For a long time I have been hearing women complain about men who feel welcome to comment on their appearance or flirt with them, simply because they are wearing sexy clothes. Expectedly, men who engage in such behaviour often justify their attitudes because women in question were wearing sexy clothes. They interpret the sexiness of clothes as a green light to move onto the women wearing them. Without intending to justify the behaviour of men, my focus here is on women. My intention is to talk about why wearing sexy clothes can be equally wrong. To do this, I need to give a bit of history.

When we lived in tribal communities, we wore very little, and what we wore was to keep us warm. With clothes having a practical purpose, there was no sensible difference between men and women in terms of the message conveyed by their dressing style as they more or less wore the same type of clothes. However, things started to change when Christian teachings, which were less accomodating of nudity, encouraged people to cover their bodies for reasons other than warmth or survival. That was the beginning of nudity being wrapped in an aura of mystery, rendering it a taboo. And the thing about taboos is that it is exciting to imagine or actually breaking them. And this is in fact what happened.

In some underground circles, groups of people started producing pornography and distributed them among those who were interested. In the beginning, such content were exclusively circulated among the elite, who were determined to protect the masses from their corrupting potential, believing they were immune themselves. But suppression of a desire often leads to its eruption. Bewildered by the mystery it carried, more and more people started to seek such content, to the extent that they became heavily sought after. Needless to say that in patriarchal societies of the time, supply and demand were both geared towards the needs and potentials of men. On the supply side, the underground industry of content producers was male-dominated; and because only men had access to means of production and jobs, it was only men who could afford the luxury of having preferences and demands. As a result, the majority of the content produced was focused on female bodies as subject of their so-called art.

This continued until revolutionaries in France started using sexual content to promote their propaganda. To the best of my knowledge this was the first, or at least a major, instance of porn being used as a tool to increase the penetrability of messages in societies. It was undoubtedly one of the determining stages in objectification of women, as they were literally used as means to an end. The second decisive impact came from the refinements carried out by the content producers to increase the appeal of their content. Thanks to revolutionaries in France, pornographic content were by that time circulating in public. With demand rising in the society, suppliers started thinking about ways to improve their content, which is when they first thought of sexualisation of pornographic subjects. And once again, with the industry being male dominated, the producers mainly focused on sexualization of females, while leaving the males as they were. This marked a point in history where decorative coverings carried messages with an intent to elicit reactions among the consumers. Because at the time there were little foundation to conduct consumer preference analyses, content producers resorted to trial and error, and refined their contents based on the feedback they received from the market. For example, they would get their female subject to wear a mesh gown and see the reaction of the market, which in this particular case was immensely positive.

With sexual content having immense success amongs consumers, other industries started getting their toes wet by trying to design products that fed into the fervour created by the porn industry. One of the first industries to enter this realm was the fashion industry. They started designing clothes which sexualized women, since that was where the demand was. This is the era that gave birth to high heels, short skirts, see-through fabrics, etc. Following the eye-catching success of fashion industry, nearly all other industries followed suit, and used sex in their productions or marketing in one way or another. In addition to producing products, which were directly designed for increasing sex appeal of consumers, industries started to use sexual content to promote their non-sexual products. For example, car manufacturers started having half-naked women in high heels pose next to their latest models with the hope of increasing their sales. Furniture manufacturers had a woman with no pants lie on their sofa in a pose that portrayed comfort. This trend continued and was picked up by more and more industries including the corporate media, who became the major player in sexualisation of women. For decades that followed, having female subjects in adverts became the sine qua non of running a business with promising results. But the ramification of this process is the casus belli between the main heroes of my story, namely men and women, and is the foundation on which I would like to make a point.

I think most of us argue against the image that has been created of women during this process. I also think we concur that women are no objects, and should not be treated as such. However, we have no choice but to agree that the image has been created. The image exists among us and creators of the image, which I call the sexualisation machine (porn industry, corporations, media, etc), is still running on full power. Whether we want it or not, the society has been conditioned on certain depictions of women (and growingly men) as sexual objects; and whether we agree to it or not, female bodies have takes up a separate entity to their existence. The question now is what happens when a women wears clothes that fit closely with what the underlying forces have been defining as sexual. When this happens, I believe the woman in question is in some form agreeing to the image that has been created of her. I know this is a charged claim, but bear with me a little. When a woman gets ready to go clubbing, or to go to the office, school, gym or anywhere else, she should ask herself one question. Is there anything I have done to look sexier in my choice of clothes and make up? If the answer is yes, she is conforming to the conventional definition of what sexy means. By wearing clothes that increase her sexual appeal, she is accepting the wrong definition imposed on her by our society. Let me give you a palpable example. If you have noticed, outfit of most female athletes is in some way sexier than those of males. Look at gymnasts for instance. If the purpose of the attire is to increase the mobility and comfort of the athlete, then the same principles must apply to male clothes. But most often, female outfits are more revealing than those of men, and as far as I can see, for no apparent reason other than to make them a tad sexier. This is why I was extremely pleased when the German gymnast, Sarah Voss, and her team, recently appeared for competitions in full-body suits. She did it to take on sexualization in sports, and she certainly succeeded. She left no room for misconceptions that she was there as a gymnast, and not as a sexual object; and let there be no doubt that she did not do this by surrendering to the whims of men, but by refusing to conform to the sexualization forces in our societies.

Now, the general tendency among women is to wear sexy clothes and suppress men's reaction. Although I think this is a good start, I strongly believe it is an impractical solution, for the same reason that trimming a few branches does not rescue a falling tree. First of all, it is almost pointless to block the consequence of decades of social conditioning, without removing the elements involved in creating the conditional tendencies. Besides, as I said earlier, removal of the elements requires active participation in suppression of the underlying cause, which is still running on full power. So long as this is the case, most efforts to de-sexualize women (or men) will have little or no impact, because they are in constant creation. So, if the problem is not tackled at the root, it will persist. What is worse is that, even if we somehow manage to successfully suppress men's responses, wearing sexy clothes in itself neutralizes all the efforts that feminists are doing to change current conception of women.

A more practical, and justifiably better, solution some women have been employing in their choice of attire and looks, is to refuse to look sexy based on how sexy has been conventionally defined. These women actively refrain from conforming to the image imposed on them by refusing to shave their legs and under arms for instance. I think this is the right way of doing it with a major caveat. So long as the underlying forces are at play, the definition of sexiness is also constantly updated based on what women chose to wear, and how they chose to look. As soon as companies and corporate media observe a growing number of women are leaving their legs unshaved, they join the movement to use it as a marketing trick. The irony is that if you look at the marketing history of these companies, it is very likely that they joined previous trends, which were heavily based on sexualization of women. The worst part is that when they join the movement, they portray hairy women in a sexy light again. As always, they use light, sound, colours, filters, clothes, nudity, and every other tool at their disposal to make content with sexy overtone. And before we know it, hairy ladies are the new sexy and we are back where we started. It is impossible to break free from sexualization of people in general, and women in particular, unless we prevent companies from using human subjects for marketing purposes. If we fail to do this, we will be chasing our own tails.

It is important to note that I am not just theorizing here; we have evidence. If you focus on the past few years, companies have been sexifying voluptuous women with the excuse of re-normalizing the norm after abnormalizing it. They don't even say it that way. They blatantly forget about their past, and claim they are joining the movement to support it. But the truth is that the money was in that then, and is in this now. This in turn starts a new sexualisation process and updates the definition of sexiness based on new inputs. And the scary part is that, contradictory to old porn producers, who relied on trial and error, modern corporations and media have now access to all resources they need to conduct preference analysis among consumers, and will take up trends before it becomes visible to you and I.

It is necessary to emphasize that an important characteristic of sexualisation machines is that they are profit-based and hence impartial. This means that if they decide to focus on men, which they recently have, in a few years or decades, legs of a man, his abs, chin, beard or any other part in his body could take a sexy dimension, depending on what the forces focus on. Knowing this, there is only one solution before us. If we manage to be mindful of these facts and actively try to resist the forces by protesting to their use of human beings as subjects, we can start neutralizing the image that has been created of women, and stop curation of men’s image as sexy objects by the corporations and the media. Now, if you have borne with me so far, here is your reward. Based on this analysis, and shocking to many of you, I think complete nudity is a much more justified way of refusing to conform to the sexualized images of humans. This is also a response to those of you who want to argue against me by providing examples of men who take their shirts off in the middle of a football field in celebration of a goal they just scored. Surely it is appealing to many women and men out there, but there is a difference. The difference is that the act is not intended to elicit sexual attraction, and the resultant image does not conform to existing criteria of sexiness as of yet. Following the same rationale, I think it is not in the least a conformist behaviour when a woman gets completely naked on the beach, or takes her shirt off after scoring a goal in a football field. So that would be a good fight, provided the person remains vigilant and protests against her sexualization on the media following the event, or else its pointless.

So, what I am suggesting here is that any decision to not conform to that image created by the sexualisation machines is a step forward, assuming we fight against the sexualisation forces while being non-conformist. The hardest part is to remain sober in face of tantalizing temptations to look sexy one last time. As soon as we fall prey to this idea again, history will repeat itself, and new versions of high heels will be manufactured, and new images of humans will appear in the media to promote sales of other objects. So, next time you are in the bathroom with your female friend, and you ask for her opinion whether opening your cleavage a little further is sexy, remember that there is a reason that it is sexy, and that reason is what feminists have been fighting against. And by agreeing to conform, you are approving the cause. If on the other hand, you have decided not to conform by say, letting your bodily hair grow, I admire your intention and support you all the way. But I have to say that your efforts will be in vain if another lady with unshaved bodily hair decides to sexualize her looks on social media, by convincing her audience that she is sexy even with hair; or if she agrees to pose before a camera to appear in the media as an unshaved sexy woman.

I am deeply sorry that after all you have been through, you are still the target of judgments, and that it is still you who need to fix things, although you had nothing to do with creation of the problem. But the fight is no longer between men and women; it is between people and sexualization machines, who comprise of people of all sexuality, but have no sexuality themselves. Men must definitely support you in your endeavours, but our success highly depends on us fighting against the right enemy, and educating each other in the process.