« SINCE LATE SUMMER, France has been gripped by a controversy of which Americans are trying to keep abreast. At issue is whether personal liberty extends only to the action of revealing, not covering one’s person — and, indeed, if public liberty requires banning from view those who believe otherwise? […] The topsy-turvy consequences of this evolution are both heartening and worrying. Whereas Marianne — at least in her late 19th-century depictions — concealed her body to reveal her political and sexual subordination, her early 21st-century iteration conceals her body to reveal her political and sexual liberation. As the well-known feminist scholar and politician Esther Benbassa recently asked in the newspaper Libération, must we really measure a woman’s “emancipation by the shortening of a her skirt, or [regard] a woman’s nudity as a tool of her liberation?” While she does not deny that some Muslim women are compelled to cover their bodies, Western women in quest of impossible slimness are really no different: “We obey a diktat, deeply rooted in our minds, to please men.” […] »
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