Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image Image

19twentythree | March 28, 2024

Scroll to top

Top

No Comments

Bikinis: Liberating or objectifying women?

June 23, 2013
Bikinis: Liberating or objectifying women?

“It’s as if they’re reacting to these women as if they’re not fully human,” said a video we came across on YouTube.

The video is definitely interesting, to say the least.

An American-Philippino actress, Jessica Rey, advocates that women’s liberation when it came to fashion, and especially swimwear, may not have been necessarily a liberation.

She argues that research has shown men reacted to pictures of women dressed in skimpy bikinis like they reacted to objects, urging women to dress more ‘modestly’ and even launching her own swimwear line to bring back the Audrey Hepburn swimsuit. She adds that it was fashion and the media that made women believe ‘modesty’ is a regressive concept that doesn’t go with fashion or modernity and dressing modestly goes hand in had with dressing like a grandma.

“Who says it has to be itsy bitsy?” is the tagline to Rey’s swimwear line.

“So it seems that wearing a bikini does give a woman power, the power to shut down a man’s ability to see her as a person, but rather as an object. This is surely not the kind of power that women were searching for, the power to be treated as an equal, to be seen as in control and to be taken seriously. It seems that the power they are searching for can be attainable if they dress modestly.”

A must-watch, share and do let us know how you feel about it; enlightening, liberating or simply regressive?

 


Submit a Comment