I realize that the limited arena of a weekly column often forces writers to reduce complicated issues to the bare-bones minimum in the name of space. That said, I wasn’t prepared to open Tuesday’s paper and find the issues of feminism, religion and Western thought boiled down into a discussion of how college girls dress (“Girls won’t get anywhere until they stop dressing as bimbos,” March 28, p.7).

I completely agree with Sufia Khalid that too many young women our age dress too scantily for my tastes and sense of self-respect. I, too, am bothered by the nearly-nude women that frolic on MTV. What I am offended by is the notion that “scantily clad women … are seen as symbols of the freedoms of Western women.”

When we talk about Western feminism (or any kind of feminism, really), we are talking about equal job opportunities, equal representation in court and divorces and the freedom that women have to choose their own lifestyles and support themselves as they wish. We are not talking about college girls who look like hookers. Any banner championing the cause of Western feminism is not going to have bikini-clad coeds printed across it.

“I don’t think that freedom means being able to dress as you want,” Khalid writes. “This is a guise to convince women they are free.” That’s a pretty bold statement, and I emphatically disagree with it. Part of a woman’s freedom does come from being able to choose how to express herself through what she wears. Some girls choose to wear little clothing; some choose more traditional or religious garb; still others, like myself, dress for their own sense of comfort and dignity (and I would add that nobody, to my knowledge, has ever labeled me a “feminist extremist” for opting to wear a t-shirt instead of a tube top). The point isn’t what we wear, it’s that we can choose to wear it, even if other people think it was a bad decision.

But if that doesn’t quite make for a convincing argument that Western freedom isn’t a guise, I could point to numerous other freedoms that Western women possess, even one as simple as the right to drive a car (which, as I learned from Khalid a few weeks ago, is not necessarily a universal privilege). I do not deny that Western women still have many problems, and I am certainly not going to deny that our current media objectifies women in unhealthy ways. But feminism is a changing, many-faceted movement, and I think that reducing any complex issue about women to a mere matter of clothing defeats the purpose of feminism in the first place.

Clarissa Nemeth CFA ’08