Dear Editor,

There is much debate in Jamaica about how women ought to dress, and in particular over how Barbados’ National Hero Rihanna dressed. The article ‘Oh, how our standards have fallen!’ by Maurice Walker (Jamaica Observer, December 16, 2021) is one such contribution that is rife with fallacies.

Walker, like other critiques of Rihanna’s sleeveless dress, went further than her bare shoulders to write, “It seemed she wore no brassiere because, in these times, it’s more important to be sexy than appropriate.”

Brassieres were invented to enhance a woman’s sexiness. As a matter of fact, before brassieres became common, French women wore corsets in the 1500s. It grew in popularity as an undergarment that “helped give women what was considered to be the perfect figure — the inverted cone shape”.

The early corset pushed the breasts up and together, causing the tops of the breasts to spill out of the tops of dresses for a shelf-like bust effect. Women, like Rihanna, with sturdy breasts, don’t need to wear a bra to create a shelf-like bust effect.

Another nonsensical argument that equates morality and dress code was Walker’s response to Krystal Tomlinson’s description of Rihanna’s outfit as a “radical expression of the exercise of freedoms, the freedom that our ancestors fought for…” He dismissed Tomlinson’s assertion with the sarcastic statement, “Our ancestors fought for us to wear what we feel like to be sexy anytime and anywhere regardless of occasion or audience.” Apart from the fact that this comment unearths Walker’s problem with women looking sexy, it confirms a lack of knowledge about how cultures view appropriate dress.

The great Anglican apologist C S Lewis, in writing about those who tried to enforce British dress codes on women of other cultures as “Christian dress codes”, said: “The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of modesty in one sense of that word that is propriety or decency. The social rules of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle.

“Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific Islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be equally modest, proper, and decent, according to the standards of their own societies, and both, for all we can tell by their dress, might be equally chaste or equally unchaste…” ( Mere Christianity)

It was our colonial brainwashing, and the rise of fundamentalist religious dress codes during the past 30 years that led us to scorn any form of exposure of the human body as we mimic the clothes of Victorian England. We see this in Jamaica when little children doing African dances, in African costumes, are clad in leotards to hide their skins. It was Jonalyn Finchen (2012) who said that, “The point of modesty is humility, not protecting lustful men from stumbling. Concealing our bodies doesn’t lead to victory over lust. Not for men, not for women. Just like removing alcohol from our house doesn’t make an alcoholic sober. Blaming a woman for a man’s lust is as asinine as blaming a Vodka label for enticing the alcoholic to drink.”

Jamaican women wore sleeveless dresses and minis during the first 20 years after Independence. The opening of the new Parliament in 1962 occured in the presence of The Queen’s representative, Princess Margaret, who wore a sleeveless dress.

Wearing a brassiere is not a canon of holiness.

Dudley C McLean II

dm15094@gmail.com