggested here that the ethnic groups in Sarawak and Bali who are bare-breasted are not patriarchal in their social set-up or that women in matriarchal societies do not cover their breasts?
This is one of those typical feminist yarns that blame patriarchy for everything including concealment partial or otherwise of the female breast.
Don’t forget that it is the patriarchal Western societies that invented and produced the Pill, which did more to free modern women than feminism itself.
It should be appreciated that anything which is exposed all the time soon becomes commonplace and begets no attention, much less excitement.
So what is the writer’s gripe against female breast concealment that, if deemed expedient, may be partially revealed to titillate?
Who is the unhappier for that?
What should the contemporary woman complain of if she has one more extra anatomical structures that become admired by the simple expedience of covering or partially covering it ... unless it is a case of a mother who takes 20 years to make a man of her son and only to have him fooled and mesmerised in 20 seconds by another woman’s partially concealed oversized mammalian sweat glands?
The fool is certainly not complaining, neither male nor female has any cause for complaint so I just don’t know what is the writer’s point here.
I believe that the context of discussion was whether women should be blamed for inviting sexual assaults by not covering up completely.
It is in this context of the relevance of covering up vis-à-vis sexual assaults that the earlier reader Blinded made a reference to women of certain ethnic groups in Sarawak and Bali who were bare-breasted in olden days. He asked whether they were inviting sexual assaults.
In the olden days, it was not uncommon in the kampung areas of Malaysia to see women with sarongs tied up to around half their breasts coming out to draw water from the water pumps as compared to nowadays when some of them even swim fully clothed in public swimming pools. Yet sexual assaults against women occur more often nowadays when compared to then.
So where is the connection between women covering up and sexual assaults? If anything, concealment makes an anatomical part more alluring whereas total exposure and familiarity demystify it and make it lose its allurement as a forbidden fruit.
If there is anything I can learn from Tan’s ‘expose’ on the female breast is that it should be more exposed than concealed to mitigate the problem of men’s arousal. |
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