What grades will porn actresses earn in my classes?

A neighbor once joked that his grades in the spring semesters of his college years were worse than his grades in the fall semesters because of one critical reason: as a young man, studying became difficult for him when the temperature warmed up and females in his college started showing more of their legs.  Thus, instead of spending time and energy on preparations for final exams and papers, well, you know.

I do not know how I might have reacted if I had been an undergraduate student in the US.  Would the hormonal biochemistry have triggered a similar response from me?

The problem, once we think about, is not about hemlines and male responses, but the overall view of women. Period.  If typically we do not think twice about male students in trousers versus shorts, then shouldn't that be the same framework when it comes to female students?  As Amanda Marcotte writes:

you're reducing a woman to her sexuality instead of considering her as a whole person.

So, if the teenage Sriram had always only noticed the changing hemlines of his female classmates, then that Sriram was one heck of a moron, wasn't he, in viewing them only through a sex prism?  Marcotte adds:

to quote Maya Dusenbery of Feministing, "looking at a woman and instead of seeing a full, complex, and multifaceted human being, all you see is ALL TEH SEXXX."

It is not merely this hypothetical teenage Sriram in a US university than I am thinking about.  It easily leads me to the extreme situation of covering up a woman from head to toe, with a tiny slit for her to view the world.

Yes, the teenage Sriram did think about these issues.  After all, he went to a coeducational school throughout his life!  And, as with most things he thought about, well, he was totally confused, which he blamed on his teenage angst!

Once, during a train ride between my college and home, a foreigner woman--a middle-aged White woman--was my seatmate.  As an older and experienced person, she knew how to engage the awkward me in a conversation, during which she remarked that as a kid she would never have been allowed to wear anything like a sari because of how much of the neck and waist areas were exposed.  She was sure her parents would have freaked out if she had dressed that sexily.

A sari was too sexy? I was quite amused to think that a sari might have been disallowed, but t-shirts and jeans would have been ok.  You see, growing up in a traditional household meant that my sister couldn't get my parents' approval to wear a pair of jeans, even though her school uniform was a skirt that was not a full-length one!

Which means, the question is not really what the clothes are, but what our construct of women is.  If we look at a woman and all we see is the sex, then the problem is not with the clothes she wears but in us.  Nope, I didn't reach this profound understanding during that train journey; wisdom arrived much later in life, after I was past all the angst of teenage and youth!

I like how Marcotte phrases it:

telling women to cover it up is just as surely a form of sexual objectification as telling women to take it off.

Exactly!  When a mullah commands women to cover up, he is equally guilty of promoting sexual objectification of women.

Now, as an older, and--I can confidently assert this--a wiser me cares not what the female students wear to class, or even what the male students wear to class.  What matters to me is whether or not they know anything about the content I have identified in the syllabus.  It matters to me whether they sleep through, or stay engaged in, the class.

With my online classes, of course, there are no problems whatsoever--nobody knows how the other is clothed.  The New Yorker summarized it the best during the early years of the Web:

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