Sorry. I honestly intended it as harmless humor but I’m sorry.
Depends on whether you’re filming hardcore or softcore.
Directed to the Reddit comment: Few middle-schoolers are afforded the right to fully control their own actions, and it has nothing to do with respecting them or not.
To the OP: the guidelines of middle-school clothing are more rigid due to peer influence than anything administrators could come up with. The articles of clothing are mass-marketed. The hairstyles are uniform. They think in terms of individuality, but only within the accepted parameters *[I want a tattoo to express my individuality; everyone else is doing it!*] At the last school dance, the girls’ hemlines look identical, and short…and this was in January, so they were all bare-legged and coatless as well in the freezing temperatures. And yet they know enough that the school enforcing a dress code is “stifling expression.”
To dropzone: your story seems to expose both the routine pubescent awkwardness of the age group, and the unwillingness of the rest of the world to deal with the “s” word as it pertains to 12-year-olds, which I think (speaking as the mother of teen girls) illustrates society’s problem pretty well. I was expecting something different: a poster might mention that the local 7th graders are showing a lot of skin lately, and another would come along and say what are you doing checking out 7th graders, ya perv. So, I do not have high hopes for this particular discussion topic, but I’ve been tempted a few times to start one myself.
No high hopes? How can you say that after we had around twenty posts concerning dropzone’s penis?
I think this is far more important than controlling what girls wear in class. Unfortunately, some people believe that controlling what girls wear will also control how boys will behave. The author of the article in the OP makes this argument as well. I don’t think this is the case at all. There might be good social reasons for controlling what girls wear, but preventing sexual harassment is not a good reason.
But lets hypothetically say that we do control sexual harassment in teenage boys, and now teenage girls can wear what they want without being harassed. Do we still control what they wear to school? I would still say yes because what you wear has real world consequences, and someone should be teaching kids about those consequences.
Going back to the OP, my reaction was, well, we do not HAVE to make it about being a matter of “sexual expression”; and there’s no problem with rules fairly applied.
We DO control and restrict the range of action and expression of minors. Because they’re minors. Not just “sexual expression”. Until they pass a certain age we don’t let them drive, vote, drop out of school (and in school their lockers are fair game for searching) and yeah, going into the other subject, we even have such thing as an “age of consent”. Online communities have minimum age requirements to post. Society and the law do NOT recognize to minors the “unfettered right to control their own actions”.
Why should it not be a matter of a dress code just because the school environment should have a certain degree of order and structure, period, and that includes making rules against wearing clothing with rude slogans or gang symbols, requiring shoes to be worn, and also BOTH boys not wearing their pants so low that you can tell what underwear they have on or if they have any AND girls not wearing their hemlines so high that the same happens; as well as a code of conduct that includes “No damaging property”, “No bullying”, “No smoking behind the bleachers” **and **also “Nobody will make lewd remarks or advances to classmates of whatever gender nor make disparaging remarks or spread rumors about anyone else’s gender, orientation or reputation”.
Yes, in the practice, it DOES happen that the sociocultural double standard results in that the criteria for enforcing dress and conduct codes in school and workplace tends to dumb down to “Girls: don’t be or look too slutty; Boys: don’t be or look too thuggish”. That’s a problem that that the people in charge have to work on solving but it does not void the very notion of teaching the young ones that there’s a certain deportment expected when interacting with society.
That would be an interesting thread, though I now know not to participate :eek:, even though I have three daughters who were once teens.
Oh, come on! It wasn’t NEAR that many! (counting) Sweet Zombie Jesus! I am heartily sorry I brought it up and apologize to everybody. 
Going from school appropriate (don’t wear a Spencer Gifts “Fuck You” shirt) to work appropriate (shirt & tie) is a huge leap, but one even the socially clueless (e.g., me) manage without too much problem, with or without school dress codes.