American Burqa: a Night Out on the Jersey Shore

There is a place where women are forced to dress all alike. It's a kind of uniform of submission: all women are forced to wear this uniform or be shunned, whether they are young and shapely or middle-aged and chubby. Black is the preferred color, though this is not rigidly enforced. What's going on inside a woman's head, her own vision of who she is and what she thinks and what she wants is irrelevent: individuality and freedom of thought is suppressed and propaganda carefully herds women to a standard of sameness. If you think I'm talking about the Middle East you're wrong. I'm talking about Friday night on the Jersey Shore; Atlantic City to be precise. Perhaps I need to get out more, though: I'm thinking it is possible that the horror I witnessed is common throughout suburban heterosexual nightlife. Perhaps in news coverage of the Egyptian revolution you have witnessed the clucking tongues of baiting neocon pundits worrying about whether Islamist activists will somehow hijack the revolution and force Egyptian women into forced modesty. Well here's what I've realized: the concern of American culture for the fate of women in predominately Muslim countries is nothing but a big-fat crocodile tear, because American women, especially young ones, have already been sent down a path of objectification and posed hypersexuality every bit as dehumanizing as what some claim has happened to women in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.


There's something fascinating about Atlantic City. The combination of wishful thinking and seediness is honed to a fine edge. The casinos are full of people and yet they're not doing great financially, just as most people spending time there -- me included -- are calculating the enjoyment of the place not in massive gambling winnings but in whether the time was worth the price. We spent a night there this past February weekend. The worst of the winter seems to have passed for now and the indoor social life of the casinos seemed to be jumping. Atlantic City isn't the setting for the MTV "reality" show The Jersey Shore, but it's in close proximity to that show's location, not only physically, but spiritually.

We arrived on a Friday night, just as the crowds seemed to shift from elderly retired people to young adults out to party. As I and my companions sat down for a late dinner we realized that practically every woman we saw was dressed identically: in uncomfortably high heels, and shockingly tight shoulderless cocktail dresses coming down a barely calculable measure below the crotch. These dresses were all about ass threatening to burst out of tight confinement. We began to play a tasteless game we called "hooker or slut." Of course there was simply no way to tell. These women had been completely absorbed into the aesthetic of prostitution.

As we walked around the casino it became almost absurd. Small groups of identically dressed women only occasionally in the escort of calculatingly-casually dressed young men moved about through the halls from bar to gambling room to club. I never saw one try to sit down, I can't imagine what would have happened to their dresses if they tried. At some point I looked at three women leaning over a counter: all had identical hair and makeup as well, the same cut, the same strange-looking false sunstreaks dyed into identical patterns. I realized that while most of these women were young and fit with curves that successfully filled out their tight little dresses, I was also seeing older women or women without such studied bodies who couldn't quite pull off the look but were doing their best to try. Sleeves and leggings accessorized those who feared the exposure of a little flab or wrinkle.

Now granted as a gay man I don't spend a lot of time staring at women. But I don't think my horror at what I saw was driven by prudery or disdain for female sexuality. In the uniformity of what I saw there was something so forced and un-sexy about the professed sexiness of the uniform. All of these women might as well have had signs pinned to their waists saying "you can almost see my vagina." Their outfits pulled attention away from their faces and turned them into automatons of base male gratification.


So when the media shows excessively veiled Muslim women in its condescending or fearful tone, I now have to ask: do you want women to be free to express their individuality? Their sexuality? Or are you just complaining that you can't ogle the flesh of these women? Is the issue the right of these women to live their lives in the way they choose? Or is the complaint that these women might have secret inner lives that are not available to your observation?

I think if I was a woman and a Muslim I would not choose the extreme forms of Muslim hijab like the burqa or abaya. And I do understand that in our harsh world, excessive hijab can be a form of oppression. And I think if I was a young woman looking for love, or for fun, on a night out on the town in a New Jersey beach town, I would not choose to make myself uncomfortable and identical to all my friends. But the choice is not really between covering up and dressing like a prostitute. This is a false choice: a false choice that the women of the Jersey Shore are apparently unable to see.

I was reminded of my visit last summer to an Orisha ceremony and to two jazz concerts in Brooklyn, all of which I described on this blog. At the Santeria ceremony, attended by people of every imaginable race and ethnic mix, the women radiated beauty and strength and individuality and even sexiness. Gay and straight women alike projected a spiritual centeredness and pride. Hair was worn naturally, sometimes very short or in locks. Clothes were not flashy, but neither were they shapeless potato sacks. Some wore African-inspired finery but everyone projected her own being. At the jazz concerts, the overwhelmingly African-American crowd ran the gamut from young to old. There was certainly flashiness there, but the fashion was consciousness and self-empowerment. If there was flirtation it was chosen, rather than a blatant neon sign of objectification and neediness.


It is not the lack of modesty that concerns me, nor the display of sexuality. It's something else. Oh I hear a voice in my head that sounds like the mean old man telling those darn kids to get off his lawn in some early 1960s youth culture flick. But I don't think what I was seeing was youth rebellion; on the contrary, I think it was the fruit of some kind of media hypnotism. To me it looks empty and false.

I miss feminism: when women were empowered to make choices for themselves, to be freethinkers, to be unabashedly sex-positive. Those tight little cocktail dresses strike me as the Burqas of our age: prisons of subjugation and objectification. I've read Middle-Eastern feminists criticize the abaya and the burqa because a woman must spend so much time hanging on to her clothes she couldn't possibly work at a physical job and must therefore change her orientation to the home. And so it is with crotch=length dresses: how can one even think if all one is doing is ensuring something won't pop out?

Bad television like "The Jersey Shore" is good for a laugh. But I'm starting to think it's not so funny. What happens when life starts to imitate this terrible, demeaning "art"?

(Atlantic City booty photos by me. Sorry for using your butts to make a point, ladies.)

54, La Rana

I'm too old for Kermit! Yesterday I noticed several facebook friends marked the 41st birthday of the seminal children's television program Sesame Street. Of course I know who Kermit is, who Bert and Ernie are, who Miss Piggy is. But I was already almost 11 when Sesame Street came out, and frankly I don't think I noticed. That was for little kids. I do remember loving The Electric Company, a PBS franchise that must have tapped my age group more appropriately, but if I have some sentimentality for the teevee of my childhood and youth, I have none at all for Sesame Street. Zilch.

We didn't have a television when I was very young, even though my father worked in the advertising business (very Mad Men, actually). I think it was a form of rebellion on his part. I think we got one about 1963, because I'm pretty sure I remember seeing at least the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination on it. We didn't get a color teevee until way into the 1970s.

There was children's programming that felt mind-numbing and false: Romper Room, Captain Kangaroo, Bozo the Clown. The time I got to actually attend a taping of Bozo the Clown disillusioned me for years: the studio audience sat practically in another room and we had to pretend we could see what was being taped and clap enthusiastically when asked; it was torturously unpleasant, but a useful lesson for life. I loved Saturday morning cartoons: Astro Boy and all that other weird out-of-synch puppetry and animation so mysteriously from Japan. Underdog was a favorite; so droll and witty.

And while I know that Kermit is legendary, and "It's Not Easy Being Green" is a great song (look for the Lena Horne version!), he doesn't move me. A coworker at my old job gave me stuffed Bert and Ernie dolls to decorate a shelf in my office; you could tell this was a significant "remember these eternal icons of childhood fun?" moment for her. I can hear the Bert and Ernie voices in my head, but it's a memory of an adult time not a treasured echo of being a kid. Many times in my adulthood I've tried to track down some childhood experience to try to recapture a flash of remembered magic, sometimes quite successfully. But sorry, Bert, Ernie, I'm glad you've become gay icons, but you don't mean anything to me either! And I've never seen "The Muppet Movie."

Back in the pond, giant green frog.

In review of HBO's "Pacific": No More Great Wars!

I've been watching the new HBO TV miniseries "Pacific." Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also produced the series "Band of Brothers," it aims to tell the story of the Pacific theater of the Second World War using the same combination of ultra-violent realistic action sequences combined with small-scale intimate character development that made that earlier series such a compelling watch. "Band of Brothers" largely avoided discussion of the larger issues raised by the war: it followed the story of a paratroop company in the last year of the war, from the Allied invasion of Normandy through various ill-fated attempts to invade Germany through the liberation of the concentration camps and the surrender of German forces. Although it portrays its characters as brave and heroic, and they were, it doesn't glamorize what being at war was about. It looks hellish. It makes occasional attempts to humanize the foot soldiers of the "enemy," but as one would expect doesn't step away from the standard narrative of what the war was about.

I'm not finding "Pacific" quite as compelling. Something about the story-telling isn't as successful. The expensively-filmed action sequences are that convincing combination of violence-voyeurism and dangerous excitement that most of us who were once little boys find irresistible; but so far the characters seem undeveloped and confusing to me. Nevermind that, of course, I'll keep watching it through. But if the traditional narrative of the WW2 and a miniseries like "Band of Brothers" is able to claim a sort of moral high ground by focusing on the forces that fought the embodiment of evil Hitler and the Nazis, fer crissakes, and touches on the liberation of the concentration camps, it seems to me that the same moral high ground is missing in a depiction of the Pacific war.

The photo above (taken by me) is from the massive Soviet war memorial at Treptow, outside Berlin. Built on the scene of Soviet triumph against the Nazis, and hosted for decades by the now obsolete satellite regime of the German Democratic Republic, the memorial glorifies the Russian military machine. Surrounding an eternal flame there are many concrete panels like the one shown, all with depictions of heroically unstoppable Soviet legions, with occasional hovering Communist icons like the floating head of Lenin shown here. The memorial is stirring to visit: and it's true that millions of Soviet citizens were killed in the Nazi onslaught; and millions heroically braved incredible hardship to push the fascist forces back and liberate eastern Europe and the Russian homeland. I'm well aware of the various historical positions on the left about this conflict: my own pacifism and anti-imperialism is certainly challenged by the nihilistic brutality of Nazism. I suppose we're let off the hook by history and what actually happened. I think it would require a certain amount of pretzel logic to suggest it didn't matter that Nazism was defeated.

But I'm left with much less certainty about the war between Japan and the various European and American colonial powers. It's true that Japan was allied with the European fascists. And it's true that in China and Korea Japan acted with brutality and a colonial mentality. But in much of South East Japan bolstered anti-colonial independence forces. In the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, India, and other places the Japanese were throwing off American, English or Dutch rule for Japanese sponsorship of supposedly local independent governments. Japanese imperialism, as a new player on the stage that was making up for lost time with aggressive military force, but was, say, Japanese occupation of the Philippines so much worse than Spanish or American occupation of the Philippines?

I read one reviewer of "The Pacific" say that watching war movies once made him feel patriotic, causing him to entertain fantasies of running off to join the army, even now so many years later. But to me the miniseries emphasizes not the heroism of the fight, but the futility, the utter waste of human life. Here young Americans fight young Japanese on islands they had never previously heard of so that Japan could dislodge England and America as master of the East and exploiter of the region's resources. Was what Japan was doing so much worse than the self-entitlement exercised by the western colonialists? When you consider the role of Europe and America in destabilizing China in the first half of the 20th-century, it may have been less militarily brutal than Japan's attacks on China, but it was not occupying any better moral place. The righteousness of the Chinese struggle against foreign domination ultimately needed to vanquish the Western powers as well as Japan; and the fighting there was not over til the end of the forties as the war of liberation against Japan was transformed into a war of liberation against the Kuomintang.

Indeed it's hard to separate American fury against Japan from American racism. The Japanese were demonized and dehumanized in American consciousness in a way that the Germans were not. And many have speculated that experimental weapons of mass destruction, the atomic bombs, would not have been used against European civilians as readily as they were used against Japanese ones. If the destruction of Japanese militarism was ultimately a good thing for the Japanese nation, it's hard not to think it would be better still if all those Japanese who died...hadn't.

From the heyday of Soviet propaganda and socialist graphic art in the 1930s come these Russian stamps marking the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, then just called "Great." Showing bombs falling on a city; the flight of refugees, and ranks of strong young men turned into cripples these images get at some of the stupidity and futility of that war. It was popular rejection of the vast human waste of that war that sparked the waves of social transformation that marked much of the twentieth century. Both the good changes and the bad can be laid at the feet of that war, from the revolutionaries who rid Europe of a handful of repressive monarchies to the reactionaries and revanchists who were invigorated to a new level of military adventurism. If as historians we can now look back at the Second World War and see similar transformative events, I for one can not forget about the terrible cost in human life. And I refuse to quantify the loss of American life as more tragic than the loss of Japanese life.

Are we beyond all this now? Or how many smaller-scale local but brutal wars does it take to add up to a new global conflict? In today's post-ideological world, aren't we back to the sort of mindless brutality of self-interest exemplified by the First World War? Where is the new egalitarian or pacifist consciousness that will prevent the next global conflagration? Does war porn like HBO's "Pacific" turn people into pacifists or turn them into willing cannon fodder for the next American military adventure? Perhaps the reason this TV series isn't as compelling as the previous one is that stripped of the veneer of fighting the inhuman Nazi war machine, the paroxysm of violence in the islands of the Pacific is revealed to be pointless.

There's a message in the past; we ignore it at our own risk.