neighborhood dress code for females

Click to enlarge.

I don't think it's worth a kosher pizza to guess where these posters were recently displayed. But feel free to Leave a Comment, and if you guess wrong, you get to sit in a corner wearing a dunce cap.

It's A-VP's understanding that the municipal authorities eventually removed the posters.

Note that the left language is English (in the spelling of USA English rather than UK or Commonwealth spelling). Somebody made a choice for a second language that the most (female) visitors could understand, and they picked English -- in the Occident and lots of the Mysterious East, this era's Lingua Franca.

But notice that all "suggestions" apply only to females, to girls and women. So, respect for religious customs aside, the posters reflect a religious group whose males set the rules for females. (Not just their females, but tourist females too.)

Notice also that these "requests" are specifically required by G-d (a common spelling convention that reflects the decalogue commandment "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain"). So this G-d

* is clearly male, no doubt about it, and

* has specific requirements regarding 
  the clothing of all females.

I'm certainly not kicking just this one faith community for its G-d-decreed male-o-centricity. Throw a dart at the globe and it'll almost certainly hit a religious community whose Big Cheeses are exclusively male, and whose females act and dress as the Big Cheeses insist.

One attractive aspect of atheism is that, lacking a G-d to tell folks what to do, atheists have far more freedom to wear whatever they like, including nothing or nearly nothing. (It is lawful for females to go topless in public in Ontario, Canada.) 

I have a chat pal from Turkey who ferociously stands up for her right to go to the beach in a bikini. I guess about 90 percent of Turkey are Muslims, but since the Ataturk-led overthrow of the Ottomans (circa 1921-1924), Turkey has replaced religious authority with a secular government which heavily rules in non-religious directions.

My born and educated religious identity is (((Jewish))), but in my long path to my current dotage, I have embraced or flirted with or studied several other religious traditions. If we look on religions as a fair, open and competitive market, some of the stalls I've lingered longest at have included

* the Pythagorean Mystery Cult -- where Ultimate Reality consists entirely of the positive whole numbers; all else, however real it seems, is just a fuzzy distorted illusion of the positive whole numbers.

* Spinozan Pantheism -- the equation of Nature and God. i.e., when we have discovered everything about the material universe, we have discovered God, and there is nothing more to discover about God. 

(A consequence of this innocent little belief is that God does not anoint monarchs; God exclusively evolves the material universe, and takes no notice of the governance or belief systems of humans. Nor does God snatch adorable little innocent girls from the path of speeding trolleys.)

* Sufism -- which Sufis themselves call "The Real." Here's some Sufi music from Pakistan. Leave a Comment about the music and the singer.



I know Doris Lessing led a Sufi salon in London, so Sufi doesn't seem to be a male-o-centric belief system.

* Every time I bump into Pataphysics, it grabs me by the necktie and drags me into its weird little circus/carnival alley. I think I'm now an official Satrap of the College of Pataphysics.

From its birth (circa 500 BCE), the Pythagorean Mystery Cult was an equal-opportunity belief system for both genders. All an adept had to do was study for and pass a rigorous geometry test and swear never to eat beans. The neighbors of Pythagoras' commune -- in Magna Graecia, Italy -- burned the place down twice.




"I'm so glad I took geometry. Hardly a day goes by when I don't have to do a proof." 

             -- I forget which USA comedian

In "The White Goddess," Robert Graves postulates that Sufi is a direct but later evolution of the Pythagorean Mystery Cult.

"In the winter, I'm a Buddhist; 
in the summer, I'm a nudist!"

               -- Professor Seagull

I'm tired and want to sleep now. Leave Some Comments. Burn me at the stake. Attack me with machetes. (I know a place, well, a few places, where guys jump out of dark alleys and kill bloggers with machetes. Bloggers. They're killing bloggers.)

Join the College of Pataphysics. 

There exists no largest prime number (and I can prove it). 

For brilliant new Number Theory equations, dream of the Goddess Namagiri (a local -- Tamil Nadu -- avatar of Lakshmi). (Keep pencil and paper by your bedside to write down the equations Namagiri whispered to you. She also gives valuable career and life counseling advice in the dreams of your mother.)