This School’s WTF Dress Code Orders Girls To Cover Up To Keep From Distracting Their Male Teachers
School dress codes tend to be pretty sexist. A student handbook might dedicate a paragraph or two to making sure the dress of young men fits certain socio-cultural mores (no wallet chains, no baggy pants, no “extreme” hair, etc.) and then offer pages of regulations about how much the girls’ bodies should be covered up and what kinds of hair and shoes and underwear they can have. (My school dress code specifically mandated that we had to wear bras.) Often school administrators say dress codes are there to prevent the male students from being “distracted” by their classmates’ bodies, but one school in the U.K. has taken sexist dress codes to a gross new level after it started sending teenage girls home out of fear that their tight pants might over-excite the school’s male teachers.
That’s right. The school’s fully grown, highly educated male faculty are being treated like a school of sharks ready to frenzy at the sight of a student in pants.
According to Yahoo News, headmistress Dr. Rowena Blencowe already banned all skirts from Trentham High School last year. She did not just ban tight skirts or mini skirts, either. She specifically banned all skirts because she said she was tired of telling girls their skirts were too short or too tight. This year when school started, the girls did as they were told and showed up in trousers, but 10 of them were sent home on the first day because Blencowe said their pants would be a distraction to the male faculty members.
According to Yahoo, school staff were on hand to assess the tightness of the girls’ pants as they arrived and send home anyone whose pants were too snug. Blencowe does not seem to care that making female students run an ass-assessing gauntlet of adult faculty is just disgusting and seems to have little purpose besides making the girls feel scrutinized and insecure.
“First the school told us skirts are not acceptable, now we are only allowed to wear trousers after they’ve been inspected,” said 15-year-old Harriet Dale. “It’s really uncomfortable to think you could be walking around the corridors and teachers will be looking you up and down. I’m not the only person who feels that way.”
That sounds appalling. I remember being insecure enough about my figure and my clothes without having to have my pants inspected by teachers to make sure they weren’t too tight.
The school should not be policing the girls’ bodies this way. It’s sexist and weird and tells the girls that they are responsible for the actions of the men around them, which is just wrong. Men are perfectly capable of being responsible for their own actions. The school should leave the girls and their pants alone, and if any of the adult faculty members are having a hard time with being “distracted” by the butts of their teenage students, then they need to be fired immediately.
(Photo: iStockPhoto/Getty Images/Majorching)
