Fundamental human rights

-The Atlantic had a piece recently by Talia Minsberg about Israel's new skinny-model ban. The comments go in precisely the two directions we'd expect: fury that Israel's being mentioned in a context other than chastising it for being the most evil country ever to exist, and complaints from those with BMIs under 18.5 about how unfair it is that they could not, in theory, work as models in Israel. Never mind that they're probably too short, old, plain, and not in Israel for this to apply to them, and never mind that without government or industry intervention, thus far high-fashion modeling has, for a while now, effectively only been available to those with BMIs under 18.5. (Frame of reference: "A five-foot, seven-inch individual, for example, must weigh at least 118 pounds to work as a model in Israel.") As if there's some kind of fundamental human right to have you or images of yourself held up as beautiful, one that we can ignore when it's an entity other than the state doing the enforcing.

-The great debate over straight women's presence in gay bars has resurfaced once more, now that an L.A. bar - one that evidently features chiseled go-go dancers - banned "straight bachelorette parties." (Presumably lesbian bachelorette parties wouldn't be held there in the first place.) The bar is doing so because - and this is reasonable enough - they think it's offensive to use gay bars as a place to celebrate marriage, when gay marriage is not yet legal across the nation. Reasonable, but quite possibly a noble-sounding pretext to exclude women from the establishment. (Does every straight bachelorette party identify itself as such?)

And if it is a pretext, so what? Do groups of women have a fundamental right to go to gay bars? Maybe, maybe not. Ethically I suppose it would depend on what kind of gay bar it was. No idea where the law stands, not terribly curious, not my concern here. There are plenty of great reasons a gay bar could give to keep some/all women out. Most notably, the purpose of the bar is for men to be among men, which would still be true even if gays could marry across the galaxy.

What is my concern - and I said this the last time this came up - is that critics of women-in-gay-bars keep acting like the only reasons straight women would go to a gay bar are a) to avoid unwanted sexual advances from men, and b) because they think of gay men as fashion accessories or zoo animals. It would seem that the more obvious reason for their interest in these locales is that they're chock-full of individuals of these women's preferred sex. This ogling is not - as Gawker's Louis Peitzman claims - about gay men as novelty items. Some women will enjoy seeing men kissing men, just as the equivalent is true. But this is fundamentally about it being appealing to a heterosexual woman to be in a great big horde of men. But a straight woman - all the more so a self-proclaimed "bachelorette" - surely cares only about handbags, shoes, and avoiding dirty, hair-mussing sex.