In the third podcast, Dr. Bezio discusses assumptions. When she talks about clothing restrictions on women, it made me think of a time in high school when a friend of mine had to have her mom bring her a sweatshirt because her off-the-shoulder top was deemed inappropriate by the librarian. The next day, all of our friends and even people we weren’t that close with all wore off the shoulder tops because we all thought it was ridiculous that she got into trouble in the first place. I remember walking into the library that day and being asked by the librarian “aren’t you cold?” It felt so incredible to look her in the eye and say, “nope”. There was a huge uproar among the student body about the fact that shoulders were deemed distracting. Could our male classmates or teachers not focus because they could see our shoulders? We all thought it was ridiculous the way they were making it our fault that the men in our high school were creepy. Like Dr. Bezio mentions, it has often been put on the shoulders of women to make sure that they do not cause a distraction, as opposed to men learning how to treat women properly. She takes it a step further though and brings up a great point about our society I have not thought of before. That is that this is kind of behavior is what feeds into victim-blaming.
Critical Thinking
I remember so many instances of these ridiculous dress code violations in high school. These decisions by school administration have only gone to show that they in many cases prioritize male learning over female learning as they would rather girls go home or leave class to change than sit in class in perfectly acceptable clothes while boys supposedly get distracted. I completely agree that this certainly feeds into victim-blaming and does so at an early age.
While I was never specifically told that any of my clothing was inappropriate at school, in my blog post I similarly discussed how I was told to regulate my clothing for the benefit of males who could be distracted. I also agree that by placing the burden on females to not dress “distracting” it creates an idea of victim blame that is very wrong. Men in these scenarios need to take responsibility and learn how to control themselves so women are allowed to express themselves freely.
This also reminds me of a section of the podcast that really stuck out to me. Bezio discussed that we have these rules and presumptions about how girls should dress based on larger cultural assumptions. We don’t ask women to cover up themselves for their sake in anyway, but it is because we just assume that men can’t control themselves. As a society, we uphold the behavior of certain groups and people and then just adjust everyone else around them.