Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

France’s burkini ban was an own goal for secularism

I’ve always hated the beach. The water? Great. The sunshine? Terrible. It starts with the hot trek across the sands to find a square of free ground – loaded up with factor 60, several books, a comedy floppy hat, two towels, three bottles of water and the rusty family parasol. Then there’s the bodily anxiety. Find me a woman who doesn’t fret about her body on the beach, and I’ll find you a liar.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post for The Spectator about my own fraught history with my body on the beach. I still don’t understand how it ever became acceptable to wear an itsy bitsy bikini around one’s dad. And even in a one-piece, if I don’t draw attention to my thickening waist, my mother will. For a single beach holiday, I spend a year trawling for swimmable cover-ups and loose T-shirts. If the burkini didn’t come with an Islamic headscarf – and if this week’s series of lawsuits hadn’t made it quite such a loaded statement– I’d be the first out to the shops to stock up.

But last time I wrote about bodies and bikinis, I didn’t do so against the spectre of France’s burkini ban, finally struck down this afternoon by the Conseil d’Etat in Paris (although Nicolas Sarkozy, launching his latest campaign for President, still promises to introduce it). I was critiquing the new excuses for Islamic dress codes, a rising rhetoric that places the veil and the bikini in direct opposition. It’s an old and false dichotomy, an alternative take on the Madonna and the whore. We’ve seen plenty more of it this summer. It plays well not just with grumpy Imams, but picture editors and tabloid hacks.

An image of two Olympic volleyball players flashed around the world last month: the Egyptian in sport-friendly hijab and leggings, the German in skin-tight bikini. 

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