Baggy Clothing and the Criminalization of the Body

This image has been sitting in an open tab on my computer for literally weeks. What with this blog being a repository for my teeming brain and all, I thought I could unload it on you, and maybe it'll stop haunting my browser.


[To really get the full effect, you'd have to see the flash-animation version of this sucker, which I am now too useless to lay my hands on. The slow and shameless alternation of the images, with asses disappearing and reappearing, with pants floating in and out of acceptability, is truly mesmerizing. But this will do.]


In a nutshell, the police department of Flint, Michigan decided there wasn't enough real crime to fight, so they came up with a series of violations in pants-positioning. Varying degrees of bagginess will earn the offender some combination of fines, jail time, and a heaping helping of public shame. To get the obvious points out of the way first:

• These laws are blatantly aimed at a certain section of the population of Flint. Their enforcement will necessarily target people of color because the laws are designed to do so. Not because those people are any more or less moral, or stylish, or anything else -- because they are being singled out by the legislators. Period.
  
• The illustration addresses only the male body, and a shirtless one at that. [Aside: I'd bet my whiskers female bodies would and will be treated radically differently, not the least because shirtless women are outlaws in practice if not in legislation.] Whether a woman sporting low-slung pants would be treated as a criminal under these guidelines, or as a common sex object "asking for" the unsolicited attention she receives and not meriting societal protection, in any particular instance, is anyone's guess. But either way, I can't imagine the laws would be enforced similarly on a female body.
• Don't even get me started on "disorderly conduct." Sir, your body is so OUTRAGEOUS that showcasing it in any way is likely to cause society to topple into chaos. I mean, come on, wearing clothes is hardly conduct at all, and it certainly isn't rabble-rousing.
  
• It is pretty damn ridiculous that the time and care was given to this issue not only to hash out what level of buttock/underpants exposure constitutes what level of criminality, but to turn it into a helpful flash animation and image set. I wonder if they made posters or radio adverts in any attempt to warn folks they're about to be picked on, or if they made no effort whatsoever and just started handing out citations and smug self-righteous superiority.

Those all being on the table if not sufficiently delved-into, I'm going to press on.

I think that animation has lodged itself so securely under my skin because I can't wrap my head around why the government has any right to tell you how to dress, ever. My ever-indulgent roommate tried to play devil's advocate with me, and invoked the counter-example of flashers -- that is, people deliberately exposing themselves with the intention of scandalizing the viewer in some way. Which is fair. I don't want to see a penis when I'm out for a stroll unless I specifically ask to [which is incredibly unlikely, for a litany of reasons]. But then again, that illicit penis would only scandalize me because I'm so unused to seeing them. So it's a circular system, wherein the current indecent exposure statutes have to remain in place because we are upset by indecent exposure because we haven't been exposed to it, so to speak.

So, what is that about? Does it have to do with our insistant sexualization of the body? Between the ubiquitous conflation of flesh and desire in marketing, the media representations of nudity as inherently sexual, and our lingering Puritan sensibilities (whereby, in our effort to repress the sex drive, we connect absolutely everything with sex, often erroneously), it's hard to think of instances of nudity we encounter regularly that aren't sexual. Children may or may not be the exception, but again, we immediately become suspicious of bathtub pictures and the like.

Are we afraid of men in baggy pants because, in our culture, that level of exposure is tacitly sexual? That's one connotation of "indecent," but certainly not the only thing the term could imply. But: any non-majority group expressing sexuality is necessarily problematic to the dominant paradigm, i.e. cis-gendered able-bodied straight white dude-bros [etc etc etc]. To assert sexuality is to assert personhood, which is very scary indeed if you're black or female or in any other way "non-normative." The logical extreme of this thought process is the burqa, in societies where women's very presence is sequestered because it is seen as provocative, and keeping them covered is an inherent part of keeping them disenfranchised. This whole thing in Flint may just boil down to an excuse to throw more black guys into the sordid interior of the justice system, an attempt to shame huge swaths of the population into assimilation for the comfort of the oppressors. But on another level I think it deeply relates to the problematic way we define what bodies are acceptable for consumption, in what capacity, when.

This is where my thinking runs into about a thousand walls. To revert to the example of the bare-chested woman in public, is the right solution to promote toplessness in women, in the hopes that breasts can eventually become normalized in all their functions, including but not limited to the sexual and baby-feeding ones? Or is that counter-productive, because in the interim those women who are trying to reclaim public space and their bodies become objects to onlookers, undermining the personhood they are fighting for? Do we have an inalienable right to comfort in public spaces, if the action which makes us uncomfortable is committed without malicious intent, or in fact, with the intention of empowerment or celebration?

My gut reaction is that every person has the right to do precisely what they please with their bodies, so long as he/she is not using that body to intimidate or harm others. But already that got murky, because we can't control what other people find intimidating, no matter how enlightened we think ourselves personally. And living in a pervasive rape culture, personal safety is constantly at stake, especially when juries are willing to blame the victim for attacks rather than condemning actual criminals. I may be feeling all knee-jerky because it's so reminiscnet of the abortion debate, in that a woman's right to her body comes into question at the point where the fetus attains some sort of personhood, and the two have to be negotiated. But using that to guide my logic here seems unfair, because I am so far on the "women should do whatever they damn please, whenever they deign to" side of the fence it's borderline insensitive. If one tries to make the free-speech analogy instead, folks should be able to put whatever they want into the world, free of consequence, unless they are posing a specific, demonstrable threat. But again, doing so might not be productive if the society receiving them is so well programmed to objectify and make otherwise pornographic all attempts at reclamation of the body that the deviant action falls into their oppressive paradigm, or puts the doer in physical danger. It feels like a Catch-22, but I may be missing a big hole in my argument, or thinking on the wrong scale -- these things are common at two in the morning.

So here I am, stuck. I know these laws are wrong, and that is more or less all I know. If you want to help extricate me from the tangled mass of my brains, by all means drop a line.