Tag: kilts

Skirts and gender norms: a look back and a look ahead

Given the recent heat wave in Houston, I decided to look back and see if I could find a fitting post from the past to do a retrospective one. And I think I found it, this little gem from 2017: Skirting the issue: Boys wear skirts to school to protest dubious dress code.

I re-read this post and I recognize the genius of these boys over in Exeter (on the southern tip of England in the UK, around 170 miles/280 km or roughly a 3½ hour drive from London). It’s a similar situation for the Chiltern Edge Secondary School in Oxfordshire (about 65 miles/105 km northwest of London or a 1½ hour drive). Per a story on Yahoo News (among other places):

As a consequence to the ‘more formal’ uniform policy, [a parent of a student] asked staff if his son could wear tailored shorts instead.

However, the school argued that shorts are not part of the uniform. He was then informed that if his son wishes to wear more weather-appropriate attire then he could don a skirt if he wished.

This story broke about a year after the original post, and I unfortunately missed it the first time around. Not everyone is a fan of this school’s dress code, though; this piece by Kenny Webster of KPRC-AM radio here in Houston was highly critical and derisive of the school’s move, stating in part:

So the Chiltern Edge Secondary School is clearly culturally appropriating a style of dress that belongs to foreign cultures. Don’t people on the Left hate cultural appropriation? British Leftists should be rioting in the streets over this news, if they believe their own rules. Look out, Chiltern Edge Secondary School, British Antifa is coming with the fashion police to tell you how to dress your students!

I would disagree, of course; I would not call this cultural appropriation and say that to cross that line it would have to be significantly more substantial than just one article of clothing which doesn’t belong specifically to any one culture any more than certain types of food. I lean left, but despite where Kenny got his ideas on left-wing ideology, I keep a more realistic view of cultural appropriation and usually leave that call to the cultures in question if they want to object in certain instances.

A couple of years after that, both male and female students at a school in Quebec wore skirts to school for a cause:

[A 16-year old female student at the school] said the movement was to protest both the hypersexualization of girls and toxic masculinity.

She said she and her friends, along with other girls in schools around Quebec, were being punished for wearing their skirts too short and told that it was a distraction for boys.

Yet, boys could hike up their shorts as much as they wanted.

After a group of girls decided to wear skirts to school in protest, the boys joined in. The end result was that both boys and girls were allowed to wear skirts to school from that point forward, which is refreshing as there are undoubtedly places where that would not be anywhere close to the end result.

To me this highlights the silliness behind some of the gender-based norms that have formed over the past few decades. I’m really curious now how skirts came to be so closely identified with female dress, though I would need to do some significant research to find out how this came to be.

 

Taking off shirts, carrying books, pink and blue, and other things on our way down the gender norms rabbit hole

This is something I wouldn’t even have thought about had I not had a poll question pop up in my Mastodon feed.

There are a few different places where this has been written about but for the purposes of this post I will cite this article from NBC’s Today show website and the Seventeen article which it links to.

From the Seventeen article, here is the difference:

Boys tend to take them off […] by putting their hands over their head, grabbing it from the back of their necks, and yanking it off over their heads.

Girls, on the other hand, tend to cross their hands over their waist, grab the shirt from the bottom, and pull their top off from the bottom […]

The odd part about this is that growing up, I was only ever taught what is now considered the “girl way”. I never even considered the “boy way” until looking it up after answering the poll.

I’ve posted many times about gender norms and the (sometimes silly) gender-based labels and/or gender-based disparities in labeling that society has slapped on certain things. For the new people here’s a (possibly incomplete) list:

So back to the story at hand. I just now tried the “boy way” of taking off my shirt (I’m sitting in my home office) and to be honest, it feels really awkward and clumsy. I’m reminded, for some strange reason, of one rather strange interaction in what was most likely eighth grade (definitely middle school and definitely the middle school where I spent my entire eighth grade year and most of my seventh grade year). In that interaction I was told I carry my books “like a girl”, which was in front of me with my arm around the cover with the cover facing me and my hand around the spine. I was of course taken aback at this and this guy showed me the “like a boy” way, which was at one’s side with the hand reaching around the spines at the bottom. I tried this, and it too felt awkward and clumsy, just like the “boy way” of taking off my shirt mentioned above. I think I may have even dropped or come close to dropping my books after trying this supposed “boy way” of carrying books. I went back to what had been called the “girl way” and oddly enough nobody mentioned it again that I remember. (In fact, the more I think about it, the more I suspect it may have been a very low-key type of bullying. Oh, how I wish I had realized this back then…)

Thankfully, now, I’m well past the age where I really care about whether or not what I do is labeled as the “girl way” somewhere. Though, part of me is now still left wondering if I was supposed to be taught the grab-over-the-head (“boy”) method instead of the cross-arms-at-the-waist (“girl”) method.

Things have changed a lot since the early 1980s when I grew up. I’m not going to go into details as that would be a whole post unto itself. Education has most certainly changed; this I have learned anecdotally being involved in a business where I frequently deal with children as well as reading through resources geared to parents (as a hopeful future parent myself). One would think something like dressing and undressing would seem to be rather timeless, though, unless the clothes themselves change a lot. At least as far as men’s/boy’s fashion, I haven’t really seen a whole lot of change from the clothing end. It’s still the same shirts and pants we’ve all grown to love or hate, save maybe for kilts (particularly Utilikilts) and the like, which are still a long way from truly catching on.

There is one change that people often forget about: at one time pink was for boys and blue was for girls. Even fewer realize the main reason for the reversal: Mamie Eisenhower’s pink dresses, which gained much more notoriety in 1952 after she became First Lady. Once you’ve fully processed that rather heavy thought, take a look at this history of First Ladies. Pat Nixon (1973), Rosalynn Carter (1981), Nancy Reagan (1985), Barbara Bush (1989), Laura Bush (2001), and Jill Biden (2021) are all shown wearing very bold and very blue outfits at least once. Arguably, there’s been a lot more blue than pink worn by First Ladies since 1952 (it’s difficult to know for some of the earlier years as many of the surviving photographs are only black-and-white). Yet that by itself hasn’t been enough to make blue the “girl’s color” once again, and I’m not sure there’s a way to explain away this mystery.

But the bigger mystery is who originally came up with the over-the-head method to take off a shirt, and who slapped the “boy way” label on it if it’s not the same person/people. It’s a mystery that will likely remain unsolved for the foreseeable future, for better or worse. What I do know is what I was taught as a boy that’s now being mislabeled as I see it.