Dress Code Distractions

This is not the kind of topic I'd normally write about, since it's been covered to death in national media, but a recent news item brought up several ideas and memories for me related to education and teaching. A high school recently gained national attention when it was revealed that the yearbook advisor had photoshopped a number of girls' photos that she decided were too revealing. The negative attention was well deserved, to say the least. It seems right, as the critics have said, that the controversy sheds light on a long-running tendency of dress codes to be biased against girls and that the additional attention brought on the girls by the editing only reinforced ideas about body shaming.

These dress codes are often defended, as they were in this case, as helping to avoid "distractions," which places the responsibility squarely on the girls for the behavior and mindset of boys. We can do a better job of educating young men to be respectful.

Here's me in high school, not violating dress codes but clearly needing some wardrobe assistance. 

The editing itself, besides sending the wrong message about shame, was also poorly done and represented a violation in and of itself -- changing someone's image without their permission. It reminded me of one of the first ideas I learned in a college photography class when discussing the ethics of photography: while there are legal guidelines about what photos you are allowed to take and who is allowed to edit them, there are also ethical concerns and even possible legal violations with photographing and/or misrepresenting people. In my long-ago photography class, the instructor told us how Native Americans sometimes viewed their photographs as a kind of "stealing of the spirit" and were very reluctant to be photographed in the early days of photography. As I recall, being cocky young people, we sort of laughed at the corny way in which this professor presented this idea, but I also remembered the general fact (which apparently is true, and some Native Americans still resist being photographed) long after learning it. She was a good instructor, and I'm embarassed to remember my attitude in that class.

The idea of girls' outfits being "distracting" also reminded me of how long this discussion has been going on, and it brought to mind a certain uncomfortable moment in my high-school precalculus class. I don't remember the teacher's name, but he was middle-aged man who had worked as an engineer and was now teaching math to high schoolers. (But he was no Jaime Escalante.) For some reason, before class started, the girls were talking about the dress code and the prohibition on skirts above the knee. The teacher, who was standing at the front of the room, with an obvious vantage point that made his comment quite unnerving, offered that too-short skirts were in fact "distracting" for him as well as for the male students. He said this matter-of-factly, as if to say "don't you realize I'm a male with normal sexual drives standing up here?"

The entire class, including the boys, tittered uncomfortably but also objected vaguely, as if we wondered what right this older male had to make such a comment. This was the 1980s, of course, so we didn't expect any repurcussions; it's hard to imagine a teacher these days making such a comment, even he thought it was true, without some serious blowback. And if he thought it was true, perhaps he should have been focusing more on improving his habits of mind; while you can't control your thoughts and emotions all the time, you can practice a more Buddhist-like attitude of steering your thoughts in certain positive directions, which in turn improves your actions and your life.

I wonder about this teacher's thoughts, actions, and attitudes. He didn't like me very much, because I had a habit of falling asleep in class. The class was right after lunch, and his droning lectures were no match for the effect that lunch of a chicken-supreme sandwich, a peanut-butter bar, and a Coca-Cola had on my system. He would try to embarass me by saying nasty things about my future to wake me up. This of course only tended to make him look petty and make the other students sympathize with me. 

I still did reasonably well in the class, as I recall, at least well enough to place out of the course for my first year of college. It was the 1980s, as I said, so I'm not surprised he did nothing to help me. Teachers were still then, for the most part, largely figures of authority, though of course there were caring and empathetic teachers as well. So the questions are rhetorical, but I wonder why he didn't ask what was wrong with me, question whether I was depressed or getting enough sleep. I wonder (but again, not really) why he didn't take more of an interest in helping me or maybe even just pointing to some resources to help me make better dietary choices and help me to avoid crashing in his class. (Of course, there was never any consideration of the possibility that he was too boring.)

The two memories of a high school versus a college teacher also point to some still-remaining important differences in their roles. College teachers can be caring and should point students to resources when they can, but they don't see the students every day, and they don't know them as well. And the students are older and at least ostensibly adults, so they shoulder more of the responsibility for their own lives and their own academic success (even in a boring class). Dress codes have always struck me as being dangerous in their trivial nature; they presume to fix more than they do and really just continue the K-12 tradition of teaching students to be compliant. Why are we worried about what students are wearing if they aren't learning, and do we really think the distractions of certain clothing choices (or god forbid, long hair) are more important than poor diet or lack of sleep when it comes to learning? Quite obviously, we have done nothing to alter school schedules after compiling decades of evidence that adolescents are not getting enough sleep and should not be going to school at 7 a.m., and in fact we keep piling on the commitments. The only real explanation -- a very poor one -- that I've heard for this lack of change is the fact that it would make the circulation of school buses impossible. 

(Afternote: When I've taught at dual-credit locations in recent years, I've noticed how much more relaxed the dress codes in Texas are these days compared to what they were in my youth. Boys sport beards, and everybody wears shorts. Thank god for that kind of positive progress. Shorts are pretty darn necessary in Houston during certain months. On the other hand, the soda machines and poor food choices remain, as far as I can tell, and now students can bring coffee to school!) 

Sexism, "Two and a Half Men," and Hemingway

I recently came across this 2015 click-bait article offering a list of the "10 most sexist shows on TV." Number 5 on the list, and featured prominently through illustration in the article, is the show Two and a Half Men. Though it's hardly surprising to see this show on the list, I'd suggest that it has more to do with the authors' conflating of the show with the persona and lifestyle of its one-time hedonistic star Charlie Sheen.

(For the record, I've never seen the show without Charlie Sheen, but think it's a pretty funny show most the time. More on that -- what makes it funny -- in another post.) 

The article calls the show "sexist" (misogynistic is used elsewhere in the article) based primarily on the presence of Charlie's stalker-crazy neighbor Rose, the cold and "selfish" mother character, and the parade of short-lived female dates and one-night stands, who are supposedly portrayed as "usually unintelligent and superficial." A similar charge of misogyny is often levied at Hemingway, and I think in both cases it has more to do with our perceptions of Hemingway the private man (who often treated women terribly) and Charlie Sheen (whose life has been raising eyebrows at least since his entanglement with the Heidi Fleiss trial in the 1990s; this fascination with Charlie and the fictionalization of his lifestyle is basically the engine that drives Two and a Half Men and the more cynical but still successful sitcom Anger Management). 

The article misses the point that on "Two and a Half Men," as with just about any sitcom (which lean toward "low" comedy, and that's not an insult), the joke is usually on the main characters. Male characters on sitcoms in particular tend to come off even worse than the women, but in low comedy generally, we are laughing at the main characters as much as we are laughing with them. Contrary to the assertions of the article, many of the "fleeting" female characters on Two and a Half Men (dates with various backgrounds, but also the expected array of waitresses, strippers, stewardesses, etc.) are intelligent, strong-willed, and unwilling to cater to the immaturity of Charlie or to tolerate the annoying qualities of Alan. Charlie and Alan, as they often admit, are the ones with issues, and most of their issues can be traced to a fear of commitment or a tendency to see women in the simplest of terms. They sabotage relationships and spoil good things because they fear the motives and minds of female characters, who they inevitably see in adversarial terms. In other words, yes, the characters can be misogynistic, but that doesn't mean the show itself has that overarching message. 

With Hemingway -- though of course it's more complicated and the comparison is mostly a postmodern dart on the wall -- with the exception of some fantasy-tinged, oversexualized characters, the female characters are often stronger and more human than the sometimes self-hating and self-destructive male characters. Read "Hills Like White Elephants" and decide which of the two only real characters in the story -- the male or female -- come off as more human, more compassionate, more likeable. Hemingway is often showing men at their worst -- pathetic and manipulative, self-defensive in their vulnerability -- and though the male characters don't always get it, it wasn't an accident on Hemingway's part. 

The image from Two and a Half Men featured prominently in the article, of a supposed menage a trois involving Charlie, is actually a shot from a fantasy sequence. Yes, Charlie has an immature and hypersexualized mind, but the females in this case are illusions. The evidence that the mother is unlikeable and hateful is hard to refute, but she's mostly there as a foil, to provide a supposed motivation for the brothers' issues but also so she can repeatedly remind the "boys" that they're grown men who cannot blame their mother forever. This is a positive message for men overall: at some point, it's time to grow up and stop blaming others. But comedy isn't about sending messages as much as it is about laughing at the failures of others -- and also ourselves -- to see what's already in front of them.