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link to my dms and emails to influencers i chose, i picked these ones because they are both very positive and have very feminist views which goes with my theme

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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link to my dress code survey

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a ted talk about rape culture, this goes with my topic because it shows how society makes it a womans problem.

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A Life Of Rape Culture | Brynne Thomas | TEDxYouth@TCS

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a documentary about school dress codes and how they cause shame and self esteem issues to girls.

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Shame: A Documentary on School Dress Code

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Across the country, young girls are being told what not to wear because it might be a “distraction” for boys, or because adults decide it makes them look “inappropriate.”
I like this quote because it shows how they make it a girls fault

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Last month, a New Jersey middle school banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to prom. Administrators claimed that the dresses were "distracting" - though they refused to specify exactly how or why. Parents reacted strongly to the rule; some supported the dress code while others deemed it "slut-shaming." On Friday, the school compromised by allowing girls to wear single-strap or see-through-strap dresses.

This is no isolated incident in the United States. Across the country, young girls are being told what not to wear because it might be a "distraction" for boys, or because adults decide it makes them look "inappropriate." At its core, every incident has a common thread: Putting the onus on young women to prevent from being ogled or objectified, instead of teaching those responsible to learn to respect a woman's body. Here are five other recent examples:

1. A middle school in California banned tight pants. At the beginning of last month, a middle school in Northern California began telling girls to avoid wearing pants that are "too tight" because it " distracts the boys." At a mandatory assembly for just the female students, the middle school girls were told that they're no longer allowed to wear leggings or yoga pants. "We didn't think it was fair how we have all these restrictions on our clothing while boys didn't have to sit through [the assembly] at all," one student told local press. Some parents also complained, leading the school's assistant principal to record a voicemail explaining the new policy. "The guiding principle in all dress codes is that the manner in which students dress does not become a distraction in the learning environment," the message said.

2. A high school principal in Minnesota emailed parents to ask them to cover up their daughters. A principal in Minnetonka, MN recently wrote an email telling parents to stop letting their daughters wear leggings or yoga pants to school. He says the tight-fitting pants are fine with longer shirts but, when worn with a shorter top, a girl's "backside" can be "too closely defined." The big risk of having a defined backside, he thinks, is that it can " be highly distracting for other students."

3. Two girls in Ohio were turned away from their prom for being "improperly dressed." Laneisha Williams and Nyasia Mitchell were barred from prom this spring for wearing dresses that administrators considered "too revealing." The girls say that they didn't believe they were violating a dress code that said dresses couldn't be too short or show too much cleavage. But one administrator told local news that the high school girls were only allowed to wear dresses that had " no curvature of their breasts showing."

4. A kindergarten student in Georgia was forced to change her "short" skirt because it was a "distraction to other students." It's hard to imagine that a kindergartener's outfit could be "a distraction to other students," but a mother in Georgia told locals news there that her daughter had been outfitted in someone else's pants - without parental permission - after the principal deemed the skirt the young girl was wearing too short." The girl had apparently wore the skirt, and accompanying leggings, just one week before without incident.

5. Forty high school girls were sent home from a winter dance in California after "degrading" clothing inspections "bordering on sexual harassment." A school board member's daughter was among the 40 girls turned away from Capistrano Valley High's February dance for wearing dresses that either exposed their midriffs or were cut too low. Before the dance, girls were apparently required to flap their arms up and down and turn around for male administrators' inspection. The school issues image guidelines for appropriate dress on its website - though the images were nearly all of women, and the only male image depicted proper attire. One girl alleges that the principal told her, "Not all dresses look good on certain body shapes." A grandmother of one of the girls who was turned away from the dance also said that a teacher remarked about her granddaughter, "What mother would allow her daughter to wear a dress like that?" Apparently the school did receive some praise, though, from the parents of two male students.

When most Americans think about "rape culture," they may think about the Steubenville boys' defense arguing that an unconscious girl consented to her sexual assault because she "didn't say no," the school administrators who choose to protect their star athletes over those boys' rape victims, or the bullying that led multiple victims of sexual assault to take their own lives. While those incidences of victim-blaming are certainly symptoms of a deeply-rooted rape culture in this country, they're not the only examples of this dynamic at play. Rape culture is also evident in the attitudes that lead school administrators to treat young girls' bodies as inherently "distracting" to the boys who simply can't control themselves. That approach to gender roles simply encourages our youth to assume that sexual crimes must have something to do with women's "suggestive" clothes or behavior, rather than teaching them that every individual is responsible for respecting others' bodily autonomy.

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How 'Slut Shaming' Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country

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Last month, a New Jersey middle school banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to prom. Administrators claimed that the dresses were "distracting" - though they refused to specify exactly how or why. Parents reacted strongly to the rule; some supported the dress code while others deemed it "slut-shaming."

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double tap for the link, its a pdf about school dress codes causing girls to change because they distract boys

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"Dress codes are a stand-in for all the ways girls feel objectified, sexualized, unheard, treated as second-class citizens by adults in authority — all the sexist, racist, classist, homophobic hostilities they experience."

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"Ugh, Dress Codes!" The title of one of 15-year-old Izzy Labbe's SPARK Movement blog posts encapsulates what I've heard so many girls say they feel about their middle and high school dress codes.

Izzy wrote her blog after years of frustration, beginning in early middle school when she began to notice girls' bodies become objects of adult interest and surveillance. She honed her critique as part of SPARK Movement, an intergenerational girl-fueled activist project I co-founded in 2010. In her central Maine high school, Izzy and her friend Hannah formed the school's first-ever Feminist Club. On the top of their list was a challenge to the terms of a dress code that penalized girls for wearing shorts and spaghetti-strap tops. After reasoned conversation with administrators failed, club members quietly posted dozens of 8.5 x 11" sheets of white paper with large black print on school bulletin boards: "Instead of publicly shaming girls for wearing shorts on an 80-degree day, you should teach teachers and male students to not overly sexualize a normal body part to the point where they apparently can't function in daily life."

Izzy is now a first-year college student, but just this spring another Maine girl, 6th grader Molly Neuner, made national news for challenging her school's dress code. Like so many before her, she joined a coalition of girls across the country using the Twitter hashtag #iammorethanadistraction. Reading her story, two things strike me: This issue is not going away and most adults don't see the gift the issue offers.

Protests against dress codes get to the very heart of what it means to be an adolescent girl. It's more than a generational claim to personal identity. Dress codes are a stand-in for all the ways girls feel objectified, sexualized, unheard, treated as second-class citizens by adults in authority - all the sexist, racist, classist, homophobic hostilities they experience. When girls push back on dress codes they are demanding to be heard, seen, and respected. This means it's a moment primed for intergenerational engagement and education.

But too often, only two types of adults appear: administrators under fire for defending their schools' policies and moms complaining about the shaming their daughters have endured or the school days they've missed for dress code violations. Where are the teachers who see the possibility for meaningful conversations about the development of institutional policies, about freedom of speech and choice, about democracy? How about those who see the opportunity to encourage critical thinking about cultural differences or the chance to examine the impact of media and pop culture on gender identity or the influence of rampant marketing and consumerism?

In response to this vacuum of adult engagement, girls are having these conversations without us. Most aren't asking schools to eliminate dress codes altogether. They simply want policies that are relevant to their lives, policies that account for changes in clothing styles, that value identity development, gender expression, and cultural diversity. And they want and expect to be consulted.

They also say they want policies that are consistent and fairly applied. One study from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, for example, indicates teachers are more likely to discipline girls of color for minor offenses like dress code policy violations and are more likely to give them harsher punishments. Dress code policies can become just another example of a hostile school experience for girls of color, for trans girls, for girls living in poverty. Teachers who have not addressed their own unconscious biases (e.g., their tendency to judge a girl's character by how she dresses), who have not confronted their internalized sexism or racism, who struggle with students who challenge the gender binary, cannot apply dress codes fairly. The best way to ensure a policy is applied fairly is diversity and bias prevention training for teachers and administrators.

It also helps to spend some time with students who have struggled with school dress codes and who think critically about bias, prejudice, and injustice. Here are a few things I've learned from listening to what girls say that make for a good dress code policy:

1. "Each dress code rule must have an explanation," Ejin Jeong writes in a 2015 blog post for SPARK Movement. "So much of the discontent with dress codes is that students often don't understand why the rules are in place." As a result, she says, dress codes "often feel arbitrary and unfair." Bex Dudley, who blogs for Powered by Girl, tells me her school "tried to enforce 'no brightly colored bras,' when the material of the school uniform meant bras were visible. They were literally shaming girls for an 'issue' that they'd created."

2. A good policy applies to everyone; there are no gender-specific rules, no double standards. If girls can't wear tank tops, neither can boys; if girls can't show collarbones, neither can boys. In fact, girls want policies that have nothing to do with gender. "Have a plan for trans students without them having to ask for it!!" Bex exclaims. A transgender-friendly policy means anyone can wear a dress or a suit or earrings or makeup; anyone can wear their hair long or short. Formulated this way, a dress code can do more than prohibit; it can affirm and protect those who are already vulnerable, including transgender students and those who dress outside the gender binary.

3. A good dress code is attuned to cultural and religious differences and allows students to do their hair (Afro, dreadlocks) and wear clothing (hijab, turban, yarmulke) that reflect these differences. And they include rules that protect students from those who appropriate or insult their religion or culture through clothing choices.

4. A good policy is practical. It "gives some room for flexibility and expression," Bex says, "like painted nails and colored hair." And it maximizes student comfort. It accounts for changes in weather, allowing for seasonable clothing - e.g., shorts, sundresses, and tank tops when the temperature rises.

5. Girls say they want policies that do not contribute to sexual objectification by making reference to their body parts or give adults the discretion to use dress code rules to body-shame. Izzy notices that teachers target girls with "curvier figures. . . . [G]irls aren't getting in trouble for the length of their shorts," she writes. "They're getting in trouble for the shape of their bodies" and "it sounds like we're blaming girls for other people's negative reactions to their bodies. That's misogyny! And it's a problem when it enters classrooms and girls' bodies are treated - by the staff, by boys, and by each other - as dirty, ugly objects that must be covered."

6. A well-crafted policy makes boys accountable for their behavior. Girls want school dress codes that make it very clear they are not responsible for how boys view them and that their clothing choices are not responsible for boys' inability to focus or learn. Such assumptions excuse unwanted attention and harassment. It's a short leap to blaming victims of sexual assault. "Can we throw the phrase 'provocative clothing' out the window, please?" Izzy asks. "Saying that clothing is provocative insinuates that it provokes sexual assault or rape or harassment, which is totally false. Harassers harass and abusers abuse regardless of clothing choices." Instead of policing what girls wear, girls say they want schools to actively teach boys to respect girls and teach everyone to respect transgender students and those who are gender nonconforming.

7. Good dress code policies give boys credit for being more than the sum of their hormones. When girls' bodies are framed as "distractions" to boys, Gabby C. writes in a 2016 blog post for the FBomb, "they not only strip girls of their sense of self-respect and free-expression, but demean boys as incapable of controlling their basic urges."

8. A good policy clearly prohibits public shaming, which means adults don't make girls kneel in front of classmates to assess skirt length or pull out a measuring tape in public to prove a strap is too narrow. Administrators don't make an example of those who violate the dress code by forcing them to wear baggy T-shirts emblazoned with "dress code violator" like a scarlet letter. Correcting and shaming are not the same thing.

9. A good dress code policy addresses the realities of poverty and social class. Some students wear what they can afford and what's available to them. A short skirt or tight top are not necessarily attempts to ignore school rules. Dress codes can become a way to target and shame students already struggling with hypervisibility that comes with not wearing the latest styles or the most popular brands, much less clothing that fits well.

10. A good policy does not send those who violate the rules home from school. There is no logic to a policy that takes away a girl's right to education because her skirt is too short. "What's more distracting, my shoulders or the fact that I just missed an entire history lesson?" Ejin asks.

In truth, most everything useful I've learned about girls I've learned from girls. On the surface, this isn't an especially profound statement. But as I look around at the ways adults talk about girls, dismiss what girls know, blame them for the symptoms of societal injustice in all its intersectional forms, create barriers for some and soft landings for others in the guise of concern and protection - I think it's radical to listen to girls and trust them as the experts on their own experience.

However well-intentioned, dress codes are a perfect example of an educational policy that puts compliance before learning; pressures and demands before support; a top-down bureaucratic solution created by adults at the expense of the time and effort it takes to really listen to and learn from students. And if girls are not heard, we should encourage them to advocate for their right to protest if need be. We can't say we want girls to have high self-esteem, to take risks, to lead, and then dismiss or punish them when they take this issue on.

With dress codes, we can see up close and personal what it means for girls to struggle in ways that release imagination and hope for something new. The safe and affirming spaces we offer, the questions we pose, the options we create together with students, are catalysts to critical consciousness, to what Maxine Greene calls "wide-awakeness," and to the possibility that their passionate and forceful reactions to unfairness and hurt will unfold in ways that better their lives going forward.

As Gabby writes for the FBomb, "Girls who take issue with these rules aren't blindly rebelling, but truly advocating for their right to be heard as sentient subjects rather than passive objects."

It's time we listened. ◼

References

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From Rethinking Schools: Girls Against Dress Codes

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"Ugh, Dress Codes!" The title of one of 15-year-old Izzy Labbe's SPARK Movement blog posts encapsulates what I've heard so many girls say they feel about their middle and high school dress codes. Izzy wrote her blog after years of frustration, beginning in early middle school when she began to notice girls' bodies become objects of adult interest and surveillance.

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I liked this source because they included photos of the dress code incidents.

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18 times students and parents said school dress codes went too far

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Here are 18 times students got in trouble for what they were wearing to school — and how they and their parents took a stand.

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puts burdens on girls to make themselves cover up for boys saying that its their fault and they have to change it

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While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite. In the past year, schools all over the country made national news for the ways they enforce their dress code- asking a student to put duct tape over the holes in her jeans, suspending a student for a skirt that was too short, or sending a student to the office for not wearing a bra -all of which take the focus off learning and place it on girls' bodies.

At East Longmeadow High School, Massachusetts, six out of the nine dress code regulations targeted female students. The dress code had not been updated since the 1990s. "It was time for us to revisit some of the language," principal Gina Flanagan said.

Many school dress codes use gendered language, such as "girls must not wear spaghetti straps or show cleavage." The reasoning? These things are distracting to other students, particularly males. Girlhood expert Shauna Pomerantz of Brock University says that "dress coding" students for being distracting is a form of victim-blaming.

"It's saying the male response is your fault. Your body is causing negativity," explains Pomerantz. Sexist rules also set a precedent for men, she adds. "It is offensive to men. It suggests they don't have the ability to talk to a female student without going wild."

Marci Kutzer, a fourth-grade teacher at Bertha Ronzone Elementary in Las Vegas, Nevada, says that, while school boards couch dress codes as preparing students for the workplace and adult life, their real purpose is to prevent "distractions."

Kutzer says that sends a powerful message: "A boy's education can be compromised by your gender. Please do what you can to neutralize it." This clearly puts a burden on female students.

Another notorious dress code rule is the "finger-tip policy." Female students must wear skirts or shorts that go past their fingertips. While this seems straightforward, students and parents report that for some, it's impossible to find clothing that complies with the rule.

In Duval County, Florida, Nikki Belsham says that she's been struggling with this rule since she was in school, and now her daughter is facing the same dilemma.

Shopping for her daughter is difficult; while Belsham can find appropriate clothing at the mall, it doesn't pass the test. This is a common problem.

"Take a tall, skinny 12 year old girl-her shorts may not pass this finger length test and would be considered inappropriate for school, even though her butt is covered and the shorts are relatively long," she explains.

Belsham also says that administration won't enforce the rule with boys. "Not one person in administration would even look at or question the length of a boy's shorts."

'White Male Default'

Kutzer says that she will only "dress code" students if their clothing is clearly so tight it is uncomfortable. Her school follows "standard school attire," (SSA) so students wear uniforms. On laundry day, however, some students show up without. Other student's families can't afford to keep up with their growing children, so their uniforms are ill-fitting.

"We are told by our administrators to send non-compliance issues to the office, but I only refer kids who are clearly wearing too tight or uncomfortable clothing, and I send them to the nurse, who keeps a stash of extra clothing for this type of situation," explains Kutzer.

The high school attended by her daughter, however, uses a dress code policy rather than the SSA. Kutzer noticed that it essentially targets female and minority students-the focus being on on parts of the female anatomy, like backs, shoulders, and legs.

"Targeting styles of clothing that are mostly associated with a particular minority group is discriminatory. When styles such as 'sagging pants' are the issue, we are putting a burden predominantly on black males," says Kutzer.

She calls this the "white male default," a common trend for school dress codes. "Dressing as most white young men do seems to be what is encouraged.'

In 17-year-old Maddie Reeser's Baltimore City public school, it's the Black girls at her school who are the most frequently dress coded-a double discrimination. "My white friends rarely get sent to the office, but my Black friends do quite often," says Reeser.

Another student said she brought up this issue to a male administrator, who told her it was "because white girls don't have as much to show." The student says this comment made her feel uncomfortable, let along failing to address the inequality.

Despite the fact that Reeser's school has a uniform, she and her peers still faced the same issues that Belsham described at her Duval County school. "The rule should be based on the clothes, not how they fit, because it's different for each person," says Belsham.

Despite the rules being the same for every girl, teachers end up enforcing the rules more strictly with Black females, and in a way that is humiliating.

Many dress codes can cause black students to fall behind academically, according to a 2018 National Women's Law Center study. Looking at public schools in the District of Columbia, the report found that three in four D.C. public high school dress codes say students can be pulled out of class or school for dress code violations.

"It's outrageous that girls are losing critical class time simply for what they are wearing," said NWLC Education Fellow and report co-author, Kayla Patrick. "This sends a disturbing message to all students: What a girl looks like is more important than what she learns and thinks. No girl should ever have to forfeit her education because her shirt is the wrong color or she has a hole in her jeans."

Making All Students Feel Comfortable

East Longmeadow principal Flanagan said she's tried to target inequalities at her own school by creating a gender-neutral dress code, and by involving students in the dress code process. "Instead of saying no low cut shirts or cleavage, the dress code says all private parts must be covered at all times," she says.

Pomerantz recommends giving students lots of leeway to express themselves with fashion. If something truly crosses the line, there's a way to tell them, without enforcing victim-blaming.

"A question you can ask is 'What is it about dressing this way that's so important to you?'" Pomerantz recommends.

Many schools are looking into updating their dress code policies by making them more gender neutral, gathering student input and changing the wording-just taking the blame off females for "distracting" male students. Kutzer says the SSA at her school promotes equality fairly successfully-at least at the fourth-grade level. The districts hasn't yet introduced the SSA at the high school level.

"We want our kids to feel comfortable when they come to school," says Flanagan. "Who knows? Five or ten years from now we may have to update again to fit the changing times."

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When School Dress Codes Discriminate | NEA

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While a dress code is supposed to make the school environment more conducive to learning, it frequently does the opposite.

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"Self-objectification, to the APA, occurs when girls “learn to think of and treat their own bodies as objects of others’ desire.”

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a passion project by Katie about how dress codes can do more harm then good and cause girls to feel bad about themselves.