More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Slut-shaming has become more rampant and acceptable than ever before in our surveillance-saturated culture. Lacking privacy, we are denied dignity.
By normalizing the behavior of pre-adolescent girls obsessed with sexuality that they don’t yet comprehend, Are You There God? is an excellent reminder that girls—like all of us—need space to act foolishly, sometimes cruelly and then grow up—without being treated like a sexual object and without the whole world knowing all about it.
School dress codes are agents of slut-shaming, driven by the belief that girls who don’t cover up are deviant and distracting. But the one exciting upside is that students are so disgusted and outraged by these sexist, racist regulations that they are galvanized to become feminist activists.
“The administration had been looking at my photo, and what they saw was my chest. It was concerning to me that they were basically viewing us just as bodies that were distracting. They were sexualizing us even though we’re still children.”
The Florida school district that doctored yearbook photos of girls without consent last spring by covering their cleavage has pledged to do better. Other school districts must learn from their successes and failures.
Strict, gendered dress codes teach that someone with power can, should and will control the choices girls may make about their bodies and sexuality. The best way to reduce sexual harassment and assault is to do the opposite: Let girls have autonomy over their appearance, and demonstrate that no one should ever get to sexualize anyone else without their consent.
Some schools already have banned students from wearing pajamas during remote learning. And dress-coding targets girls and women of color more than others.
Rather than disrupt dress-coding, the pandemic exposes who gets to be comfortable and what “comfort” means.
