I would not be able to make any sense of what you just said if it were not for the last paragraph. There you say that we should tolerate the barbaric practice of making women wear burkas because to raise objections about that practice would be to cause "hurt to the most powerless among us".

How is that different from saying that we must empathize with and "support" the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps who, on behalf of the relevant authorities, "dealt with" the prisoners who were weaker than they themselves were? Don't you believe that there are higher human standards that we can employ than those of a concentration camp? Evidently you do not, judging by your signature. In your own perverse way, you are trying to make Hobbes' dream come true.

For what it's worth, my late wife did not find it "frivolous" to be able to go to work some days without wearing a bra, after she got tenure. As far as I could understand from my limited "male" point of view, her new job security which allowed her to do so enhanced what liberals (of whom you seem to be an instance) call her "quality of life".

As far as I understand, this is a political blog, not a "raising of your consciousness" blog, or a "how to improve your relationship with your significant other" blog. You raised a problem: women are more constrained in how they dress than men are. What has the very likely true fact that men don't understand women and their problems to do with anything, when it comes to politics? Women are the majority of the electorate. Thus, as a real problem for which one seeks a solution, this is not the problem of the eternal failure of men to understand women, but of getting laws passed to make women more equal to men. If women are unhappy about reigning social mores requiring the natural form of their breasts to be obscured by clothing, what man who claims to be a healthy heterosexual could possibly object, if women turned this into a political issue?

You concluded your diary thus, speaking of bras:

I'd love to be free of them -- they're uncomfortable as hell and burning them clearly didn't work.

Yes, burning them didn't work, but why not try getting a law passed?

In your latest comment, you claim that you were being "humorous" in your diary with regard to the predicament about dressing that women face in their daily lives. But my impression is that you were raising a real problem, and now are trying to dismiss it, to conform to the normal practice with the left these days, to make noise while abandoning politics.

A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns