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A hotel in France drained their pool and tried to charge a Muslim woman for the cost of cleaning said pool after she swam in it with her burkini. This is patently irrational.
There is a fundamental problem with this idea — besides the issue of it being racist, anti-religious and outright disgusting. It’s just stupid. How is it still possible in the year 2017 to find the psychological dominance of the male gaze determining how women can dress, socialize and even go to the beach?
I did some research into the history of swimsuits and discovered something which should render this entire conversation into what it is: a patriarchal and systemic dominance over women’s appearance and their bodies.
Swimsuits, from as far back as the 1700s and 1800s, have an appearance almost identical to the modern burkini. If one went back in the United States to the 1920s to the 1940s swimsuits were downright puritanical in their appearance AND also covered as much skin as the burkini does.
Any place which has bans against the burkini are blatantly wrong and should get the all the scorn and derision we can muster. Stop shaming people for how they dress and their viewpoints if it isn’t harming you. What a woman swims in has varied wildly over the centuries and should cause no issue with how you enjoy your day at the beach.
It is clearly not about the outfit. There are plenty of one-piece swimming suits for men and women which completely cover their bodies and yet are not banned at the beach or swimming pools or hotels.
It is the accepted discrimination against the cultural Other which permeates all of these so-called bans against women and their appearance. It appears discriminatory behavior under the guise of religious intolerance becomes more acceptable if it can be linked to styles of dress or what is considered unorthodox behavior to a less accepting culture.
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What do you think of this behavior?
Would you knowingly frequent a place which had such a burkini ban?
Why does the male gaze continue to dominate how women appear in public?
What do you think we can do collectively to stop companies, hotels and other places from continuing to perpetrate such irrational and bigoted views?
With the rise in anti-Islamic behavior becoming normalized, how do we show solidarity with people of differing religions and faiths than our own?
When you’re ready to submit, click the red box, below.
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