Is school out to lunch with bra rule?
This obsession on how young, female bodies should dress sends exactly the wrong message
Every spring, as the mercury climbs and students shed their warm clothing, the Great Dress Code Debate inevitably rears its head in Quebec high schools.
Arguments have focused in past years on the appropriateness of spaghetti straps, proper skirt length and whether shortshorts are, well, too short. But the hot-button issue this year is not what clothes students are wearing to school, but what they are wearing (or not wearing) under their clothes. Yes, schools are now trying to regulate students’ undergarments (or lack thereof ).
A petition was launched at Outremont private girls’ boarding school Saint-Nom-de-Marie after a student was called out for not wearing a bra.
The topic was titillating enough that Hélène David, the minister for Higher Education and the Status of Women, weighed in. She suggested Quebec schools start a discussion about whether bras should be mandatory.
In fairness, David was responding to news reports about the petition, which garnered 1,000 signatures. And to her credit, David said: “I’m more on the side of choice, honestly.”
But — honestly — should our schools be giving any consideration whatsoever to policing their students’ underwear? Should we really be having a discussion about schoolgirls’ skivvies? What’s next: an interdiction on thongs or bikini briefs? And who’s going to make those intimate verifications?
The problem with school dress codes is that, predominantly, they unfairly and unfailingly target female students. Whether a given institution has a uniform or just a policy on appropriate attire, the female body ends up hypersexualized and all the onus is put on women to cover up, lest they arouse the apparently uncontrollable desires of their male peers or teachers.
This is the completely wrong message to send to both boys and girls in the age of #MeToo and the march toward gender equality. Boys are being taught they are not responsible for their own urges and actions, while girls are being told that their bodies are little more than sex objects and it’s their fault if they somehow become a distraction to the men around them. It’s like institutionalized slut-shaming when we should be teaching men to show respect and women to expect it.
This mixed message pertains even to school uniforms, which routinely consist of kilts that billow in the wind like Marilyn Monroe’s iconic gown. Despite the pretence of immaculate modesty, the “schoolgirl look” is fetishized from pop culture to pornography. It’s a prime example of telling women to be saints while treating them like whores.
The Great Bra Debate of 2018 brings this dichotomy to a whole new level of intrusiveness. Do we really want principals and teachers looking closely enough at female students’ chests to determine whether or not they are wearing a bra? Because that’s the level of scrutiny making underwire mandatory would invite.
It also disregards that many young women might be eschewing the garment out of feminist conviction. Burning bras was once a potent symbol of fighting the patriarchy.
Dress codes and uniforms often themselves become a distraction from real issues affecting young people. When I was in high school, teachers spent an inordinate amount of time cracking down on untucked shirts, “illegal” shoes and kilt lengths. Clearly, little has changed.
I can see why parents, schools and some students favour uniforms. There’s no decision about what to wear in the morning and everyone is theoretically equal because they look the same. But those were the reasons I hated mine as a teenager.
By their very nature, dress codes and uniforms are patronizing, a way to wield seemingly arbitrary authority over young people (especially women) who are trying to express themselves. If we want our kids to grow up to be independent and responsible, maybe we should treat them as such. We should definitely give them a little more credit when it comes to dressing themselves — even if they make some fashion faux pas along the way.
Ironically, while we’re once again wringing our hands over whether some female students are showing too much skin, Quebec is in the throes of an ongoing debate about those who don’t show enough. Politicians in the National Assembly were recently tearing their shirts over a young Muslim woman who wants to be the first police officer in the province to wear a hijab. A society that is truly striving for equality shouldn’t be telling women what to wear any more than it should be telling them what not to wear.
If we have to have uniforms or dress codes at all, maybe we should set some ground rules for the rules: they must be applied equally to men and women and they must be kept to a bare minimum — even if it means some students bare a little more flesh.