On beaches across the Mediterranean, White women have found themselves victim to the latest fashion fiasco as the French ban bikinis; just last week a woman was fined €11 for wearing a bikini and sunglasses on a beach in Cannes. This week, pictures have emerged of French police forcing women to put on jeans and long-sleeved shirts over their bikinis as part of the ban on Nice beach. Inventor of the bikini, Louis Réard, explains that he created the swimwear to give women freedom, not to take it away. One would surely be right to argue, nonetheless, that having the option to wear something that exposes so much of their skin takes away their freedom, making them subject to purporting extremism around the sexualisation of women's bodies and therefore explicitly supporting the radical movement Sexism. It's clear to see, therefore, that forcing women to cover themselves completely when visiting beaches, effectively implemented through the banning of bikinis across the Mediterranean, gives them back their freedom and helps emancipate them from the hold of patriarchal traditions. Whites pose a lot of threat to the Western way of life, basically because they're White, marking them out as different, and 'Other'. If we want to fight the extreme force of Sexism, we need to control these Whites and give a lot of media attention to Sexism. It's obviously fine if men want to just wear shorts at the beach and not cover up; they're already free and what they wear is of little concern in the fight against Sexism. Rather, the ban is there to help the White women. In no way obviously is their specific targeting aggravating to Sexist leaders, and it's obviously well-informed and considered. It is advised that one respect the bikini ban and embrace covering up completely. It'll free you, White women.
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Burkini, bikini. Burkini, bikini. Burkini, bikini.
Try say that repetitively and fast. Think Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry. The two words merge together, right? They're not that different, after all. But wait; there you're wrong. These two words, burkini and bikini, have a huge gulf between them! They're practically oxymoronic! The paragraph above reads farcically because we're conditioned to bikinis. Replace the word bikini with burkini and White with Muslim, and, suddenly, apparently, it's not so farcical. That statement itself is a farce.
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| Source: Babe.com |
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| Source: Here via Babe.com |
French politician Nadine Morano last year described France as "a Jewish-Christian country... of white race, which takes in foreigners". Her statement reeks of imperialist, racist odour. But it's clever; it masks the odour under a deodorising vapour of objective innocence. The burkini ban today is the same; it's veiled in a rhetoric of emancipation, anti-extremism and equality, but really it's explicitly bigoted, imperialist and, ultimately, racist. This implicit contradiction was dichotomised effectively with the emergence of pictures, such as above, of police officers forcing a woman to undress. Because the supervised removal of clothes is liberating? Because forcing women to remove their clothes and conform to the Westernised norm of beach attire is so different to the apparent patriarchal stronghold Islam holds over women's rights through clothing such as burkinis that such an action seeks to weaken?
In 1907, Annette Kellerman, an Australian swimmer, was arrested on Boston beach for wearing a form-fitting sleeveless one-piece knitted swimming tights covering her entirely, from the neck down. In 1943, pictures of her swimsuit were used as evidence of indecency in Esquire v. Walker, Postmaster General. Like the image of a woman's swim-short length being measured above, silly, right? In the late 1940s, French fashion designer Jacques Heim and French automotive and mechanical engineer, running his mother's lingerie business, Louis Réard, both engineered the modern day bikini. Sales didn't pick up fast. Social resistance, on the contrary, was rife. The two-piece swimwear was banned in the French Atlantic coastline, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Australia, whilst being prohibited and/or discouraged in some US states. Pope Pius XII condemned the 1951 crowning of Kiki Håkansson as Miss World in a bikini, declaring the swimsuit 'sinful'. Réard himself is quoted as proclaiming that the bikini 'reveals everything about a girl except her mother's maiden name', in line with Esther Williams comment that 'a bikini is a thoughtless act'. Today a bikini doesn't even warrant a second glance on the beach. They're everywhere, and even, thanks to a combination of sun-avoidance, fitness, politics and fashion, Jess Cartner-Morley writes, now old-fashioned and dying. And yet the burkini, an item which represents a modest alternative to the bikini, has been stigmatised by a discourse of misogyny, oppression and extremism.
"They are saying burkinis show men controlling women and then respond to that by men making women remove them. The law banning the burkini was also probably passed by a majority of men seeing as the political elite tend to be male."
"I don't get the deal about clothes - they're literally just pieces of material stuck together that you wear, yet some innocent thing like wearing 'too many' or 'not enough' can somehow cause some massive offence to everyone." (both debated by my friend, Cat)
At base existence, both the burkini and the bikini are items of clothing, nay even further, they are both merely pieces of fabric construed for the particular purpose of swimming. And yet this holds no apparent ontological weight in the recent ban(s). Bikinis are not broadly tainted by a particular religious or political connotation. However, the mere mention of burkinis is now absolutely coloured by overtly exaggerated links to Islam. Wearing alternative, more modest (this adjectival choice is debatable, but for now take it as a temporary placeholder in lieu of digression) swimwear on the beach is not Muslim. In 2011, Nigella Lawson was seen wearing a burkini-esque outfit created by British brand Modesty Active whilst on holiday in Australia, later explaining that she wore it to protect her skin. Other companies, like Aqua Modesta, create similar garments for Orthodox Jewish women. Although ~60% of the burkini client base is Muslim, in an interview with Women's Wear Daily, burkini designer Zanetti explained that she'd 'sold to Jews, Hindus, Christians, Mormons, women with various body issues' and 'had men asking for them, too'. One could go so far as to argue that making the extraneous link between burkinis and Islamic oppression is equatable to linking bikinis to heretic atheism. That's a really extreme statement, and felt stupid to type. But the same sentiments hold for the normative discourse of the burkini. Irrespective of the purely sexist discussions that could envelope the rhetoric of the burkini, it is the link made with extremism in the form of Islam, targeting Muslim women in particular, that is both most worrying and critically ignorant.
As the ever-reliable OED explains, a religious habit is a distinct set of garments worn by members of a religious order. Veils form a common component of such; indeed, Muslim women and Roman Catholic or Anglican nuns all traditionally wear veils as part of their religious habit. Imagine the uproar that would accompany a ban on burkinis for or police-supervised forced undressing of a Roman Catholic or Anglican nun on French beaches. The intimation that nuns covering themselves purports support for religious and political extremism, whilst also representing patriarchal oppression to which the nuns are blindly victim, would be called out as bigoted and ludicrous. The same call wasn't made for Muslim women. Instead, bans were introduced. France's highest administrative court has now ruled that these burkini bans are illegal and a violation of individual liberties, but reports indicate that individual mayors still hold legislative power and continue respective bans. Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
It would be unjust to state that France has had an easy time this summer, and they certainly cannot be blamed for the attacks made on their innocence. It's only natural that the government feels pressure to show that they're doing something, anything, actively, to tackle and respond to the source of these attacks. But, as the United Nations says, a ban on burkinis is a 'stupid' reaction to extremism, condemning them as fuel for the 'intolerance and stigmatisation of Muslims'. Islamophobia does nothing to prevent extremism besides inciting it itself through the polarisation of 'other'; it fuels that which it purports to stop. David Thomson, author of 'The French Jihadist', is quoted in interview as saying that actions such as these and particularly photographs such as those of police supervising the removal of clothing are 'a godsend': "Jihadist sympathisers themselves seem surprised that the municipal police of Nice make their propaganda for them. For them, this is a godsend." Extremism and terrorism are not a religion either, so the implicit link between extremism and Muslim women shouldn't hold weight. The parallel argument made for the ban regarding female emancipation is also 'stupid'. True emancipation for females would be allowing them the freedom to wear what they feel most comfortable in at the beach, without importing labels or interpretations upon their choices for them. Whilst we're labelling and banning female swimwear, where are the companion discourses on male shorts, trunks, briefs and shirts? Who is having this discussion, really? And for whom are they having it?
"What's happening in France is not even thinly-veiled (haha) racism. It is out and out "What are you gonna do about it?" racism. If you're reading this, ask yourself what you're going to do about it. If you count yourself as a feminist, ask yourself, "Where the heck have I been and why have I not cared about the policing and criminalisation of Muslim women's bodies the same way as I care about the policing and criminalisation of white women's bodies?". If you're worried about the world and war and extremism ask yourself, "Am I just sitting by and letting my society be segregated by the powers that be?" (Suhaiymah Manor-Khan, 2016)
"No woman in a burqa (or a hijab or a burkini) has ever done me any harm. But I was sacked (without explanation) by a man in a suit. Men in suits missold me pensions and endowments, costing me thousands of pounds. A man in a suit led us on a disastrous and illegal war. Men in suits led the banks and crashed the world economy. Other men in suits then increased the misery to millions through austerity. If we are to start telling people what to wear, maybe we should ban suits." (Henry Stewart, 2016)
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Further reading:
- Dear white people of France: being forced to undress wasn't exactly the liberty I was hoping for
- The bikini is old-fashioned - no wonder it's dying
- France's burkini ban exposes the hypocrisy of its secularist state
- Women in burkinis and men in suits
- Why we wear the burkini: five women on dressing modestly at the beach
Stats, figures and quotes: sourced from above articles
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