Distracting Dress Codes

One of my friends from youth group is now a youth pastor and has posted a dress code on his church’s website. I find one sentence particularly amusing: “Undergarments should be worn and they should not be visible.” If they’re not supposed to be visible, what does it matter if they’re not worn? The rationale behind most of the guidelines is expressed in a statement implying that certain ways of dressing (“rags or ripped clothing”?) tempt others into sin: “Each of us have our own responsibility to take measures to protect and hold ourselves accountable from temptation and resulting sin.” The explanation for the rules doesn’t explicitly say what the “resulting sin” is, but the rules themselves seem to indicate lust.

There are several things problematic about this line of reasoning. First of all, it places too much of the responsibility for lust on the lustee rather than the luster. This runs dangerously close to the “She was asking for it” mentality of the rapist. By extension, it gives lusters an excuse for their lusting: it’s the provocative dress that makes me sin. Such reasoning is false, of course. Both men and women lust with little or no visual provocation. In fact, if one is lustful, one tends to seek out stimulation. If people don’t provide it in the way they dress, one may look to pornography, television, erotic literature, or even brain-generated fantasies. Certainly people can dress inappropriately, but it seems to make more sense to make rules about lusting than to make rules about what might possibly provoke lust, especially when many items on the list do not seem to be undeniably provocative (lack of “clean[liness] and neat[ness]” or “fish nets”).

My current school has a similar (but less stringent) dress code, and there’s much debate among the faculty as to how much energy we should put into enforcing it. The dress code is, on one level, a nod to the professionalism that not only teachers but students, too, should observe—the motto we use is “it’s school, not the beach.” There is a hint, too, of the “don’t provoke lust” ideology inherent as well, though, since we do allow students to dress shabbily or in an ugly way, but we don’t allow bare midriffs or short skirts. It’s not the sinfulness of lust that schools fear so much as the supposed “distraction” cleavage, bare midriffs, and short skirts provoke in a co-ed environment (with the assumption that all boys are heterosexual, of course). Honestly, though, I have never had a male student so distracted by his fellow classmate’s dress that he is not able to function in class. It would seem to me to be more distracting (or to take away from learning time) to stop class, single out the offending student and have her go get a change of clothes.

In some ways, it’s kind of like Christians protesting The Last Temptation of Christ or Jews protesting The Passion of Christ. The publicist’s proverb “All publicity is good publicity” has some truth to it. Sometimes if you don’t raise a big fuss over something, it loses its power. Sometimes the best way to defuse an offense is to ignore it; not always but sometimes. Why do girls dress scantily? For attention. What do you do by policing them about it? You give them attention. In some ways, it’s a lose-lose situation, but policing isn’t the solution. Both girls and boys need to understand what motivates people to dress provocatively. The natural defense is “It makes me feel better/more confident about myself.” The more important follow-up question is “Why does it make you feel better about yourself?”

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