High up on the wall of my maternal grandparents’ sitting room, hangs a studio photograph probably taken in the 1940s.

In the photo, my grandfather — wearing trousers, a jacket and shoes — stands behind his wife who sits in a chair. She is in an ankle-length dress, her hair covered in a head kerchief and wearing no shoes. As a small boy, I was always intrigued by the footwear discrepancy.

Once, on an impulse, I asked her about it. She chuckled, tickled by the ridiculousness of what she was going to say. “Wee, back then it was considered indecent for a woman to wear shoes,” she told me. “They would have called me a prostitute.” Even as a boy, I was staggered by the sheer stupidity, irrationality and hypocrisy of patriarchal reasoning.

I was reminded of this nature of patriarchy last week when the media reported that a group of men had stripped a woman naked in the street because she was “indecently” dressed. This was not an isolated case.

She was the latest victim in a series of incidents in which men in the streets constitute themselves into morality panels that decide what is decent dressing and what is not. Just as in the case of my grandmother’s missing shoes, the reasoning behind these acts is a study in stupidity, illogic and hypocrisy.

First, consider the assumption that there is some kind of self-evident moral standard that is absolute and eternal. But determination of what is moral or immoral is whimsical and changes according to a myriad of factors.

What was thought of as immoral dressing years ago may not be thought so now and vice versa. Today, no one of sound mind would strip women of their shoes as might have happened in the 1930s or 40s.

Second, this country has serious moral issues that have nothing to do with women’s hemlines. For instance, we not only cheer people with illegally acquired wealth but we also elect them to parliament.

Further, we proclaim as protectors of our communities those spitting the crudest forms of hate speech. And not so long ago, we were pulling people from matatus and hacking them to death because they belonged to the “wrong” tribe or burning children and people in wheelchairs in a church for the same reason. At night, men sleep around and then abandon the resulting children. During the day, they claim to be morally offended by a miniskirt.

Then there is the argument about loss of African cultural values. First, our traditional wear was a lot more revealing than anything today’s woman could ever wear. Also, there is the question why this criterion only applies to women’s dress and behaviour.

Now, if we feel that miniskirts so thoroughly offend our national sense of morality, then we should pass a law to ban them, which would still not be a licence for ad hoc panels to strip others naked.

But were such a law passed, Kenya would enter the realm of the truly absurd, with our policemen walking around holding rulers to measure women’s skirts, miniskirts being held up in our law courts to determine their length, and fines being handed out according to the number of centimetres by which the offending miniskirt violated the legal length.

The argument I’m leading to is that the stripping of women has nothing to do with decency or indecency. It is just another form of asserting patriarchal power relations through violence and humiliation. If not arrested, it will lead us down a slippery slope.

For what other modes of dress will be deemed indecent? Low necklines, trousers, form-hugging dresses, shorts? What will stop the moral panels from walking into swimming pools and stripping women wearing swimming costumes or going to our beaches to strip tourists wearing bikinis?

Further, we all must realise that stripping one naked occupies a point on the criminality continuum. The next stage will be violent robbery of women and men, “decently” or “indecently” dressed. We must stop this criminality now.

Tee Ngugi is a political and social commentator based in Nairobi.