One more reason I am dreading my eleven year old’s soon to be junior high school days.
[“And dressing my baby sister up as some sort of cheap faux-punk whore for your own sick amusement? That’s just low, Nale, even for you!”
There’s a middle ground between dressing like a street walker and wrapping yourself in a burqa and everyone’s line is somewhere different. But for dress code rants and debates in general I tend to find the following ideas humorous, some are on display in the OP:
Implying that showing off your body is feminist.
That such male pleasing behavior is empowerment.
That barely clothed women aren’t distracting to men.
That barely dressed men could be as distracting to women in the same manner.
When you’re arguing that women should be able to dress suggestively you’re basically arguing for free entertainment for men. Why female self expression involves showing more skin more often than not is a stone best left unturned, but hey, no complaints! I don’t know if I should be thanking evolution or Western culture first.
As for the linked article, pretty good. Plenty of fair points. I’d agree that citing non-existent bad male behavior as a reason to punish women is serious BS. But there’s no doubt it was written by a high school girl.
Yeah, some reason. Huehuehue.
I was referring to leggings which leave little to the imagination on either gender.
Also, I will agree that if Dangerosa is correct that the boys at the school are allowed to wear tank tops and leggings but the girls aren’t then yes, that is sexist.
I’ve never heard of any public school that has such a policy, are there any?
But if bikinis were banned for another reason, you might be OK with it?
Showing off your body is human - not feminist or not-feminist. Good looking people tend to be rewarded for being good looking, and so exhibit behaviors to get that reward.
Dressing for yourself is empowerment. Check out a tattoo thread sometime.
Barely clothed women are probably distracting to men - but it really shouldn’t be the problem of the barely clothed women.
And you bet…there was this computer technician at work years ago - the women used to pull their network connection out to get him to crawl under their desk…when he left, the problem tickets for network connectivity dropped by 40%. (I used to do statistical analysis on help desk tickets - how do you explain that one to the boss…“John has such a nice ass that women pull their LAN cables hoping he’ll be assigned the ticket and come crawl under their desk and if we move John onto not visiting desktops and doing just the remote work, we will get fewer calls.” )
Yep. Come up with a reason other than “distracting” or the insipid “inappropriate.” Not sure I’d go for “offensive” either since that opens up putting girls in headscarves in areas with large Muslim populations.
I see a disconnect between the first sentence of your paragraph, and the rest of it and the first linked article, from which I quote:
I think, and if I’m interpreting correctly the writer of this article thinks, that there’s a significant difference between having a dress code for the purpose of reducing distractions and having a dress code for the purpose of reducing sexual harassment.
From my own experience as a teenage boy, I can assure you that the way a girl is dressed can most definitely be a distraction. Not enough of one to make my brain go completely numb; and not enough to make me think a strict dress code is a necessary for an atmosphere conducive to learning, but enough to at least make me sympathetic to the idea that there is educational value in placing limits to how revealingly girls may be dressed at school.
But never would it have occurred to me to say or do anything about it. I never would have thought that how a girl was dressed would have excused any inappropriate behavior on my part.
A business setting or a school setting is the same in this regard. My employer would be more than justified in calling me and saying “you’re being ridiculous and unprofessional and it’s distracting, please change or find a new job”.
A dress code is just sound policy and easier to enforce in a school environment. Maybe that line isn’t exactly where every single student and parent thinks it should be, or most even, but I don’t read teaching slut shaming to our young boys there.
I agree with you that the school administrators in the links you provided handled this matter really poorly by setting the dress code for girls in fear of poor impulse control by boys, apparently, instead of:
I’m a 47 year old straight (primarily) woman - and frankly, some of those 15 year old girls would be distracting to ME in a burlap sack. I can’t imagine what its like for my own fifteen year old son to walk around in that hormone haze. But they are distracting in a burlap sack - its really not what they wear at that age, its who they are. At the risk of sounding like a creepy pedophile…
Or as one of my friends teenage sons put it during a conversation on this “duh, mom, they are girls. If they are cute, it really doesn’t matter what they are WEARING, they are distracting.”
'No, it isn’t. Your employer doesn’t have to employ you. A public school is legally required to provide education.
I’m not a fan of school uniforms - but I’d much rather have school uniforms than these sorts of dress codes. School uniforms can be policed more consistently and the burden falls equally on both genders.
So you want surgery done on teenage boys brains, because, believe me, boobies and butts do have powerful effects on teenage boys’ brains, and brain surgery or chemical castration are about the only things that will prevent that happening.
Also, dress codes are not slut shaming. Indeed, one of their functions is prevent the arising of situations that could lead to slut shaming.
If boys had any tendency to come to school in clothes that prominently displayed the shape of their junk, or with large codpieces, for instance, I an sure a dress code wold quickly be put in place for them.
Simple solution: school uniforms.
Alternatively, dress codes teach kids a valuable lesson: that those in authority can set arbitrary standards using byzantine logic.
No, I want boys to have to be responsible for their own actions and reactions, independent of the behavior of the girls around them. I’ve been assured in conversations with several teenage boys that it is possible to exhibit self control and actually learn, even when an attractive girl in a short skirt sits next to you in chemistry.
Agree with the last sentence. A dress code is always gonna fall more heavily on girls. Maybe that’s abhorrent to you but in the real world that’s just how it is. It’s an issue that can’t escape gender.
My high school’s dress code was. Men were specifically forbidden from wearing “muscle shirts” and the length of men’s shorts was regulated (and the regulation was much longer than that of the women). Men also couldn’t wear anything form fitting that distinctly showed the shape of their genitals.
Well, you can escape it by not having a dress code. Then enforcing respectful behavior rather than presentation. But if you are going to have a dress code, do uniforms rather than trying to walk some line between leggings, jeggings, super tight skinny jeans with spandex, yoga pants, jammie bottoms and plain old narrow cut jeans.
My son is forbidden from wearing hats in school (I’m old school, I don’t think hats should be worn indoors at all), and not “sagging” - but the sagging was never enforced. I wish it was, but as long as the boys kept their t-shirts over their underwear, it was fine. I’m not sure when you went to high school, but currently pants that would show the shape of your genitals are SO out in favor of pants that are falling off. And shorts are basketball shorts down to, or past, the knee. They aren’t supposed to wear tank tops - but that isn’t what teenage boys currently wear anyway around here.
Sagging was forbidden and very strictly enforced. No chains either. We also couldn’t wear outfits primarily composed of a single color unless it was school colors because it promoted “gang behavior.”
Why is all the responsibility to be placed on the shoulders of the boys here? Why is it that girls absolutely have a need to reveal lots and lots of skin at school? I must say I have grown heartily sick of all this feminist entitlement, where a woman’s every whim must be accommodated at whatever cost to any males that are affected by it. Always it is “The males must take responsibility, the females’ freedom to do whatever they wish, including deliberate sexual teasing, is sacrosanct and must not be infringed in any way.”