Melbourne: The burqa vs the FMB

(I assume this defintion of FMBs)

aug 07, John Birmingham, Brisbane Times

It was just outside the pub that we passed them. Three women in full burqas, with only the eyes showing.

Now, they were kinda swishy, blue burqas, about as stylish as it's possible to be, when you're wearing a two-man tent with a peephole, but it set off one of my old buds, Rachel, the hardest charging, most stupidly fearless of all my surf grrrl crew.

Long story short, Rachel has as many issues with the burqa as she does with, say, rapists. For her it's like the dark ages reached out down the years and smacked her in the face. Being confronted with a phalanx of burqas leaves her feeling little different to being confronted by a wall full of Penthouse or Hustler centrefolds. It's all about oppressing the chicks and it sends her into an insensate rage ...

So you can imagine how this scene played out.

There wasn't a lot of tolerance.

It made me think though. This is a debate you don't see very often. For a country that's raised such a healthy crop of arse-kicking feminists they seem kinda quiet on the position of women within the Muslim community ...

Me? I'm afraid I'm mostly with Rachel. I don't simply see the burqa as a jolly piece of ethnic costuming. Yeah, I can pay it as an individual statement of faith, but I also see it as a tool of oppression, something that goes well beyond an individual's choice - assuming of course they have a real choice in whether or not to wear it.

To be flippant for a moment - because, you know, I so rarely am - it's worth comparing the meaning of the burqa with the meaning of one of post modern do-me feminism's iconographic artefacts, the FMB.

There's nothing submissive about a woman donning FMBs. It is a loud and very public statement of her existence as a sexual being, but it is not an invitation to every drunken real estate salesman at the bar to feel her up, and it is most definitely not a rebuke to any other woman who chooses to wear, for instance, a sensible pair of comfortable hush puppies. The FMB is an individual choice of apparel that contains no message or meaning for anyone but the wearer and at the very most, the person or peeps she wore it for.

I'm willing to stand corrected, and doubtless will be in furious tones, but there seems inherent within the burqa an admonition to all women who do not wear it. To don the burqa is not a fashion statement. It's many things, but foremost amongst them there seems to be a moral component, a statement that women's very bodies are such powerful sexual totems that they must be hidden away, because men are ethically weak and frail and prey to animal urges they cannot possibly be expected to contain. This was the core of Hilaly's cat meat argument, a pathetic excuse that's had no standing as a defence against charges of sexual harassment or worse for a long time now. At least not in the modern world ...