By Alie Sonta Kamara
For many gender experts and advocates canvassing for gender-parity, how a woman chooses to dress should be her right and should be no driving force behind rape, teenage pregnancy, and other related sexual offences. Nobody should endanger the personal freedom of anybody, especially how women want to dress, they say.
In Clinton Carter’s piece ‘9 Things Men Think When They See You Naked,’ Clinton argues that visual cues are a major part of the sexual response for men. “Your body has a hypnotic power over us,” he refers to women.
In his piece, Clinton quoted a section of how cartoonists interpret man’s sexual desire: “Our eyes bug out, our ears turn into steam vents, and our feet flap together so fast that we temporarily levitate. It’s actually not that farfetched. When you disrobe in front of us, our heart rates spike, our blood flows south, and we slowly lose the ability to follow a train of thought. But we don’t want to give off the impression that we’ve never seen a naked woman before, so we TRY TO KEEP OURSELVES TOGETHER. While we want to howl like cartoon wolves and let our tongues roll out of our mouths, we won’t. We’ll keep it together.”
In the above quotation, I clearly bold printed and wrote the phrase ‘try to keep ourselves together’ in uppercase letters to emphasis its significance in relation to rape. Rape is ruthlessly a grave crime and requires stiff punishment. While tremendous efforts have been made to legislate against rapists of any age, not much attention has been given to the root-cause of the act. In order to solve a problem once and for all, the circumstances that create the imbalance should be looked at. Legislators against rape have used the phrase ‘self-control’ to persuade counsels who advance reasons hinging on women’s choice to dress half-naked. They argue that men should have self-control and should never use the ‘half-naked’ claim as an escape route. However, the verbal particle ‘try to’ means one makes an effort to conquer something but fails. The term is mostly used to speak about an endeavour that brings forth improper result. When used in the context of ‘try to keep ourselves together’, it means that even when men try to have self-restraint against sexually prone sights, they go away with heavy heart, and in some rare case discharging orgasm.
And it is the nakedness from the breasts and the legs that most times turn men on. Thus, every man responds to the food of the eyes (a woman’s naked parts) in quite diverse ways. There is no self-control even in countries where punishment against rapists is overly stringent. The man who sees a half-naked woman but bows his head is himself creating a sexual scene on his mind. He is not completely capable of letting it go. This occurs with men who are strong, God-conscious and men who live in countries where punishment against rape equals the act. In their piece ‘15 Weird Things That Turn Guys On’, Amanda Montell and Maria Carter say men operate visually. “Watching you (women) please yourself is a turn on,” they write. For those men who have strong sexual attraction and do not take into consideration what the world may say would not mind to face a woman that is half-naked and forces her to bow whether instantly or after days or weeks of monitoring.
Connecting the dots to another point, campaigners against rape have had difficulty agreeing with those who argue that rape is sometimes triggered by a woman’s code of dress. They claim that babies and underage children have been raped to death. What gave rise to such heinous acts? It is culturally true that some men rape babies and girls below the age of consent for ritual reasons. Those who do so are murderers; they are not driven by sexual forces, and their punishment should be different. Nevertheless, there have been investigated reports where men have raped babies following sexual drive. These are weak men. Putting the claim on a scale, we should regard those who killed babies and stole the innocence of children as murderers, and not precisely rapists when the effect is weighed. Lawmakers should consider this distinction very well.
Bringing the whole argument into context, campaigners for the ‘Hands off Our Girls’ movement should not disregard the dress code of women as a puerile reason for rape. This is the natural force acting against men. Men are naturally called men because they get turned on seeing half-naked legs and breasts. Whether some men perform the action in their mind or practically engage in rape when they see women half-naked, efforts should be made to engage women on dress code.
It is absurd and overly sweeping to say that rape would end if women mind their dress code; it would not. Stringent laws against rape and women minding how they dress would facilitate the so-called ‘self-control’ mechanism and would steadily control the increase in cases of rape. I rest my case.
