Don't Be Attracted to My Shoulders, Be Attracted to Good Grades

By Isabella Ligor, Staff Reporter

Courtesy of CHANGE.ORG

These dress code experiences happen all over the country but are only a huge issue for women. Our generation has made all the wrong things the main focus, especially a school’s dress code.

Let's say it is one of the warmest days of the year and you want to wear something that is appropriate, but also makes you feel good about yourself and keeps you cool throughout the day so you're not sweaty or uncomfortable from the heat.

When you step foot on your campus there are already administrators and a teachers eye-balling you because of how you are dressed, leading you to get in trouble, and forcing you to change into some embarrassing outfit that you obviously got because you were in trouble for dress code.

Female students regularly have to work around and compromise what they are wearing because it “attracts unwanted behavior” by male students. It is unacceptable and women shouldn't feel obligated to wear something they don't want just because men don't know how to control themselves.

On Friday, Oct. 9, a group of boys who attend Nouvelles Frontieres College in Gatineau, Quebec decided to wear skirts as part of a movement to protest against sexist policies and toxic masculinity.

“I knew that it was going to be a big movement, but not that big of a movement,” one of the boys said when one hundred of their fellow classmates ended up arriving at school in skirts.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” another one of the boys said.

Boys at Quebec high schools wore skirts that month to protest the double standard in dress code at schools. Schools around the world should take part in this protest on the double standard issue to show how unfair it is that young girls and women have to dress how men say we should.

Men never have to go through what women have to go through with deciding what is allowed or what does and doesn't attract attention in clothing alongside inappropriate and unwanted comments and cat calling. If young women are a disturbance to learning and everyday life of young men then maybe young men need to learn how to control themselves around beautiful, confident young women because without women being able to wear what they feel good in they will cover up and not see their true potential.

“We are restricted to wear all types of clothes that you see people wear everywhere you go,” Kennedy senior Rebecca Perez said.

We need to change the narrative that the clothes women and young girls choose to wear “distracts” men and young boys as administrators and others say because it's genuinely upsetting to women who try to be body positive and don't get the chance to be.