"What's wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally. . . "

"Some people," as in, men are weak! Men are stupid! Look, men, look at the shiny things! It's so easy to distract men!

It kills me how eager the men who subscribe to the ideals of women's purity are to insult themselves.

That's ridiculous. Do they ban billboards and bumper stickers as well?

Anyone else reminded of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer crashed a car and tried to sue a woman who was walking down the street in a bra for distracting him?

I was just going to mention the Seinfeld episode, Louise.

I think we can all agree that if it was used as a wacky premise for a storyline centering on a classic "hipster doofus" of situation comedy, it probably shouldn't be codified into law.

Next up on the Ugandan National Assembly's legislative queue: A national security order instructing all citizens to be on the lookout for Manbearpig.

To be fair, I've heard that in many places in East Africa, the thighs are considered psudo-sexual, like breasts in America. While equating indecent exposure with embezzlement is still absurd, this could be similar to American laws prohibiting women from going topless. Let's not be too quick to call the kettle black.

Ew, now I'm flashing back to my driver's ed class. My sexist asshole teacher, among his many awful deeds, once actually did a lecture about how to ogle a woman walking down the street while driving without having an accident. I can still picture him looking forward, to the side, forward, to the side... jerkoff.

Reminds me of the reason used for the banning of any type of shirt that didn't cover the shoulders or mid-drift (this was during the Britney spears craze) at my school. I had a female and in most other respects cool creative writing teacher tell me that my shirt was inappropriate and I needed to wear something over it because it cut in to show the shoulders despite the fact that it was knit of rather heavy material, not tight, and went the whole way up around my neck. I also noticed as a full C cup that the girls with smaller chests didn't usually have staff ask them to cover up or get chewed out, it was only the more well endowed girls. The reason used by the staff was because it would "distract the boys." I knew that was a bullshit excuse then. Most straight teenage guys are going to check out teenage girls regardless of what they are wearing and none of them were so mesmerized that they went into a trance and sat there drooling with glazed eyes and deaf ears for the hour and a half of class. I think most of it boiled down to a discomfort with female bodies and sexuality despite the hard facts that we had an entire alternative gym full of pregnant girls. (Our school actually had a rule about bra straps showing. For some reason I am supposed to be ashamed if they are. Of course, I am also supposed to be ashamed if I don't wear one.) I was back in that school recently by the way, and the nurse's office was full of abstinence only pamphlets and posters designed to frighten and not one about practicing safe sex.

To be fair, I've heard that in many places in East Africa, the thighs are considered psudo-sexual, like breasts in America. While equating indecent exposure with embezzlement is still absurd, this could be similar to American laws prohibiting women from going topless. Let's not be too quick to call the kettle black.

This is not a simple matter of cultural essentialism. Once the state can decide what is appropriate for one gender to wear it will lead to other areas of control. There is a reason that women were Burkas in Saudi Arabia. Some women would choose to wear them anyway but the lack of choice is to restrict the movement and freedom of women. If this law were passed how long would it be before a woman is blamed for her rape because of what she was wearing at the time of the assault?

The interesting part to me was the photo displayed with the article - that skirt is almost knee-length (not a lot of thigh showing); so part of the question is what is considered a mini-skirt there? Where would they draw the line between appropriate and indecent?

I think it all boils down to ethno-differences. In African cultures, looking at a woman's breasts is not taboo. In fact, women breast feed in public (restaurants, classrooms etc) without shame. That is culture for you!!

I think it all boils down to ethno-differences. In African cultures, looking at a woman's breasts is not taboo. In fact, women breast feed in public (restaurants, classrooms etc) without shame. That is culture for you!!

I find it funny that while *clearly* men are the more easily distracted drivers, women are always caricatured as bad drivers in America. Well, which is it? Or maybe they think women are distracted by, say, show stores, the way men are by breasts or legs.

Danyell, the notion that women are worse drivers than men has been empirically debunked. The car insurance companies charge teenage boys up to 6 times as much for car insurance as they charge teenage girls, and the rates do not equalize until men and women are about 30 or so. A Johns Hopkins study in 1998 found that when drivers start out as teens, girls outperform boys to a huge extent, and then as people age, men get more experience and become better drivers. But men drive 74% more than women over a lifetime, yet over a lifetime have 15% fewer fender-bender accidents, and are 3 times more likely to be in a fatal accident... indicating that men need 75% more driving experience than women to get 15% better, and with 75% more time on the road get into 300% more fatal crashes... which indicates that men start out as bad drivers, need huge amounts of practice to get as good at avoiding fender benders as women, and are always more likely to die or kill someone else.

This is not explained by truck drivers. While 90% of all truck drivers are male, only 3% of the vehicles on the road are trucks. So the number of men who are truck drivers is small in comparison to the number of men who drive. Probably truck drivers get in a disproportionate amount of fatal accidents given their lack of sleep and the size of their rigs, but 300%, when they are 3% of the driving population? Don't think so. (And if it were so, it would imply that trucking regulations need revision ASAP!)

Seriously, any young man who thinks women are worse drivers should have to explain why his car insurance is so much higher than his girlfriend's, or his sister's.

Personally, I feel that if men look at women in miniskirts while driving, men should be restricted to night driving unless they can complete a defensive driving course on how not to look at women in miniskirts. I am *so* tired of male weaknesses being something women are expected to modify *their* behavior to manage. If supposedly women got into accidents because they stare at men, the Ugandans would probably argue that women should be banned from driving.

In a weird, sort of hilarious way, this reminds me of the ban my high school had against spaghetti-strap tops for girls. School administrators rationalized this ban by claiming that "showing too much skin" would cause a feasible distraction from students who should be concentrating on school work. (School work like watching A League of Their Own to teach us about World War II, but I digress...).

Now, it's worth mentioning that our school was also under extreme construction at the time, so the air was constantly permeated by the raucous noise of drilling and jackhammering.

So, which would be more distracting to students: a couple construction dudes pounding metal outside of the classroom window, or a couple of girls in less-than finger's width tops across the room? You do the math.