this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
845 points (97.8% liked)
Witches VS Patriarchy
943 readers
878 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
right, but saying that exposes your thinking that girls are inherently sexual and require clothing modifications to make them "plain" and "equal" to boys - this is the same mindset of modesty and sexualization of girls that the OOP is calling out, the whole point is that it doesn't have to be this way, it's a social norm but you're treating it like it's natural
We don't need clothing guidelines and modesty for boys, we need to not sexualize girls and then impose modesty guidelines to moderate that sexualization.
We might have fundamentally different views on how we see people around us.
I think as humans, we are sexual beings. Men are conventionally drawn to women and vice versa. 12 year old boys and girls may or may not be awaken to that. I'd say chances are that they are. And they like to copy people older than them.
I'd say sexuality is about as natural as it gets. Unless you are cloning yourself, it is a deeply ingrained characteristic and behavior of any species. And it is not a perfectly symmetric affair.
I think clothing choice can help enhance a persons sexual characteristics. Society is perpetuating the norm that women and girls should wear a specific set of clothing. Biased toward the sexual characteristic enhancing options. Why this is, can be discussed in perpetuity by intellectuals.
The organizers have a choice to let people dress ass they wish, which includes anything society perpetuates as normal. Or they could, as in this case, try to change the norm, if only temporarily. I don't know if the organizers approach helps in any way. As I said earlier, I think personal agency weighs heavier. It's possible they are just trying to address some specific problems that happened in the past. And are not taking any stance on gender norm issues.
Solutions: If we agree that clothing is a variable in sexualizing the wearer and we want to stop the sexualization of girls; one option is to change the mind of our entire society and somehow make people unified in what they want to wear, just to influence younger people in the same direction. Sounds hard to me.
I agree, that we should avoid sexualizing girls and boys. And I agree that we should moderate bad behavior. I believe this should be done through quality education. I think the asymmetry of how one sex is more sexualized than the other, is a very hard problem to solve.
to be honest, I think we probably share fundamental views on how we see people around us - the difference is in how I relate to and understand my views
You have naturalized sexism, you think because humans are naturally sexual beings that the situation of girls being sexualized is natural too.
I don't disagree that humans are generally sexual creatures (though obviously asexual people exist as well), and I agree also that children have sexualities - but we are talking about why girls have a bunch of extra rules like not being able to wear white shirts, not being able to wear two-piece bathing suits, and requirements of wearing shorts ... this isn't just because humans are naturally sexual, this is because in our society we see boys as wanting sex, and as girls as having the sex that the boys seek.
The rules are seen as protecting the girls from the boys, which positions girls as sexual prey and boys as sexual predators. It views girls as having a virginity that must be protected.
Even within this view, the idea that the solution is to police the girls puts the responsibility on the girls for the boy's perceived predatory behavior.
Why is sexuality "bad behavior"? And if we agree it's bad, why do the rules focus on regulating the girls, why not have rules that regulate the inappropriate behavior of the boys instead?
And of course you're right that the asymmetry of how girls are sexualized and viewed as prey from whom boys "take" sex is a very hard problem to solve, not a problem we will solve individually or in our life times, but big cultural problems have shifted before - we used to not think of women as human at all, Aristotle posited that women were malformed, defective men who were unable to wield their will and require a man as a master to control them for their own good. Hegel opined that women are essentially like plants, whereas men properly belong as animals. Women were excluded as belonging to "humanity" in the ways Enlightenment thinkers articulated it, and were structurally treated as subhuman - unable to vote, own property, etc.
It's only very recently that in the West women were permitted to get an education or have a job, these were huge cultural shifts that occurred due to feminist activism, including violent campaigns of bombings and arsons by suffragettes.
Despite the progress made, there is much more work to do - and the feminist movement is far from reaching the gender egalitarianism it aims for. One of the problems that stand in the way is the continued belief that our socially arbitrary and sexist norms are actually entirely natural (something Aristotle said about his views of women, too - mind you, his views on women were explained through biology, as were the dismissals of women experiencing PTSD from sexual trauma as "hysteria").
If you wanted more to read on this topic, I recommend Julia Serano's Sexed Up for the way it analyzes both the gender binary and the predator / prey mindset.