According to Click2Houston, an administrator at Clements High School in Fort Bend County, Texas, was addressing an auditorium full of upperclassmen and trying to get them to dress more conservatively. But rather than say, “Dress more conservatively. Bare stomachs are not appropriate for school,” he tried to use humor. It came out like this:
“Ladies, I know you’ve been working on your abs since the Olympics, right? But your shirts can’t be up here. It’s gotta cover the whole gut. Ladies, I blame you all for boys’ low grades because of tight clothing,” he said.
Ugh. Can’t he just sit backwards in a chair or grow a ponytail or something? It’d be pathetic, but less so than attempting to get through to the kids with a ham-fisted attempt at humor that was just an overt display of sexism. Male and female students alike report being offended by the remarks. The men did not appreciate the implication that they are academic magpies incapable of remembering the quadratic equation if they see a woman’s belly button. The women did not appreciate being told their bodies were responsible for the test scores of other students.
Seriously, we are finally getting to a generation that has enough of its shit together to push back on this constant, ridiculous harangue that men are animals and women are fucking zookeepers, and I’m supposed to be mad they all use Instagram or whatever it is that we’re mad at kids today about?
I am impatient with dress codes because they’re almost always used to police girls and distract girls from learning, but also because the message is that there is no more important issue for high schoolers than how they look.
Not whether they’re homeless because their dad or mom just lost a job, not whether their school is a burned-out shell in a bombed-out town, not whether their parents are on drugs or not around or abusive. How they dress. That’s what we’ve decided to make a federal fucking case about. That’s the hill we’re all going to die on.
Those kids are damn right it’s not fair to the boys OR the girls.
A.
Yeah, so terribly stupid society we live in… Nobody in the high spheres of power really care About Things that matter, but just about irrelevant questions that are significant for them (Who knows for what hidden reasons)
Honestly, I want to give a giant hats-off to both Gen X for raising their kids to be aware that this shit is sexist and disproportionately aimed at girls, and also to the internet for giving these kids the confidence to speak up. (My Boomer parents didn’t see anything wrong with dress codes, and the internet of the early 2000s was a giant “tits or gtfo” shit show.)
Definitely huge amounts of applause to the kids here for leading the charge, but props to the backup singers too, y’all are definitely helping 🙂