BRATTLEBORO — The recent dress-code trouble at Brattleboro Union High School (BUHS) is an important story, one playing out in school districts across the nation. A recent New York Times op-ed piece from the West Coast covered similar ground, the tip of the iceberg.
I applaud The Commons for taking it on, because it is a story that really matters - even though now that school is out, it can be easy to forget.
I have some inside information on the issue, since one of my daughter's closest friends was somewhere near the center of the controversy. The moveable feast of teenage girls who sometimes inhabit our home was also involved.
The thing that seems most murky to me is the question of how a protest that began as a sort of ironic nonviolent gesture to wake the BUHS administration up to the flaws in its policy turned into a rumored riot.
The story, as it came to me, is that the initial impulse to protest, in the fashion that Olga Peters' piece had it - a nice bit of ironic theater - was taken over by some students who wanted a more immediate and less thoughtful way of bringing the message home.
In this version, the initial design of the protest, which actually came from a politically savvy circle of friends, got hijacked along the way by some kids who wanted to have more fun than that and did not necessarily understand the principle of ironic nonviolent protest.
Now, my sense is that these savvy girls will keep the issue alive - if only because fashion mores have changed more quickly than the code, and these girls are actually just wearing the clothes you can buy at the mall.
There are not many alternatives. It's almost as if you'd have to have your tops and shorts special-ordered if you wanted to fit the code. My own daughter often carries a sweater with her, just in case she gets caught by the border police.
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The whole issue has been interesting to me in various ways. I've been disturbed by the dress code, and I have wondered how many other parents are, but have stayed quiet like me, because it is their daughter's fight to fight.
Perhaps we have not done a good job of teaching this generation how to fight back against the numerous forms of oppression they face - ironic, since it was our generation who made protest fashionable. Perhaps that it turned out to be merely fashionable for many of us was the problem. I won't exempt myself from that critique.
Another thing that interested me, in this instance, is that it seemed to recapitulate what often happens on the left: Reasonable intellectuals formulate a goal and a design, but it seems too gradual and looks like appeasement to those who carry more anger and aggression and want some action.
Kerensky, then Lenin, then Stalin. Martin Luther King Jr., then Eldridge Cleaver, and then the Panthers. Not that the Panthers were wrong about the problem. But their strategy did not work.
In my time in the 1970s in the anti-nuke movement, the original focus on massive nonviolent protests of Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, with arrests, was taken over by a more powerful and committed splinter group called the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook. Instead of being arrested and clogging the jails, they wanted to battle the police and occupy the building site.
Someday I'll write about it - that was a crazy experience. All these big, radical thugs with gas masks and wire cutters, and the jack-booted state troopers, from every New England state, with tear gas, mace, and clubs. Quite a melee.
Seabrook went into operation a few years later, but some angry young men definitely found some bliss that weekend. I left the movement before the second round.
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My guess is that, given how reasonable the administration of BUHS is, and the school board, we'll see some good changes in the dress code for next year, and that this will be an opportunity for some smart young women to flex their political muscles. I hope so, at least.
BUHS #6 School Board Chair Bob Woodworth indicated that the policy is on the table for review, as it should be. And it is an issue everywhere. I have wondered whether this might be yet another instance where our great state and great local community might take the lead.
You can't really fault the schools. Is it okay to wear bathing trunks or bikinis to class? Where does the line get drawn? Sexist or racist lettering on t-shirts seems simply wrong and easy to ban. I'm not quite as sure about hiked-up boxer shorts with low-hung jeans on males - a look so stupid that it seems to provide its own censure.
Schools with strict dress codes tend to have strong student outcomes-but these are mainly charter or private schools, and they often cherry-pick their students.
My own preference would be that schools help students see that going to school is a sort of job, and that you should dress the way you do when you go to work (unless, of course, if you are a lifeguard).
But I am rapidly becoming an old fogey, or at least rapidly becoming old.
The main thing here, which I feel very strongly about, is that girls are being asked to dress in ways that are less comfortable and fundamentally unnecessary in the hot weather because it makes them distractible to boys. This is just wrong.
I think it is fair to ask that students not wear clothing that is distracting to themselves - it is school, after all. But wearing a tank top and shorts, with maybe a bra strap showing - really?
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The male gaze is so deeply inured in our culture now that it is almost impossible to imagine how to make it go away.
And let's face it: these transgressive forms of dress are meant to attract the male gaze. It is a system, one that goes back to the biology of adolescence and forward to the way that our late postindustrial capitalism uses sex, the sexual allure of young women, and the male gaze to sell everything from toothpaste to cars.
It is easy to criticize the sexualization of our youth by the mass media and the powers of capitalist marketing, and I tend in that direction.
But I also know third-wave feminists, younger women, who would argue that teenagers are already intensely sexual by their nature, and that my concern about the marketing of transgressive forms of dress is simply a kind of sexual suppression and even prurience, a sort of neo-Victorianism. Instead of being victim or captive to the male gaze, they have turned the tables and made the male gaze captive to them.
Let's not forget that the Victorian era in England, which focused so intently on a sort of surface decorum, was a period of massive exploitation of poor women by richer men - a period of broad sexual transgression, in the worst sort of way. Perhaps this cultural turn may presage the potential that America might become a less sickly prurient and sexually repressed society.
The concern for male distractibility seems simply foolish to me, and demeaning to young men. The concern for female vulnerability may be equally so, although in our current ethos, I'm not so sure.
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In any case, there's no question in my mind that we have to stop this business of using rulers to see if a young woman's shorts are too short, and that thing about bra straps is simply weird - another version of the way some municipalities ban breast feeding in public.
I feel sympathy for the schools. I've served my time as an academic administrator, and I know that no good deed ever goes unpunished. I trust the BUHS administration and the school board to do the right thing. It seems like a good moment to revisit the policy.
And I also want my daughter to feel free to wear whatever feels comfortable on a hot day, alluring as it may be.
She has her own boundaries, too. Maybe we should start trusting our smart young women more, and do a better job of teaching our young men about what it means to be a man rather than a boy.