Picture this, you are an eighth-grade female student walking in the hallway at your middle school. It is a warm June morning where the sun is brightly shining, children are laughing, and you are in a generally enjoyable mood. Everything was going well until you approached your homeroom and heard a booming male voice behind you say “That shirt is too distracting for school, I’ll see you in detention.” “Too distracting?,” you think to yourself, “too distracting for who?” What is so distracting about your outfit that a school staff member felt the need to dress code you? Looking down to check what is so wrong with your outfit, all you saw was a slightly shorter type of shirt that you would normally wear because it was a quite warm day outside. You brush the encounter off, but in the back of your mind, you keep wondering, just who was your stomach distracting? No matter how many times the same question was asked in your head, every time you knew who the staff member was referring to, and every time you just didn’t know why boys didn’t have to go through this same struggle. How exactly would it make you feel if you were told your body was too distracting for someone else? 

The ongoing struggles of girls feeling accepted in their own bodies have always been due to many different societal expectations and roles that they have been forced under. One of the contributing factors to these girls feeling uncomfortable is the public school dress code.   Moreover, the sexualization of young women’s bodies has been going on for years especially in middle and high schools. The public school dress code dates back to as early as 1969. It is safe to say many of the morales and what is socially acceptable have drastically changed from the 60s to the present day. So why does the dress code seem to keep the same idea from half a century ago  that teenage girls are not allowed to show relatively any skin? This can be traced back to the idea that women can only be taken seriously when they do not show skin and cover-up which can make girls feel as uncomfortable as wearing a large puffer jacket in ninety-degree weather. Furthermore, these old-fashioned ideas and dress codes  contribute heavily to girls having depression, developing eating disorders, and extremely low self-esteem. These dress codes end up creating negative environments especially for girls that have been dress coded and girls who are curvier. It can then produce the idea for them that because they got dress coded their bodies are viewed as unacceptable by society. According to a Brooklawn Middle School student, when asked in an interview about how being dress coded made her feel she responded that “It made me feel uncomfortable and sexualized” The student wondered just why she had to ¨hide what I was wearing for someone else.¨ Despite most school administrations still failing to realize just how harmful the dress codes can be to teenage girls' mental health, a solution still has not been found. What is possibly even more concerning about public school dress codes is how it disproportionately affects girls. But, what is the real reason for this disproportionate discrimination? 

In general, women’s bodies are considered to be more inappropriate than mens’ and the public school dress code undeniably contributes to that. Now some might disagree with that observation and make the argument that boys and girls get dress coded equally in a public school environment. Making that argument is equivalent to stating that seatbelts are useless in a car; a simply untrue statement. In a study where students were asked about public school dress codes, “79.3% of those asked responded that they knew a female student who had been dress-coded.” (Eagan)  In contrast, only “3.7% of those who responded stated that they knew a boy who had gotten dress-coded.” (Eagan) This truly puts into perspective just how schools unfairly target female students over male students. The main message that the dress code ultimately conveys is that teenage girls' bodies are too distracting for their male peers in a school environment. For instance, it should not be a girl’s issue if her male classmate would rather focus on her outfit than his work. Instead of teaching these girls to “put on a sweatshirt” or “cover-up” perhaps it would be much more efficient and wise to teach boys to not get distracted by a girl’s shoulders or midriff in a place of learning. 

 In conclusion, the public school system should come to understand that the use of a dress code may not be such a positive thing after all. Many schools believe that dress codes are only further improving places of learning when in reality they are further worsening the school experience for many of its students. Therefore, the main question that is a product of the dress code dilemma is just how bad will it get? If schools do not take the appropriate steps to solve this dilemma it is, unfortunately, going to lead to even more girls who become insecure. It will lead to even more girls who develop depression and even more girls left to struggle with eating disorders. Consequently, the public school dress code will undoubtedly contribute to so many more statistics of girls who develop body image issues if school administrators just do not wake up and finally see the full picture clearly.