On Yoga Pants and Rape Culture

As someone with "legs for days" (to quote some of my best friends), I always struggled to find shorts that did not violate the school dress code growing up.  I think this may have played into my insistence on wearing jeans year-round...I got used to being told my legs needed to be covered.

In the wake of a rash of yoga pants-bans in high schools, I really got to thinking about school dress codes.*  And in the wake of a subreddit that asked rapists for "their side of the story," I got to thinking about rape culture and victim blaming.**  And thinking about the two together got me...angry.

Let me preface this by saying that there is nothing wrong with telling your son or daughter what they can and cannot wear, especially when they are children.  Determining what is and is not appropriate clothing to wear to school, work, or outside the home is a conversation that parents should absolutely have with their children, and is a decision that should be reached based on a child's age, comfort level, body type, economic status, etc.  There is nothing wrong with this.

There is also nothing inherently wrong with having a dress code in place which defines what is and is not allowed to be worn on school grounds.  Offensive clothing, clothing that violates public decency laws, clothing that is dangerous (I actually totally support flip flop bans) are absolutely a problem in schools.  However, the problem comes in when it comes to how these issues are approached, explained to students, and justified in the code of conduct.

Yoga pants or my shorts do not violate a dress code because they are dangerous.  They are written into the rules because they are "distracting" and you "don't know how they'll affect the boys."  And this is where the problem comes in.  Because a society that starts out by telling a twelve-year-old that she cannot wear a particular kind of sweatpants because the shape of her butt is going to force the boys to stop paying attention doesn't stop there.

It becomes the same culture that tells a girl in Steubenville, Ohio that the fact that she was repeatedly raped by two young men was her fault because she should have known that getting drunk around boys was going to put her in a bad situation.  It builds into a culture where what she's wearing and the fact that she's drinking mean she's a "whore" who was "asking for it" and should have been charged for underage drinking.***

There is nothing wrong with having a discussion with your kids about what is age-appropriate or appropriate for certain settings when it comes to clothing.  But the second you start to contextualize that discussion in the realm of "how will it affect the others," you play into a culture that normalizes sexual assault.  Someone's inability to control their own actions is their fault and their problem, no one else's.

Yours,
Rachel Leigh

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/09/leggings-ban-kenilworth-junior-high-california_n_3046043.html
**http://jezebel.com/5929544/rapists-explain-themselves-on-reddit-and-we-should-listen
***http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/23-people-who-think-the-steubenville-rape-victim-is-to-blame

On Take Back the Night

As I take a break from taking notes on why Paul Feyerabend thinks we should throw method in science out with the bathwater, I want to talk about Tuesday night.

Tuesday, April 9th at UR was Take Back the Night.  For those of you who don't know what Take Back the Night is, it began in Philadelphia in the 1970s in response to the problems that women face walking alone at night.  Women are taught to fear the dark and the things that go bump within it, and Take Back the Night is intended to empower women and reclaim what has repeatedly been taken away.  It is primarily a sexual assault/rape awareness campaign, and at UR involves an open-mic style speaking event and a candlelight vigil.

It is a really moving event, but I think more than anything what I love about Take Back the Night is the extent to which it 1) puts a face to the idea of a survivor of sexual assault and 2) forces you to look at people as whole, complex individuals who have faced things and have proven themselves to be extraordinarily strong in the face of something that breaks a lot of people.  I know that I, personally, have this overwhelmingly powerful reaction whenever I see someone now who I have seen speak at TBtN in the past.  It is a combination of sympathy, empathy, and respect, sadness for what they have gone through, and pride for the strong and wonderful people they continue to be in spite of it.

I was heartbroken to see the sheer number of women who are a part of my daily campus community who went up to speak about something that no one should have to face and extraordinarily impressed and inspired by the number of strong, brave, beautiful women who refuse to let their rapists, stalkers, abusers, or scars define them.

I am proud to know you.  I am proud to fight with you.

Yours,
Rachel Leigh

On SCOTUS, Obamacare, and Perspective

Let's get a perspective check, shall we?

While we've been squabbling over whether a government should provide health care to its citizens (heads up, America: the rest of the first world has already made a decision on this issue and, even today, we're still way behind the trend...so, awesome).

In the 12 hours since the SCOTUS decision about Obamacare

• Roughly 15,000 people died from malnutrition and starvation.  What did you throw away today?
• 820,000,000 people struggled to find safe, clean drinking water (Meanwhile, I have gone to the Brita in my fridge today three times to fill up my water bottle, and can't even begin to comprehend what it would be like to not have access to drinkable water)
• Roughly 3600 people have contracted HIV (for which we have yet to develop an affordable, accessible cure), in spite of worldwide programs designed to increase awareness and stop the spread of the disease
• 360 people were raped or sexually assaulted in the United States alone

I'm not saying there aren't things worth fighting about.  There absolutely are.  I think affordable access to medical care, education, and housing is the right of all people.  But there are bigger issues, within our borders and outside our reach to keep in mind.  We forget that the world has ACTUAL problems, problems with some obvious and not-so-obvious solutions that we can't seem to fix.  And when we get so wrapped-up in what side of the aisle we fall on or whether the wealthiest taxpayers should be taxed 34 or 35 percent, we lose sight of these real, tangible, terrifying problems and we forget to fix them.

If all this can happen in 12 hours, what could we do with a week?  A month?  A decade?  What could the world look like if we didn't get so off track?

Sorry that got so serious.  I promise, the next post will involve a picture of a kitten.

Seriously yours,
Rachel Leigh

Sources:

• Worldometers.info (http://www.worldometers.info/)
• The United Nations AIDS Clock (http://www.unfpa.org/aids_clock/)
• The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network [RAINN] (http://www.rainn.org/statistics/)
• Basic math skills on the calculator on my laptop