Women in Revealing Dresses: Liberation or Titillation?
To those who articulate that women should mind their clothes and dressings, the question arises: what kind of person are you, man or woman, if anything is able to disturb or provoke you so easily? The allegation is that when watching a woman dressed skimpily, it becomes a disturbance, a distraction, even a provocation. How will you insulate yourself, and how much will you insulate yourself from the world? And what are the limits to what you want to see and not see? Today, it is said that a woman’s legs or thighs provoke you. What prevents you from saying tomorrow that her ankles and fingernails provoke you? Would you then demand that she should cover up from head to toe?
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Questioner: There is something that has been bothering me quite a lot. There is this view according to which wearing revealing clothes—short dresses, etc.—in public is unacceptable; that it is alright to wear such clothes at home, but it is not alright to wear them in public. There are some who even allege that one of the reasons that a woman would get raped is because she was wearing revealing clothes. What is your understanding on this?
Acharya Prashant: There are two sides involved here: one, the woman who is walking about wearing whatever clothes she is wearing, and she has her own story to tell; and then there are those who are leering and jeering, ogling, mocking, sometimes attacking. I would want to have a sincere discussion with both of them.
Firstly, the side that is so articulate in saying that women should mind their clothes, their dressings, I want to ask them: what kind of person are you, man or a woman, if anything is able to disturb or provoke you so easily? Your allegation is that when you watch a woman dressed skimpily, then that becomes a disturbance, a distraction, even a provocation. How will you insulate yourself, and how much you will insulate yourself from the world? And what are the limits to what you want to see and not see? Today you say that a woman’s legs or thighs provoke you. What prevents you from saying tomorrow that her ankles and fingernails provoke you? Would you then demand that she should cover up from head to toe? I want to question this.
