It's the same argument: don't make me do something I don't want to do.
It can be very isolating and sometimes dangerous to be the outsider in an area with uniform religious and cultural beliefs.
What are your thoughts on western governments that attempt to ban the hijab? I can't remember if France succeeded.
I believe banning a piece of clothing is not reasonable, like banning jeans or headscarves. On the other hand there is a lot of stigma around hijab if you choose not to wear it among some muslim families so much so that it’s not a real choice anymore and it’s not a simple piece of cloth. So I think it’s not bad to have some legal ways to protect you against your over zealous family/community but this kind of lawmaking is very prone to other issues too. Furthermore, banning and enforcing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin which is ultimately the root of the problem. It’s very complicated. I wish I had a straightforward answer.
In the end it is about a social contract, the details of which may change with the course of time.
If wearing too little is illegal in most places, why wouldn't it be possible to wear too much, in theory?
You might be cool with that, but I’m not.
Some forms of dress and undress have laws. Others don’t have laws but are still bound by social contracts. The person you are replying to is clearing trying to compare these and pointing out responsibility may come down to the wearer in both cases and wondering out loud that society may punish any extreme state of dress.
At which point did he say you should pass new legislation or that he agreed with it?
Locality and social norms definitely play into this conversation, here in Seattle at least there is a culture that supports nudism, whether it's the summer solstice bike ride, certain beaches that are popular for swimming in your birthday suit, etc.
I've seen art students making life drawings in a city square, for example.
I tend to elicit the feeling you are mentioning often, without intending to. I have seen old women move away from me while we were waiting to cross the street. I have been stopped by police because “I was acting suspicious” (I was walking to the gym, after work).
It’s not a nice feeling, scaring people just by being around.
Because of this, I never wear the hood of my hoodie. In general I have to wear as unthreatening clothes as I can. And I avoid dark streets, because someone can see me as a threat and fear makes people do irrational things.
We would all benefit from less fear.
I am not “athletic” though :)
A similar thing would be the ban of wearing nazi symbols.
It's a head covering; it covers your head, which can provide comfort depending on the environmental conditions.
Depending on the specific garment and context, it may provide some privacy/anonyminity.
Comparing it to nazi symbols doesn't seem right; in part because it's not purely symbolic, but also because it's only oppression when you're forced to wear it, not when you choose to. No one is calling for the star of david to be banned because Jews were forced to wear them; if someone wants to wear it, they can.
Perhaps we should examine your beliefs for indoctrination? To use your indoctrination as an excuse to remove your bodily autonomy.
The topic is much more complicated than "fragility" as you are dismissively trying to portray it. We wear clothes in civilised societies for a reason, and different types of clothes have different types of societal effects.
Your freedom ends where the the freedom of the next person's begins.
Also, the Nazis are just really exceptionally bloody-handed. In terms of intentionally, directly killing people, they killed like 16 million people. In terms of intentionally, indirectly killing people, their deliberate use of famine killed eight or nine million civilians in the soviet union alone. Then you add all the people that died due to massacres, or were killed as collateral damage, and you can understand why 30 million people died in the USSR, the vast majority of whom were civilians. It generally gets much worse in areas the Nazis had a longer duration of control: in Poland, they killed about one in five people.
It's generally pretty hard to kill that many people before the 20th century, because the means of killing are too innefective, and the number of potential victims is too small. For what it's worth, Genghis Khan is probably the most bloody-handed pre-modern figure, so if we're going to blame religion for his behaviour, it's probably shamanism that has the highest death toll.
Making it simply a choice of clothing is reductionism and you know it.
Do you consider the widespread laws in the West that require women to cover their chests in public similarly oppressive?
For whatever reason, fragile people get real offended by what other people wear.