Caution: Trigger. The topic covered therein will include the use of sexually charged language and topics.
A midshipman, a female one is asked on the stand, if she wore a bra the night she was sexually assaulted. There are lots of other aspects to this case, but I want to just focus on this one facet.
Tell me, did it ever occur to you, that if you are sexually assaulted, someone would care if you wore a bra? Should they care if you wore a bra?
Pert bouncing boobs are sexy, but apparently bras are sexy too, or we wouldn't have ad-campaign-extravaganzas to advertise all the sexy ways women can bind and support and reshape their breasts.
Is it possible to be raped wearing this bra?
Because you know, if you have saggy tits, well that means you don't care. Sexiness for a woman, is also a proxy for a professional appearance. If you don't wear make-up and a bra, and you don't shave your legs, and wear fitted clothing that matches, it wouldn't matter how smart you are, you are a frump and frumps are not successful. In the military, you wouldn't pass inspection. Besides girls are taught from a young age, to wear bras, not necessarily just to keep their nipples from poking through their shirts, but also because bras are a sign of adulthood and sexiness.
So that brings us to a sort of issue here: are bras, being the ambiguous garments they are, a good indicator of authentic, sexual, availability? Can you tell if a woman actually wants to have sex minus overt, verbal queues, by the presence or absence of a bra?
Even good girl bras are all about feeling and looking sexy, even if they also try to be comfortable. Feeling sexy = confidence in this culture, until that is someone decides that looking sexy makes you a target. Then looking or feeling sexy suddenly becomes a shame-filled experience that permanently warps your psyche and your social standing.
If you wear a bra that has lace on it, is it because you are expecting another person, potentially a sex partner to see you in it? And if so, will that hurt your chances if you should go to court to file rape charges the day or night you wore that bra?
Let's see what the greatest generation has to say about this matter:
My that's some sexy undies grandma! Tell me, are you wearing those for you? Or are you wearing those for your beau?
If someone is going to have sex with an unwilling partner, or with someone incapable of consent do you think they will care if that person is wearing a bra? Isn't that just an excuse? How easy it would be to go from: "Your honor she wasn't wearing a bra," to "Your honor she was wearing sexy underwears..."
And because all undergarments are intimately associated with primary and secondary sexual characteristics, is it possible to divorce the notion of panties or bras, from thoughts of the vagina or breasts? Or from the buttocks? And if not, can there truly be, unequivocally, unsexy-undergarmets? Would being without them, potentially be just as much of a potential excuse, as wearing them?
Could it be that women are caught between the desires and fears of a culture that desperately needs to finish going through puberty?
Special thanks to Tara the Anti-Social Social Worker and her post on This Weeks War on Women.