The XX Factor: What women really think.

Seeing Past the Polka Dots

My sister e-mailed me this morning with an interesting addition to our conversation about M.I.A's Grammy outfit. She's on Jessica and Nina's side that the get-up wasn't particularly revealing, especially by pop-star standards, and questions what's causing people like Marjorie to feel uncomfortable with it:

The only reason people are pearl-clutching over it is that the body underneath it is pregnant, and we're socialized to believe that a pregnant woman's body no longer belongs to her alone. Look at all the "think about what your future kids might think!" horror—like just because the fetus is in there right now, he's got some say over the exterior decorating. Sorry, but the fact that you don't give up ownership of your body (and the right to make ugly fashion choices) just because you're incubating is kind of a basic pillar of feminism.

There's also a great conversation going on in the Fray about this, with most posters agreeing that the polka-dot onesie was more kick-ass than indecent. And kak79 makes a good point that the artist herself was actually fairly M.I.A. in the Grammy performance:

I think what astonished me more about M.I.A's Grammy performance than her outfit was that she had such a small part to play in her own song. Was she not good enough to perform her own song on her own? Yes, I know the Grammys are big on pairings. So, I'll grant them the desire to do a remix with another performer. But, really, they practically wrote her out. It was her and four men and they held a good 95% of that performance. I think we should all be talking about that and not her crazy fashion choices.