This School's Anti-Shorts Dress Code Sucks

It's a well-documented fact that school dress codes are supremely unfair to girls. Which is why it's awesome whenever you see high schoolers fighting back, like the teenage girl who protested the dress code at her prep school by putting up notes telling everyone that there's nothing wrong with wearing shorts when it's hot outside. Which is not something you'd think we'd have to tell people, but high schools exist in a universe all their own, where the rules of common sense get trampled underfoot all the time.

A picture of the unknown student's message has been viewed over 8,000 times since a fellow student linked to it on Reddit three days ago. According to the person who posted the photo, the school in question is a prep school with a dress code that presumably either doesn't allow shorts or has rules about what kind of shorts girls can wear. The messages appeared around campus, according to the post, and it seems like no one knows who's behind them beyond the fact that it's presumably a 17-year-old girl. But whoever she is, she rocks.

The messages read, "Girls wear shorts to stay cool when hot, not for you. We are seventeen years old, stop sexualizing our bodies. If my shorts make you uncomfortable, you are the problem."

There are any number of reasons to hate school dress codes. They almost always focus disproportionately on what girls are and are not allowed to wear, they don't take the temperature outside into account, they oftentimes rule out most of the clothes actually made for teenage girls, and whenever they result in girls being sent home for dress code violations, they send the message that boys' education is more important than girls' education by basically saying it's better for her to miss out on her classes than for a boy to be distracted during his. Plus, they are often times extra unfair to plus size girls.

And yet despite being horrid and sexist and unfair, these kinds of dress codes are ridiculously common. There are always the more egregious examples of schools being awful about their dress codes that make headlines, like the school that used Pretty Woman to slut shame students for leggings or the school that had a special "dress code violation suit" to shame students. But it's far more common for schools to just go about being quietly sexist, placing disproportionate restrictions on what their female students wear, especially in during the warmer times of year when trying to find something that's comfortable, not hideous, not a dress code violation, and actually produced by a clothing manufacturer can feel impossible. And this has been going on for a long, long time.

Fortunately, there students are fighting back against unfair dress codes more and more every year. Which is awesome.

So whoever you are, anonymous prep school dress code protestor, you are awesome. Keep fighting the good fight — and wearing whatever shorts you damn well please.

Image: serikbaib/Fotolia; Imgur