WOMEN’S AGENCY IS NOT FOR MEN TO POLICE.
In 1961, an Australian dancer, by the name of Joan Barry, was fined three pounds for offensive behaviour. Her crime? Wearing a bikini at Bondi Beach. Fast-forward 61 years, and a male doctor on twitter tweeted that it was a pity that Grace Tame could not afford to buy a full-length shirt to appear on Q&A. Her crime? To wear a midriff top with long sleeves while sitting on a discussion panel!
Some may claim that we can’t take a joke, but I say, I remember, June 17, 1988, which was the last day of Semester One of Year 9 for me. A guy in my year’s brother had had a haircut and he’d had a crew cut but left his forelock long. The Science Head of Department, with a smile, told him that he should go back to the barber and let him finish the job. I remember, two years later, another guy in my year grew whiskers on his chin and said that a teacher had quipped to him, “We need to introduce you to a razor blade.” At that time, I was only shaving once a week, and my mother later told me that I needed to start shaving more often and asked me if anybody said anything to me at school. But a few years earlier, she said that if a boy grew a beard in high school, the school couldn’t make him shave it off at a public school.
Bearing in mind that high school students are still minors, they typically cannot shave without parental permission. I remember saying to my mother that I didn’t believe that if the father shaved that he should stop the son from shaving, and she replied that it was different. “The father shaves because he has to, sometimes the son shaves because he wants to.” Is this true? Well, the father needs to remember what it was like to be a teenage boy, and whether he was keen to shave, even if now it’s a daily chore. I remember, in August, 1988, my mother squeezing pimples on my face in the bathroom before telling me to raise my head and picking up the razor she used to shave her legs and removing three hairs off my chin. I would have preferred if she had said, “Get the shaving cream out, please,” and then said, “Okay, squirt a little bit onto your finger. Now rub it on your chin. Now, here’s the razor, gently move it over the shaving foam.” Just like the proverb about fishing, I say, “Give a teenage boy a shave and he’ll have a clean-shaven area until the whiskers grow back. Teach a teenage boy to shave and he’ll have a skill for life.”
And let’s not forget that teenage girls typically want to shave their legs and I remember my mother telling me that my grandmother was angry with her for shaving her legs without permission. Yet if my grandmother had been alive when I started shaving, she might well have told my mother to show me how to shave, not do it for me!
I have seen men say that they like blondes, brunettes or whatever, but there’s a difference between a man saying what he finds attractive and a man trying to tell a woman in his life how she should or shouldn’t be. Now, I know that if a woman asks her husband or boyfriend whether she should wear the red dress or the green one and if he says one or the other, she’ll ask him what’s wrong with the other one. If I had a girlfriend and she asked me that, I would say, “Whichever one you like.” I have heard of some far-right cults where the man says to his wife, “I want you to wear this, today,” and I would say that that is dangerous and misogynistic. And to any man who would say that he didn’t want his wife to show too much skin as it might cause her to have other male attention, I would say, “Well, if you’re giving your wife the love and attention she deserves, that shouldn’t even come into it! Another man might look, but your wife won’t be led astray if she feels loved.
It is not funny nor is it clever for a man to say about a woman who has no direct part in his life that it’s a pity she couldn’t afford a full-length shirt. In the case of the teacher telling the guy to go back to the barber and let him finish the job, the teacher was known to the student and that was just banter and hence different. How Grace Tame or any other woman dresses to appear on television is her business and her choice and none of another man’s business, not even her husband or partner’s business.