Women's bodies have long been the site of robust political battles. Abortion, prostitution, contraception, virginity, modesty, childbirth: for millennia, policy-makers the world over have sought to influence these issues one way or another in the hope of shaping a society that most resembles their vision of perfection.
Simultaneously, women's bodies have long been used as canvasses on which cultural, religious and political expectations can find expression: bound feet for Chinese women, corsets for Victorians, unshaven armpits for feminists, shaitels for orthodox Jews, uninterrupted ovulation for Catholics, burqas for Muslims, suspenders for strippers, habits for nuns, breast implants for anyone who thinks they might enhance their feminine appeal.
Liberal democracies have tended to debate these and other manifestations of ideological influence with healthy vigour, tolerating practices they don't necessarily agree with (prostitution by drug-dependent women, arranged marriages) and disallowing those that are so harmful as to be indefensible (clitoridectomies, rape within marriage).
Until now, that is. With the call for the banning of the burqa in countries across Europe, common sense and the fundamentally democratic principles we associate with that continent have been shown the door. The nasty storm being whipped up against women who wear the burqa in public — and the men who apparently elicit this practice — is not just bigoted; it is an extraordinary display of hypocrisy, and an affront to women the world over.
In the latest lobby, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, German member of the European Parliament, has called for a Europe-wide ban on the wearing of the burqa, labelling it a 'massive attack on the rights of women'. The burqa, says Koch-Mehrin, 'is a mobile prison'.
But it was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who threw the decisive, opening punch. His veiled prejudice notwithstanding, Sarkozy's condemnation of the 'anti-female' burqa would be so much easier to accept if only his own house were in order.
Burqas, he has said, 'do not pose a problem in a religious sense, but threaten the dignity of women'. If this were really so — if female dignity was his reason for initiating the bill aimed at banning the wearing of the burqa in public in France — he would readily ensure that the dignity of all women was not threatened, undermined, manipulated or, at worst, thoroughly annihilated.
Of course, Sarkozy — president of a country in which women are sometimes objectified, trafficked, abused, degraded, forced into labour,