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A post by Maynard

I was checking out this “Opus” comic (take a look, if it’s still there), and I was curious about the reference to a “burqini”. What might this be? The strip names a website, www.ahiida.com. Yes, there it is, the burqini collection! Finally, a line of swimwear for Muslim women! And from Australia, no less.

A little web research traced the lineage of this apparel back to the 2005 Cronulla Beach (Australia) riots, in which racial tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims turned violent. I’m vague on the details, but the flashpoint seems to have involved a lifeguard whose swimsuit was regarded as immodest.

This incident inspired an Australian woman to invent the “burqini”.

Mrs Zanetti, 38, said it had taken her a year to persuade Muslim women in Sydney that swimming “is not a sin”. Now sales of the “burqini”, which retails for about £65, have soared, largely through word of mouth.

Meanwhile, back in America, I noticed Susan Estrich’s FoxNews editorial, “Little Girls in a Sick Society”:

When my daughter was younger, I used to despair every time we went clothes shopping. The outfits in the “girls department” weren’t for girls, they were for little women, cut for little women’s bodies, designed to reveal what was not yet there, or not appropriate for showing, even if it was.

Slut-wear is the only word for it; bad enough for women, horrendous for little girls. Now, when I go to the mall, I notice whole stores devoted to selling nothing but that, aimed at the pre-teen set.

So at one extreme we have a culture so structured that it’s regarded as sinful for women to swim. And at the other end, young girls are rushed into sexualized roles.

These are not ideologies that can coexist in close proximity. Clearly we’re doomed to ongoing culture clashes if our “multicultural” aspirations are to mainstream and normalize both extremes.

But that’s the practical aspect. It seems to me the underlying, and troubling, philosophical question is whether mankind is worthy of the freedoms we enjoy in the West. Must we be enslaved or subservient in order to be good? Without a suffocating social structure, are we doomed to descend into hedonism?

The human creature cannot survive in a state of anarchy. Either we are restrained from within (i.e., by personal conscience and moderate social conventions), or from without (i.e., by church and/or state in positions of coercive authority). I’d prefer to live in a world of the former rather than the latter. But sometimes I wonder if my dream is unrealistic.