Every so often, usually in a period of warm weather, an email conversation surfaces among the staff about what students are wearing, or not wearing, or what body parts are showing.

Imagine our awkwardness: Many of us feel uncomfortable with students’ body parts hanging out in our classrooms but feel even more uncomfortable approaching students about it.

We love our culture of student freedom and self-expression. We don’t really have a shared practice of requiring or prohibiting certain kinds of dress. But aren’t there some lines we should be drawing?

Of course, we are mostly talking about girls’ body parts here (although a few years ago when the boys’ varsity crew team showed up in their pink skin tight racing spandex, that definitely inspired some con- sternation). The way I see it, there are three factors at work here.

The first I call the professional-ish factor. Just as different kinds of language are appropriate in different settings, the same is true with dress. I know some of you wear pajamas to school sometimes, but, in general, school approximates a work setting rather than a home, beach, mall or nightclub setting.

I’m completely comfortable with the grown-ups in the community declaring that appropriate dress means professional-ish dress, because this is an institution explicitly dedicated to academic, professional-ish stuff.

This means we should cover up undergarments and most body parts, particularly ones that are sexualized in our culture. I personally also try not to wear my most raggedy stuff.

The professional factor is related to the distraction factor. Let’s face it, the real issue here is sex.

Of course, if you wear T-shirts advertising alcohol brands or other mind-altering substances, teachers should call you out on it. Just don’t do that. But where it gets more difficult is the sex part.

You all are adolescents and hopefully your sexuality, whatever that means for you, is awakening in a safe and healthy way. It’s also okay if you’re not exploring that part of you yet.

The point is, you all have hormones and they are bouncing around the hallways and classrooms, so it would help us all better focus on our professional-ish stuff if we made this place slightly less distracting.

However, savvy adolescents have asked the very excellent question: why it is that female body parts are the ones mostly in question here? And why should we women have the burden of shielding whoever might be attracted to those body parts from their own hormones and distractedness? Why is it somehow our fault if others get offended/distracted/attracted, and why is it our responsibility to cover up?

This brings me to the complicated-gender-rules-in-our-society factor. It’s not cool that women get blamed for attracting unwanted attention and violence against us. It’s cool for young women to feel comfortable and at home in their bodies and sexuality. I get the argument that gender-flavored dress codes can be considered sexist.

But I think the story of sexism doesn’t end here.

Why do we define women’s attractiveness in the ways that we do? Why is it so important for young women to worry about attractiveness anyway? And why is it that women are supposed to show body parts or undergarments in order to be attractive to men?

I don’t quite buy the argument that when young women display their bodies it’s only about their own empowerment. Because why is women’s power defined as sexual in the first place?

Here, it helps to refer to our culture’s long history of limiting women’s power to the realms of sex and the home.

I have nothing against celebrating female sexual power as positive, but I don’t think that by itself is enough to challenge the roots of sexism or rape culture.

Instead, I’d rather we all work to expand our notions of female power to include intellectual, economic, political and artistic empowerment. And, while we’re at it, let’s expand our notions of masculinity to include more than athleticism, hyper-sexuality and emotional cluelessness- I dare say those gender rules are just as limiting and inaccurate.

Obviously, we have made great strides in this realm. No one goes around Brookline telling young women they have to be homemakers. But the sort of sexism that causes us to limit how we see women and women’s potential power is not so easily dismissed.

I have a seven-year-old daughter who is fierce and feisty and creative. But already she’s been swallowed up by Disney princess and Barbie culture. What she wants to be when she grows up is beautiful.

Isn’t that sad? She’s already coming to believe that the most important thing about her is how she looks. No one is telling her overtly that her surest ticket to feeling powerful and good about herself is the appearance of her body, but she’s picking up those messages nonetheless.

I don’t believe we are free of those messages in high school either. Our pop culture relentlessly promotes a certain kind of sexual expression as the key to power and happiness, and I do believe that whether or not we want them to, those messages can limit how (heterosexual) boys see girls, and yes, how girls see themselves and their options for feeling powerful.

I want school to be a place where my daughter and all women can be relatively free of the pressure to display themselves that way, so we can concentrate on developing other parts of ourselves and cultivating other kinds of power.

Ladies, feel free to dress however you want after school, on the weekend, on the street. Gentlemen, if you want your boxers to hang out your rear outside of school, I’m not going to be offended even if I don’t particularly enjoy the view.

But in school, I ask that we remember that this is a professional-ish environment in which we aim to develop our intellects, creativity and critical thinking first and foremost, as free of distraction and limiting cultural pressures as possible.

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