h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Women are rightly offended at being treated as sex objects. But there's an elephant shuffling about here.

A few memories of things that set me thinking:

When I was about eleven, I heard the announcement that female police were to be introduced. I was fascinated, expecting to see these women with short-back-and-sides, the regulation police haircut. I felt cheated when it turned out that they could keep their long hair.

I grew up in the fifties, when all women, even my aunts and grandaunts, wore skirts, stockings, makeup. On most women it was pretty incongruous, but that was the spirit of the age and you can't escape that.

I once did door-to-door canvassing and heard objections to my candidate's plan to free up the Irish anti-contraceptive laws (yes, in the seventies). A late-middle-aged man said it would lead to women going round with bunches of these things in their handbags and behaving like animals. I didn't ask him was he thinking of his wife, who was peeping around the door. His image of 'women' did not seem to include her at that moment.

Some people (both men and women) enjoy dressing up and looking ravishing. They are an entertaining minority. Some also enjoy undressing in public and looking ravishing, a smaller minority.

The fact that they are (knownst to themselves) going to be treated as sex objects doesn't really say anything about the majority, who dress to look fairly ordinary.

I look forward to a future when men and women are equally free to look as dowdy or ravishing as they choose, without prejudice.

Cool old Guy shifting gear
"So you look out for the day some overly trained guys to populate the 'page three'?

Well, I would not mind, nor care.

Difficult subject, you have some points.

Whoopy Goldberg expressed something the other day regarding the police actions in the USofA. 'We should not only battle racism, we have to battle otherism.'

Felt she had a point; We humans seem to protect 'our own kind' at times this even counts for gender, as we do not have a natural neutral point of view for the other. "

ALso expressed in the rule 'the test of a civilization is how it treats its minorities'.

Related thought, another side: Erin McKean wrote in he blog:

You don’t have to be pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.

http://dressaday.com/2006/10/20/you-dont-have-to-be-pretty/

I think that quote says everything I would like to say.