Poems reveal clothing tyranny women face

‘She asked for it,’ they said. But all she asked for was a red dress she felt good in

do we feel? What do we think about the tableau before our eyes? What do we think about women who wear pants? How would we feel about men wearing dresses?

In her poem “What Do Women Want?,” Kim Addonizio has her character want something. A dress. A red dress. It is easy for us today to find this harmless, the fact of a woman wanting something and making it known. “I want a red dress,” she states. “I want it flimsy and cheap / I want it too tight.”

We still hear, in shebeens and at morabaraba tables, how a woman “asked for it”.

During summers in Paris, where I live, I see rich sheikhs from the Middle East ambling about in white, flimsy shirts and sun goggles, while ladies with them are covered from head to ankle in black fabric. There is no problem in abiding by one’s religious rulebook, but I do not know why religion would decree such a thing, or why it would apply only to women.

Enter the lady who wants a cheap, flimsy red dress, and with it the hope that wearing such clothing does not, or should not, imply she’s asking for anything apart from apparel she feels comfortable and well in. “I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, / it’ll be the goddamned / dress they bury me in,” she says.

The flipside of all of it is that women wearing such clothes were and still are victims of harassment. In What She Wore That Day, poet Vonani Bila shows us the other side of that same coin: “it was her choice / to wear a tight skin stomach-out / and zero-centimetre mini skirt / and perhaps a g-string.” It sounds like the same woman, wanting an item of clothing and putting it on. Free, confident, resolute. And “it fitted her waist perfectly / it lifted her spirit as she strode in noord street”. All good reasons to dress that way. We don’t know what happened to the `lady in red’, if anything, but this other ‘lady’ has a dissimilar experience. Or could it be the same person before and after?

We did associate dress and pants to females and males respectively, and often still do. What would happen, in such a setting, to a skirt-wearing man, or to a man wearing “male clothes” that reveal too much?

What it boils down to is that men are allowed to publicly lust after women, but women can’t, or aren’t supposed to do similar. It is why women can’t reveal too much but men can. It is why some religions make women cover themselves more than is physically tolerable. It is why women get confronted, by men, when the latter consider a dress too flimsy, or a G-string too conspicuous. It is why words like “slut” and “loose woman” are freely used, yet no equivalent words exist for men.

Instead, a masculine human who shows more interest in sex and in women than is customary is dubbed a ladies’ man, a Don Juan, Romeo, a wolf, a womaniser. It would be awkward to print terms that refer to a woman who shows more interest in sex and men than is customary.

Here’s what a character in poet Liesl Jobson’s At the Home of a Colleague from the Child Protection Unit says: “My fear, like my roots, / like my sixteen-week bump / is starting to show.”

I encourage you to seek other poems on this topic.

Michelle McGrane, a South African poet living in Canada, has a blog, Peony Moon

with postings about sexual violence against women.