#a lot of times the justification for modesty culture was 'nobody wants to see that'

[bloggingfromearth]

Performative... whatever this is, irks the shit out of me.

Let's disect this, shall we?

The transormed wife is a person who some time ago decided that her identity should be entirely centred around somebody else. About not who she is a person but as an adjacent of somebody else. She has no personality of her own. No interests. No ideas or goals. They are always and only in relation to somebody. Which in on itself is why we have this performance behaviour.

When you don't exist for yourself, doing the things you want to, it turns you into an actor with an audience of everybody, really. Because sacrificing your identity requires an audience. You are not doing it for yourself but for another person. The audience. The husband. The society. The whatever. So you have to, no, you need to constantly check and ask for the validation you believe you need to get to justify your decision to sublimate your identity.

Some people use religion for this. Others use "traditional" as the go to model. It's easy, really. Center your identity around your husband and there you have it. You will now win at life by being the best at being a traditional (whatever that means for you) wife. Why am I saying win? Because you do this to prove that you are better. If you feel the need to identify as defined only by something that nobody cares nor minds anyway, it turns into a competition. In which you HAVE to win.

But how do you win at being a "traditional" or whatever it is? By nonstop making it about how much better you do the benign thing you chose to do than everybody else. Most likely your significant other doesn't care about how much BEST you are at the thing, they like you for who you are. Unfortunately even though she defines herself by her relation to her husband, the approval that she is after is not his. Otherwise she wouldn't be on every possible social media insisting how much better she is than everybody else and winning at the competition that she invented in her own head.

So, the opinion imof her husband, ironically, doesn't matter that much. It's the approval of total strangers whose validation she is seeking.

Case in point, modesty. See, modesty is a funny beast. Modesty is not an absolute concept. It's always in relation to. In a culture with more relaxed ideas about personal freedoms or expression, what is considered modest will most likely be seen as extremely inappropriate in a culture with a different type of expression of identity. Modesty in on itself could be anything. It could mean anything. It could be incredibly being or openly hostile. In on itself is a non-concept, a nonword. It could be just an individual concept or it could be consequential. Unfortunately when it is consequential, as per our own history and reality, we know that it can and will be always used as a tool of oppression and a way to harass somebody. When somebody's personality and humanity are not tied to their existence in on itself, one can always and will use it as a reason, as a justification why somebody is not treated as fully human for whatever reason. If your humanity is not inherent but situational or optional, conditional, one can thus be seen as deserving for dehumanization.

We see that for women are lot more than for men. In regards to this person, she dehumanizes herself to the point that she sees herself as an object that belongs TO somebody else. In this case, her husband. Her body is not hers. She doesn't own it. We already knew that based on her username since her personality stems from her relation but her own words further reinforce that. In this case, what she wears. The issue with her choice here however is not that somebody or anybody really gives a fuck. Nobody is invested if she wears a skirt, a full nun outfit or a g-string. So body would spare a second glance at her leggings and skirt. Unfortunately that is not good enough, as we have established, when your identity is a performance, everything you do needs to be individually observed and validated proving how much better that makes you than everybody else peacefully existing. So this is when the hierarchy of existence is pushed forward. See, she is not a weirdo who sexualizes a pair of leggings, no, she needs to remind us how much better she is by hiding a part of her body. Except that is not her body. It's her husband's who is the only one who should be observing it. But how could one make it about herself? By shaming the other women who don't do it and thus patting herself on the back how much more moral and better she is. Because she is not like all those other women who show their bodies and acting as if those bodies are theirs. It doesn't matter if they are married by definition siad bodies are owed by their husbands even if the said husbands don't yet exist. In advance your body is not yours, it's always owed by a man. Be that your father, brother, husband, whatever. Body autonomy is not something she approves of for women, that much is obvious. Nobody who is happy with the choice makes it a point to bitch about other women bot having done the same choices makes it crystal clear how she sees body autonomy and who is allowed to have and not have autonomy.

Why did I write this whole tirade over a short post? Mostly because we have a resurgance of Nazi bullshit masquerading as "traditional", this or that. Unlike in the past, they did develop the situational awareness that men insisting what women should do, look like, engage in and etc. doesn't work that great, thus now we get the female version of "I CHOOSE to be entirely defined by a paternalistic environment that sees me as a baby making machine with little autonomy that should be subservient". Ironically, they use the core idea of feminism, the right to choose, to insist that women have to choose the thing that will dehumanize them. Losing her identity clearly doesn't make her happy, because she sees women making other choices and she doesn't want them to do so. Also, if women make other choices, this makes her choices less valuable and the performance of being a good, neigh, better wife falls on deaf years because people don't care about chasing some imaginary, impossible standard but simply live their lives ad hoc, not trying to get approval how much better they are than all those other women. And it must be other women, because it is a competition in a paternalistic soeicety in which the only way to have real value is for men to bestow it to you.

So, be warned. This is not just a random weirdo who needs to make her skirt all about how much better she is. It's a reminder how much peiole fall down the rabbit hole when they stop seeing themselves as fully autonomous beings and need the rest to also not do it.

This is not a criticism of being a stay at home or dressing however the fuck you want but making it a must or trying to shame others for not making your own choices. This is the very idea of having the right to choose. Do whatever you think is right with your own body, self and life. Leave the rest to do the same.