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Part 1 The sexualized messages Dress Codes are sending to students with data collection assistance from

Kait Thomas and Anna Houston

If you aren’t currently in high school, it’s probably been a while since you’ve read a student handbook. The dress code section, present in about 55% of US public high schools, contains a set of hotly debated policies. They are most commonly accused of being racist, sexist, reinforcing gender stereotypes, and promoting sexualization. This is the first piece in a forthcoming series where we examine how public high schools police bodies differently and attempt to add data to each of these conversations. Here, we’ll focus on the last issue: how dress codes sexualize students by analyzing the rules and their framing in 481 public high schools across the US. In early 2017, writer Dana Schwartz posed a question to the Twitter-verse: “Ladies, when was the first time you were made to feel embarrassed and sexualized for what you wore?” Ladies, when was the first time you were made to feel embarrassed and sexualized for what you wore? I was in 5th grade, shorts too short. — Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) March 26, 2017 I thought of my earliest memories of this type of behavior—the times when I wasn’t aiming to be “sexy,” but was still perceived that way. I remembered the girls who were stopped outside of our middle school dance because their shoulders and underarms were bare. And being handed a detention slip because a small sliver of my torso was exposed. Like Schwartz, my earliest memories of feeling sexualized came from the adults who were enforcing my school’s dress code. I like to imagine that their intent wasn’t malicious. I mean, it’s not like my school’s policy literally said: Messages now (Not a Real) Dress Code Ladies, your bodies are too sexy and need to be covered up. 🙈 But that is still the message that I received. When it comes to exploring sexualization in dress codes, these hidden messages make the process difficult. Afterall, how do you quantify something that is implied? Following the lead of researchers in California and Washington DC, we collected data from hundreds of high schools to learn about what they prohibit and why these policies exist.