You wrote : ‘I have chosen not to cover my hair. This places me at odds with the community in which I grew up, which saddens me at times.” So, you made a choice not to cover your hair. There were some repercussions, but still, you had a choice. Maybe not as a youngster, but a person does not have to have religous parents for them to restrict what their child wears.

Here are a few exerpts from an article on Muslim dress codes. THIS is what NOT HAVING A CHOICE looks like.

These exerpts are from an article in The Boston Globe:
In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend’s wedding.

In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.

No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she refused to wear a hijab. “She just wanted to look like everyone else,” one of Aqsa’s friends told the National Post, “and I guess her dad had a problem with that.

There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the victims of “un-Islamic behavior.”

I am a religiously fundamentalist conservative, but my religion is the historical Judaism, and not this newly-invented Haredi caricature of historical Judaism.

As I remark in my blog post at http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/04/orthodox-women-and-body-image.html, I think the key to solving this entire problem is not so much to modify the rules of tzniut (this may very well be necessary, but I do not believe it to be the crux of the issue), but rather, our task is to reeducate men.

As you note, when men overemphasize tzniut (whose purpose, ostensibly, is to teach men that women are more than just bodies, that they are people as well), they defeat the purpose of tzniut, because women become nothing more than bodies to be hidden! An immodestly-dressed woman may appear over-sexual and deceive men into believing women are less than fully human, but overemphasizing tzniut will do precisely the same!

The key, then, is to reeducate men, to teach them how women are to be viewed. We might start with Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits’s truly awe-inspiring article, “A Jewish Sexual Ethics”, in Crisis and Faith (Sanhedrin Press, 1973 if I remember correctly), and reprinted in Essential Essays on Judaism (ed. David Hazony, Jerusalem; Shalem Press, 2002).

We also need to educate our women differently. As Rabbi Yehuda Amital notes, Orthodox Jews of old were not so particular on halacha as the defining nature of Jewishness. Students of Rav Kook would say that it is a post-Temple perversion of Torah to limit Torah to the four cubits of personal individual halacha. Either way, women should be taught that FAR more defines them as Orthodox Jewesses than what they wear. To paraphrase and adapt Rabbi Amital’s words, women may very well be required to dress modestly, but this is amongst other halachic imperatives, and this does not define them as Jewish women, any more than their eating kosher alone defines them as Jews.

See my blog there, http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com/2009/04/orthodox-women-and-body-image.html, for elaboration.

But what no one seems to get is that by making the decisions I’ve made, I have made a choice, like you said MY CHOICE and I do not in any way desire to press that choice unto others but I’m glad that it was mine to make.