TW: mention of r*pe once
School is supposed to be a place where kids can go make friends, try out for sports, and get an education. It’s a safe place to be able to take the first steps into maturing and growing, however with school comes the strict guidelines, and more specifically their dress code. A dress code shouldn’t be hard to adhere to, just don’t show up in your pajamas or swimsuits, however the American school system has made the dress code so hard for young women to even go shopping for clothes that can comfortably fit them while still being within the guidelines. After discussing with some of my friends, it truly surprised me how almost every single female I talked to seemed to have some story about being sent to the office or having a phone call home, all while missing vital class time. I personally have two accounts of being dress coded, one in middle school and one in high school. In seventh grade, I was forced to change out of my shirt that my mom got me to wear for picture day that had one shoulder exposed. While the female administrator was waiting for me to change, I begged her to let me slide considering that my shirt had a built in bra and the school’s shirt was too tight for me to comfortably wear without being exposed. Her response was that I was going to have to “suck it up and maybe the embarrassment would keep me from breaking code again”. A few years later, I ended up spending my last day of my senior year of high school in In School Suspension given that my shorts that past my fingertips were considered “too short” because too much of my leg was exposed and I didn’t get to spend my last day of high school with my friends. After thinking about these incidents, I reached out to Facebook and asked others to tell me their stories of being dress coded.
One girl named Maddie messaged about how her assistant principal duct taped her ripped jeans to the point where it took hours to not only get it off her clothes and even her skin. Multiple girls then responded that similar situations where they also were forced to duct tape their jeans, one even stating that the rips were barely two inches wide when she was called out by a school official. Two women told me two separate stories in which someone was sexualized as a minor for wearing shorts during the hotter months in South Carolina. The first told me how she witnessed a peer get sexualized by their eighth grade teacher and how he kept making glances toward her lower half and would single her out during the class period. The other spoke that within the first week of sixth grade, she was pulled aside and told her shorts were too short and she should never wear them again because they were deemed too inappropriate. Multiple stories of too short shorts, shirts that showed too much shoulder, and dresses that girls wore to Sunday church but not to math class.
And yet not once did a guy comment or private message me about getting dress coded during school. The truth is the American system has a dress code that is only written up to oppress young girls. While women have to make sure their sleeves are bigger than three fingers and shorts are past their fingertips, guys are told not to wear shirts with profanity. The only time girls are seen in anything that goes against code are when cheerleaders would get to wear their uniform before game day. The unspoken truth is that dress codes are sexist, play into the sexualization of minors, and are even worse when you’re a more heavy set girl. Students treat dress code as a joke, because in truth it is. When I was in school, the line was that “r*pe starts at the shoulder” because the administrators put the hammer down on underage girls and tank tops. And the fact that duct tape, even colorful duct tape, was deemed less distracting than a simple rip in denim jeans. The point of this article was to shed light onto the oppression that young girls face with schools’ dress codes, how we feel sexualized as children and how heavier girls are forced to cover up more just because they’re more endowed. Dress codes are needed to prepare individuals for the workplace, however when young women are forced to miss class and made uncomfortable with their own bodies, this is the issue and this is dress code overload.