Feminism is in the air. Thank you, Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly, for bringing it to the forefront of my mind. Up until now, I’ve been pretty happy with my lot in life, being a woman and all.
It’s hard to decide which awareness campaigns are worth supporting in a never-ending stream of awareness campaigns. I can get behind things like Equal Work, Equal Pay and anything, and I mean
anything
, relating to domestic violence, but I prefer to stay
on
the bus when it arrives at the Nipple Inequality Campaign stop or the Make Barbie Fatter Campaign stop, both of which are topics in the general area of feminism, but I’m not exactly sure either has the ability to bring true change for women.
Then this little gem surfaced on my Facebook feed. With feminism being a hot topic right now, it caught my eye.
Is the sign maker right? Is it the girls’ problem that they’ve drawn attention to themselves for wearing revealing clothing, or is it the boys’ fault for not knowing how to treat a woman respectfully, no matter what she wears?
I read the sign over and over trying to decide if I agreed or disagreed with it, finally deciding that making a girl go home to change clothes does not produce distraction free learning for boys.
Making a girl go home to change is actually a way for her to respect herself so SHE can have distraction free learning.
I’ll go a step further and assert that this isn’t specifically a girl problem or a boy problem. It’s a matter of respect. A scantily clad girl doesn’t respect herself any more than the boy who can’t keep his eyes off of her.
How do we teach young, hormonal boys and girls to respect one another at school? We talk about it openly with them. We model respectful behavior. We use examples. We provide opportunities outside of school to spend time with the opposite sex in appropriate settings. And we eliminate inappropriate clothing from schools.
I took a look at the dress code policies for a variety of schools in Fargo and Moorhead. They range from nearly non-existent to almost three pages of specific attire no-no’s. The overwhelming majority were vague, primarily banning clothing with drug or alcohol references, gang symbols, and pajamas. A couple went a step further, banning midriffs on girls and visible bra straps. One even required underwear be worn, but never visible. (!?)
As a parent, I am the first stop in determining if my child’s clothing is acceptable. I see kids walking to school in the mornings, and I can’t figure out how they made it out the door in their chosen outfits. I will enforce a strict dress code at home if the school can’t do it. Right now, my girls know what kinds of things they are not allowed to wear to school and they know they need to keep their underwear covered in public. When they are older, we will discuss the reasons for appropriate clothing in greater detail. My son will learn to respect his sisters’ privacy at home and ultimately how to respect women through his words and actions.
Maybe a time comes when nudity isn’t such a big deal, when breasts are no longer sexual objects, and Barbie gains some weight, but until then respect for the opposite sex starts with respect for oneself.
