Women need new outfits for equality

Last month my wife and I were riding a double-decker bus up London’s Regent Street. It was a Saturday evening, a few days after Harvard University President Lawrence Summers had flabbergasted the world by suggesting that women might be inherently inferior to men in math and science. The outcry, in Harvard Yard and the pages of the U.S. press, was instant and galvanic, as President Summers (who later apologized) was battered by sternly worded statements insisting on the fundamental equality of the sexes.

Around us on Regent Street, by contrast, there was relative calm. The bus was filled with a polyglot array of teenagers, university students, homeward-bound shop attendants, and neck-craning tourists. Below us, the sidewalks were awash with young people taking advantage of a brisk but dry evening. On the bus and outside, many of them were women, in groups or alone. As far as I could tell, their gender had no bearing on the way they experienced their freedom. Whether or not they were accompanied by men didn’t seem to matter. They traveled the streets with a liberty their ancestors would have felt alarming and inappropriate.

What if our bus had contained the proverbial visitor from Mars, curious about gender differences? He would have found Regent Street a fascinating laboratory. Had he stopped those women to ask, “Do you think females are inherently limited in what they can accomplish?” most would have dismissed that notion out of hand. Over the past century, he would have learned, a defining feature of progress has been the extent to which women have taken their rightful places as full and unfettered citizens in Western societies. Like President Summers’ critics in Harvard Yard, those women would have told him that any hint of gender bias was itself alarming and inappropriate.

But the trendy apparel and accessory shops behind the plate-glass windows of Regent Street would have offered a more complex view. At first blush, they too seemed to celebrate women’s emancipation. They bore witness to the freedom of females to earn their own money and spend it as they wish. They celebrated women’s right to live unencumbered by centuries of conditioning that defined them as mere chattel in a man’s world.

Yet under the surface, the mannequins of Regent Street told another story. In their scant garments, revealing cuts, provocative poses, and sensual photographs — and even in such notorious brand names as “French Connection United Kingdom,” whose large-lettered anagram is ubiquitous on sweatshirts and T-shirts here — the message was plain. The body language of Regent Street insists that women are explicitly designed for sexual pleasure. The windows fairly throb with a mind-numbing demand: You must dress for sex, think of yourselves in sexual terms, and use every opportunity to promote sex.

Why? Because, the mannequins whisper, women are essentially objects of allure. As such, they are absolutely dependent on men, without whom their highest objective goes unfulfilled. What if, as Harvard Yard argues, women are fully equal to men of professional acumen and academic prowess. Regent Street couldn’t care less. That equality, it would say, is either irrelevant to a woman’s destiny or strictly subservient to her true hormonal goals.

So change the question. What if our Martian friend asked, “Do you see anything demeaning in these fashions, anything undermining your freedom and dignity?” I suspect he might be surprised by the indifference. So powerful is the message of woman as sexual icon — driven home through movies, music, television, magazines, and every other avenue of pop culture — that the manipulation has become strangely invisible. Where is the voice of outrage, so fervent in Harvard Yard and other global centers of thought? It’s nowhere to be heard along Regent Street nor in thousands of similar shopping arcades around the world.

If President Summers got it wrong, it may be because he confused something innate (the equality of the genders) with something socialized (a disparity in test scores between men and women). If his critics got it right, it was because they knew the disparity stemmed from conditioning rather than genetics.

If today’s generation of young people is to continue this battle for the equal rights of women, it needs to start bringing the moral outrage of Harvard Yard to the demeaning allure of Regent Street. It can’t succeed in rejecting traditional biases while supporting conventional stereotypes. It can’t demand high moral and intellectual parity while buying into a fashionable debasing of woman’s identity. In such confusions freedom is lost.