You're Thor? I Can Hardly Sit Down.
I have what is known as a "restless mind", which is a polite way of saying "short attention span". While composing the previous post, I had a series of thoughts run through my head then attempt to escape out my right ear-canal . I've since tracked them down, and have placed them on display below.
Thought Number One: Who started covering women up and why?
Think about it (if I had to, you should too); the burqa and the Duggars' swimwear (yes, there is a link to that site on the Duggars' site. Marion, Don't Look At It - Shut Your Eyes, Marion!) didn't just appear out of nowhere*: for thousands of years, men have been covering women from head-to-toe. This seems counter-intuitive at fist; after all, if you've got a small Bronze-Age village run by men, wouldn't it stand to reason that all the women in that village would be dressed like Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC[E]? Clothes might make the man, but men make the rules.
So when and why did men start forcing women to "dress modestly, with decency and propriety" (Timothy 2:9-10)? I honestly don't have a good answer. What I do have is a theory.
Let's say you're a guy living in the aforementioned Bronze-Age village wherein all of the women have been running around in fur bikinis for a century or two. You may have begun to notice that the warriors from the village on the other side of the marsh have a nasty tendency to regularly raid your village and carry off your women. So, you call a meeting of the village elders wherein someone comes up with the bright idea that if you cover up all of the women, raiding parties won't know whether or not they're carrying off Angelina Jolie or Angela Lansbury until they get home and "unwrap the goods".
Maybe this is why, in the ritual of the wedding ceremony, which harkens back to the days of arranged marriage, the groom doesn't get to remove the bride's veil until after he's said "I do"?
Oddly, this led me to...
Thought Number Two: The Worst Wedding Night Ever
Norse mythology (which used to be Norse religion) gives us the charming and equally disturbing tale of Thor's attempt to appear on RuPaul's Drag Race.
Somehow Thrym, king of the Giants, managed to get his hands on Thor's magic hammer (Paging Dr. Freud, Dr. Sigmund Freud to the white courtesy phone), Mjollnir.** Anyhoooo, Thrym offered to trade the hammer for the hand of the goddess Freyja (for whom Friday is named) in marriage.
At this point the god Loki gets involved in the story: Which, if you know anything about Norse mythology, means that something weird is about to happen. Loki somehow convinces Thor to put on a wedding dress, complete with veil (I don't know a whole lot about Thor's personal life, so maybe it didn't take much convincing), and off they go to the Land of the Giants, where despite the phony Freyja scarfing down an entire ox at a wedding banquet, nobody catches on until it's too late and the hammer is handed to Thor/Freyja as a wedding present (???).
"I'm an action transvestite really, so it's running, jumping, climbing trees... putting on make-up when you're up there!" - Eddie Izzard
All this talk of clothing and lack thereof led to...
Thought Number Three: The Emperor's New Clothes
The great irony of the fable of The Emperor's New Clothes is that it has been told to generations of school children as an example of the virtue of questioning authority, yet not once, to my knowledge, has some little child, upon hearing the story, raised his or her hand and said "Wait just one Odindamn minute! While the kid in the tale did manage to point out the emperor's swinging scepter, and no point did he also point out that it was a stupid idea to have an emperor in the fist place and that, perhaps, a parliamentary form of government might be a better idea. And while we're on the subject, if the same kid had pointed at either the Pope, the Dalai Lama, or J. Edgar Hoover and said 'Hey, look at that guy in a dress', his brains would be all over the sidewalk. Now where's my box of juice?"
* I should point out that the Muslims swiped the idea for the burqa from the Byzantine Christians, and the the Duggars' swimwear was probably inspired by...hmmmm...LSD in their water supply, perhaps?
** I don't know how Thrym did this. Yes, I've getting at least four books on Norse Mythology sitting only a few feet away, but I'm feeling too lazy to bother to look this up.
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Comments
My theory is the fat people in bikinis at the beach scenario. Probably weren't that many great looking ladies in bikinis running around, and the men finally got tired of the jiggling midsections. Once they learned about getting toned, it was too late, and women realized the power their bodies held over men, so they would remain covered up, unless it suited their needs.
Posted by: MrStinky
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February 5, 2010 6:59 PM
i think the whole covering-females-up thing is likely to've been far more a product of the whole patriarchal ownership dynamic than any practical consideration. the marriage ritual you mention is a good example: it displays the concept (and latterly the LAW) that nobody but a woman's lawful handler^H^H^H husband gets to lay his hands or eyes on her whelping apparatus... which, in the case of unmarried women, therefore means nobody does, period.
Posted by: dogfaceboy
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February 6, 2010 2:01 AM
Rodney, I hate to tell you this but you've got it all ass backwards :D
For the last few years I've been writing a novel which has a lot to do with this and in brief - it goes back to Ice Age Europe.
Tribes needed to travel about, stalking herds of Mammoth etc, but they didn't have pack animals. Instead they used their women. They covered them head to toe in as many skins as they could wear. The Ice Age costume for women would have been more in line with the burqua than Raquel's fur bikini, but that's fine because it's freakin freezing outside, nearly all year round. If anything the women probably wanted it this way, as some still do (also notice that one of the classical conservative gifts a man can give a woman is a fur coat).
The patrlineal edge comes from the fact that all clothing, up until the invention of linen, came from the backs of the animals that the men killed. The woman did the foraging and the fishing and the small animal hunting that kept the tribe fed, far moreso than the men, but the men brought home the skins that protected against the cold. It was their main point of value in the stone age world. On a subconscious level, the burqua is an echo of this ancient age, a primative voice saying, "woman, you will not survive without me. I hold your existence in my hands. Do as I say or you'll end up naked and freezing in the cold."
Which is also the reason why we westerners (unlike, say, Polynesians) on a gut level tend to see something humiliating and shameful in nakedness, even of a healthy human body. Which brings us back to Duggars' swimwear and the folly of naked Emperors. Why can't an emperor rule in the nude. I'm writing this to you while totally naked (actually, not really).
The question is, how long are we going to let stone age attitudes rule over us, even though they have long since lost their value?
Naked is never right, naked is always wrong
So get the hell away from me. You god damn naked man
Get the fuck away from me, back to your naked land.
-Butthole Surfers.
Posted by: JD McDonnell
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February 8, 2010 10:37 AM