I’ll put it out there, I don’t agree with all aspects of the dress code. Girls not being able to show their shoulders is ridiculous. I’ll also agree to the fact that there are far more restrictions against girls than there are against boys in the dress code. That being said, I believe that we need a dress code in high school.

Why do you think girls have more restrictions against them than boys do? Let’s face it, girls’ clothing is designed to be more revealing than boys’ clothing. The dress code does not sexualize the female body or the male body alike. What sexualizes our adolescent bodies is society. We see all of the beautiful women on TV and the shirtless male models at various clothing stores. Society sexualizes bodies. In fact, Cosmopolitan Magazine will be sending a party bus full of shirtless male models to North Carolina State University to get female students to vote for the democratic party. If that’s not sexualizing the male body, then I don’t know what is.

We’re teenagers. What’s something we love? Freedom. If we didn’t have a dress code in high school, then what would we be wearing to school? I can tell you one thing for sure, there would be a lot of girls showing mass amounts of skin and a lot of boys with their pants around their ankles. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not walk down the halls of my school, a place designed for learning, worried about whether my eye balls are going to burn out or not.

Have you ever been to a professional work site? An office, the police station, McDonalds, Walmart, any place that’s meant to serve the public. What’s something they all have in common? A dress code. What makes you think that we shouldn’t have to follow a dress code either? By having a dress code, we are being taught what’s going to be acceptable to wear in the work place and what won’t be. You know what happens to the workers who go to work and break dress code on multiple occasions? They get fired.

Girls walking around wearing revealing clothing and guys wearing their pants too low is a huge distraction. If you’re a guy and a girl is wearing revealing clothing, it’s obvious that you’re going to be distracted in class. Boys are hormonal at the high school age and that is not something they can always help. Revealing clothing not only easily distracts boys, but girls too. The other way also applies . If a guy is sagging his pants too low, then both genders are distracted yet again. Many things can distract a student during school, clothing is a major distraction in not only Northmont but in schools across the nation as well. Regardless of what gender you are and regardless of what gender the other person is, a body is going to be distracting if they’re breaking dress code.

A dress code also keeps our school looking acceptable. How often do we have visitors inside the school? They’re expecting to be walking down the halls of a high school, not through the doors of a downtown club. Instilling a dress code amongst the students and teachers keeps the school looking formal which gives any visitor to our school a good impression of what we can be as a student body.

I ask you: would you rather have a dress code we have now or do you want to start wearing a uniform? Having a dress code, although it’s a restriction, is sort of a freedom when you look at it like that.