With summer coming to a close, the number of girls wearing shorts in the Southwest corner of Minnesota will soon start declining. Both because of the weather, and because of the shame connected to showing skin. Males can be seen wearing nothing but shorts, and maybe sandals, during mid-summer without feeling the need to cover up from others’ stares. And why would they? It’s hot, the material their shirt is made out of is too heavy, and they feel comfortable enough to their body to show it off a little under the sun. Girls have the same feelings of comfortableness and also experience heat, but when we don shorts and tops with spaghetti straps, we can’t help but feel judging stares and hear the underlying whispers calling us sluts and attention whores. This is the mentality that plagues us as a society and excuses behavior like rape and violence against women and those identifying as such.
The day I graduated from capris to shorts as a fourteen-year-old girl, in the eyes of society, I became a young woman, an attention whore, an object to be both desired and despised. I remember the nervousness as the sun finally became too much for me to handle. First, I had to find shorts that fit the length I wanted—a goal that seemed impossible to obtain. By that, I mean that there were two options: shorts so short that I felt going in a bikini wouldn’t make much of a difference, and shorts that looked similar to the capris I threw out. I’ve heard people make comments about, “If she didn’t want to look like such a slut she would have bought shorts that actually covered her,” but what they don’t think about is that, no, they really can’t. Our society markets for female beauty and objectification. Reducing women to a pair of legs are the way we are marketed to think, and, as such, is what we both demand and then supply.
When I finally found shorts that I deemed acceptable in the dressing room, I had to step out and find that they weren’t acceptable in society. I felt uncomfortable with my body—a sentiment that hadn’t been inside me before—because my little bit of skin exposed due to heat was now being objectified and judged. That little bit of exposed skin meant, that in our society, my body—the body of a fourteen-year-old girl—no longer belonged to me, but instead, belonged to everybody else to poke and prod. I had to grow accustomed to stares, filled with both lust and contempt, in order to maintain cool in the summer.
This past week I vacationed to Texas, a place that averaged 97 degrees compared to our current average weather of 82 degrees in Minnesota. Seeing as my Minnesota blood was melting from the heat, I wore the shortest shorts I owned and still felt the heat. One thing I noticed at a store I visited, was that, having grown accustomed to the weather, many Texans around me wore jeans or capris. While later I found more people wearing shorts in different areas, I could not shake the feeling of being exposed and targeted. My feminist mentality told me I was only wearing shorts, I had reason to wear them—it was hot—and even if I hadn’t, it was my body, I could wear what I wanted. But even though that mentality is the one I currently have, for the first five seconds of noticing, I had immediately felt the urge to cover myself up for fear of stares and judgement.
Shorts are meant to be short, because of the warm weather they are helping to combat. Shorts are not meant to be shameful or signs allowing you to comment on a girl’s body. So then why do we treat them as more than they are, just pieces of cloth?
