Ellen Goodman Asks: “Have you noticed how much dress and undress matter? Even to prime ministers? Have you also noticed how many women believe they are making their own choices when they are actually caught in a cultural vise?”

Read her recent column, “Undressing for Halloween,” in which she observes:

Here in America, our Halloween revelers have only the scantiest — and I do mean scantiest — idea of how the market has shaped the options that they regard as their own. Most women are only dimly aware of how we internalize the liposuctioned, breast-implanted, celebrity-shaped images that define the “right” female body. They are even less aware of a culture that defines sexy as something seen rather than felt.

There in London, a young teacher wearing the niqab seems equally unaware that the mask she dons as an act of self-expression aligns her with the mullahs of repression. After all, in today’s Iran the choices may be veil or jail. And in Afghanistan, women are choosing the burka to save their lives. As Deborah Tolman, who wrote “Dilemmas of Desire,” says, the stakes are astonishingly high: “If we can’t cover it, we can kill it. That’s the context.”

Mullahs and marketers are not the same. Nobody is forcing an American woman into the “Sultry Witch” costume. Nobody is forcing a British citizen into a full-face veil. But there is something, well, scary when women claim the “freedom” to fit into such narrow constraints of sexuality.

Via Our Bodies, Our Blog.