Nudity and Morality: Legislating Women’s Bodies and

Dress in Nigeria

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

In recent years, women’s sartorial1 practices have become the

site for pernicious policing and debates about social and moral
decay in Africa generally and Nigeria in particular. This has
resulted in calls for intervention and the imposition of sanctions
within Nigeria’s higher education institutions, by religious
organisations, as well as media and government agencies.
Some universities have banned the wearing of trousers, the
bearing of mid-riffs, spaghetti tops and any item of clothing
that reveals female flesh. Young women’s fashion choices are
seen not only as a “distraction” to male students, but as a
provocation towards male lecturers. The argument is that
revealing attire has made sexual violation and harassment a
marked feature of university life in Nigeria and therefore the
only way to curb this is to impose a strict dress code on female
students.

Similarly, towards the end of 2007, when the General Overseer

(GO) Adeboye of The Redeemed Christian Church of God
(RCCG), the largest Pentecostal church in the country, decided
to address the issue of moral laxity and social corruption
among his congregation, it was against women’s clothing that
he directed his condemnation. Adeboye banned the wearing of
revealing clothes and trousers for his female church members.
The GO’s proscription coincided with the arrest by Lagos State
Police of women wearing trousers and ‘skimpy’ clothes, which
they claimed was aimed at discouraging vice in the city,
especially among sex workers who allegedly harboured
criminals.2 Most of the women were arrested on allegations of
either ‘indecent dressing’ or ‘wandering’, a term from a law
that was repealed more than a decade ago.3 After a wave of
1
The term ‘sartorial’ refers to issues relating to clothes and the way they are tailored or
worn.
2
See the Lagos State Police Press Release on connection between sex workers and
criminals in http://fiyanda.blogspot.com/2007/08/police-press-release-on-indecent.html
3
The defunct omnibus law against ‘Wandering’ was repealed in 1989. It targeted,
among others, “loose” women who were thought to be prostitutes or ‘sluts.’ It was
imported in the Penal Codes of many former British colonies with variants of the following
text: “Every person found wandering in or upon or near any premises or in any road or

1
public outcry against Lagos State Police, the State Governor
and the Chief of Police went on record to deny authorising the
arrest of women.

The call to ban and criminalise women’s sartorial choices

received legislative support in January 2008, when Senator Eme
Ufot Ekaette (hereinafter referred as “the Senator”), the female
Chair of the Senate Committee on Women and Youth Affairs,
presented a Bill for second hearing to the Senate against
‘public nudity and sexual intimidation’. The ostensible aim of
the Bill is to reduce the increasing sexual intimidation and
immorality that women’s fashion choices help to generate.
Although the Bill has gone through several readings at the
National Assembly (Nigeria’s parliament), it has not been
passed into law. However, the widespread denunciation of
women’s sartorial choices raises interesting questions about
normative attitudes towards women, morality, sex and
sexuality, the state and the economy. It also raises the
question about the gendered subtexts that make it possible to
draw a causal link between the previously unrelated issues of
sexual intimidation, indecent exposure and women’s fashion in
order to talk about contemporary social tensions and morality.

Focusing on the textual analysis of the proposed Bill, I argue

that in order to make her case, the Senator collapses various
distinct issues into a confused and spuriously unified account.
First, she assumes that there is a causal relationship between
nudity and sexuality. Second, women’s sartorial agency is
assumed to always be directed at men and is held to be an
invitation to erotic encounter which may often lead to
unwanted consequences. Women must therefore be disciplined
and protected from any potential masculine sexual terror that
acts under provocation. Finally, the Senator assumes that the
judicial system must be based on a religiously grounded
morality which can be universalised, regardless of differences.

What is important to note is that the debate about women’s

exposed flesh and perceived immorality is less about the
personal choices of women, and more about how young
women’s bodies have become the site on to which many social
highway or any place adjacent thereto or in any public place at such time and under such
circumstances as to lead to the conclusion that such person is there for an illegal or
disorderly purpose.”

2
insecurities and existential anxieties are projected: women’s
sexuality and agency in urban space (Ivaska 2004, Wilson
1985, Little 1973); the proliferation of new information
technologies, images and the semiotics of fashion (Barthes
1985, Hebidge 1979); increasing economic and social
inequalities; and public morality and private vices. Because
women’s bodies are the trope for the articulation of these
anxieties, they also become the site for both the attempted
resolution and restitution of that anxiety.

The Bill: Public Nudity and Sexual Offences

In this section, I perform a critical reading of two texts: first the
Bill titled “A Bill for an Act to prohibit and punish public nudity,
sexual intimidation and other related offences in Nigeria”
(2007); and secondly, Senator Ekaette’s written defence of the
Bill to the Senate in February 2008. In the Bill, public nudity is
defined as a ‘state of indecent dressing which expose in the
public or in the open’ the breast, belly, waist and lap of a
female above the age of 14 years, as well as any part of the
body from two inches below the shoulders downwards to the
knee (2007:1). For men, indecent dressing is classified as any
exposure of the male aged 14 years and above from the ‘waist
to the knee’. In a textual defence of the Bill in the Senate, the
Senator pointed out that ‘indecent dressing’ has reached such
epidemic proportions that ‘even the most disciplined clergyman
could have his/her conscience polluted by acts of indecent
dressing or public nudity in every place in our society’ (ibid:2).
She added that clergymen are not the only ones under threat -
young men and women whose ‘hearts and thought’ are
polluted and seduced by such lewd images and are ‘forced to
battle with reflections of obscenity in their mind’ (ibid).4

The Bill defines sexual intimidation in terms of:

a)Any action or circumstances which amount to

demand for sexual intercourse with either a male or
a female under any guise, as a condition for passing
examination, securing employment, business
patronage, obtaining any favour in any form
4
   Similar arguments have been made elsewhere on the continent.  For example in September this year the 
Ugandan minister of Ethics and Integrity proposed the banning of mini skirts because they distract motorists and 
cause road accidents.  He said, a woman wearing a mini skirt “can cause an accident because some of our people 
are weak mentally" See “New Vision September 17, 2008.

3
 whatsoever […]

b) The exposure of any private part of the human

body […] by any person whatsoever by form of
indecent dressing or any form […] which is capable
of sexually seducing the other person to demand or
request for sexual intercourse in exchange for any
favour in any form […].

c) Acts of deprivation, withholding, replacing and or

short-changing of entitlements, privileges, rights,
benefits, examination or test marks/scores, and any
other form of disposition capable of coercing any
person to submit to sexual intercourse for the
purpose of receiving reprieve thereto (ibid:1-2).

The subsequent sections of the Bill then go on to define

punishments, which include a prison sentence of three months
for public nudity, and three years for sexual intimidation. The
remainder of the Bill deals with enforcement (by the Police),
jurisdiction (by both Magistrate and High Courts), legal
obligations (placed upon the head of educational institutions),
as well as details on the Right of Appeal. The Bill finishes with
a short section (16) on the ‘Roles of Religious Bodies and Public
Agencies’. For the purposes of the analysis to come, it will be
worthwhile to quote this in full here:

The roles of religious bodies in moral rejuvenation of our

country is by this Act hereby guaranteed:
a) The Ministries of Information, Cultures and National
Orientation shall develop policies and programmes for the
integration of religious bodies in the reformation of the
society for moral uprightness;
b) religious bodies shall be encouraged in teaching moral
uprightness to its adherents (2007:6).

In the short presentation defending the Bill to the Senate, the

Senator makes two key points to justify the urgent need for
legislative intervention. First, she points to the collapse in
morals in the society and suggests that God is the touchstone
for moral and spiritual rebirth. In her opening paragraph, she
writes,

4
 Over the years, I have watched helplessly as our
society degenerate from a community of people with
very high values, morals, self-esteem/respect,
dignity of the human person, upright family
values/upbringing, etc. to a state of near-madness,
collapse of moral values, tolerance of immorality
and all forms of decadence of social ethics which
uphold the dignity of the human person. I am happy
that now, GOD has given me the golden opportunity
to steer the partnership with you, Distinguished
Senators, on the project for the RESTORATION OF
HUMAN DIGNITY[caps in original text] (2008:1).

The Senator buttresses the pivotal significance she accords to

God in the presentation of her Bill by making reference to the
1999 Constitution statement that we the people resolve ‘to live
in unity and harmony as one indivisible and indissoluble
Sovereign Nation UNDER GOD’ [caps in original text]. For the
Senator, the danger of not legislating against public lewdness
would result in the complete annihilation of ‘our age-long
values of very high morals, [and] we would be forced to all
wear iron jeans trousers with padlocked belts to avoid being
raped or sexually assaulted. God forbid!’ (ibid: 2).

Secondly, by way of comparative analysis, the Senator states

that careful examination of the Nigerian laws and penal codes
shows the absence of a ‘prohibition or punishment for the social
crime such as public nudity, public lewdness or nakedness’
(ibid: 3).5 Such omission in the law makes it possible for people
to ‘decide to go naked in the name of fashion’. This prompted
her research into legal precedence elsewhere. It will be
instructive in our later analysis to note the criteria she uses
here:

5
The Nigerian criminal and penal codes already have clauses about indecent acts and
sexual offences (see section 214 - 222, 252 – 253, 351 – 360 of the criminal code and
section 285 of the penal code. Since there are already provisions (however inadequate)
within the legal system, we can only conclude that a) the Senator has not really explored
existing provisions; b) she is not interested in modifying or strengthening the existing
codes so that they will be more favourable to women; and c) she is more concerned with
instituting a dress code where it was previously absence and in doing so criminalise
women’s expressive agency.

5
 In my desperation to find a redress for these moral
decadence, I was forced to examine the laws of
various advanced democracies of the world and
other highly religious nations. The laws of the
United States of America, the Great Britain, Canada,
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Germany, India, China etc
(emphasis mine) (ibid: 2).

Having provided a brief summary of the key points made in

both the text of the Bill and Senator Ekaette’s presentation of it
to the Senate, it is now time to unpack and offer some critical
analysis of its key claims.

Law and Morality

For the Senator, individual moral permissiveness is a sign of a

collective social degradation that must be remedied through
legislative intervention. The first point to note is the use of God
in the Senator’s text and how she aligns God with morality.
This appeal to morality proffered both by God and the law
means that it is possible to regulate and discipline an
individual’s liberty in order to prevent immoral behaviour. Such
legal moralism rests on two assumptions.

First, she assumes that there is a moral consensus in Nigeria

that can be reached. In a society that divides into Muslims,
Christians and followers of traditional indigenous religions,
layered onto a patchwork of several hundred ethnic groups, it is
difficult to imagine how any kind of moral consensus can be
reached, whether it originates from a specific religious
framework, or ethnic derivation, or perhaps from within a more
secular, universalist context, especially in the case dress and
other perceived moral transgressions. We know that even
within the same religious community, a shared moral
consensus is difficult because this is always fractured by
ethnicity, geography, generation and other differences (Uwais
2008). Indeed, another Senator from across the Atlantic knew
very well that he could not impose faith-based morality on a
pluralistic society like USA. Barack Obama argued:

The religiously motivated translate their concerns into

universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires

6
 that their proposals be subject to argument, and
amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for
religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the
practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my
church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion
violates some principle that is accessible to people of all
faiths, including those with no faith at all (Quoted in
Mansfield, 2008:89-90).

The fact that religion and state are not separated in the 1999
Constitution, thus halting the development of a modern secular
state, does not preclude or abnegate the reality of Nigeria’s
socio-ethnic complexity and the rural-urban matrix with its
myriad conceptions of dress and nudity, morality and
immorality. It is hard to imagine that any religious prescription,
specifically in relation to dress and adornment, can be
universalised across this complex patchwork of beliefs, without
considerable resistance and contestation on the basis of local
cultures and practices in the emerging context of global
semiotic flows and exchange. For example, whilst some
Nigerian Pentecostal groups attempt to restrict the wearing of
trousers for women because of a fear of blurred gender
boundaries announced and reproduced by dress, among
Muslims, the wearing of trousers by women fits into their
doctrinal code to cover the flesh. Such diverse positions on a
single item of clothing contests the Senator’s claim that ‘all our
religions forbid public lewdness, public nudity or public
nakedness’ (2008: 4). This statement, in the face of the
examples just provided, shows that in a pluralised society as
Nigeria, the Senator’s desire for a unified legal moralism is
already doomed and unworkable.

Second, the Senator assumes that the social fabric and judicial
system of a society must be grounded in a universally shared
morality that can be adhered to across time and space. This
pre-secular presumption takes the law to be the codification of
religious and cultural custom into abstract principle. It does not
occur to the Senator that the law could be grounded in a
secular principle of human rights or ethics which does not
require an underlying moral consensus across social difference.
Many legal theorists would agree that the use of morality in
criminal law has no traction in a modern legal system, let alone

7
in a plural society as Nigeria. Yet, Senator Ekaette continues to
view the law through a religious and cultural lens, as well as
regarding the semi-nudity of rural African women as harking
back to a pre-historic, stone age era that has no place in a
modernising Africa.

It is interesting in this regard to note that the comparator

benchmark countries that Senator Ekaette mentions to support
her legal moralism are ‘advanced democracies’ such as
Germany, USA and Britain etc. and ‘other highly religious
nations’ such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. What all these
countries have in common, according to the Senator, are laws
prohibiting and punishing public nudity and lewdness. The
contradiction between open societies such as Germany where
nudity is legal, and Saudi Arabia, where there is a strict
standard of modesty where women are expected to cover up in
burqa or the hijab remains unresolved in her text. She does not
see the chasm of difference between public lewdness and
indecent exposure legislation in secular advanced democratic
nations and its equivalent in theocratic nations, precisely
because she does not make a distinction between theological
and secular conceptions of the law and morality.

Moreover, the Senator conveniently misunderstands the

content of the laws surrounding public lewdness and indecent
exposure in advance democracies. These laws, variously
referred to as “public nudity”, “public indecency” or “indecent
exposure” are quite specific and generally refer to crime
involving the exposure of an adult’s (usually male) genitalia
with the aim of causing affront or alarm.6 This may also include
masturbation and sexual intercourse in a public place. Public
nudity laws tend to be much less concerned with moral censure
and more focused on curtailing offence to the general public.
Moreover, these laws make no reference to types or patterns of
dress.

Now, even if a moral consensus can be reached about women’s

dress codes, it is not clear that society should be able to punish
perceived misconduct simply because most people disapprove
of it or believe that it is offensive. In this Bill, there is an

6
   Commonly referred to as “Flashing,” this exhibitionist phenomenon usually involves a male opening his fly 
and in a ‘flash’ exposes his genitalia to an unsuspecting individual (typically female).

8
assumption that beyond our own private morals, judicial moral
principles are required to guide the conduct of the citizen who
would otherwise be immune from moral and social censure. For
the Senator, it is both right and necessary to insist on some
moral conformity and to legally enforce that conformity in a
country like Nigeria, which we are told, is fast losing its moral
compass. She writes, ‘Society must use the law to preserve
morality in the same way it uses it to safeguard anything else if
it is essential to its existence’. The law becomes part of the
disciplinary regime that will not only produce a regulated,
civilised subject (Foucault 1978, Elias 1969), but subjects that
can represent and ‘safeguard’ the interest of the nation
(Moorman 2004, Allman 2004) as opposed to those bent on
perpetuating the ‘stone age’ position of their naked ancestors.

Culture, Nudity and Sexuality

Arguments against indecent dressing in African contexts often

cite Western influence as the source of all moral degeneration.
In this vein, Senator Ekaette makes frequent appeal in both her
presentation to the Senate and in a follow-up live radio debate
(on the BBC World Service)7 to the moral conservatism of
Nigerian culture. Given this, it is significant that the proposed
Bill makes an exception to ‘sports, festivals, theatre/stage
acting and swimming exercises’ (2007: 3) as moments where
nudity is legally permissible and is de-eroticised. If certain
forms of nakedness or state of undress were an abiding feature
of Nigerian festivals and tradition, why then would the Bill
propose a waiver in this area? The obvious underlying point
here is that the Senator is well aware that partial nudity is
commonplace in Nigeria outside of the large cities to this day,
as is attire which exposes the body in ways which contravene
the definitions of the proposed Bill. What the text of the Bill
unwittingly reveals is a repressed indigeneity. Historically and
even now, minimal clothing or exposure of the torso is a
common feature amongst a diverse group of Nigerians,
especially in the rural areas where most Nigerians still live.

If the Bill was passed, would we then not have to force large
communities of Nigerians to re-adjust their socio-cultural
perspective to one which eroticises or sexualises states of
7
 BBC World Service, Africa Have Your Say, Tues Feb 12th 2008. 

9
nudity or semi-nudity which were previously normatively
neutral? By eroticising the naked body, does the Senator not
participate in both real and symbolic dismembering of the
female body? In a context where commodification is
commonplace, by measuring areas of the female body parts
that can be legislated upon, is she not reducing women’s
bodies to a collection of sexual organs perpetually ready for
sexual appropriation?

By drawing a causal relationship between nudity and sexuality

and attempting to legislate against its occurrence in order to
preserve a pristine Nigerian cultural and moral universe, the
Senator betrays her ignorance about the way in which Nigerian
society is overlaid with what we can call the globalisation of
signifiers. Nigeria is not immune to global cultural flows of
images, vocabulary, sartorial practices, language, memes and
concepts. Although only a fraction of Nigerians have access in
their homes to satellite television, the images of scantily-clad
women on MTV or Channel O are well-known and well-
circulated. There is strong liquidity between youth culture
formation in Nigeria and hip-hop subcultures and mainstream
cultures in North America and Europe. One sees this
transference in both locally-made music videos where women
in different states of (un)dress are displayed and consumed as
part of the commodity fetishism of late capitalism, as well as in
the popularity with which black American rappers visiting
Nigeria are welcomed. More importantly, with increased urban
migration, education and an influx of global fashion styles and
imageries, young women use fashion to signal their non-
conformity to restrictive rules about hegemonic norms of
femininity even as they re-subscribe to it (McRobbie 1999,
1994). This globalisation of signifiers intensifies and confuses
the question of social development. In other words, the
question of whether Nigeria should position itself as a modern
society with the goal of becoming an ‘advanced democracy’, or
whether Nigeria should benchmark itself against ‘highly
religious’ societies, remains moot in the analysed texts. From a
religious perspective on the law and the heterosexual subtext
of the Bill, this swirl of eroticised signifiers through dress is
quickly constructed as an attack from a degenerate occidental
outside, against which a more conservative, highly fictionalised
African cultural heritage is framed, even as the terms of the Bill

10
represses it.

More significant still than this point about repressed indigeneity

is the collapsing of nudity with sexuality. The unclothed body
which in many Nigerian cultures was previously read in a non-
sexual way is now overburdened with sexual meaning and
anxiety that acts as a prelude to sexual intercourse. This new
meaning is part of a pattern of ‘culturally and historically
shifting ideas about shame (Hansen 2004: 168) inherited from
the two colonising religions – Islam and Christianity. In both
these Abrahamic religions, especially in its Judeo-Christian
guise, the female body is often viewed as the seat of sin, moral
corruption and a ‘source of distraction from Godly thoughts’
(Entwistle 2000:84). From the tales of the first Testament
through to the letters of St. Paul, women have been associated
with temptations of the flesh and decoration. This is part of
what Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has referred to as the
somaphobic impulse at the heart of Western philosophy and
Christian teaching. In this teaching, the body must be ‘mortified
and chastised into submission’ (Entwistle 2000:84) for the sake
of the soul. The unclothed body is thus regarded as
‘inseparable from sex and sexuality, and has hence been
located adjacent to the indecent, the obscene and the immoral’
(Cover 2003:55).

Within this obscenity discourse, nudity or the partially clothed

female body is seen as part of a libidinal opportunity that
threatens to unleash an unrestrained sexual energy into the
world. This unbridled erotic force must be condemned and
contained through disciplinary institutions such as the family,
law, religion, educational institutions and community
organisations. Just like the primordial heterosexual couple –
Adam and Eve – nudity signals a fall from grace, an invitation to
illicit desire and yearning which should inspire shame and
disgust in the fallen, who is always a woman (Tseelon 1997).
According to Tseelon, the discourse of modesty and chastity in
dress is one of the ways in which Christianity tries to link
women’s body with sexuality in order to better control it.
However, by shamelessly flaunting their body, for the moralists,
young women show their disregard for the body’s sacredness
which should be for the intimate gaze of their husband and
their refusal to carry the moral burden of Eve’s guilt. The fear

11
therefore is that since semi-clothed women are unwilling to be
morally burdened, they must be protected against themselves
because their partial nudity ‘might give off unintended sexual
signals’ (Duits and van Zoonen 2006:107) which they cannot
control and may lead to unintended consequences. For the
Senator, there are two consequences of public exposure:
promiscuity and violation, desire and penalty (rape and
intimidation). The unclothed female body therefore becomes a
site for both seduction and an invitation for violating
experiences, especially when this body moves around in urban
public space (Hansen, 2004). This is because normatively, the
naked female body is only meant for the private male gaze, an
expectation which fits into a broader discourse about the
sexualisation (Dworkin, 1981) and compulsory
heterosexualisation (Rich 1983) of women’s body and the
anxiety about women’s erotic agency.

The moment the naked body (as it always will) moves from the
private arena and is displayed in the public realm, it becomes
marked as sexual and exposed to social conventions of policing
and disciplinary apparatus. This ‘ignores the fact that sexuality
is not an essential feature of bodily display and dress, but the
effect of the reaction of others’ (Duits and van Zoonen
2006:108). From the Senator’s perspective, what is important is
less the agency and opinion of the wearer, but the reaction of
others who are forced to confront the public display of youthful
female flesh. It is precisely because the Judeo-Christian subtext
of the Bill associates women with the body, sexuality,
decoration and morality that the Senator privileges the
perspective of the different publics (law, church, institutions,
media etc.) over the agency of women. The very fact that both
the Senator/moralist and the wearer of the clothes or the semi-
naked women can encode their action with multiple meanings
shows the malleability and mutability of dress.

While I would not want to deny the possibility of latent

eroticism or arousal that the body and dress might generate, I
would rather argue that this is always a potentiality in any
given context, including being fully clothed. The injunction to
cover up assumes that veiling or being fully clothed will
eliminate erotic desire and prevent or minimise sexual
misdemeanour. Indeed, the Senator alluded to this in her BBC

12
interview when she said that covered women are unlikely to be
raped. Through the work of feminist and gender activists the
world over, we know that being clothed or unclothed does not
prevent sexual intimidation or violation. In fact, it is possible to
argue that the very act of clothing and covering can actually
open up the possibility for more erotic imaginings. Because the
closeness of clothing to the body involves an interplay between
concealment and exposure, we can never know in advance
what will cause arousal. In saying this, I do not intend to draw
any correlations between causality and effect. Rather, I contend
that being dressed or partially undressed does not
automatically expose the wearer to or protect them from
inappropriate and unwanted sexual advances. The fact that
unwanted sexual advances and violations are always read as
imminent is part of a structured patriarchal system which
assumes that female sexuality is always for and available to the
male gaze and open to manipulation and violation.

Heterosexuality and the Economy of Signs

In closing, I want to now point to what I think of as three

interrelated surface aspects of the Senator’s argument which I
take to be symptomatic of an underlying logic which is at the
core of her desire to sanction dress codes upon Nigerian
women.

First, the Senator assumes that women’s sole motivation in

dressing is to please, impress and attract men as well as to
stimulate male sexual desire. By suggesting a causal
relationship between women’s dress, sexuality and the
potential for violation, the Bill treats women’s bodies as sex
objects to be made available for the male gaze. Women’s dress
is part of the arena of patriarchal surveillance, control, power
and meaning. Women who dress modestly do so in order to be
viewed as modest by men and avoid being harassed, raped and
beaten up. Conversely, women who expose their flesh are,
under this logic, considered to be indecent ‘harlots’ who dress
to give off sexual messages with the inevitable consequence of
provoking or awakening an irresistible sexual urge in men.
Senator Ekaette and other moralists therefore assume that
female sexuality cannot be conceptualized or lived outside its
capacity to cause arousal in men (Rich, 1983). The image of

13
the scantily dressed female is therefore directed at and
displayed for the consuming male spectator who has the
privilege of looking and possessing the objectified female
(Berger, 1972).

Second, once women’s sartorial choice has been invested with

sexual meaning in this way, it appears to be a matter of logic
that regulation and self-regulation should follow, in order to
protect women from the inevitable masculine terror that is
automatically provoked by the revelation of female flesh. In so
doing, both texts and the Senator’s media commentaries tacitly
reassert the normative power of heterosexuality as the only
legally, theologically and culturally legitimate form: that
women’s dress is directed at men and should be regulated by
men. The possibility of women dressing for themselves or
directed at non-normative forms of sexuality is erased in this
assumption of the normativity of heterosexual desire. Yet, the
image of heterosexual desire offered here is one of potential
threat and an instrument of perennially abusive power
relations, from which women must be protected from as well as
which women must conform to. Here, we see why Senator
Ekaette considers the relationship between revealing clothing
and sexual harassment to be automatic (as they are
contiguously placed in the actual Bill): women are sexually
harassed, or sexually harass, only when they wear provocative
clothing.

As already noted above, it is therefore no surprise to hear, in

her debate on the proposed Bill on the BBC radio programme,
that she concedes (with no supporting evidence) that almost all
women in Nigeria who have been raped must have provoked
the attack, and were ‘asking for it’ by making the choice to
wear what they were wearing. Women are therefore held not
only responsible for their own comportment, but also taken to
be responsible for the sexual responses of men (Entwistle
2000). The Senator’s simple prescription for women is to avoid
either harassing or being harassed by men is for them to dress
with decency, and for this to be within the ambit of legislative
decree. What is absent from her texts is any sense in which
male desire itself should be circumscribed, or that men should
be held to account (either morally, or within the law) for their
desires in specific circumstances. In other words, women’s

14
desire for sartorial expression and women’s sexuality must at
all times be controlled and protected from the violating male
gaze, whereas male desire itself must be allowed its
untrammelled course. Here, we see the ontological violence of
an internalised patriarchal logic, whereby women’s agency and
modes of identity are subordinated to male desire and male
control, without any trace of reciprocal delimitation.

Third, the Bill fails to place Nigerian women’s vulnerability in

the context of social and economic inequality, instead masking
the brutal reality of scant options within in a moralistic
discourse. We should be clear that the proposed Bill has a clear
target in mind: young women on campuses and in the work
place. At the very moment when many young women are
experimenting, exploring and playing around with a multiplicity
of identities through expressions in dress and corporeal styling,
the person responsible for speaking on women’s behalf in the
Senate is pushing for a restrictive definition of acceptable
femininity and feminine comportment to be brought under the
law. The pains the Bill takes to define education institutions and
leaders of such institutions, as well as her presentation to the
Senate where she mentions female banking staff leave no room
for ambiguity. Young women in Nigerian universities and banks
are taken to be reducing their bodies into transactional value.

What the attempt to police women’s dressing shows is the

critic’s inability to engage with the realities behind that which
they contest: the economic vulnerability and existential
insecurity of women and the greater pressure poverty places
upon them. Due to the economic disadvantage of most women
in African societies and their limited ability to participate in
decision making structures and the creation of symbolic capital
(Bourdieu, 1986), most women become more dependent on
their body and ‘sexual relations with men (ranging from legal
marriage to literal prostitution) (Gallop 2001: 32/33). It is
therefore important that the question of the ‘indecent dressing’
and transactional sex among young women in Nigeria should
be placed squarely in the context of economic and social
inequality which force women into entering varying forms of
coercive relationship, rather than trying to restrict women’s
agency and mobility by resulting to moralistic argument. It is a
fact that each year hundreds of thousands of students graduate

15
to face a society where there are simply not enough jobs to
absorb its youthful population. Part of the dynamic of a
patriarchal society like Nigeria is to ensure that there is less
competition for jobs by reducing the chances of women to build
a career. Young women are therefore encouraged at an early
age to marry and reproduce; they are also deterred from
entering competition with men on the corporate ladder via a
thousand subtle and unsubtle prejudices and tacit barriers to
entry. The consequence of this is that while both young male
and female graduates are placed under severe pressure in their
search for work, it is female graduates who face the most
extreme pressure where there is a tacit expectation to present
their youthful body for commodification and sexualisation.8 The
picture is the same while at university (Bennett 2004).
Research has shown that the key opportunities for sexual abuse
of female students lie at two stages: in the struggle to get
accommodation on campus, and during and after the exam
period9. In both cases, men act as gate-keepers, requesting
sexual favours in order to assure results (a room on campus
and successful exam scores).

Similar accounts can be given of women in the work-place

itself. In each case (women as students, women as graduates,
women in the work-place), we see women positioned as
economically vulnerable, dependent on the sanction of men. It
is in the context of this social pressure that we see processes
by which the flesh is commodified and objectified in Nigeria.
With little options available, many women are forced in many
cases to face one of three alternatives: destitution, dependency
upon the favours of men, or to offer their bodies for transaction
via the various forms of prostitution available to young women.
Women who chose the latter two options are pushed down a
transactional path, whereby their bodies are valued in
monetary terms by clients who pose as either Uncle figures
(known popularly as ‘Aristos’), or more simply as prostitutes via
8
 It is a common practice in the banking sector to put new attractive female graduates in
the marketing section and as new recruits go out into the field, they are provided with
condoms and encouraged to do ‘whatever’ is necessary to bring in the account. One way
to acquire new accounts is for the women to use their body, and revealing dress
becomes an entry point for this. It is therefore possible to say that the senator is
responding to the outward manifestation of a complex social process where women are
forced to use their body to perform certain role. However, in her response to the banking
industry use of women’s body to grow their business, the Senator fails to outline the
economic vulnerability of women.
9
Charmaine’s research etc.

16
hotel night-clubs or on-the-street modes of pick-up. It is in this
context that Senator Ekaette’s proposed Bill about sexual
intimidation should be properly framed. Rather than a sign of
moral degeneracy, the transactional use of the body by young
female students, graduates and women in the work place is a
response to huge social strain and inequality whereby
competition for jobs, and ultimately, financial stability, requires
and almost demands the commodification of female flesh.

These three points raised in the Senator’s various texts and

pronouncements: a heterosexual over-determination of the
reasons why women dress the way they do; an emphasis on
regulation and control of women’s dress; and the refusal to
recognise the economic context within which Nigerian women’s
vulnerability is situated, all point to a deeper underlying model
which shapes Senator Ekaette’s thinking and the structure of
the Bill itself. What is at work is a patriarchal model of
heterosexuality, where women’s relations with men are taken
to be determined and controlled solely by men. Women can
either be virgins, mothers or whores in this scenario. Any other
model of explanation, for instance, the idea of women dressing
as a form of agency outside of a male regulatory framework, is
nullified. The possibility that young women might relate to
their body and sexuality in a non-abusive way or non-violating
way is utterly masked by Ekaette’s moralistic stance and logic
of victimhood. The possibility that women’s sartorial choices
could also be a site of conscious erotic play that is not
channeled towards men is completely elided and replaced by a
fearful model of heterosexuality, within which women’s
comportment must at all times be contained.

In this sense, it is interesting to appreciate more clearly how

women, as the embodiment of economic vulnerability and
dependency within a normatively heterosexist masculinist
framework such as Nigeria are subsequently blamed as the
source of moral degeneracy. It might seem doubly cruel that
women under conditions of extreme social strain are
pressurised into commodifying their own bodies, then to be
blamed as the source of provocation. It is also interesting to
witness such extreme hetero-normativity issuing forth from a
woman. The most insidious forms of power in society operate
via the silent internalisation of its strictures by the victims

17
themselves: the ressentiment of the oppressed as Nietzsche
might have put it.

Reference

Allman, Jean (2004) ‘“Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our

Ghanaian Costume”: Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Cloth-
ing in Nkrumah’s Ghana’ in J Allman (ed), Fashioning Africa:
Power and the Politics of Dress. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press

Barthes, Roland (1985) The Fashion System London: Cape

Bennnet, Jane (2004) ‘Exploration of a Gap: Strategising Gender

Equity in African Universities’ in Feminist Africa Vol. 1 African
Gender Institute e-journal issue. http://www.feministafrica.org

Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the

Judgement of Taste¸ London: Routledge

Cover, Rob (2003) ‘The Naked Subject: Nudity, Context and

Sexualization in Contemporary Culture’ in Body & Society
Vol.9(3)

Duits , Linda and van Zoonen, Liesbet (2006) ‘Headscarves and

Porno-Chic: Disciplining Girls’ Bodies in the European
Multicultural Society’ in European Journal of Women’s Studies
13(2)

Dworkin, Andrea (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women.

New York: Perigee.

Entwistle, Joan (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and

Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press

Elias, Norbert (1969), The Civilizing Process: The History of

Manners, Vol.1 Oxford: Blackwell

Foucault, Michel (1978) The History of Sexuality: An

Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin

18
Gallop, Jane (2001) ‘Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment
(excerpt)’ in Feminist Consequences: Theory For The New
Century. New York: Columbia University Press

Hansen, Karen, Tranberg (2004). ‘Dressing Dangerously:

Miniskirts, Gender Relations and Sexuality in Zambia’ J Allman
(ed), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Hebidge, Dick (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style London:

Methuen

Ivaska, Andrew, M (2004) ‘“Anti-mini Militants Meet Modern

Misses”: Urban Style, Gender and the Politics of “National
Culture” in 1960s Dar es Salaam” in J Allman (ed), Fashioning
Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Little, Kenneth (1973) African Women in Town: An Aspect of

Africa’s Social Revolution London: Cambridge Press

Mansfield, Stephen (2008) The Faith of Barack Obama,

Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2008.

McRobbie, Angela (1994), Post-Modernism and Popular Culture,

London Routledge

McRobbie, Angela (1999), In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion

and Popular Music London: Routledge

Moorman, Marissa (2004) ‘Putting on Pano and Dancing Like

Our Grandparents: Nation and Dress in Late Colonial Luanda’ in
J Allman (ed), Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Rich, Adrienne ( ) Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence’ in
Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: British
Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

Senate (2007) ‘A Bill for an Act to Prohibit and Punish Public

Nudity, Sexual Intimidation and Other Related Offences in
Nigeria’ sponsored by Senator Eme Ufot Ekaette Abuja:

19
National Assembly

Senate, (Feb 2008) ‘Lead Debate on the Bill for An Act to

Prohibit and Punish Public Nudity, Sexual Intimidation and Other
Related Offences in Nigeria’ presented by Senator Eme Ufot
Ekaette Abuja: National Assembly

Spelman, Elizabeth (1990) Inessential Woman: Problems of

Exclusion in Feminist Thought London: Women’s Press

Tseelon, E (1997). Masque of Femininity, London: Sage

Uwais, Maryam (2008) ‘Feminism and Transforming Lives:

Fundamentalism and Muslim Women’ Paper presented at the
First Nigerian Feminist Forum, Denis Hotel 24 -27 January, Abuja

Wilson, Elizabeth (1985) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and

Modernity, London: Virago

20