The podcast really made me stop and think about a lot of common practices in the United States. I always thought it was dumb that girls could not wear tank tops in school. I remember growing up, my parents always taught me that I should take pride in and love my body — I was very lucky to grow up in an extremely accepting household. The only caveat was that there were rules to when I could do this. It was not appropriate to wear my summer shorts and tank tops to school or to my grandfather’s house because it was \u201cinappropriate\u201d, even when it was 90 degrees out. I never quite got this because I did not understand why it was okay to wear some clothes to some places but not others, especially as a little girl. Then I grew up and started to hear stories about male teachers and students getting \u201cdistracted\u201d by females’ clothing choices. While I guess I can kind of understand the hormone-fueled, puberty mayhem of middle school making it harder for boys to concentrate in general, I still don\u2019t get why some teachers, the people you trust your kids to spend hours a day with, are being protected because they are distracted by a young woman\u2019s shoulders. I think it is frankly disgusting and not something we should accept as a society.
\nFurther, the assumptions we make about other people and their bodies\/choices are archaic. I understand that there is a gap in knowledge between every person as we are always dealing with instances of asymmetric information — people will only know what they know if they never try to educate themselves or accept education from others. This being said, we cannot accept people who refuse to try and be better. Just because people grew up with a different understanding of normal does not mean we should allow them to use it to hurt others. We have so much information now and yet, not that much has changed. I know that we are slow to learn and evolve, but I feel like we could speed up the process if we stopped protecting the people who are actively hurting others. I have always had a sharp tongue when it came to people in my life that perpetrated assumptions of racism, misogyny, etc. While that has gotten me into some trouble and some awkward family dinners, I don\u2019t regret what I say to those that are being terrible people. Yes, it probably should have been done with a little more class, but I am sick of excusing people because \u201cthat\u2019s just what they know\u201d. I am grateful to know more and grow up in a more accepting time but that also means that things will change yet again and that I will never be able to stop learning or bettering myself. These baseless assumptions once had meaning, right or wrong, but if we know they are wrong, why do we still accept them? We all have work to do to educate and understand our biases but the weight should be on the people who are perpetuating this, from microaggressions to straight-up bigotry, because if we accept the idea that \u201cI personally wouldn\u2019t do that but they grew up in a different time\u201d, we will never get anywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The podcast really made me stop and think about a lot of common practices in the United States. I always thought it was dumb that girls could not wear tank tops in school. I remember growing up, my parents always taught me that I should take pride in and love my body — I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6452,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450\/revisions\/6452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}