US School Dress Codes

The admirable NPR discussion show 1A recently had a discussion title, "When School Dress Codes Ban Students’ Bodies." The discussion elicited a lot of comments. Here is mine (lightly edited).

For many years back in the last third or so of the 20th c., the first assignment in my writing courses was "Clothes" ("Write about what you know about; write about what you care about"— and, oh boy, my students knew about clothes). What many of my students most wanted to write and talk about was high school dress codes. Here are some discussion questions we started out with.
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Discussion/Opening Questions:
(1) John T. Molloy [in Dress for Success] says that "Dress codes can work." If you've been places with dress codes—have they worked? If so,
How have they worked? For whom? To what ends? If authority figures have given you different justifications for dress codes than Molloy gives, which justification(s), if any, do you believe? How could you test the theories?
(2) With "code" in the sense of "a set of rules for affecting behavior and/or allowing communication," there were dress codes at your high school, and there are codes at Miami U. at Oxford (MUO). At your high school, who set the rules? How were they enforced? At Miami, what rules have you inferred?
(3) Molloy finds college students prejudiced about clothes; is this true? Are you(se) more prejudiced than high school students or, from Molloy's comments anyway, business executives?

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High school girls' having to kneel so adults in authority could judge the length of their dresses is mentioned in Jerry Farber's satiric essay from 1967 that you can look up under his name and "The Student as ...": "In some high schools, if your skirt looks too short you have to kneel before the principal in a brief allegory of fellatio." Farber's analysis was that dress codes are part of the larger function of American schooling in general to teach Obedience to Authority. What Farber missed in 1967 was that there are always social rules and that the key question are Who makes them, and How are they enforced? At the Oxford, OH, campus of Miami University, groups of students made the rules for their groups and enforced them through usually subtle, sometimes not, peer pressure. The strictness of student rules was clear in the shifts over time from backpack carrying over both shoulders to over one shoulder and than back to both shoulders. I counted 99/100 students obeying the rules, and a student tested the theory by wearing his backpack over both shoulders when the rule was one shoulder. He got looks but elicited a comment only when he buckled the waist straps: *that* was going too far. The one-shoulder rule was robust enough that a male student risked life and limb obeying it while riding a high racing bike in a strong wind next to a busy highway.

"Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" — A Couple Tentative Answers to a Rhetorical Question

The 1A show on NPR on May Day 2018 was on "Big Guns," a title of a book by former U.S. Representative in Congress Steve Israel, with the subtitle for the 1A broadcast, "Fighting Firearms With Funny." There was a significant rhetorical question raised, one I'd like to answer. The question was something like, "Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" 

One answer to the question is, criminals sloppy enough to have to figure on getting into shoot-outs with police or pathological enough to really desire a shoot-out with police.

More significant, though, are those for whom the Second Amendment primarily protects "The Right of Revolution" and (mis)understand revolution as mostly partisan warfare against the military forces of the State. And who are the front line of those forces of the State? The police, who sometimes where protective gear that will resist passage of ordinary bullets. 

This reading of "The Right of Revolution" also explains why one would want not just military-style weapons but military-grade weapons, 'cause that's what the military and paramilitary forces of the State have. The position usually involves paranoid fantasies of vast conspiracies by ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) or more fashionable embodiments of The World-Wide Conspiracy — and/or anticipations of race war — but after granting the assumptions, there is a logic to it. It's just not a logic you'll like if, say, you're a police officer or have police in the parts of the family you like or depend on the police for protection or dislike cops but not enough to want to kill them or want to improve the current American Republic and not overthrow it or have ideas about revolutions that are based more in history than in video games.

In the US, we tend to talk too much about "senseless violence"; here and elsewhere, we need to analyze  the ways in which most acts of violence do make sense — but are unjustified and evil.

Jocks and Athletes (and Pejorative Labelling)

I have this memory of a discussion in a writing class a couple or three decades ago where a student objected to the use another student's essay of the word "jock," which he considered pejorative (a low-key insult). I pointed out that when and where I was an undergraduate and graduate student, "jock" could be used neutrally, as in saying someone was a "ROTC jock" or "tennis jock" or "math jock": just meaning "(somewhat) dedicated to," "interested in" and/or "good at" the activity.

The student countered with noting that "dumb _____" is completed with "jock," not "athlete," and "the well-respected ______" was completed with "athlete," not "jock." If we wanted a neutral or complimentary term for someone serious about one or more sports, we should use "athlete."

I threw in that "jock" for me suggested an activity someone had talent in, and didn't have to work at, and usually didn't. So if we meant someone serious about a sport, and who worked at it, I'd definitely go with "athlete" — and the discussion continued a bit.

MORAL here for me and maybe thee, nowadays: Screw microaggressions; when we insult people, we should insult them consciously and with intent, avoiding as much as possible — as in a Good Society imagined by Joanna Russ — unintentionally giving offense. In that case, the student-athlete did us a favor in telling us to be careful with "jock." It was a subject I hope I brought up much later, in a beautifully oddball class with a number of jocks/athletes of various persuasions, about half of whom were women. oddball class with a number of jocks/athletes of various persuasions, about half of whom were women.

Disruption vs. Business as Usual: Bakers, Milkmen, #NeverAgain

The cover story for The Nation Magazine for their end of April double issue is "How the youth activists of #NeverAgain are upending gun politic" and bears the cover title, "THE DISRUPTERS."

"Disruption" has become a positive buzz-word, and I can go along with that, having insisted ca. 1970 with US warfare in Vietnam, "No more business as usual."

We should keep in mind, though, that the flip side is the need for "regular order" in most of the business of the Congress of the United States and that the bakers of Paris during The Terror after the Revolution and the milkmen of London during the Blitz in World War II acted admirably in staying calm, carrying on, and supplying their cities with necessities. There can be heroism in "business as usual" and resisting disruption.

So let us praise the young disrupters of #NeverAgain, and, in different situations, those who got on with their business when the times were dangerously unusual.