This is going to sound like a story I’ve made up to make a point. But it’s the truth. Last week I accidentally went on Iranian cable telly. I thought it was just AN Other cable telly station, and arrived to review Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary Clinton. So we were sitting there, chatting away nicely waiting to start, when a woman ran on and said: “Can I just do your jacket up? The headquarters are in Tehran!” You wouldn’t have called me Jacqui Smith (newly appointed United Kingdom home secretary), of whom more in a minute, but it’s true, I wasn’t wearing a polo neck. So I said, “Yes, of course”, but where does that pliability end? As a for instance, I’m pregnant. If they’d asked me to cover up my bump a bit, would that have been OK? If they’d asked me to put on a headscarf, would that have been OK? Of course not. The implication would have been that you are defined by your sexual characteristics and, as such, you have to adapt yourself to someone else’s view of what constitutes a distraction.
We all, men and women, adhere to the fundamentals of broadcasting decency — don’t be naked. We all, broadly, adhere to the same principles of what a man should cover up. But it goes without saying that there are massive cultural differences in what is considered decent for a woman. And it ought to go without saying that the more repressive a culture is, the more it restricts its womenfolk, the more clothing it requires them to wear. Considerations of space prevent me from going into why I don’t think this is a coincidence, but suffice it to say I would not refuse a veil because it would be stuffy and make my eyes water. I would refuse it because it would outrage every sinew of my being. And, in the end, if I’d left the house having decided that my cleavage was decent enough, isn’t this the same issue? Ought I not to have defended it more trenchantly?
Well, no. Cleavage is different. Nose, faces, ankles, we can all agree on. Decolletage, all of a sudden, seems to be a battleground between variants of right-on-ness. Let us return to Jacqui Smith, whose cleavage-revealing outfit for her debut as home secretary the sketch writer Simon Hoggart described for us as resembling Alison Steadman’s in Abigail’s Party. He wasn’t the first columnist to comment on it. Quentin Letts of the Mail called her “pneumatic”, Andrew Gimson of the Telegraph “a babe”, and Amanda Platell, also of the Mail, trounced them all by pondering whether the view “most closely resembled a dead heat in a Zeppelin race or two bald men at a head-butting contest”.
Reconstructed men did not mention it; unreconstructed ones said, “Oo-er!”. Unreconstructed women said, “What does she think she looks like?” and reconstructed women said, “What a disappointment! Why is she playing into their hands?” As far as new feminism goes, this is a non-point. The only important factor in a woman’s dress is that she wears what she pleases. The idea that she shouldn’t wear a low-cut top because her predecessor John Reid wouldn’t is daft. He wouldn’t wear a pussycat bow, either, and that never got anybody tittering at Margaret Thatcher.
People will always sexualise one another because we’re all human. The meaningful question is not, “Do you play into men’s hands in that outfit?” but, “Did you choose that outfit yourself, for whatever funny motive popped into your head?” I say that, however, knowing that I fight a second-wave action against the very movement that got breasts into the public arena in the first place, ironclad or otherwise. It seems to me that cleavage perfectly bifurcates the old and new misogyny. Old school feminism doesn’t allow decolletage, new school feminism requires it — or at the very least, requires us to defend it. Maybe we could bridge this by showing one at a time. — Â