How many times have you seen women air drying underwear? How often do we come across bras and underwear basking in the sun – sanitizing in the most natural way possible, with no cover to keep them from being seen by the public? Rarely.
Women’s underwear always makes people, men and women, uncomfortable because like our bodies, our clothes too have been sexualized. Meet a host and they’ll share with you the story of this pervert who masturbated outdoors just because he stood outside a hostel with his gaze fixed on a bra hanging on the windowsill to be dried . Such incidents often left students disgusted, not only with men, but also with their own bodies and the clothes that covered the most intimate parts of our bodies.
But even when you leave out the pervs, it’s not like our society approves of women air-drying our underwear. Most aunts and mothers would suffer a seizure even if a strap of your washed bra sticks out from under the towel you covered it with on the clotheslines. “Jao theek kar ke aogirls are told angrily,Aise accha nahi lagta.” Pay attention to the words that are used to make us cover our bras and briefs. It’s as if hanging out our bra to air dry is like putting it on a rack in the busiest places in town. crossroads, not that there is anything wrong with that. Nevertheless, women feel guilty for laying their underwear out in the open.
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One can understand that such instructions come from a feeling of protection. The women of our homes, each one of them, are familiar with the lustful gaze of predators. They know that even our underwear has the potential to sexualize us and even incite sexual violence, that too with a sense of entitlement. She hung her bra out in the open, she asked to be ogled. But this policing only empowers women for sexual safety and gives predators a free pass.
Many men are liberal enough today not to sexualize women’s underwear. We know husbands, dads, and brothers who do laundry, and they don’t apply any particular strategy to hang wet bras on the clothesline. They just leave them there, like any other piece of clothing. Because these men know better, they were brought up better, and that’s what we should be focusing on.
Instead of watching women, criticizing the way they dry their underwear, why not teach boys and men to respect women and not see their bodies as objects designed solely for their sexual gratification? It’s not the women who need to be blamed if their clothes trigger sexual thoughts in some people’s minds. It is our society that is responsible for letting some people get away with such a mindset and punishing half the population for their sex rather than teaching the other sex to treat women with dignity .
The opinions expressed are those of the author.
