Non uniform at school - provocative clothing.

[MotherMorph]

I'm probably really late to the party about this and has been discussed a million times before.
I was discussing with a friend the other day how only womens clothing is really ever described as provocative/suggestive. "They were dressed like a slut etc" I've literally never seen anything written about how a males clothing could be overtly sexual or provocative. It made me wonder why there always eems to be some responsibility on woman (and the way they dress) for how how men behave.
Then recently on a local fb page someone started a discussion about 6th form dress codes and non uniform policies at school. The list of what girls cant wear is as long as your arm. What cant boys wear? Ripped jeans. That's about it. (In 6th form to be fair, they are expected to wear suits)
The argument was brought up about hormones and whether girls would dress provocatively. I realise that they would need some boundaries, but my DD has "cropped" tshirts that finish on her belly button, it's not the same as wearing a triangle bikini. No strappy tops, vests, cropped tshirts, off the shoulder, cold shoulder, short shorts, ripped jeans etc. There is not a lot in her wardrobe that isnt in this list and yet she dresses quite conservatively!! (This is for non uniform)
In 6th form they must also wear suits or business like clothes. But there are 100 rules about that as well.

I think it's naive if people want to pretend that their choices are made in a vacuum free from all of these influences.

Of course.

But knowing why men are leering at girls in short skirts doesn't excuse their behaviour.

But knowing why men are leering at girls in short skirts doesn't excuse their behaviour
I've not excused their behaviour.

I still think it's worth talking to teens about socialisation and advertising and encourage them to question why they're making certain decisions.

For example, there's no need for any students to have their arse on show, their midriff out, their chest out. There's a question then as to why girls' fashion more than boys seems to be designed to expose more flesh. And it's worth questioning why disproportionately schools have to make rules to respond to the way some girls dress for school. It's because they're continually told that this is what's attractive, more invidiously continually bombarded with the idea that dressing in this way is empowerment (and just happens to be the very thing that men have been pushing for decades).
We could say 'you do you and if anyone has an issue with students having bums/chests/midriffs out then turn it around and suggest they are responsible for male actions' or we could say there's no reason for any students to be dressing with that much exposed and if it's such a big issue where girls feel they must have their crop tops and hot pants start to unpick the issues as to why girls seem to disproportionately want to show up to school with substantially more bare skin than their male peers.

**Insidiously

I tell my girls that wearing certain things is likely to encourage certain behaviours from men. But I also tell them this is down to the men involved and they can wear what they like. We talk a lot about fashion/sexualisation of women.
There is nothing inherently sexy about most body parts (genitalia excluded I guess) and it's not down to girls that the patriarchy has sexualised them.

The victorians were covered up and the men found a flash of ankle scandalous and provocative. Telling females to change their clothing choices to avoid being sexualised has precisely no impact because the patriarchy will just sexualised them for something else.

We need to deal with the root cause- which is to address a society that sees women as less than human, sex objects.

We do that by creating and enforcing expectations on boys and men not to treat girls as sex objects, regardless of what they look like or wear.

Unfortunately at the moment we have a society which is saturated in porn and where women can be raped with impunity. Telling girls not to wear short shorts is not any kind of solution to that problem.

@LonginesPrime

Really, sexualisation of the female form is sort of feminism 101. I get that some people think it's not important but it shouldn't be surprising that people have an issue with it

Please educate us, Goosefoot - where are we going wrong in thinking that women shouldn't be held responsible for men's behaviour toward them?

You could try reading some of the foundational second wave feminist texts if you feel all at sea.

I think you are pretty determined to only see this as being about girls being responsible for men's response.

I've been talking pretty exclusively about society and the fashion industry's sexualisation and objectification of the female body.

People who benefit from women being seen and treated as objects are the ones pushing this, and their victims in these cases are the young women that buy into it and face the consequences of that - not just directly but in terms of the larger picture of how women are placed in society in the law etc - and their victims are also the young men who are conditioned to see this as normal.

People talk here pretty disparagingly about people/men who take a choice feminism approach to porn and sex work. Where do you think they learn that it is ok for women to choose sexual objectification, that some of them just like that, that they do it for their own selves, that it is empowering? That it would be wrong to try and question that?

As for the response of men - pretty much everyone has a sexual response. The fashion industry deliberately produces products meant to trigger it. It really says nothing bad about men that they do so effectively, it's a billion dollar industry and they are good at what they do. Obviously they need to control their urges like anyone else, but it's pretty unfair to insist they can somehow not notice what the products are designed to make them notice. And that will affect them, that's what happens when we are exposed to things over time.

The other point is we aren't talking about laws around what women wear. It's schools, mostly filled with minors, and schools have a duty of care as far as the environment the provide for all the students.

I've been talking pretty exclusively about society and the fashion industry's sexualisation and objectification of the female body.

People who benefit from women being seen and treated as objects are the ones pushing this

As for the response of men - pretty much everyone has a sexual response. The fashion industry deliberately produces products meant to trigger it. It really says nothing bad about men that they do so effectively

Goosefoot, the reason we will never agree on this is because we fundamentally disagree as to whether structural oppression exists in any form. We've discussed it on other threads in the context of race and homophobia also, so I'm not even going to try to convince you here!

It's great that we both agree that the sexual objectification of women is harmful and that sexism is damaging for everyone.

It's just that we disagree on the root cause of the problem. My view is that we are never going to be able to identify a single tangible culprit for the sex-based oppression women face. It's not Mr Moneybags at the top of the fashion industry or Evil McGreedy and his publishing empire - removing them will not solve the problem as the patriarchy is bigger than all of them.

I know you don't agree and you absolutely don't have to. I do wonder if you might find the notion of structural oppression unpalatable because you're viewing it in terms of evil oppressor and innocent victim, though. For the record, I don't think that members of a dominant class (men, for example) are inherently evil or malicious by virtue of being members of that class, and I believe that most people want no part in the oppression of others. It's just that it's sometimes hard for individuals to see everything that's going on around them because of where they're standing.

The fashion industry only benefits from the sexual objectification of women to the extent women want to buy clothes that make them sexually attractive. The fashion industry didn't mastermind the whole of the patriarchy.