The No Fly Pants

It seems we still can't make our minds up about how much, or how little, we want women to wear. While Muslim woman in France are being told to take clothes off if they want to visit the beaches, a woman has been denied entry to a flight because she was wearing too little. Naturally, I immediately checked out the pictures. She is wearing hot pants, knee high socks and a sweater with a tiger on it. More 80's roller disco, in fact, than Stringfellows. Certainly not indecent, as far as I could tell. If it were, then surely she would have never made it to the airport in the first place. I mean, I know the police are stretched, but if they're relying on the baggage handling staff to start enforcing indecency laws then we're in a worse state than I thought. What's next? McDonald's staff to start looking out for dodgy tax disks? Car park attendants to keep an eye on property fraud?

The simple matter is that we, as a society, can't seem to make our mind up about what constitutes offensive dressing. Putting aside the discrepancy between being upset about both wearing too much (burqas) and wearing too little, there seems to be little agreement on what an indecent outfit actually is. When a woman (it's always a woman, men are rarely told off because their trousers are too short) dresses skimpily, there will always be someone to tut strongly and talk about moral standards. Whose moral standards are we talking about, though? We have no clear definition of skimpy. Summer dresses are arguably more revealing than certain styles of underwear. Bathing costumes, on the other hand, are extremely revealing but are considered acceptable if you're on the beach. It's hard to know who we're protecting from what. The airline banned Miss McMuffin (I'm not making this up, that is the lady in question's name) because they believed that families would be offended by what she was wearing. How they would have been offended is unclear. I have a family, and if confronted by a woman with too few clothes, my children would be more likely to giggle than become irreversibly corrupted. In fact, even if she'd been completely nude, the sight of a naked body would not have come as a surprise to my children. They know what naked bodies look like, they've each got one of their own.

Of course, a large part of the problem is that the airline didn't have any rules about what was and wasn't acceptable – the airline staff just made a snap decision and banned Miss McMuffin from the plane. I can be sure of this because she was transferring from the previous leg of her flight at the time with, presumably, the same airline. Somehow, in the time it had taken her to fly from New York to Seattle, her outfit had transformed from unremarkable to shocking. More importantly, this left her stranded, unable to reach the destination she had already paid for and planned for, unable to leave the airport like Tom Hanks in The Terminal although, unlike Tom, her predicament was solved simply by purchasing a pair of pyjama bottoms.

Well, I'm going to state something shocking. I don't really care what people are wearing. In a world where people are oppressed for their religious beliefs, imprisoned for their sexuality or killed for being born into the wrong gender, I think we have more things to worry about than someone else's fashion sense. I believe people should be judged for what they do or say to other people, not what they do to themselves, and how someone chooses to dress should be their own business. And that stands whether you want to flaunt what your mother gave you or hide it behind a veil.

It's just clothes, baby. A bunch of rags to keep us warm and hold in the dangly bits. Clothes don't maketh the man, manners maketh the man, and that includes treating each other with respect, no matter what we wear. Maybe it's time the world worked that out.