Why is it that in so many male-dominated societies they've found a way to hobble women?

We want you when we want you!

Foot-binding was a Chinese thing, not Japanese. Comparing wearing a dress to being literally crippled is a stretch.

Yes, such men are scared of you, and don’t want to admit it. They prefer you accessible, unable to defend yourselves, slow-moving, and to need them. They fear lacking a woman, having a woman leave them, etc.

That’s why I wear running shoes and not Birkenstocks. Can’t run and fight in flip flops. High heals would have the same problem. I wear cotton sweat pants for comfort warmth and flexibility. You should be free to wear whatever you choose.

It’s restricting all the same @Zissou. Thank you for the correction though. You are correct. It was the Chinese.

Is this a question about the church and female oppression, history and female oppression or just in general? If it’s religious I’m out!

In general, @LornaLove. That’s why I mentioned the Japanese, even though I meant the Chinese and didn’t know it. I don’t think they bound their feet for religious reasons.

I bet you dollars to doughnuts the church group was related to the one I grew up in. I almost drowned once on a trip to the river with the youth group, wearing a floor-length denim skirt. Same river, actually, that a former friend’s 17 year old son drowned and died in over Memorial weekend this year. He was not wearing a floor-length denim skirt.

That church does it in the name of “modesty”, and because in our culture skirts and dresses are a “woman’s garments”. In the book of Deuteronomy (chapter 22, verse 5) the Bible says “A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garments, for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.”

Now, you and I and most of the Apostolic church knows and understands that in the Middle-East in 2,000 BC men’s and women’s garments were very similar. Women’s garments may have been distinguished by colour, or ornamentation, or fineness of weave, or something like that. That’s irrelevant to the church’s interpretation of the scripture.

They were a Pentecostal church in a small town. I’m pretty sure they were all related in some way. One girl mentioned her grampa and her cousin.

I just felt so sorry for them. They were kids. They wanted to run and jump and climb and chase a ball, but they couldn’t. So I gave them a half of a sunshine cake that was left over from the reunion.

I win!

Yeah, the only cardinal sin they’re allowed to indulge is gluttony, so you were right up their alley.

LOL! Well, I attended a Pentecostal church for several years. We didn’t have to wear dresses. We WERE expected to talk in tongues, which I thought was particularly stupid so I never did.

Charismatic Pentecostals. Our church knew they were all going to hell. Fake Pentecostals, they were! Fie!

FIE!!!

I must say I haven’t seen women around here (UK) dressed in such a way. That sounds rather odd to me. The girls here often go the other way, leaving butt cheeks hanging out of their skirts perhaps they want easy access as a priority. Of course, women were suppressed historically, these days macro and micro cultures can do the same, but in general I think a woman is as oppressed as she allows herself to be.

” ...in general I think a woman is as oppressed as she allows herself to be.” Well, that’s a difficult call @LornaLove. Maybe that’s more true today because women have a lot more option. But it’s still hard.

Or because women themselves prefer to wear skirt because they like how it compliments their body and that they think wearing skirt make them more attractive/desirable to men. Personally, such surpression is largelly no longer exist in our modern society (with the exception of Middle Eastern countries) and every women can opt to dress the way they like.

I can only imagine that churches are organizations, just like corporations where they have set a formal uniform code for both men and women. Just a silly dress code protocol but it differentiates them from regular people and confer a sense of duty.

If they prefer it it’s fine. Obviously the women of that church aren’t allowed a preference, as @Seek would attest.

It looked to me like the men and boys wore whatever they wanted.

@LornaLove they’re easy to spot. They wear a plain skirt and a shirt that often doesn’t even match. It’s like they just grab whatever from their drawer. They aren’t making any kind of fashion statement by any stretch of the imagination. They are simply “wearing a skirt.”

My understanding of the foot binding is it was sexual in nature. Men would place the small feet in their mouths during Intercourse. Small, or dainty things are considered feminine in many cultures . The binding must have been painful, and no doubt led to many health problems.

I feel it relevant to mention that many things females do to their bodies, or wear are painful,or at least inconvenient. Most women I know like to feel attractive. So they shave this, pierce that, lift this, augment that, cover up this etc.

To see how women prefer to dress,one need only go to a party on Halloween. Almost all costumes (chosen by the women ) are sexual in nature. Naughty nurse, sexy cop etc. These costumes, to me, represent an underlying desire to dress provocatively.

You’ll never hear me say women weren’t /aren’t oppressed. But if you thumb through a women’s magazine like Cosmopolitan, you will quickly see that women desire to dress and be perceived in a sexy way.

In other words, both genders play a role in ‘fashion.’

To answer the meat of the question, I assume that men were usually stronger, and people in general take advantage of such things. I submit that if women were the strongest, since the beginning, they would have oppressed men the exact same way.

If it is their preference to dress a certain way it’s fine. It’s when it’s forced on them by society, and they aren’t allowed to have a say in it, that makes it wrong.

I disagree that women would have oppressed men in the same way. It happens because of the testosterone, and a desire to dominate. That would be a good question though.

^Yeah. I thought about that a minute ago. Testosterone was a factor I’m sure.

Some would call it apples and oranges, others would say a wild strawman, and some might even say a toothless tiger. It comes back to some manufactured ”See!? Men are rooking us!” direction. Some of this ”hobbling” women have and are doing to themselves; but then it is not restricting or hobbling if they do it in the name of fashion, etc.

I was 12 when I obediently strapped myself into my first training bra. It had a Winnie the Pooh logo in the middle, right in front of my sternum, and one classmate mercilessly teased me when the sunlight shone through my beige T-shirt to reveal Winnie’s red shirt. I went straight to the bathroom and cried in the handicap stall. So far, my introduction to the bra life wasn’t going so great.
Combine that with my mom informing me that my boobs would sag by the time I hit 30 if I abstained from wearing underwire bras, and my tween self already felt like it was time to catch up. But as soon as I strapped on that first beige undergarment, a hatred began to fester within me. The pinching underwire, the itchy tags, and the impossible-to-clasp plastic hooks — I wondered how any human being could allow themselves to be so burdened for the rest of their life. But I wore the thing anyway, day in and day out, to school and to dance class, internally griping and moaning all the while._
[GINA M. FLORIO]

She is not the only one, when women shackle themselves in bras with all that is unfavorable about them, it is all cool, if you don’t comply you are some slut or inappropriate.

When was the last time you were talking to a girl and you suddenly thought, “OMG! She’s not wearing a bra! What a bitch!” Let me guess — never, right? That’s because women don’t care if other women don’t wear bras.
[Maya Cagan]

Why would you care what a church does, it is not your affiliation. Even if they were somewhat missing the spirit and interpretation of the bible to achieve a certain thought or idea, women who are not in the church do the same thing with shamming other women into wearing bras, not going commando in a mini, etc. I do not think it has anything to do with ”let’s keep the girls from having fun”. Maybe it is a response that so many secular men are into kiddie porn, to not make their young girls tempting they go beyond the standard to not make them sexual of objectifying, if the physical manifestation of that is dresses that curtail certain activity, oh well, they lose any way they go, if they would have had the girls in volleyball shorts where complete romp-a-round freedom was there, someone would have had SOMETHING to say about that. Is it men that hobble women into being scared to even go to the curb to get the morning paper if she is not all dolled up in her makeup, or would not be caught dead rushing to the 7–11 at 1am because she ran out of diapers because she took her ”face off” for the evening?

Cherry picking ones hobbling doesn’t make it any real than a spook, ghost or specter.

I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to pin the blame for the subordination of women exclusively on men. There are scads of you girls perfectly prepared to perpetuate and enforce your own persecution.

I don’t regard the bra as a “tool of enslavement”. Clearly, it is a useful and functional device of great benefit to most women. Like a hard hat or steel toed shoes, or a cup for men.

@Hypocrisy_Central I choose to wear a bra because I look seriously sloppy without one. Not wearing a bra also creates other hindrances for me, some that are painful. I wear one because I choose to. Lots of smaller breasted women can, and do, get away with not wearing one. It is not a form of bondage for me, although I would seriously prefer smaller breasts.

I also choose not to wear make up most of the time, unlike my mother’s generation. Mom never left the house without spending at least 15 minutes preparing. She said, “You never know who you might meet.”

If it’s what we choose to do it’s OK.

And why would you think that girls in dresses would be less tempting to a pedophile? That’s ridiculous.

Do you have an example of what you mean @stanleybmanly?

If you think about it, there would be little chance of enforcing any of the many restrictions and tortures inflicted upon women without a majority cadre of women participating in their own subjugation. Everything from female mutilation through the Spring previews at Vogue depends upon the eager cooperation of women in the unconscious subjugation of themselves and their sisters. In all of these societies it is the women who are depended on to see to it that the feet are bound or pre teen girls are castrated. When it comes to our own society, it really galls me that some of the greatest beneficiaries of the feminist struggle, bimbos like Schlafly and Coulter, women who would otherwise be restricted to their own kitchens with their mouths shut, busily portray those responsible for their own freedoms as women who’d rather be men.

@stanleybmanly . We’ve been over this in other threads. They refuse to be accountable for their role. Any part of it….

I don’t think it can be about “easy access,” because from what I understand, during the same period it was taboo for women to wear trousers, undergarments were rather elaborate—basically trousers underneath skirts. Not exactly easy. Also, at this same time, the skirts were long, and they obscured the shape of the legs. So, skirts were modesty. (I also wonder if skirts were more practical with what I understand were rather bulky methods for menstrual protection at that time—wouldn’t pants show that?—but I have no information one way or the other regarding that. It’s just idle speculation on my part.)

Garments haven’t always been gender-ized by how many openings they provide legs. Apparently “women had been wearing trousers for outdoor work thousands of years earlier in the Western world,” (as well as the rest of the world, the page explains in other passages) (source). And paintings or tapestries from, for example, medieval times, show men in robes and other dress-like garments.

I know there was a period of rigid genderizing of garments—pants for boys, skirts for girls, etc.—but over the longer span of humanity, it is (from what I understand) the exception.

Personally, I wish it were socially okay for men to wear dress-like garments again, and I am sorry for them that it isn’t yet. While skirts might not be the best for manual labor or for wearing around extreme breezes, are wonderfully comfortable for leisure activities. Right now, even with the issues of sexualizing and objectifying women for wearing certain cuts of clothing, it seems that women today get to wear a much larger variety of clothing shapes than men do.

Chinese men put the tiny bound feet of the women in their mouths during intercourse? Ookay, that is disturbing. haha

I can’t add much to the discussion other than to say that, obviously, the modesty factor of hardcore religious types is what this is all about as has been mentioned.
I’m old enough to remember when girls could only wear dresses to school. It was in 5th or 6th grade where we were allowed a pants day, mostly worn UNDER our dresses. haha
This was about 1969.

^I read an article about the foot binding thing a few years ago. It went into more depth, but I never forgot the thought of having mutant feet in my mouth. (Shudder)

I forget which country(somewhere in Asia?), but neck rings were also mentioned in the article. Women add a ring like every now and then to their necks. The effect of the desired appearance of the elongated neck is quite substantial to the body. The neck isn’t any longer at all. The thorax is slowly pushed down into the abdomen, compressing all organs.

Again, it was a cultural thing. Done to the women by themselves.

I feel it relevant to mention that I myself am circumsized. Obviously as an infant. Something I would not have done,if it were my decision. Men have weird things happen to them too as a result of culture, or ‘common practice. ’ A bra seems better than having sensitive parts of your anatomy removed as a baby.

@MrGrimm888 Yes, I have seen those women with the heavy brass rings around their uber elongated necks. yeah, and shudder to think that some cultures circumcise their baby girls and adolescent girls too. Gah!

The female genital mutilation is one of the most pathetic, awful things humans have ever done. It would be hard for me not to stomp a puddle in the ass of a man who told me he’d had any role in such a thing.

For the record…..

@stanleybmanly I don’t regard the bra as a “tool of enslavement”. Clearly, it is a useful and functional device of great benefit to most women. Like a hard hat or steel toed shoes, or a cup for men.
Yeah, those breast certainly need some protection while hitting the button for the Bluetooth while driving, or to hold them in place while getting that milk and eggs from the market, and they really need to have control typing at their computer keyboards, if it were truly like a hardhat, they would only be needed for when actual peril was at hand. I don’t need a hardhat when driving, taking out the trash, grocery shopping, and certainly not typing, a bra doesn’t equal the need of a hardhat. ~~

@Dutchess_III I choose to wear a bra because I look seriously sloppy without one.
And is that because you came to that conclusion, or it was the prevailing ideology society drummed into you since you were a teen that you have been exposed to so long, you do not think any different or that it was not your original thought?

Not wearing a bra also creates other hindrances for me, some that are painful.
Wearing bras to some women are painful and uncomfortable but they are still encouraged to wear on, just get a better fit.

Lots of smaller breasted women can, and do, get away with not wearing one.
Sure, I agree, a lot of women even as large as 36c and I have seen some 38c who could rock it without a bra, when have you seen anyone encourage them to ditch the bra if they did not need one? If they DIDN’T wear one, it would be a source of scorn or gossip.

It is not a form of bondage for me, although I would seriously prefer smaller breasts.
As I am sure some of those women in China who bound their feet did not see it as bondage, even if it was uncomfortable or had lasting effects, so to blanket name it bondage is not a call you can make.

I also choose not to wear make up most of the time, unlike my mother’s generation.
If women are truly attractive off their personality, wit, and charm, what purposed do putting that stuff and all the chemicals in in on the face in the 1st place?

If it’s what we choose to do it’s OK.
Why not afford other women that too, be it they bind their feet, stretch their necks with brass rings, tattoo their whole back, whatever, if that is what they chose to do, then they were not forced into some subjugation by men.

And why would you think that girls in dresses would be less tempting to a pedophile?
I merely put a feeler out on how some might think, even if it is not correct. Just like those who believe their child is in great danger walking to school or to the store alone because they will get snatched up by some stranger and sexed up. The facts state if their child gets sexed up by anyone it will be someone the child knows, but people want to ignore that fact as if they are scared to admit they have more to worry about from friends, acquaintances, and family members sexing up their young’uns then some nameless, faceless stranger.

@MrGrimm888 but the mothers of those girls are often proponents for the FGM because it was done to them and it is what is expected by the men of their culture. They are caught and trapped in the same thinking because of the male dominated culture. Try again about your ‘blame the women too.’ bullshit

^I didn’t blame women for FGM…Try again…. My comments about FGM are only a couple responses up. Please read them before reacting.

@MrGrimm888 you go on in your answer above that, blaming that the women do it to themselves. Of course the women who are oppressed support that oppressive shit. They are brainwashed by their culture and religion to do this crap. Like your circumcision. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t your choice.

This thread stumbles into another issue:

Is it possible to identify a monolithic as well as a monologic masculinist [signifying] economy that traverses the array of cultural and historical contexts in which sexual difference takes place? Is the failure to acknowledge the specific cultural operations of gender oppression itself a kind of epistemological imperialism, one which is not ameliorated by the simple elaboration of cultural differences as “examples” of the selfsame phallogocentrism? The effort to include “Other” cultures as variegated amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative act that risks a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of phallogocentrism, colonizing under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept into question.

—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Ch. 1 Sec. IV

That’s what she said! ;-P

@cazzie . I realize you may take this negatively, but it is not my intention.

What can we (men AND women )do about these issues?

You’re intelligent, and well traveled. Are there places you’ve been where women’s rights are improving? If so, why? And how can we keep it moving in that direction? With the goal being equality of rights,and treatment?

Instead of bringing up things we all agree are in need of fixing, what solutions are there?

I live in Norway. We have universal health care. We have free university education. We have, what amounts to, a years maternity leave. We have some of the best child care facilities and they are government subsidised. Things aren’t perfect here, but these things would be a good start in the USA to bring a more equal footing between men and women.

You could start by really educating yourselves on the issues and stop perpetuating myths. Don’t buy your granddaughter or niece that pink packaged stuff. Learn what she is really interested in and get her that. She’s fed enough Elsa and Disney that she’ll choke on it for the rest of her life. Let her life be about more than that. But we have to teach them that their lives can be more than that. Microscopes, Chemistry Sets, Build a Birdhouse kits….. Take her into your garage and show her what you are doing on your lawnmower. Bring her fishing and let her gut and scale the fish and put the worm on the hook. Tell her the reasons why certain fish like certain food and go for certain lures and why and where they school. Show her the outdoors and show her how to identify birds from their silhouettes. Show her what animal tracks look like. We have to stop letting the media raise our kids. They are getting such a horrible skewed view of the world.

((I think I was lucky with my choice of Dad. He even showed me how he made his lead sinkers. I had never seen melted metal before and I was fascinated! He was always bringing me home junk from the Mill to mess around with in the garage. I always miss my parents most when I’m sick and I’ve been sick all this week and now I’m super emotional from other stuff, so no, my emotions don’t make me weak, they make me strong. I found out this week that I am capable of more love than I knew and that makes me feel happy and powerful.))

Not sure what myths I’m perpetuating. My words are from observations of your gender. I don’t direct life,like a movie.

I SUPER agree with you about the little girl’s growing up learning stuff. Dolls,and such aren’t challenging mentally. No problem solving skills, or mental stimulus.

I’ve said it before. As soon as they can hold something, we give our male babies fake guns, and our female babies fake babies. Then people wonder why young men are violent, and young women have babies too early.

Treating the genders equally FROM THE START would most likely reap great benefits.

Sounds like you were lucky with your Dad @cazzie. He raised an excellent person. Hopefully more men follow suit. Where I live little girls hunt and fish. I like that.

@MrGrimm888 when you comment about your ‘observations’ you are putting it through your own filter. Your comments are showing bias. Even the most trained scientists are known to show bias. When I get upset here on Fluther about comments people make, I am negative about the comment. I don’t know most of you, so I’ve no right to make it personal.

I’m being called ‘man hater’ because I call out racist, sexist comments. That’s not constructive. I’ve been asked tonight, ‘Why don’t you just kill all the male babies, seeing as how they just grow up to be men that hate women.’ These types of argument I will absolutely NOT get into. They are puerile and unhelpful. I think we are all better than that.

“Dolls and such” are imaginative play, and imaginative play should be encouraged among all genders. I hesitate, personally, to buy too much themed stuff, unless the theme is imaginative in itself, but my eight year old son enjoys playing with stuffed animals. Some of them are Pokemon, and others are generic lizards and bears and dogs and whatever.

However, imaginative play is not the only play, so give the kids an Erector set and some Lego bricks, too.

And while you’re at it, make them scoop the cat litter and wash the damn dishes sometimes. I’m not your maid, kid.

Oh, and dolls are challenging. Have you ever tried to dress one? I’m not saying no dolls or play kitchen stuff, but that can’t be the only stuff.

I just used dolls as an example. Perhaps I miss spoke.I don’t think I ever tried dressing one. I just meant they weren’t legos, Linkin logs, or Transformers that had rubix cube like properties.

Transformers are literally themed dolls.

I wish you all could all come to my front patio tonight to wait for the aurora. They are meant to be spectacular tonight. We have a bit too much cloud cover, but I’m crossing my fingers. (throws an arm around @Seek )

Seeing the ‘northern lights’ is on my bucket list.

@cazzie Me too.

@MrGrimm888 Someone said, in another thread, “women are only as controlled as they allow themselves to be.” That sounds really good but historically a woman really couldn’t survive without a male. If that male turned on her, beat the shit out of her if she didn’t do what he wanted, well….she ends up doing what he wants no matter how uncomfortable it may be for her. That resonates through us to this day, and certainly among some churches. You might not get the shit beat our of you, but you will be shunned, or whatever.

“Oh, and dolls are challenging. Have you ever tried to dress one?”

No, but taking off their bra is way daunting! ;-)

Even when I put a doll on a pedestal and show respect to its cleavage, I still have to use scissors. ;-(

*good that this is in social, eh?

WTH, I’ll flag it anyway.

No problem with getting flagged: it’s not a comment that needs to be seen in perpetuity. ;-o

I think it might be time for a history lesson. So many of us grew up with women having the vote and being able to own property, but did you know that it wasn’t that long ago that a women couldn’t open up a bank account without her husband’s permission until the 1960’s in the US and not until 1975 in the UK. I’m looking for a good source that isn’t too long about certain facts we tend to forget about women’s lives and the actual culture we live in.
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/05/28/10-things-that-american-women-could-not-do-before-the-1970s/

This is a rather long detailed list, but it is fascinating. Ooops.. It’s not a wiki article… it is a wiki talk. Not public access material, I guess. Just put in Timeline of women’s legal rights (other than voting) into the wiki search and you’ll get it yourself.

@cazzie – the second link is broken

@cazzie “I wish you all could all come to my front patio tonight to wait for the aurora.” Reykjavik turned off its city lights so they could see the northern ones.

(Brian, if you were on my facebook friend’s list, you’d see that I already posted to that, but thanks.) Oh and Brian, why AREN’T you on my facebook friend’s list?

I don’t have an account. Would Googling facebook lead me to the set-up procedures?

Anyone here remember Gamergate?

Oh, yeah… My kid was really listening to the back and forth of this. It was the first time he heard the term ‘feminazi’. We had a very long talk after that.

@Dutchess_III Back when the pioneers and settlers were travelling across the bare stretches of the western United States, in some sections there were no trees or bushes to hide behind when the women had to pee. Plus the women couldn’t get too far from the wagons because of the threat of Indians. So they would get together, go some distance away, stand in a circle and spread out their skits and dresses to hide their peeing activities. Also, long dresses made that task easy when a woman was out by herself, I suppose…

Dresses were invented long, long, long before the 19th century. As a woman I can promise that wearing a dress wouldn’t make the task any easier, or more private, than if you wear trousers. In fact, it would be more cumbersome and messy.

Of course, I never meant to imply that dresses were only invented in the 18th century so that women crossing the barren plains in the old west could have some form of privacy with which to pee…
Just a single example of the usefulness of a dress.
And I suppose they could have drilled a hole in the bottom of the wagon, inserted a funnel, and squatted over that. No dress required!

In my experience peeing in the woods, a dress would have to be bunched up and pulled up around your waist, out of the way, or it would get peed on. It would be much more difficult than arranging shorts or pants to pee, although there are a few tricks to even that. For one thing, always make sure you’re peeing downhill or it drains back onto your feet.

Yeah, I really can’t think of a lot of advantages to wearing a dress at all. Not for the women, anyway. Especially a long dress. They swoop around and get in the fire. Mice run up their long dresses (which is why we have the stereotypical woman jumping up on a chair when a mouse is around.) Can’t really run. You’d have to hike the dress up to even try to do more than walk.

^ Yeah, I really can’t think of a lot of advantages to wearing a dress at all.
Well if you…..oh, forget it…......

Were you trying to say something adolescency crass about sex @Hypocrisy_Central?

^ Were you trying to say something adolescency crass about sex..]
The heck with it, I was going to say you can’t find any advantages to wearing a dress because you spend so much time manufacturing advantages for the wearing of bras; there, I said it and I approved that message.

I’ve pooped outside a lot. Usually I’m wearing pants,or a swimsuit. I can’t say I’ve ever pooped while wearing a dress,but it seems better than pants. Yes you’d have to pull the dress high,but isn’t that better than the shackles effect I get with my pants around my ankles? I’ve fallen in the act before. Not always going forward…... If you catch my drift.

Now I simply remove a pant leg. Still seems like it would be easier in a dress. But, I agree,it seems a long dress would be cumbersome, and awkward in regards to movement.

I used to live in an apartment complex where a guy we refered to as ‘hippie dude ’ (I don’t remember his name ) wore long dresses all the time. He looked quite odd with his big brown beard, and his flowing green dress. But it never encumbered him.He did get beaten and robbed once,but I didn’t ask him if he was wearing a dress at the time,so I don’t know if it hindered him in that instance.
He said ‘dude,man, like if it weren’t for like horses man, all men would wear dresses.’ Take whatever you want from that wisdom.

Pooping is not like peeing. It’s much more contained. Easier to clean up too. But, as you said, either way the dress has to be hiked up so the idea that it somehow contributes to modesty doesn’t fly.

And it would be pretty easy to ride a horse in a dress. But kind of stupid to do.

I gotta ask a question about dresses!