Slut Shaming Never Goes Out of Style

As someone who both remembers when schools banned blue jeans and also deplores droopy pants, let me assure you that this latest school stupidity has nothing to do with dress codes and everything to do with shaming women to preserve patriarchal power.

Jessica Valenti at The Nation:

This (month) students at New York’s Stuyvesant High School (my alma mater) protested a discriminatory dress code by participating in “Slutty Wednesday”—a day in which students deliberately violated the code that bars them, among other restrictions, from wearing anything that bares their shoulders. (The horror!)

Senior Madeline Rivera told the New York Times that the way in which the dress code is enforced singled those out those with certain “body shapes” or those who were “more curvy.” In fact, according to reports from students over the past few months, the code almost exclusively targets women in language and practice—a possible violation of their Title IX rights.


SNIP

In addition to the violation of female students’ rights, the thinking behind the code sends a dangerous message to young women – that they are responsible for the way in which society objectifies and sexualizes them.

Take this comment from Principal Stanley Teitel: “Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s nowhere else to go…. The bottom line is, some things are a distraction, and we don’t need to distract students from what is supposed to be going on here, which is learning.”

It’s not the responsibility of female students to mitigate the male gaze. You find female bodies “distracting”? That’s your problem, not women’s. Society teaches that women exist to be looked at, objectified and sexualized—it’s up to others to make sure that they don’t contribute to that injustice.

Read the whole thing.