Let's pretend that an Israeli extremist has blown up a mosque using explosives in his kippah, and that's why it needs to be banned. It doesn't really matter what the pretext is. The point I was making was that it is an item of clothing which we can pretend is the subject of a universal law when in fact the effect of the law will be felt by only one group. That is not Jim Davidson racism but it is still racism.You know what's really disempowering to women? Infantilising them by letting the government choose what they will wear that day instead of trusting them to make their own dress choices, whether the rest of society likes those choices or not. FGM is practised on children not adults and genuinely is a different ball park because there is no possibility of consent or informed choice when the victim is four.If I choose to wear a chastity belt do you think the government needs to pass a law stopping me? Should we have mandatory up-skirt checks (done by a gender-appropriate official, of course, we wouldn't want this to be discriminatory!) to ensure that no women are disempowering themselves by wearing one? One of the biggest challenges facing women in the west is infantilisation using the rhetoric of freedom. We'll liberate you by choosing what you can wear! We'll empower you by letting you get naked and dance for us! Welcome to the new liberation, traced in the outlines of the old sexism.
