Of Course This Mom’s Explanation For Why Your Daughters Need To Cover Up Involves Her Precious Sons

Parents of girls who are struggling to talk to their daughters about clothing choices, listen up: there’s a mom of boys who thinks she’s got it all figured out. Sure, your daughter might be humiliated and shamed for her sleeveless shirt or her short shorts, but that’s okay: revealing clothing might make this woman’s sons uncomfortable, or worse yet, develop a preference for mini-skirted, tank-topped Slutty McSkankersons!

Blogger Melissa Fenton explains on Huffington Post that she thinks common sense is missing from the equation (but doesn’t seem to have figured out that the common sense that’s missing is her own):

Evidently, they are tired of their daughters being humiliated and shamed by being singled out and called out of class to the office and having to await a change of clothes. I reminded them if they do not agree with the school’s dress code, they should seek other schooling options. But no, that was not enough. They demanded that girl’s bodies stop being shamed, that in no way is dressing in revealing clothes disrespectful and why do we need a code governing what we can wear? At that point, I had realized common sense had left the building.

So simple! If parents are so weird as to not want their daughters publicly humiliated for their clothes, they have TONS of options! For example, you can a.) subject your daughter to draconian rules designed to protect boys from “distraction”, because boys’ access to distraction-free education is more important than girls’ access to education at all; b.) pay a lot of money that you may or may not have to send your daughter to a nearby no-dress-code private school that may or may not exist; or c.) quit your job to home-school your daughter someplace safely sequestered away from other people’s sons. Common sense, y’all!

I don’t understand how Fenton can go from complaining about how complaints about dress codes seek to protect girls’ “feelings” (which she actually puts in scare quotes) to talking about how she wishes girls would dress modestly so that her sons won’t be made uncomfortable. They’re used to modestly-dressed women and the sight of bare lady-flesh might convert them from good little boys into insatiable lust-wolves! But then again, she doesn’t seem particularly self-aware anywhere else in the piece: her proof of how her precious boys are into modesty is that they complained when she appeared in a sports bra after going for a run once. Uh, maybe your boys aren’t going to be quite as traumatized by the sight of a bared midriff that doesn’t belong to their mother?

Here’s a tip for moms of boys who are rendered horribly uncomfortable (I’m guessing in the pants region) by girls in skirts or V-neck sweaters. Instead of teaching them that they are powerless automatons made to suffer in the presence of bare shoulders, teach them that they do, in fact, have the power not to ogle their classmates. Actually, please teach your sons this even if they are the opposite of uncomfortable in the presence of young women. That way, when, as Fenton writes, your boys end up somewhere with “a whole lot of T&A up in their faces”, they’ll use that old common sense of theirs and realize they have the ability to turn their faces in a different direction. For the severely ogling-challenged, I suggest staring at your feet. Or directly into the noonday sun.

Fenton closes by commenting that she’s currently looking for all-male colleges to send her boys to, which is probably a joke, but I wish that it wasn’t. I could live without my daughter going off to school with boys who have never learned that she’s not there for their consumption or their comfort.

(Image: iFocus / Shutterstock)