Our younger daughter traveled to Israel with a group of teenagers in July 2021, the summer before their senior year of high school. The trip was organized by two summer camps run through the Union for Reform Judaism, the progressive movement of Judaism. The myriad sites they visited included praying at the Western Wall. In advance of the visit to the Wall, the young women received “the talk,” whereby the chaperones informed them of the proper dress code for praying at the wall. That there was a dress code only for females did not sit well with these young women, most of whom have come of age in Texas, where their experience of the sexist dress codes in high school was all too familiar.
The temperature in Israel was at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The young men could wear shorts and t-shirts; the young women were told they needed to cover their legs and arms, preferably with long skirts and dresses, not pants. Frustrated with a dress code that only applied to females, our daughter and several of her friends hiked up their skirts above their knees and approached the Wall to pray. People glared, and one older woman stalked them, hurling epithets at them. “Where is it written [in the Torah/Talmud that women must cover in specific ways to pray at the Western Wall]?” one young woman responded. This seemingly small act of resistance, large to these young women, aimed not only to call out the sexist clothing requirement that applied to women and not to men but also to reject a view of women that tells them their knees and elbows are shameful and distracting.
I stand by my daughter’s act of resistance, and yet her act terrifies me. I can’t help but wonder how close my daughter was to being stoned, spit on, or otherwise physically assaulted by a religious extremist who decided it was their responsibility to enforce their self-proclaimed moral authority. How close was my daughter to being murdered?
Melodramatic? Histrionic? The question asked by an overly emotional mother? Not when considering the recent events in Iran where 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died—allegedly killed—on September 16, 2022, while in the custody of the Iranian morality police. What was Amini’s moral crime so abhorrent that she should be arrested and allegedly beaten by the morality police? She was accused of “bad hijab,” which, in her case, is wearing her hijab too loosely such that some hair showed. In short, she violated the Islamic dress code.
According to Reuters, the morality police force, known as the Gasht e Ershad (Basij) or Guidance Patrols, [sanctioned by the United States and now also Great Britain] is tasked with “detaining people who violate Iran’s conservative dress code. The force aims to ‘promote virtue and prevent vice’.” Significantly, this severe dress code was not always in place. Women are often seen in photographs wearing shorts and bathing suits in the years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution—just 43 years ago. Although the state introduced increasingly conservative mandates for women’s clothing in the years following the revolution, the “fight against ‘bad hijab’ is as old as the Islamic Revolution, which has erected the conservative dressing of women as one of its pillars” and women who violated the dress code were frequently threatened with violence.
At the time of this writing, the definitive cause of Amini’s death remains inconclusive. Iranian officials claim that she died of heart failure. But she was a young, healthy woman. Eyewitnesses claim they saw her beaten while in custody and thus claim that she died due to police brutality. Brain CT scans show severe injuries to the skull, which are unlikely the result of “underlying diseases,” as Iranian authorities claim. The speculation that her death was caused by a punishment inflicted because she wore her hijab too loosely has sparked protests not only from men and women but also young schoolgirls, calling for the Iranian religious authority’s fall and for political freedom and human rights to be recognized in Iran. Whatever happens, the bravery of these individuals protesting in a country that would jail, beat, and even kill them must be acknowledged.
We can point our moral and political fingers at Iran, and certainly, we should. A woman died in Iranian police custody, and the evidence points to her being brutally beaten for wearing her hijab too loosely, so her hair showed. But by pointing fingers at Iran, we lose sight of the global ubiquity of dress codes for women that condone, promote, and sanction increased surveillance over women’s bodies, lives, and sexuality; that convey to women they are to be ashamed of having been born, or become, women; that tell women they are distractions to men and thus must cover their skin from head to toe [because women are held responsible for men’s behavior], or in some cases be excluded from those spaces altogether [rather than require men to take control of their own behavior]. Iran’s moral police is undoubtedly extreme, but how should we think about these dress codes more generally?
As a feminist theorist working at the intersection of 20th-century French philosophy and themes in the philosophy of education, I found the work of Althusser and Foucault productive for thinking through the theoretical foundations and philosophical implications of dress codes that are developed and enforced within a moral framework. However, Kate Manne offers another way to think about Althusser’s structures that describe the respective roles of law and ideology as mechanisms for controlling behavior (see especially chapter 3 in Manne). Bringing all three theoretical apparatuses to bear on my analysis is particularly powerful, but for this piece, I will focus on Manne’s work.
Manne distinguishes between sexism and misogyny, which she argues have been wrongly used interchangeably. For Manne, sexism is the belief that women are inferior to men and they ought to be subordinate. Misogyny is the enforcer, the laws or actions (outside of law) that subjugate women. Manne’s structure is conducive when applied to dress codes. Sexism produces the view that women should dress modestly—women are temptresses, distractions, sluts, and ultimately, they are responsible for men’s behavior. Misogyny creates the dress codes enforcing this view, not only through real punishments, e.g., in school suspension (the US), lashings (Iran), being spit on (Israel), but also through the threat that wearing this clothing means they are responsible for whatever violence happens to them. The shame produced by the negative views of women who dress this way (sluts) and the codes (which make violators feel like sexual criminals) is worn like an immovable piece of clothing. It is no accident that the Iranian force is called the Morality Police, explicitly linking dress code violation to moral transgression.
Apart from women and young girls who explicitly reject the role of modesty in female subjectivity, many women and men who support and enforce the dress codes believe in this criterion of modesty. They use words like distraction or attempt to scare young girls with a claim that “boys will see their undergarments” if their shorts are not long enough or that they’re sluts and impure (who would want them?) if they wear clothes violating the code. The concern is that girls will function like sexual objects or be ridiculed. In other words, while a real punishment hangs in the distance as the ultimate enforcer, a primary enforcer of the dress code is the ideology, or at least it was hoped this would work.
One can see this enacted when a young child says, “I don’t care” to the threat that “boys will see you.” It is as if the child had called out the emperor’s no clothes, pulled the curtain to reveal the wizard, or within Nietzschean terms, rejected the threat of exile for a perceived transgression (See Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals). We see this now with the protests in Iran calling for a regime change and an end to the moral authority that established these dress codes. While they might wear the hijab out of fear, Iranian students, including young girls, don’t believe in the religious views grounding the law. So what does an authority do when facing ideological rejection? On the one hand, the power is revealed to be ephemeral because although punishment can occur, the primary aim—the fear of being ostracized or shamed—has been subverted. But, on the other hand, the authority can increase the fear-mongering, telling these young girls that the dress code is for their own protection, to prevent unwanted touching, and even to prevent rape. And if that doesn’t work, the young women are arrested, beaten, jailed, re-educated, or killed.
As unfair as it is to make young women responsible for the learning environment for young men, my concern transcends the fundamental unfairness. I have written previously about the danger of US high school dress codes perpetuating rape culture and why school administrators, teachers, and parents should be alarmed. Moreover, young men should be enraged by the converse claim that they cannot control their actions. But how far are we from US dress codes resulting in pecuniary or corporal punishment for women?
We see frequent references to the US’ risk of becoming The Handmaid’s Tale with their red capes and hoods. But is this only satire? Here we are in 2022. The Supreme Court’s current makeup includes a conservative Catholic majority whose members not only believe in a retrograde view of women but also that they’re justified in making rulings based on those beliefs that will impact all the women in the country. Can we be confident that dress codes permeating US high schools, as dangerous as they are even in that venue, will remain confined only to high schools? Iran allowed short shorts until it didn’t—and that was only 43 years ago.
According to NPR’s Peter Kenyon, “Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has now weighed in on the protests, condemning them as plots engineered by the U.S. and Israel…” How ironic.
*This piece is a revised/updated version of “You’re wearing that?” published in the Women and Philosophy Blog of the APA
*At this writing, and as reported by BBC Persian and posted by Rana Rahimpour on his Twitter account, the Iranian sport climber Elnaz Rakebi, who competed without her hijab at the International Federation of Sport Climbing’s Asian Championships in Seoul, was initially reported missing, and then found to be flying to Tehran two days earlier than planned. “There are concerns about her safety.”
The Current Events Series of Public Philosophy of the APA Blog aims to share philosophical insights about current topics of today. If you would like to contribute to this series, email sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org.
Claire Elise Katz
Claire Katz is Professor and Interim Department Head of Teaching, Learning, and Culture in the School of Education and Human Development at Texas A &M University, where she holds the title Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education, and religion and (2) K-12 philosophy.
