Dress Codes

One of my Facebook friends shared this article yesterday about what school dress codes say about young women. I found it interesting because it's an issue that has been bugging me since middle school. Why are the clothes that young women wear so heavily regulated based on what young men find "distracting". What kind of message is this sending to young women? I remember my friends and I being both disturbed and amused by it back in 6th grade. We weren't allowed to have spaghetti straps for unexplained reasons, but were allowed to have wider strapped shirts. I can only assume this was because they didn't want our braw straps to be shown, which is a pretty ridiculous notion to me. If a boy can't concentrate because he knowns that I'm wearing a bra by seeing a strap on my shoulder, knowing full well that nearly every girl in the room is wearing one whether he can see it or not, then I don't see why that should be my problem. If the reasoning is not to keep from "distracting" boys, which is both blaming girls for what boys think or do to them and insulting to boys, insinuating and teaching them that they cannot control themselves, then it is probably to teach girls "modesty". Teaching modesty is at least less of a problem in my opinion, depending on the reason given for why it is important. I think schools need to be careful about how they approach the dress code issue, as young girls walking around in their bikinis is hardly school appropriate, but blaming girls for the supposed faults of boys is hardly helpful.
Of course, sometimes the issue goes the other way as well. When I was in 8th grade, my school placed a short-lived ban on kids bringing their backpacks into class. However, girls were still allowed to bring their purses in, which the boys of the school deemed unfair. To protest this, a group of guys in my grade borrowed their sisters' purses and brought them to class with them. The principal, while amused, was not a huge fan of this, and tried to prevent the boys from doing so. Unfortunately for her, the kids had the support of many girls along with teachers, and couldn't do much to stop them at risk of being called sexist. As a result, the ban was eventually lifted as the boys got rowdier (middle school boys have a tendency to get out of hand). This event brought to my attention that the clothes boys wear are almost never regulated. When have you ever heard of a school banning tight shirts or skinny jeans for boys just because it would "distract" the girls? I never have, but anyone who thinks that they won't get distracted or have a look needs a heavy dose or reality. So why are schools so one-sided in their regulation of dress code?

MissRepresentation

I saw the MissRepresentation documentary the other day after they used it in the 60s class, and was both pleasantly surprised and unable to keep from rolling my eyes a bit. The movie brings up many good points, some that have been said many times before, like the media's effect on girls' views of themselves regarding their weight and perception of beauty. But there were also some new perspectives that I hadn't considered. The statistics about the number of women in leadership positions, specifically in the media brought up issues of getting the women's perspective. When men run all the media and are making the decisions,  we tend to end up with stereotypical and over-sexualized images of women everywhere that fail to represent the reality. This makes me think of the Bechdel test, which is a test created in 1985 that has three simple provisions to check how women are portrayed in media, which only 56% of movies pass. The requirements are that there are at least two named female characters, they talk to each other, and that they talk about something other than men. Unfortunately, many films are still failing this test, Pacific Rim being one of them, not that it was a particularly revolutionary or "intelligent" movie in the first place, but either way women are still being portrayed in films in unrealistic ways. Passing the Bechdel test in no way means that a film is not sexist, about half the films that pass the test do so by having women talk about marriage and babies instead of men. And when women do talk it often seems to be about something superficial; when was the last time you actually saw two women in a movie talk about something intelligent, scientific, or academic in some way? Usually if any women is talking about that kind of topic to another, one of them is too stupid and shallow to understand, apparently there's only room for one smart woman at a time. Women are portrayed in an overly sexualized manner with shallow concerns, and strong female roles are almost universally masculine. Why can't a woman look good and be in a leadership role? Think about Sarah Palin (not that I'm arguing that she's the best role model but that's not the point), so much of the focus put on her was her appearance when she was running for office. And the attempts to portray Hilary Clinton as crazy and out of control of her emotions is ridiculous. How often do you see media reports of some man in politics getting passionate about an issue? And how often are those portraying him as crazy and unable to control his emotions? It happens to women politicians and women in every day life all the time. A woman's place in life is not to sit around doing whatever men tell her to just because that's what they want and so she isn't "crazy".