Hey feminists, if Melania doesn't mind her nude pictures, why do you?

Are some feminists today becoming the men they wanted to marry, to quote fiery feminist Gloria Steinem?

There’s been an uproar over the publishing and posting of glossy, nude pictures of First Lady-in-waiting Melania Trump, which have been denounced by feminists as downright sexist, misogynist and slut-shaming.

For months, a section of feminist writers in the US media have been decrying the “slut-shaming of Melania”, as newspapers and television screens published her nude pictures. The pictures, they argued, were used to attack her husband, now president-elect Donald Trump, during the campaign by his adversaries.

Nobody says the leery headlines and cocky captions are not unprincipled and wrong, but to dismiss the very idea of the seductive pictures as anti-women and intolerant is ridiculous.

The past few days have seen people here too being heckled and hounded off social media charts for posting Melania’s captivating, au naturel pictures, and being called out as chauvinistic and patriarchal.

Writers like William Darlymple and columnist Tunku Vardarajan, among others, were berated for being faux liberals and bigots, forcing them to either hastily remove the pictures, or simply move on.

Perhaps the chastity feminists should ponder over this:

What was so offensive about Melania’s pictures taken over 20 years ago? The ones posted were of Melania when she was a successful professional, working model, that too on the cover of GQ, a regular men’s style magazine, that’s available on any newsstand.

She posed, she seduced, and gave her come-hither look from the cover of the magazine apart from some coy, nude pictures inside.

Was Melania forced to do the nude photo-shoot? Was she underage, trafficked, held captive by an exploitative agent? NO! In fact, Melania obtained a green card in the US in 2001, a year after the GQ photo-shoot, applying as a model of “extraordinary ability” for she was already scorching the fashion ramps from Milan to Paris for a decade.

But guess what, one chastity feminist columnist went on to say that Melania was fair game in the attack on her husband as she was after all from a former communist nation, so there must be salacious second-guessing by men that she could have been an escort, or a drug dealer, or a gold-digger in search of a sugar daddy, or all three!

So convinced are chastity feminists that men are sexist pigs, they are now even second guessing what must be going on in their bigoted minds, making stereotypical cultural conclusions about poor Melania, the Slovenian from Hell.

The problem with chastity feminists is that they are still stuck in a hole where they don’t see that women have gone beyond traditional gender expectations.

It’s the irony of ironies that it's these moral crusaders who insist Melania must be ashamed of her past, to be shamed today, even if she did her shoot then as a successful fashion model. Worse, they believe that women who pose nude or sell their bodies must be all victims, waiting to be rescued from the clutches of their patriarchal, sexist exploiters.

For the prudists, they must be saved, cleansed and rehabilitated for a happily-ever-after traditional, cottony world. They refuse to see that many women own their bodies, and believe they are within their rights to decide what they want to do with it – market it, sell it, own it. There’s no humiliation, shame or disgrace here.

And what’s wrong in gazing at Melania’s picture and passing it on to social media friends? The argument is that the pictures were brought out to embarrass her husband, that she is collateral damage as the world sees a woman only as an extension of her husband. Really?

Melania may have posed for the pictures in the men's rag with nothing on, but she had her head on her shoulders; and there was no doubt she was posing to seduce the lads. But hey, going by the chastity diktat, pardon the pun, the boys are not supposed to flip over her. Worse, there cannot be any curiosity either about the past of the future First Lady. If you do, you are branded as sexist and vile.

Well, unfortunately for the chastity feminists, proclaiming the ownership of your body couldn’t be better now, and is as good as it gets today. 

Also read: Sharing nude photos of Melania to mock Trump's presidency is obnoxious