Recent events at the Ski House and the subsequent student reactions have a lot of us thinking about how different cultures should and should not be represented. The recent cover of the “sex issue” of Foreign Policy Magazine is a perfect example of how to use costume to oversimplify and degrade someone else’s culture while giving them no say in the process. A nude female model poses on the cover, looking into the camera with seductively frightened eyes. Her ribcage glistens under black paint, which is meant to make her look like she’s wearing a niqab, with only the rectangle around her eyes unpainted. Her black hair is gelled into the shape of a veil.
One of the many ironies of this image is that, if this woman’s painted-on niqab were to be removed, she would still equally represent a culturally enforced standard for women. Her posture, her body, and the expression on her face are all typical of images you see plastered all over billboards, magazines, film and television, as well as on frat bedroom walls.
Look at the cover of the Foreign Policy sex issue and you can guess what’s inside. Article after article reaffirms our conception that countries like China, India, and especially Middle Eastern countries are the outrageously sexist, that men who live there are invariably monsters and that they should be treated with open hostility. By completely ignoring the issue of sexism in Western countries, the magazine suggests that our model is to be conformed to, that if you wiped down the woman on the cover, she would be fine. As Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi, guest bloggers for e-zine Jadaliyya put it, “The female body is to be consumed, not covered!”
The more complex reality is that women who wear the veil might feel that they are doing a beautiful thing, that they are expressing faith, solidarity, a sense of identity. They might also feel suffocated. Likewise, women in America who are pressured to conform to a certain visual identity could feel either empowered or oppressed.
A young Egyptian blogger, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, posted nude pictures of herself online and wrote that she did so to protest sexism in her society. In October 2011, Yemeni women burned veils to protest their government’s crackdown on uprisings. French Muslim women, by contrast, chose to wear their veils as a form of protest against French policies that increasingly force Muslims to hide their identities.
Sasha Grey has no problem offering her body for consumption. “My body is my art, and it’s also a tool that I use to make money,” she said in an interview with AskMen.com. On the other hand, Megan Fox has expressed dissatisfaction with the many double standards that exist for male and female actresses. “Women are expected to be conformist automatons in L.A.,” she said an interview with the Daily Star. Actor and comedian Rachel Dratch said she also has felt marginalized by Hollywood standards. “I am offered solely the parts that I like to refer to as ‘The Unfables,'” she wrote in her memoir “Girls Walk Into a Bar.” These women are all actors, and in that respect they are clearly different from the majority of American women. However, we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that this standard does not affect the day-to-day-lives of most American women. The videos that we all had to watch about anorexia in health class attest to this, as do the products that American women consume every day to try to look how they’re supposed to.
People can and do judge any of the women above, American, Egyptian or French, for their attitudes about their own bodies. My point is not to do this, or even necessarily to condemn societies for imposing standards on women. My point is that media like the sex issue of The Journal of Foreign Policy frequently opt to simplistically condemn other societies while avoiding the need to look inward. The standard for American women that this cover represents is so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible. That’s just what women are supposed to look like. However, to someone from an outside perspective, this might look like as glaring a symbol of repression of women as the veil does to many Americans.
You might think, “Well, their problems are worse than ours.” The writers of this journal certainly do. But what does publishing something like this accomplish, aside from reinforcing beliefs in American cultural superiority? Are people in Egypt or Saudi Arabia going to see this and decide to push for the policies that Foreign Policy says they should push for? It seems very unlikely, when the cover screams, “We don’t respect you. We don’t respect your women, and we probably don’t respect our own women very much either.”
Hannah Green is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at hannahgreen2012@u.
