Watch your dress!

I don't understand this obsession our state governments are having with the way people (especially women) dress. First we had the Penang council cctv watching a woman's thighs on the basis she was dressed "sexily" - as they defined it. Now we have a whole state telling its residents how they should and should not dress.

This brings me to an earlier post I did about swimwear. Nevermind that someone wearing an outfit like that could probably drown or be too heavy to pull out of the water.

This new directive got me wondering about Indian women who wear the sari as their everyday dress. The traditional design of the Indian sari naturally bares the midriff. Would these women have to wear an extra-long choli or give up wearing the sari altogether to avoid raising the blood pressure of men unused to seeing bare flesh? Isn't that an infringment of a basic human right - that you are allowed to wear what you want in particular a traditional dress?

I think it should be borne in mind what the traditional dress of the different cultures are, before infringments are made on how people dress in public. The Indian sari traditionally bares the midriff, the Chinese cheongsam is traditionally form-fitting and the Malay kebaya is similarly form-fitting and sheer to boot.

It was good enough for our ancestors = it should be good enough for us. If our ancestors had felt the need to make everyone dress in a gunny sack or in a bedsheet, covered from head to toe, that would have been our national costume.

Let us not throw away our culture and tradition in the name of prudence and conservatism. Dressing in bedsheets in our hot and humid weather is suffocating and unnatural, not to mention unhealthy. It may work for those in dry desert conditions where the veil serves as a mask from the desert dust, but not here.

I think its time we stopped looking to other cultures and adopting them wholesale for our own, without thinking of their functionality and practicality in our weather and country. Their culture developed from their circumstances, as did ours.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from an anthropological point of view, heavy borrowing from another culture or race indicates superiority of that culture or race. Is the culture here so weak that it has succumbed to copying a far superior culture? Are we in danger of losing our identity?

Not everyone's grass is greener - sometimes the land is barren. Do we then raze our lush greenery to fit in too?