Boobquake Revisited: Faulty Feminism?

By ELIZABETH DONGER

May 19, 2010

Senior Iran­ian cleric Hoja­toleslam Kazim Sadeghi declared last month dur­ing a Fri­day ser­mon in Tehran that “women who do not dress mod­estly … lead young men astray, cor­rupt their chastity and spread adul­tery in soci­ety, which con­se­quently increases earthquakes.” The fact that seis­mol­o­gists have been pre­dict­ing an immi­nent cat­a­strophic earth­quake in Tehran for some time makes the state­ment all the more dangerous. Sadeghi’s words were widely reported by a range of west­ern media outlets; however, the most provoca­tive report­ing came from a young blog­ger in Indiana.

Jen­nifer McCreight, a self-described “lib­eral, geeky, perverted athe­ist fem­i­nist trapped in Indiana,” responded to Sadeghi’s words on her blog, Blag Hag. She sug­gested that women should test the cleric’s ridicu­lous state­ment by col­lec­tively wear­ing “the most cleavage-showing shirt [they own]…the one usu­ally reserved for a night on the town,” to see if an earth­quake would result. She dubbed the exper­i­ment: the “boobquake.” This post was picked up by the wider media and the idea quickly spiraled; the boobquake was cov­ered by CNN and Blag Hag received almost a mil­lion unique vis­its and thou­sands of emails over a few days. On April 26, over 100,000 women, recruited through Face­book and Twitter, participated in the boobquake exper­i­ment. The scantily-clad women did not affect the sta­tis­ti­cal fre­quency of earthquakes.

Jen­nifer McCreight claims that “the major­ity of peo­ple – includ­ing earth­quake researchers, feminists, and many Ira­ni­ans – thanked me for this exer­cise in skep­ti­cism.” Although the exer­cise was, accord­ing to McCreight, “light-hearted mockery,” the rea­sons why this exer­cise was per­ceived as amus­ing are more serious: Jennifer McCreight is point­ing out the absur­dity of Sadeghi’s belief that earth­quakes can be caused by women’s cloth­ing (or lack thereof). However, McCreight is also point­ing out the absur­dity of Sadeghi’s insis­tence that women be dressed “modestly.” She responds to this rea­son­ing with an act of defiance: “cleavage-showing” tops and “immodest” attire.

The boobquake is an exhi­bi­tion of the west­ern ‘lib­er­ated’ woman’s abil­ity to choose to wear what­ever she likes, which auto­mat­i­cally estab­lishes the oppressed Mus­lim woman, who is forced (by men such as Sadeghi) to wear “mod­est” cloth­ing, as the antithe­sis to this. This over­looks the fact that some Mus­lim women who dress mod­estly do indeed choose to dress this way. For­eign audi­ences are not always in the posi­tion to decide whether these women are oppressed; the belief that no Mus­lim women can rise above social pres­sure to dress in a cer­tain way, but west­ern women can, is misguided. Further enrag­ing, McCreight places this com­men­tary within the con­text of “light-hearted mock­ery” which is far from ideal. Half-hearted mock­ery of men who use their author­ity to con­trol female behav­ior and per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tory norms does not chas­tise them but rather is only a ben­e­fit to our own sense of supe­ri­or­ity. The dichotomy of the Western/Muslim woman estab­lished by the boobquake dou­bly over­looks the com­plex­ity of ‘cul­tural’ female Mus­lim dress and also lacks an appre­ci­a­tion for the dan­ger and impact of Sadeghi’s atti­tude towards women.

The boobquake assumes that our right to dress provoca­tively is a sign of our liberation. It pits immod­esty against mod­esty, estab­lish­ing women with the lib­erty to choose immod­esty as the oppo­site to those who do not. West­ern women’s choice to wear reveal­ing clothes is, osten­si­bly, freely made. How­ever, our belief that these clothes “look good” is the direct result of a male-created par­a­digm of beauty. The male desire to see female flesh and men’s per­ceived right to observe our bod­ies cre­ate our shared stan­dards for female beauty. This is a clas­sic exam­ple of patri­archy embed­ded so deep in our con­scious­nesses that we do not pause ques­tion it. I do not know what fem­i­nists thanked McCreight for her exper­i­ment but they clearly need a talk­ing to. McCreight wrote in the Guardian that, “As a sci­en­tist and a skep­tic, I firmly believe that we should test claims peo­ple make, espe­cially when they’re ridiculous.” Jennifer McCreight is a self-identified fem­i­nist and the boobquake exper­i­ment is not only point­ing out Sadeghi’s ques­tion­able sci­ence; it inevitably makes a (questionable) statement about Islamic women, modesty and female liberty.

Eliz­a­beth Donger is a sopho­more in Yale Col­lege. She is a staff writer for Broad Recog­ni­tion.