Just last week, I was sitting in Latin class when I overheard a few girls talking about Cross Country. I usually don’t care too much for sports, but this caught my attention.
According to a few different people whom I talked to, the girls’ Cross Country team was running off North’s campus in their sports bras during a hot day. An anonymous man called in and claimed seeing the high school girls running in their bras made him “uncomfortable” so the school told the team they couldn’t run in bras on or off-campus. This angered a lot of people because the boys team is allowed to run shirtless on and off-campus. They also don’t run the risk of having an anonymous woman call in and tell the school it makes them “uncomfortable.”
They’ve since changed the rule back, allowing the girls’ team to run in sports bras again. Despite this, they still made the rule (in my opinion) out of the blatant misogyny of a random call from a man who probably didn’t even disclose his name. Basically, the comfortability of women was taken away for the comfortability of a man for the millionth time.
This year, it’s been kind of my personal goal to get dress coded to protest the dress code. My sophomore year, it came to my attention that a curvier freshman friend I had was getting dress coded almost every day and we wore practically the same clothes. I had friends who had gotten dress coded for showing an inch of midriff, or the back of a shirt was open. Every now and then I see a guy walking around in a crop top but you never hear about them getting in trouble.
Therefore, this year I took it upon myself to finally get dress coded, and I did. On the first day of Homecoming week, I wore a crochet top for hippie day. I’ve worn it to school before, but that day it was more revealing or something because an administrator took me into their office to talk about how too much of my cleavage was showing, and that the visibility of my bra strap was unacceptable. I wore my friend’s jacket for the rest of the day, but continued to think about the encounter.
I understand that I shouldn’t have too much cleavage showing (despite the fact I’ve worn worse to school) but it was weird how the administrator mentioned my bra strap. Yes, the back of the shirt was very open, but I don’t see how that would be “distracting” for anybody. On the first day of school, I wore a similar shirt with an open back without a bra, and I didn’t get stopped once. I didn’t realize that people couldn’t know I was wearing a bra.
To be fair, the dress code at Fargo North is relatively lenient compared to other schools I’ve heard about. When talking to a teacher the other day, she mentioned that they altered the dress code so that girls are now officially allowed to wear crop tops. It’s basically bare bones now: If you cover your boobs and your butt, you’re good. In my opinion, this is a great step in the right direction.