Abington Senior High School recently began to reinforce the existing dress code, which, in my opinion, restricts students from fully expressing themselves and even puts them at risk. Dress codes have been and always will be a sexist and unfair act toward young women in the United States. They project the overt sexualization of teenage girls, and by prohibiting students from simply living in their bodies, the school is only objectifying young women. These “rules” continue to push ideas of misogyny and depersonalization of young women.
By calling parts of the human body like shoulders, and even legs, sexual, we are only discouraging girls from being comfortable in their bodies. I continue to use the words “girls” or “young women” rather than referring to all members of the student body because a majority of these rules apply to those who present or dress femininely. For example, we cannot show midriff during school, but in classes like lifeguarding, boys are completely shirtless. The dress code does not prohibit any of this, once again showing how this code is objectifying girls. The “code” even bans students from showing their shoulders or upper legs.
An email sent to the student body and their guardians reads, “Students who wear clothing considered to be disruptive will be asked by school personnel to change their clothing.” Considering any sort of clothing “disruptive” is downright disturbing to me. If teachers, entrusted with our education, are distracted by something as innocent as a bra strap, quite frankly they then should not be working at a school. The ideology of categorizing clothing as “distracting” then also plays into the misogynistic ideas of someone “asking” for sexual assault. By doing this, not only are you objectifying them, making young girls extremely uncomfortable in their bodies, but also continuing to support the idea that young boys do not need to learn self-restraint. It is completely disgusting to me that this school is sending out classes of young men who will not learn to face the consequences of their own horrific decisions, and rather punishing the young girls these attacks are against.
This dress code not only continues to support the patriarchal society we live in, but also puts students at risk, and I mean that literally. The school is mostly restricting clothing worn in warmer weather, like tank tops or shorter shorts. If you ban children from wearing summertime clothes, you will have to deal with health issues and even students passing out in class. Additionally, banning coats from being worn is obscene; students need to keep themselves warm. Dress-coding us for keeping ourselves comfortable is overall odd and heinous.
Moving on, the banning of “head coverings”, I found to be shocking (as if forbidding us from wearing coats wasn’t enough). In the email sent out to students and parents, the school never said that there would be any religious exemption from these rules. Many people in our school veil or wear hijabs for religious purposes. You cannot ask people to take off their head coverings as they are seen as symbols of their religion, and I hope that this “rule” does not apply to anyone covering their heads for these reasons. Yet, I still don’t see the harm with someone wearing a hat or beanie in school. It’s simply an accessory and there is no harm in wearing it. There is no harm in wearing any kind of clothes unless it includes things like hate speech. We are all impressionable young people, and by implanting this idea in our minds you are failing at your job to help us reach our full potential. Students do not need to conform to these rules to learn— anyone can understand and focus whether they are in the presence of a crop top or coat.
Dress codes have deeply embedded misogynistic culture into our society for years on end and our school is only promoting this idea. By forcing girls to change in the middle of the school day you are further objectifying them and pushing standards onto them that they already have to deal with outside of a school setting. The school is only programming fear and insecurities into girls rather than teaching young men and others to control themselves and focus. To conclude, I have a quote from poet Sylvia Plath, that all together sums up the reason as to why we must let young women live freely. “All is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”
