E.G.

Warning: No point of any significance is made in the following post.

Bill Maher has a "beekeeper suits line."  Here’s an example:

If he [George Bush] had gone to Viet Nam instead of getting out of doing so, he might have learned what young men do learn about people who aren’t like us when they’re ‘in country,’ which is that they’re REALLY NOT LIKE US! That as crazy as it is – and I agree, it is pretty crazy – lots of Muslims care more about not doing anything that may offend Allah (and Allah, like our Biblical God, is a jealous one, and does seem touchy about freedom in many of its forms) and keeping their sister in a beekeeper suit than they do about elections and flagburning and performance art.

Bill Maher likes the beekeeper suits line; I’ve heard him use it more than once in different contexts.  The beekeeper suits line is funny, but it’s uncouth.  We’ve become accustomed to the idea that clothing choices are culturally relative — that one standard of dress is just as good, and just as arbitrary, as any other — and therefore that it’s chauvinistic to criticize the clothing standards adopted in other cultures.  However, I suppose the view that one clothing standard is as good as any other is itself a typically western contention.

It’s interesting to juxtapose Bill Maher’s line with remarks made in a 1927 public speech, by Mustafa Kemal (a.k.a. Ataturk), the founder of modern Turkey, criticizing Turkish traditional garb (and especially the fez):

This grotesque mixture of styles is neither national nor international…My friends, there is no need to seek and revive the costume of Turan.  A civilized, international dress is worthy and appropriate for our nation, and we will wear it.  Boots or shoes on our feet, trousers on our legs, shirt and tie, jacket and waistcoat — and, of course, to complete these, a cover with a brim on our heads.  I want to make this clear.  This head-covering is called ‘hat.’

In another speech:

I see a man in the crowd in front of me [he said, pointing to a citizen]; he has a fez on his head, a green turban on the fez, a smock on his back, and on top of that a jacket like the one I am wearing.  I can’t see the lower half.  Now what kind of outfit is that?  Would a civilized man put on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up to universal ridicule?

(I’m taking both these quotations from Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (2002) p269).