And this was before he gave the speech.

Lee Siegel in The Daily Beast has one of the most insightful responses to the president’s schoolroom speech. An unpredictable essayist with his own take on modern life, he recently published Against the Machine, a quirky polemic about the plight of the blogger and the excesses of online commenting – amongst other things.

Who better to analyse the president’s slick yet wholesome message?

And now I know why the entire “controversy” has been making me snicker. While liberals and conservatives were trading cliches about the president’s anodyne advice, my inner 12-year-old just wanted to cut school.

Because Obama’s speech to the kiddies is “borrowed from” William Bennett’s infamous The Book of Virtues, a “treasury of great moral stories” for social conservatives. Siegel was outraged, but I’m impressed when my president does stuff like this.

Siegel writes:

Imagine Obama warning the bankers and the businessmen that they could only be bailed out if they fulfilled their responsibilities. But he didn’t hesitate to tell that to the kids.

Okay, fine, but can we also get real? The grown-ups have always behaved one way around kids and another way around bankers (i.e. other grown-ups.) Most parents talk to their kids not quite the same way they talk to a loan officer, broker, attorney, used car salesman… any adult they have to do business with.

Sometimes this is the reason parents drink. (John Cheever’s short story The Sorrows of Gin comes to mind.) Making the switch can be stressful, but it’s part of the parental role – and parents who can’t play it are incompetent.

The good middle class parent (personified by Obama) tells the children about responsible living and tries to discourage greed, sloth and lying. All competent parents know that their own generation is guilty of these things, but the idea is a sound one: if you believe these aren’t ‘the done thing,’ you will keep your most dangerous impulses under control. (It’s how we learn to avoid red meat or pizza most days while having the occasional flesh/carbohydrate feast.)

Parents (personified by Obama) are supposed to hold children to a higher moral and behavioural standard than they hold other people. (Higher standards can be annoying, but they harm nobody.)

I know all this because I was once a child (and so was Lee Siegel) but I was also … a BABYSITTER. (Was Lee Siegel ever??) As a barely nubile babysitter, I was like middle management – and the parents I worked for were the board of directors. We babysitters were the foremen on the factory floor of childhood.

As a babysitter, your theoretical role is to uphold official values – but if you’re under a certain age (as I was) you are still a kid, so you want to critique and thumb your nose at these values. (If your charges fall asleep early enough, all this is moot. You can do whatever.)

Basically, Obama’s well-behaved speech was about one obvious (to babysitters) fact of life.

Childhood is a time for obeying the rules other people – most notably bankers, and even a few babysitters – don’t have to follow.

While this is deeply unfair, I don’t think it’s William Bennett’s fault. Parents of almost every political persuasion uphold this system and Obama, have you noticed, is a member of the parent class.

However, his advice about Facebook makes me wonder if he’s a closet babysitter.

I talk about it here on the NY Times opinion page.

That’s how my friend Susan, a stripper for 15 years, responds to the news of Diablo Cody’s Oscar for best screenplay. At Desedo.com, a blogger known to me as MHB cites Diablo’s tattoo — “a bikini-clad + rope bound lass” — as a reminder that the screenwriter “was once a stripper.” According to MHB, Juno’s dialog is “strongly rooted in the self-aware and acerbic style of writing oft found in sex worker literature.”

Thank you, MHB. But who is MHB? (Full disclosure: I found Desedo.com because a reader known as Christian Dior wanted to show me the Manhattan Call Girl reference in MHB’s post.)

Not everyone is feeling as excited as Susan. Or myself. Some unfortunate-sounding malcontents have cobbled together a Diablo-dissing parody which was posted at SpoutBlog. Sad!

The go-to guy, if you want historical perspective — and who doesn’t? — is Richard Porton, one of the editors at Cineaste and author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination.

“Even the most successful screenwriters working today are not household names for the general public,” he tells me. “Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges had to become directors to become famous. So it’s great that Diablo Cody is helping to put writers on the map — even as it creates a big backlash and a lot of jealousy.”

I find this rather bracing. The price of writer power?

“There have been famous screenwriters in the past like Robert Towne (Chinatown) and Ben Hecht,” he points out, but they didn’t have Diablo’s kind of visibility. “Of course, they didn’t write during the age of the Internet. That seems to make a big difference.”

Film and the Anarchist Imagination is an excellent guide to anarchist thinking, some of which plays a role in today’s sex worker activism. Richard’s book is also available in Spanish.

Go here to read my take on Juno, a film I enjoyed without reservation or apology. I’ve no idea why some feel the need to apologize for liking Juno. The movie is under attack for being a “twee vector”, for being anti-abortion, for its “precious” soundtrack and — most absurdly — for its witty dialog.

Oh well. I liked it! Especially the much-critiqued dialog. As Diablo said last night, “This is for the writers.”

I’m happy when a film has real dialog — and no, that’s not necessarily the same thing as realistic dialog.

That a Chicago Sun-Times critic who purports to be “old-school feminist” (and a father) hated Juno only convinces me I’m on the right track!

What about those Tracy Quan Mystery Photos on eBay?

Well, this year, I’m participating in a charity auction to benefit MIX NYC, New York’s Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival. I got involved for very personal reasons, which I’ll get into shortly.

You can bid on my mystery pics — or those of 150 unusual suspects — and support a fabulous LGBT cause! 150 of us (…Norah Jones, Annie Sprinkle, Meredith Monk…) were asked to shoot a disposable camera. The undeveloped (signed) cameras are auctioned on eBay to raise funds for the MIX NYC Festival.

My pics are from deep inside the New York Interior — not a single one was shot outdoors.

Filmmaker Hima B., former exotic dancer and union organiser, is my very personal reason for getting involved.

She runs a free summer programme in media training for LGBT youth. This programme began in 2006 to help develop the next generation of media artists, targeting marginalized youth. Intensive training lasts several weeks, and results in completed short videos by each student, which are late shown at the MIX Festival and other venues.

Hima B., programme leader, is widely admired as the maker of “Straight for the Money” a documentary exploring the lives of lesbian sex workers. (SFTM: nice riff on the sex industry term “gay for pay.”)

As a former teen runaway, I feel honored to be part of the MIX NYC benefit auction. It took many years for me to learn how to tell my story because I was afraid I would lose control of my past. For a long time, I was in the closet about my teen prostitution years. Not because I was ashamed. Simply because I didn’t know how to prevent the establishment media from stealing my history and distorting it.

I’d like other young people to be telling their story sooner, and I think Hima’s project is very important. I like the fact that it’s not aimed exclusively at runaway teens. Projects which ghettoize are not just paternalistic. They are often dangerous to people’s safety, they make it harder for us to grow up and lead normal lives, and many teenagers are afraid to participate.

Hima’s programme is open to all LGBT youth, but especially marginalized youth. So it’s based on integration. We hear a lot of empty rhetoric about inclusion, but this is a real example of inclusion in action. Hima, it goes without saying, is a fantastic role model for kids who feel silenced or intimidated by the powers that be.

It’s also nice because it’s for ordinary, not super-wealthy, donors — bidding starts at US $50. You have until 24 June to place a bid on eBay, if you would like to support Hima’s project.

So! Visit MIX NYC to find out more about the auction. Visit eBay to place a bid on my camera. Or, go here to bid on the cameras of Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnussen and many, many others!

He assures us this isn’t about ethnic “discrimination.” Thank goodness, because West Indians are also conspicuously absent from Shashi’s “raucous” clique. Despite the fact that the inaugural match, in Jamaica, was a victory for the West Indies and the final will take place in Barbados!

Also absent (in a conspicuous way) is any mention of cricket as something people DO in New York. So, a naive New Yorker might be left thinking of cricket as a too-civilized spectator sport for snooty Commonwealth exotics.

However, not all cricket players dress like “poor relations of Gatsby,” as Shashi puts it. I’ve seen guys in rasta hats playing cricket in Van Cortlandt Park — part of a long tradition that’s been around since before the Second World War. (Check out this old clipping from Time magazine on Harlem Cricket.)

If Shashi were just any old op-ed contributor at the New York Times, I wouldn’t care. But he’s the (departing) under secretary general of the UN. Perhaps we can hold him to a higher standard? He’s also written a book about India, “the emerging 21st century power.”

Shashi concedes that cricket isn’t as decorous or English as Americans imagine it to be. That’s putting it mildly. In 1999, fans at Kensington Oval (in Barbados) behaved so badly that plans for THIS year’s World Cup were greatly endangered. As were the lives of Aussie players who had bottles thrown at them, during a one-day match between Australia and the Windies. I witnessed this horrifying violence from a safe distance while visiting my family in Port of Spain. The Prime Minister of Barbados had to publicly apologize for (some of) his people’s “ragamuffin” behavior and warnings were issued by the West Indies Cricket Board regarding the 2007 World Cup.

Of course, it’s heartwarming to know this has been resolved, and I’m glad Shashi didn’t dwell on the problem of fan violence. But still, there is something in his approach to cricket — and to cultural difference — that I do not like.

What bothers me about Shashi’s column isn’t the cheap shots he takes at American baseball fans, or at “America” — whatever that is. While he points out that the global audience for cricket is immense, he fails to convey the reach of cricket. He prefers to perpetuate the idea that cricket is foreign, unknown and alien to America. Well, it’s not. In this American city, the game is part of our cultural history — and our living culture, too. Granted, it may be an aspect of American life that is hidden or ignored. But isn’t this the kind of nuance we might expect Shashi Tharoor to catch? This isn’t just hair-splitting. Unwittingly, he also perpetuates the obnoxious notion that the people who play and watch cricket are not truly part of America.

Of course, we are talking about a lot of non-white cricket fans living and working in America, some as citizens, some as migrants, at a time when xenophobia is on the rise — who don’t necessarily have Shashi’s social connections. And cricket-playing countries aren’t all emerging powers. Some of these countries are small, powerless and, like most cricket fans, trying to get by.

Instead of helping people rethink who really comprises “America,” he wastes his influence on snide remarks that don’t so much commemorate the World Cup as play into the hands of American racists. Not to mention UN-bashers!

Nice going, Shashi.

On Wednesday, March 14th, I’ll join my neighbor Molly Jong-Fast at Solas in Manhattan’s East Village, where we plan to celebrate our special relationship with the Upper East Side.

There is more to New York than Soho House or the meat-packing district. And sometimes, less is more. It just so happens that this part of town is ideal for writing because there are so few distractions. Thrill-seekers and tourists rarely come to this neck of the ‘hoods. We have no hot restaurants, hip nightclubs or name clothing shops.

I’m not talking about that gleaming stretch of Madison Avenue around the corner from the Met that conks out after 9 o’clock on a Wednesday night. I mean the East 70s and East 80s, the “wrong” side of Lexington Avenue, as you head toward York Avenue and the East River. Here, the streetscape becomes endearingly uncool, almost drab, and you need an eye for detail to appreciate its charms.

Instead of Chanel — go to Soho for that — we have a few GAPs. And a giant branch of Staples (the office supply chain) at Third and 86th. Or, to some people’s dismay, a Duane Reade on every block. Despite this dearth of hipness, there are some very good restaurants, but how many self-respecting New Yorkers will come up here to eat?

Years ago, this was known as the Girl Ghetto because the apartments, streets and bars were filled with young single women with office jobs. And you will see, here and there, ladies of that era who never left the Girl Ghetto.

In the 1990s, I palled around with a girl who became a real estate broker and was given to opinionated outbursts. One day, in a fit of pique, she told me: “All these young couples are ruining the city because they’re trying to outdo each other. It’s a competition to find the funkiest-coolest-most-offbeat place. They drive the prices up, so nobody else can afford to live downtown. And what do you think, as soon as they have their first child, they move to …the Upper East Side!”

She found the unambiguous exclusivity of the Park Avenue market less hypocritical. Naturally, she lived on the Upper East Side, on the “wrong side of Third.” (The right side of Third Avenue gets you closer to Lexington, away from Second Avenue.)

The Upper East Side is easy to stereotype, sometimes accurately, sometimes not.

“Why do you live THERE,” people ask, implying that we’re not rich enough to live in Tribeca or left-wing enough for Brooklyn. It only enhances our outsider cred to hear this from friends in overhyped Chelsea (the West 20s) or Park Slope: to be marginalized for living here is both satisfying and perverse.

“This doesn’t feel like New York,” an Upper West Sider told me the other day. (“OH? It’s the only part of Manhattan that still DOES,” I replied.) But East Siders have thick skins. We don’t fear the insults — I think we’re more frightened of change. When I cross Central Park, the Upper West Side feels like a churning engine of expansion. New chain stores, three times larger than the ones on the East Side. Strangely adaptable residents who seem to embrace every new thing that happens to their avenues. Traumatic.

An ex-pat Brit incurred my wrath one night after we’d both had too many glasses of pinot noir: “But the Upper East Side has no indigenous population,” he said. “There’s no ethnic group associated with the area, it’s all just white middle class transplants. It’s a neighborhood with no history.”

“What?” I protested. “We have multimillion dollar condos right next to rent-controlled tenements. We’ve got the super-rich and the working class living cheek by jowl. You can still get real sauerkraut and bacon biscuits on Second Avenue. The Czech, German and Hungarian shops were here for decades. That’s what a city’s all about!”

The Upper East Side is also a place where schools, families and call girls have coexisted, very carefully, for quite some time.

As Molly and I both know.

The difference between her Upper East Side and mine is like the difference between fate and will. Such differences can be deceptive.

Molly writes about growing up, going to school, coming of age, in the part of town where my fictional characters turn tricks. My Upper East Side is populated with outsiders who came here to establish themselves. Hers is an East Side where she had to find her way as an “insider.” Molly’s humor is also about surviving your fate. Before we met, I laughed through both of her books — Normal Girl (a novel about drug addiction) and Girl [Maladjusted], a memoir of semi-celebrity childhood (as Erica Jong’s daughter).

“Sleeping with the Upper East Side” is more than a two-girl show. It’s the maiden reading for Dirty Springtime, a new series curated by Anne Ishii under the auspice of Grace.

If you’re in New York this Wednesday March 14, come to: Solas (upstairs lounge), 232 East 9th Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, New York, NY 10003. 7:00 – 9:00 pm.

To find out what Dirty Springtime (and Grace Reading Series) will offer next, write to anne.ishii@gmail.com

Despite this, Sarler joins the “anti-raunch” chorus. She’s especially ticked off by a question Cosmo posed to readers: is flashing your breasts on a night out empowering?

A transatlanic anti-raunch movement is growing, but today’s finger-wagging scolds are different from the militants who opposed porn in the 1980s. They don’t necessarily hate men or view women as blameless victims: Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, is troubled by the fact that young women are themselves fueling the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon. They’re more mainstream: The jacket of Pamela Paul’s Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families features an American-flag thong panty, and Pamela seems just blonde enough to carry off the look in private. (Dark-haired Ariel might be too earnest for stars-and-stripes underwear but she has her own appeal.) I doubt that either of these camera-ready authors could end up like Andrea Dworkin, who, at the height of her fame, looked as eccentric and tormented as her message. Today’s anti-porn headliners tend to be pretty and presentable. They may be wrong about a few things but they aren’t lunatics — or even wild-eyed visionaries like Dworkin. Nor are they radical thinkers, like Catharine MacKinnon whose outlandish legal theories broke new ground. They are packaged not as hardline feminists, but as voices of sanity in a hyped up, hypersexual wilderness.

But you can’t blame Ariel and company for trying to make sense of this new reality. When MacKinnon and Dworkin hatched their theories, the college students who flash, masturbate and French kiss each other in Girls Gone Wild videos weren’t even born yet. Strippercise wasn’t being hawked by the Washington Post or BBC as the latest way to tone your abs. Back then, MacKinnon, Dworkin and their followers were almost as marginal as the sex industry.

As a former sex worker, I have some questions about “raunch culture” in general and about cardio-striptease in particular. Jenna Jameson, who once worked as a stripper, made it clear in her memoir that exotic dancing is extremely hard on the body — it’s a job, and hardly the ideal path to fitness. In How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Chapter 9 is devoted to shin splints, degenerative muscle tissue and other occupational injuries. The dancers I know are doing Pilates, yoga, kick-boxing and weights to stay fit — not “strippercise.” Some take self-defense classes to protect themselves on the job. The same is true of hookers. Sex industry workers who can afford to do so invest considerable time and money in physical therapy, relaxation treatments and health care because our bodies are, quite literally, our business.

But not all sex workers can afford such antidotes, and sometimes I think women outside the sex trade are being sold a bill of goods about how “empowering” or fun sex work is. While it can be fun, there are dues to be paid, and sexual power extracts a price.

That’s why I never recommend prostitution as a career to anyone, even the most enthusiastic would-be call girls. And it’s why I question the wisdom of appearing in a commercial video, naked and masturbating, in exchange for… a tank top. If someone is making money off your body, you should too. If it would make you feel a bit sleazy to sell your own sex videos or to get paid for that masturbation routine, then perhaps you shouldn’t take your shirt off for the camera. Are you doing it just because you’re drunk? Like Ariel, I can believe that appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video leaves some participants feeling a bit, well, hungover the next day.

There’s nobody more prudish than a former prostitute. When I see the girls I once worked with, we trade quips about how white our cotton undies are. Few of us will watch porn with our boyfriends or husbands. Been there, done that — with our clients — and porn looks too much like work to us. We actually think it’s unromantic for a man to ogle other women — that’s something customers do.

And yet I’m not ready to cast my lot with anti-raunch campaigners. While I’ve arrived at my brand of prudishness honestly, I’m not convinced they have. And, as one who still identifies with the sex industry, I don’t trust them.

In America, for example, the anti-raunch consensus seems to be that society is going to hell in a handbasket — and college girls are getting rowdier — because sex workers aren’t cowering in their shame-filled closets. Recalling that Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown because Penthouse photos had resurfaced, Ariel appears to be nostalgic for the good old days when “being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from.” Now, to her dismay, being in porn is “itself the comeback.” Though she urges her readers to remember that sex workers are, indeed, working, you get the eerie sense that we’re like black people moving into a previously white neighborhood. Perhaps, since she’s deploring our cultural influence on hitherto “nice” girls, a better analogy would be white fans aping black musicians, a trend that’s been around since jazz was invented.

One supporter of Ariel’s alarmist thesis is Jennifer Egan, a New York novelist who looks askance at mainstream books about sex work and, like Ariel, assumes that commercial sex is in league with raunch culture. It’s more complicated than that, for the sex industry is no monolith. Many prostitutes view themselves as traditional beings clinging to a subtler, more feminine, aesthetic than we now see in porn, at lap-dancing clubs — or at hen parties.

Romantic Cinderella fantasies are still alluring to us, but these tend to bubble below the surface, in the private sphere of the prostitute’s mind. A deeply independent streak might render those fantasies moot in the cold light of day but still… prostitution can be a lot less raunchy and brutal than some of the mainstream dating rituals I’ve witnessed. As a former hooker, I’m shocked and puzzled by what young single males get away with — not with sex workers but with civilians. The old-world pre-feminist concept of the gentleman is alive and well in the world of post-feminist prostitution, where respectful admiration is still valued.

From a distance, the sex industry appears larger than life. Close up, you will see that it’s not just a parade of bigger ‘n’ better plastic breasts. Or cosmetically altered sex organs. In the most traditional areas of the sex trade, where people don’t just gawk and stare, there’s room for civilized interaction.

The problem Ariel describes is real: Women outside the industry don’t have much contact with the intimate side of commercial sex. So, they can be conned into embracing the most visible hype — the carnival of the lap dance club, the gymnastics of porn, the superficial sleaziness of “raunch culture.” Prostitution’s a different kind of zone where off-the-record intimacy is uniquely its own thing and quite varied: illicit, awkward, friendly, disturbing, joyful, tense, kind, or even angry and resentful. It’s a very mixed bag of emotions. Men who aren’t in the industry can easily sample these intimate, humanizing secrets. Most men who visit prostitutes are probably aware that internet porn, phone sex and lap-dancing contain a cartoon component. But they don’t tend to discuss their findings with the civilian women in their lives. It’s just not done.

And yet, women in large numbers find aspects of the sex trade rather alluring. The result is, you guessed it, recreational pole-dancing as a form of empowerment.

Or, perhaps, flashing your breasts on a Saturday night. Whether you find it empowering or appalling, this is a trend worth discussing. It tells us much about our cultural mood and reflects some new thinking about the sex industry in relation to society.

In other words, Cosmo has found a way to treat our body parts not as “rude bits” but as, well, talking points.

When I asked a handful of friends to reveal “the most important thing you learned in 2006,” I was sure my little list would be home by Christmas — well, at the very least, a cakewalk.

Be careful what you wish for.

Eventually, I received answers from London, New York, Bahrain, Goa, Trinidad, Laos, Canada, Bangkok, Brittany, Palm Beach and Provence. Many came from friends who write, publish or sell books. A few are from the sex industry. One intransigent correspondent called this a project for those with “too much time on their hands.” (Yet he didn’t shirk from our email exchange about the true meaning of “neo-virginity.”) Another insists he learned nothing at all in ’06, which worries me a bit.

Lesson #3 struck me as controversial, but #19 is, apparently, moreso. Its author — a well-known blogger herself — insists on ironclad anonymity.

In random order, here’s what my friends have learned in 2006.

1. The magazine on a TT pistol can drop out if you’re not careful using a two-handed grip.

2. If you’re flying Air France, take Delta miles. (Yes, Air France has a mileage plan, but the website is like a castle with a virtual moat around it, and you’re on the wrong side of the moat.)

3. CASH: Have it, so young guys can suck your toes (and you don’t have to suck old cocks.)

4. Plan for better times, even when things aren’t going as well as you’d like.

5. Greed outlasts even lust: a very important and valuable lesson.

6. “Rubble don’t cause trouble.” I was shocked when I heard the whole neo-con war machine philosophy summed up, but that’s how I’ll remember 2006.

7. I’ve discovered that my house is well-oriented for making solar electricity — the roof faces south — so I’m having photovoltaic cells installed. Our planet is very much in danger.

8. Thieves are everywhere, and Nature is one to watch out for. My swimsuit was stolen on a beach in Rio while I was wearing it. This was no violent altercation. The sea washed over me and took away my sunglasses and bikini bottom. The elastic of my beautiful Pucci-esque print suit couldn’t compete with the larcenous surf.

9. You can be in love with more than one person, and it always feels like you’re learning it for the first time.

10. My mom and her friends actually had colourful lives. Before I was born, and while I was growing up.

11. In 2006, I experienced firsthand some of the worst inequities in our criminal justice system.

12. It is amazing how many people can walk upright without a spine.

13. I am the elephant in the room. In the West, I’m considered petite but now I live in a teak house near the Mekong. Every time the room wobbles, I’m reminded of the local expression for a woman with a heavy tread: “like an elephant in a teak house.”

14. True friends will surprise you with their generosity, even when you are least focused on asking for their help.

15. If small is beautiful, Lycra is a necessity.

16. Never pray for justice, because you might get some. If Margaret Atwood really said that, she was onto something.

17. The travel section of a bookstore is the only one customers specifically ask for by name. If you take the travel section away from the ground floor entrance, you will fuel their psychological need to be carried by piggyback toward the tool they desperately need — to guide them through (and to) unfamiliar climes.

18. I often let frequency of contact, or the time I’ve known someone, determine who is a close friend, but that isn’t enough. I learned that I can greatly improve certain friendships, while many I had considered “close” didn’t really make the cut.

19. Bloggers are usually dull, office-dwelling suits, no matter how scandalously their blogs are titled.

20. Writing a book takes much longer than writing a book’s worth of short copy.

A Martian might be forgiven for interpreting our current obsession with full body veils as a symptom of collective “thong fatigue.” But seriously, why is modesty pathologized and why is it treated with such condescending suspicion?

It’s unlikely that veils will be outlawed in the UK, but the concept of a ban hangs over our minds like an ominous, invisible curtain. (At one Egyptian university, the niqab-clad are forbidden from using campus dorms. In Turkey, the hijab is banned in schools and many workplaces.)

Whether your clothing is designed to reveal or obfuscate, you make a statement about fitting in or standing out, and sometimes it’s beyond your control. In the UK, right now, you’re more likely to stand out if you’re too covered up. When Zaiba Malik donned a niqab for a day, she encountered the crudeness of strangers — everything from hostile stares to bizarre requests from American tourists.

Mainstream, as opposed to radical, modesty is expressed in more subtle ways — wide-legged trousers, big sunglasses, and a turtle neck are my favorite portable hide-outs —- and mainstream modesty succeeds most when it appears to reveal a bit.

A woman wearing a pantsuit because she feels shy about showing her legs might not register as modest if her pants fit well (showing just enough shape but not too much.) The extent of her modesty remains her own secret. To “always leave them wanting more” is a safe way to express modesty. Being “in your face” about modesty is seen, increasingly, as a daring move — “as outrageous as wearing a bathing suit to the office,” according to Salama Ahmed Salama, a columnist at Al-Ahram.

Blatant modesty may be as distressing to some as blatant nudity is to others. We’re no longer accustomed to such “frank coverage.” Full frontal modesty strikes us as willful and perverse, a contradiction. Frankness, after all, is the province of exhibitionists; modesty, infringing on their terrain, seems to forget her place.

When veils are in the news — head scarves banned in French schools; Jack Straw carrying on; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown agreeing with him for once — I have mixed feelings.

My empathy for the voluntarily veiled comes from a surprising place, for the urge to cover up is intimately connected to my public identity as an “out” sex worker. Discussing prostitution on TV, in bookstores, at conferences, with people I’ve never met before, is sometimes a challenge. When my career pushed me into public view, I found myself drawn to longer sleeves, ladylike pants and other protective strategies. I love the work I do and thrive on public conversation but sometimes, contemplating a public appearance, I can see the appeal of enclosing myself in a body veil.

The history of covering up is complex, taking us all over the globe. In 19th-century Japan, wealthy merchants were still prevented by the ruling class from wearing padded silk, a prohibition in place for at least 200 years. But merchants weren’t so easily controlled, and a typical ploy was to wear a fabulous silk lining, hidden inside a sober wool kimono. In Paris, during the early 20th century, Colette was photographed in a man’s suit, complete with waistcoat and cravat. When we admire this iconic portrait today, it’s hard to believe that women were legally forbidden to wear men’s clothing in public. Colette’s circle of bohemian lesbians “would never venture into the street,” she wrote, “without donning a large plain cloak, like that of a mother superior, to conceal their masculine jackets” — and elude the police.

Is covering up a form of obedience or defiance? In some cases, it’s a combination of both. But it could also be a prerogative of privilege. In Assyrian law, the veiling of head and face was strictly for aristocratic ladies. According to Ethel King, “slaves and rustics… flaunting themselves in an invisibility to which they had no right” were courting punishment. At one time, French prostitutes were prohibited from wearing veils, while “respectable” women were encouraged to publicly remove the veil of any harlot violating the law.

So the forbidden veil isn’t such a modern concept after all. Nor is it inherently benign.

Policing what people wear seems to be one of the hardest habits for humanity to kick. A few years ago, I met the historian Martin Duberman, who told me about New York nightlife in the early 1960s: “You made sure to wear at least three pieces of clothing appropriate to your gender, otherwise you were subject to police harassment.” New York City cops used this as a pretext to raid and close down gay bars “all the time,” said Duberman.

Perhaps dress codes aren’t really about what you wear but who you are. In Paris, waistcoat-and-trousers were unacceptable garb — for a woman. In Europe, it’s uncontroversial to wear a headscarf if you look like a middle-aged Sloane Ranger, while a Muslim schoolgirl in a head-covering becomes a political symbol. A doctor who covers his face for medical reasons is just doing his job but a woman covering hers for religious reasons is — what exactly? Committing a thought crime? Because I will never be mistaken for a teenage boy, shop managers do not flinch when I enter in my hoodie. When it comes to dress codes, identity is the elephant in the room. It’s about who should wear what, under what circumstances — and who decides.

Traditional sumptuary laws were elitist, defined by the people on top — like those Japanese nobles, telling businessmen what fabrics they could wear. But revolutions that bring down the social order do not guarantee freedom of dress: the blue uniform worn throughout Communist China for too many years is but one example. The French Revolution offers another.

If you’re ready to be provoked, try Caroline Weber’s “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.” You’ll find that it’s much more than a political history of one woman’s wardrobe. One chapter, Revolutionary Redress, brings to life battles fought during 1789 — over colour. Savvy aristocrats, courting the revolutionaries, had their dresses trimmed in blue and red, colours of “the Nation.” (A new shade of red, sang de Foulon or “Foulon’s blood”, named after a murdered cabinet minister, became rather popular.) To be dressed in white, without red or blue, was politically dangerous — signalling ancien régime loyalties. Wearing black with yellow was a surefire way to push people’s buttons, because it meant you were supporting a foreign power. According to Thomas Carlyle, one man was almost hanged from a lamp post because he “refused to cast off his black cockade.” (The colour black was doubly suspect all by itself, for being one of the Hapsburg colours, and for being associated with royalty.)

If you think today’s Muslim veil is politicized, consider the fall bonnets of 1789: blue spades, golden swords, crosses, cockades, fake roses… plastered on muslin caps and gauze helmets to show that “all of us are now mere citizens,” in the words of one French fashion editor.

In our current climate, “Queen of Fashion” is required reading. It will make you look at the fashion controversies of 2006 in a new way.