Students (And A Parent) Protest School Dress Code Sexism
The eternal dilemma of schoolgirl attire Image by Getty Images
As the weather gets warmer, school dress codes once again get put to the test. Even secular schools, even public schools, will often have skirt-length requirements. While rules themselves may be gender-neutral, we live in a society that sexualizes women’s and girls’ bodies. Outfits designed for women and girls tend to be revealing in ways that their masculine equivalents are not. Restrictions on which sort of dress or leggings a child wears, or whether a child’s bra strap is showing, could in theory apply to boys, but not so often. In what is admittedly not the most dire protest movement of the moment, but still, I think, a reasonable one, students are pushing back against these rules and their enforcement.
I understand why, as a protest movement, the right to dress skimpily in school can grate. Especially, that is, when it’s presented as a feminist cause. The branch of feminism that centers on women’s right to look sexy – on the tremendous empowerment that is wearing stilettos and thousands of dollars worth of skin creams – has a way of seeming… not so feminist. That hypocrisy is rather delightfully explored in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” song “Put Yourself First”, and in anepisode of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
But… is that what’s going on when girls in New York City protest a school dress code banning tank tops, or in British Columbia, one forbidding crop tops and shorts?
There are many reasons a girl might show up for school in something ‘too’ skimpy that have nothing whatsoever to do with the male gaze. So many reasons that I have trouble interpreting student protests as having all that much to do with the right to look seductive. These reasons include growth spurts; weight gain; and that other form of growth that was, at least in my day, euphemistically referred to as developing. The same garment can be fine one month and revealing the next. With a couple inches of height, a skirt becomes a miniskirt, and so on.
I will give an example from my own life: I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly purchased a crop top. I have, however, worn midriff-bearing shirts. You can piece together for yourself how that works. And I’d have been humiliated if high school administrators would have pulled me aside to point out that whichever Calvin Klein via Century 21 t-shirt was showing some midsection.
If you had one build for the first 14 years of your life, and find yourself suddenly with another, it’s not just that your clothes will fit differently. You’ll need to keep this new (and still changing) build in mind when shopping for new clothes. And if “you” are a kid, that likely means your parents will taking you on those shopping trips. Meeting a dress code with inch-by-inch specifications takes time and money, which is something that ought to make a public school in particular wary. That’s why I appreciated Catherine Pearlman – yes, of “‘Juslim’ superheroes” fame – framing her objections to her daughter’s school’s restrictions as an open letter to the school principle, asking them to take her daughter shopping.
The creeps are, often enough, not same-age male classmates (whose attention girls do sometimes seek, which is fine) but grown men. Adults. That’s who – outside of school and, unfortunately, all too often, within school – is leering at young girls, no matter what they wear. This was, for me and for many other women, a truly dreadful part of being that age. (When I read about a male school administrator telling a 14-year-old girl her outfit might distract “‘11 and 12-year-old boys,’” I think back to realities of early adolescence, and am skeptical. I think of the high school teacher who craned his neck when one of my classmates left the room… wearing altogether unremarkable clothing.) Rather than cracking down on girls who had the audacity to purchase any jeans made in the last 10 years, all of which are designed to show underwear, how about a reminder that 14-year-olds, even the ‘developed’ ones, are children?
Ah, one might say, but what about teaching ‘em young about life in the working world? Surely students need to learn to dress properly! To which I’d say: Dressing appropriately in an office environment is not a complicated skill that needs to be honed beginning in middle school. If Facebook is anything to go by, classmates who were goth as kids are doing just fine in business attire as adults.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of “The Perils Of ‘Privilege’”, from St. Martin’s Press. Follow her on Twitter, @tweetertation
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