Check out our Storify about dress code at the high school: https://storify.com/SagamoreBHS/dress-code-at-the-high-school
I was a stripper this Halloween. I wore a bright green, sparkly vest. It was tight and short and showed a little stomach. It accentuated my chest, revealing enough to entice customers. I wore tight black leggings: like dress pants, but better on the butt.
Some people may say that’s not too out of the ordinary, but others have issues with that costume. Maybe they think it is bad to represent a profession they deem unrespectable. Maybe they think it is shameful that someone would show so much skin at school. Maybe they think it is distracting to other students. Maybe they see Halloween as the wrong day to make a statement.
I was not the only person that day who wore a sexual costume. The number of things that have the word “sexy” is deplorable. Sexy Santa, sexy ebola containment suit, sexy you name it, it’s probably been brought to that level.
Although I may have not been the only one in a sexy costume, I was among a minority. I was male. I still am actually, but I was one of the few men that day wearing a revealing costume.
Normally, when a sexy costume is put on display, people get offended. People say it’s distracting that she’s wearing such a short skirt or that it’s unprofessional to have so much chest showing. Often, even on normal days, girls are called out in public by people who have something to say about how they are showing their bodies. This is purported to be a dress code.
My statement, and experiment, was to see if I would get “dress coded” for wearing something which would have gotten a girl sent home. I wasn’t.
Teachers laughed and joked about what I was wearing. I walked through the hallways and talked to teachers. I even walked into the middle of the cafeteria and made a scene, playing “Careless Whisper’ in the style of the sexy sax man. Yet no one said anything to me about my clothing.
I was never told I was being distracting. In fact, it wasn’t until after school that I even heard that I might have made one of my teachers uncomfortable, and that my director told me that I should put on more clothes. It is clear that, were I female, I wouldn’t have made it through a class without a teacher talking to me about my dress.
It all comes back to the idea that when women dress up they look like sluts, but when men dress nicely they look sexy. So it is not okay for a woman to dress provocatively, yet when a man does, it’s so abnormal that it becomes a joke.
This double standard is perpetuating a gender binary and institutionalized sexism. My statement was an attempt to show that things like our dress code can reinforce the obnoxious and pointless divide we have created between the sexes.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE SUH
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