Why it's important to parade through Paris in bird feathers and high heels

This Tuesday gone by, the South African performance artist Stephen Cohen pranced down the road below the Eiffel Tower in Paris, dressed in bird feathers and high heels, with a live rooster tied to his genitals. From his story, I learn two important things. The first is that Cohen is much, much more of a Real Man than I’ll ever be: I wouldn’t have had the raw courage needed to do this even on a drunken undergraduate dare. The second is that the French don’t like people who parade through Trocadero Square dressed in bird feathers and high heels, with a live rooster tied to their genitals, any more than they like women in burqas or men in turbans: Cohen was arrested by Paris’ finest, and now faces trial for sexual exhibitionism. Like most apparently pointless, attention-seeking provocations, this one poses some serious questions: precisely why is that what people choose to wear, or not to wear, bothers the rest of us so much? Precisely why is that walking down through Trocadero Square dressed in the teeniest of teeny black dresses (and bird feathers and high heels) isn’t exhibitionism, but doing the same thing with your private parts chastely covered in a live chicken (and bird feathers and high heels) is? [caption id=“attachment_1106141” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A man wears a feathered costume as he parades the streets of Paris. Reuters[/caption] Put another way, closer to home: why is it fine for Naga sadhus to parade naked through the very sacred Kumbh Mela, when showing up undressed the same way at Firstpost’s editorial offices is likely to elicit a certain, well, disapproving reaction? The answer is this: clothes aren’t just clothes. They’re a form of everyday, in-your-face political propaganda, perhaps the most inescapable one there is. What we wear — and what other people wear — broadcasts values and attitudes on everything from faith to gender, class values, and conformity or defiance of tradition. And that’s precisely why it’s such fraught terrain. In India, as complex debates about sexual violence and womens’ personal freedoms have unfolded this past year, what women wear has been contested terrain. From National Commission of Women chief Mamta Sharma to Andhra Pradesh’s former V Dinesh Reddy, influential public figures have argued that rising sexual violence has something to do with the clothes women are wearing. Kailash Vijayvargia, Madhya Pradesh’s minister of industries, argued that “women are dressing provocatively, which is leading to deviation in society”. “Women’s fashion, lifestyle and conduct should be in accordance with Indian culture”, he asserted. Delhi University’s recent decision to bar women students on a study tour from wearing skirts or spaghetti tops, and men from wearing shorts and sleeveless t-shirts, is just the latest in a series of similar showdowns over choice. The university claims the dress code is meant to protect students from sexual assault — demonstrating a wonderful disregard for scholarly rigour and the need for empirical validation. It’s interesting to note these debates are taking place the world over. Canada’s Quebec, following in France’s footsteps, is seeking a ban on public servants wearing ostentatious religious symbols — like burqas, turbans, Jewish skullcaps and large crucifixes. These displays, proponents of the ban argue, undermine the necessary religious neutrality of civil servants. In Tunisia, teenageer Amina Tyler sparked bitter debates by posting topless Facebook pictures of herself, her breasts marked with graffiti proclaiming her right to do as she wished with her body. In a superb essay, commentator Nizar Bahloul pointed out that the photographs created the impact they did precisely because they intersposed themselves in a battle between Breasts and Beards: between personal freedoms, in other words, and neo-fundamentalist pietism. The global tide isn’t clear: in New York, police have issued instructions not to prosecute women subathing topless, just as men have long been free to do. In Peshawar, you’re best off not trying the same thing, whether male or female. Fights over what we wear aren’t new, of course. The cleric and traveller Abu Abdallah Ibn Battuta, was crazed by the bare-breasted women he encountered in the Maldives in the mid-1300s. “I endeavoured to compel women to wear clothes”, he lamented in his masterwork, the Rehla, “but I was not able to get this done”. It’s worth noting, in passing, that Ibn Battuta was not appalled by all the island’s sexual mores; he married six times, and had several concubines. In similar vein, Victorian archaeologists were deeply troubled by the nudity they encountered in ancient Hindu temple art. Hindu nationalists have, through a strange process of mimesis, internalised these values deeply. The outrage provoked by MF Husain’s bare-breasted paintings of Saraswati are a case in point: even a cursory acquaintance with Hindu religious iconography shows how deracinated the cultural-nationalist reaction was. Traditional liberals, as well as libertarians, tend to respond to these debates by insisting personal choice ought be respected. The problem is, it isn’t always clear what is a choice and what isn’t. Feminists like Rafia Zakaria have defended the right of women to wear the hijab, saying it is an expression of their individual religious freedoms. Feminists like Nudrrat Khawaja have argued that this purported choice is in fact an illusion, noting that society imposes them on women, often at a very early age. Feminists like Madhu Kishwar and Meera Nanda have starkly opposed appraisals of the choices tradition offer to women in India. Indian women on the Left have been united with the Right, conversely in their opposition to fashion contests, arguing, albeit from quite different premises, that they objectify and degrade women. It’s a complex argument, and a critically important one, because at it’s core, it is a debate about our freedom. That’s something worth parading for, even if it’s through Paris wearing bird feathers, high heels and a live chicken.