In Iran, women are required by law to be imprisoned for up to sixty days or whipped up to seventy times as a punishment for exposing anything other than her hands and face in public. We gasp at this law, but reprimand girls who expose more than four inches of thigh. And yes, while these two issues are very different cases – the former has brought about violence and protesting in the Middle East – they both regard outside control of the presentation of women’s bodies.
While Grady’s dress code affects both genders, there are significantly more restrictions on what our female students are allowed to wear. Shorts, skirts and dresses shouldn’t be less than four inches above the knee. No spaghetti straps. The list goes on.
A dress code accomplishes nothing except feeding the false stigma that women’s bodies – anyone’s body, for that matter – and the way they are presented should be regulated. Our administration shouldn’t be telling girls not to wear leggings “because they’re too distracting for young men in an educational environment.” This claim is insulting to both genders; it asserts that boys cannot pay attention to anything else if they see a female leg, and that women’s bodies are solely objects that need to be controlled.
Nearly all people have legs. They shouldn’t be that distracting.
And why should it matter that, for seven short years of our lives, we aren’t given the right to dress ourselves however we want to? By limiting what we wear during middle and high school, the administration is encouraging a mentality that we don’t deserve that freedom. We are lucky enough to live in a country that gives us all sovereignty over ourselves, and we should be able to express that in the way we dress.
Students don’t break the dress code to be defiant. In Georgia, it’s stiflingly hot for a large chunk of the year, and generally people are willing to stray one inch away from the rules for comfort.
On the occasions that I’ve been caught breaking dress code, I’ve been treated like I committed an incredibly shameful act. I know several people who have cried during that dreaded wait in the discipline office that one has to endure after breaking dress code. And it wasn’t because they didn’t want to sit in there for an hour, missing the better part of first period (Forcing us to sit in the discipline office and miss class, for the purpose of not being a “distraction,” also places boys’ educations over girls’.). Or that they were afraid of the in school suspension that they would inevitably be sentenced to if their parents didn’t arrive with a pair of jeans.
It’s because when we are called out on violating the dress code, whoever does so is essentially saying that our shoulders or legs are not appropriate for a school environment. This part of our body, that we literally have no control over the existence of, and only use to walk on or reach out with, is too distracting, too inappropriate to be exposed. Monitoring what we wear reaffirms and continues a centuries-old belief that women are merely sexual object, and that’s the opposite direction our society ought to be moving in.
