In High School we all had fairly strict dress codes. Whether you went to a private school, a charter school or a public school, you most likely had to stick to a very specific set of rules when it came to what you could and could not wear in the school. For boys this dress code is not as extensive, nor was it enforced in the same way it is for girls. I remember throughout my many years in middle and high school that even the slightest infraction could get a girl sent to the principals office, but boys got away with basically everything. We all know that there is a gender imbalance when it comes to regulating the dress code within schools, but what people don't know is the effect it has on young girls. It teaches them that what makes them feel good is not school appropriate, it tells them that when at school they are sexualized when just walking down the hall, and it makes them think that showing and loving their bodies is a punishment in a school setting.
For all of my years in public school (except in elementary school) I always had to say to myself in the morning, "will I get dress coded if I wear this to school?" The fact that those rules were so engrained into my daily routine says something about the system that schools run on. I know that a boy at my school didn't think about the repercussions of their outfit every morning, so why did I have to? In my city we are mostly made up of public schools, except for the select few private ones. All of these public schools ran by the same or similar dress code while the private schools ran by a dress code of uniforms. In my junior year of high school an article came out about one of the middle schools in my city. It was all about the school's new dress code. This dress code detailed the do's and don'ts of what to wear in school, more specifically that girls could not wear yoga pants or leggings. The school believed it was good for the school's cumulative GPA, the focus of the boys in the school, and effective effort within the school. The problem with this was the dress code that had been created was almost exclusively centered around what anyone that identified as a girl could not wear. The administration had no proof saying that boys could not focus because girls were showing their legs in class. This in a sense is blaming all young girls that their bodies are the reason that boys are "stupid" which is absolutely absurd.
After hearing about all of this, I wrote my junior research paper about the sexualization of young girls, because I truly believe that the time to influence young adults the most is middle and high school, and an event like that can tell a girl that they are an object of sex and nothing else. It's hard to convince girls that they are beautiful and something more than a sex object when all society, institutions, adults, and schools tell them is that they are. We can be better, make girls feel safe, create a better gender balance and treat young girls better than this, and it all starts by stopping schools from telling their teachers that they can sexualize a young girl in their own school. LOVE. YOUR. BODY.
