ON THE DAY OF HALLOWEEN, a friend of mine shared a PSA, so to speak, on Facebook that was written by one of her friends. Please see below. I was immediately struck by how this message was coded with anti-female language that supports a deeply negative concept, one that’s been ingrained in our culture forever: young women’s bodies and sexualities stand as distractions to young men from achieving their full potential. Immediately, I commented — not usually my thing, but this felt important — and pointed this out. While my friend’s response was compassionate, she said she couldn’t understand what some of these girls wear “at the football games, though.” This made me even sadder. While I’m twice the age as her teenagers, the time when I was their age doesn’t feel so long ago.
As I started to write her a private email about my concerns about these kinds of posts and language, I saw an article about middle school-aged girls who fought against a school dress code and won. These girls were being sent home or held in the principal’s office for hours a day when they wore tank tops or skirts considered too short. Detention was bad enough, but they realized they were being punished in a far greater way: their education was being taken away from them. They were being held behind and punished for their bodies and therefore missing class time and opportunities to be as prepared as their male counterparts, prematurely thrusting them into the lifelong battle women have to fight to be given the same opportunities as men.
That Facebook post and the school’s enforcement of their dress code send the same message: that a young woman is an object that represents distraction or sin, and is a threat to young men’s futures. The ideology gets reinforced, bodies get sexualized during the formative adolescent years, and then kids find themselves in situations where boundaries, both personal and social, get tested. It’s exactly that kind of conditioning that teaches young men that woman are objects, giving them permission them act out and demonstrate unwanted power on them at parties or in bars, through sexual assault or violence or abuse.
The sad thing about the football game reference she made is that I’m sure the young girls who are barely dressed are just as confused as everyone else as to why they are dressed that way — probably even more so. As adults we can at least say, “It’s cold, you’ll get sick, be rational.” But adolescence is confusing! And we hate our bodies and are self-conscious, but desperately want to make them look like the ones we see around us. Then at school, we are constantly being reminded of them, and as this article notes, being punished by them in the worst way possible: disadvantaging us by making education harder to access properly. It’s a confusing paradox: we want to encourage young girls to have confidence and love their bodies, but we punish them for displaying them, for the sake of their male counterparts.
My conversation on Facebook and reading that article have made realize that we have a responsibility to encourage and support young people who are so deeply influenced by social media in a way, that as older people who didn’t grow up completely immersed in a digital milieu, we might not even consider. I was bullied a lot in middle school, and I can’t imagine how I would have handled that in this decade, when social media is in play. I’m finally old enough to cringe at some of my naive choices from my past and work really hard not to beat myself up for not knowing things I didn’t know. I was privileged enough to go to an all- girls Catholic school with a uniform, so I didn’t experience the whole “your body is a distraction” rhetoric — just a lot of “thighs are ugly” from the principal nun who couldn’t stand the sight of our tiny skirts. Regardless, I certainly had my fair share of awkward moments, where I was uncertain about my body. Throwing guilt in for distracting male classmates would have only made it worse.
This is the crux of the issue: pointing out young women’s bodies isn’t the solution. It only makes it harder for young women already trying to figure out how to be comfortable in their bodies. If young men are being distracted by young women’s bodies, then let’s start a conversation about how to see these bodies. Let’s teach both boys and girls that our bodies are not objects, but temples, machines, tools, homes where we should feel safe at all times. This kind of shift in thought requires an overhaul not only in middle schools, high schools, and colleges, but in society at large, too. It sounds daunting, but if we start the work, we can break down the way women and their bodies are viewed as objects to overcome and conquer, and see them instead as subjects that deserve access to the same rights, opportunities, and education as anyone else.
