dress-codes

I__ going to say this once here, and then__ecause it is obvious__ will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls_ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl__egardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance__ad been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being __istracted_ at school? At best, blaming girls_ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is counterproductive. At worst, it__ a short step from there to __he was asking for it._ Yet, I also can__ help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors what she called __ore so-called provocative_ clothing, are missing something. Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? __f they aren__,_ Moran wrote, __hances are you__e dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as __ome total fucking bullshit.__ So while only girls get catcalled, it__ also true that only girls_ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks __kinny jeans_ for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls_ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others_ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls_ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding __o questions about how their bodies feel__uestions about sexuality or arousal__y describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.

If the justification for controlling women's bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was 'women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.' Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be 'covered up' to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men.