1-6-90 Saturday. The more I hear liberals discuss women and the women’s movement, the more convinced I become that they haven’t the foggiest idea of what feminists are saying. Mike Royko [1932-1997], a longtime Chicago journalist whose syndicated column appears in the Dallas Morning News, wrote a column the other day about a squabble that took place in Dallas recently. Apparently, the National Organization for Women (NOW) complained that the Cotton Bowl parade demeans women by including scantily clad cheerleaders and dancers among its floats and bands. This sends a signal that it is permissible for women to be ogled by men and to be thought of as attractive objects rather than as active, intelligent persons. Royko asks “What’s wrong with looking at women’s legs?”. Most women, he says, appreciate male attention of this sort; and besides, doesn’t NOW support a woman’s right to choose whether to wear dresses, participate in parades, become a cheerleader or dancer, and do whatever else she wants? He accuses NOW and other feminist organizations of being anti-choice, which is to say authoritarian.
What Royko fails to understand is that the women who participate in the parade are as much victims as the men who ogle them. Sure, NOW supports freedom of choice, but not the constrained set of choices that women have had and continue to have handed to them in our society. NOW is making a profound point about socialization, indoctrination, and the perpetuation of inequality. By permitting scantily clad cheerleaders and dancers to participate in the parade, the Cotton Bowl committee (1) expresses its support or condonation of such activities and apparel, (2) tells men that it is appropriate to view women as sex objects (that is, as objects of sexual attraction and desire), and (3) reinforces the longstanding notion that women are sex objects for men. Royko can’t see this because he wears liberal spectacles. All he notices is the fact that (some) women choose this or that; he fails to ask whether such choices are meaningful or whether social institutions such as the Cotton Bowl committee should reinforce or put the stamp of approval on certain choices that women make. The answer to both questions is an unequivocal “No”.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 