The Hijab And The Muffin Top

Today I took my family to the Detroit Zoo. At the excellent kids playground (near the Penguinarium), I saw a sight common to Metro Detroit: a young Muslim family. The mom was wearing a hijab dress, which covered her hair, arms, and legs, but kept her face open, similar to the photo below. Muslim Mom had a playful side to her otherwise very conservative outfit, she had fancy checkerboard shoes.

Exhibit A: Example of Hijab

From FLICKR

If you pause to think about it, there is some wisdom to this style of dress, even if it is very alien and threatening to us Americans. By being so explicitly modest, the Muslim woman forces you to look at her face--you can't talk to her chest, or any other physical part of her. In other words, you are forced to consider her as an individual, not as a sexual object. I don't think this is the case, by they way, with the more restrictive forms of muslim garb, like the burqa, which by hiding the face of the woman seems to me to nearly dehumanize her.

The Muslim woman, in her modest dress, really stood out because she was surrounded by average blue collar Americans, on a sunny 80 degree day. That means women in flip flops, tight shorts, tank tops, many of which were too large to pull off such revealing clothing gracefully. Not to mention all sorts of tattoos, muffin tops, whale tails, butt cleavage, and so on. What does the sloppy, revealing clothing say about the women who wear it? Doesn't it say, "I don't care what I look like as long as I am comfortable", or maybe "go ahead and look, this is my best asset"?

And what about the competition this sets up? The thin, pretty women in revealing clothes will be compared, by men and by women, to the not-so-thin and not-so-pretty women. But the modest women are competing on a higher playing field, they have to be judged more by what they say and do, not by their physical shape.

Exhibit B: (mild examples)

From FLICKR

Given the choice between seeing hijab and décolletage at the Zoo, I would pick hijab. And I'm not a Muslim!*

Update: I am not saying that women should be required by law to adhere to some dress code, as some of the commenters seem to assume. I am saying people should be more thoughtful about what their mode of dress portrays.

*In fact, the rulers of Iran would like to "purge" some of my "Zionist" relatives.