Now in Australia, most
students wear uniforms. No big
deal. Girls have a dress in summer
and shirt and skirt in winter.
Boys have long or short sleeve shirt (sometimes a t-shirt) and pants.
Most schools give girls the option of pants, but less than 1% take up the
offer. It’s just not done.*
So looking round I saw
these boys in shorts and a t-shirt, and the girls in dresses, and I got mad all
over again. Of course I wore the same in high school and while I hated it, it
was just what you do**. But I can
see teenagers already so well versed in the way they hold themselves so
differently and have such different concepts of personal space. Even in the supremely awkward stages of
adolescence, they have their gender performance down pat. The boys are slouching and taking up
space and the girls are perching and limiting themselves. Even the weird, shy kids (I say this
with love as one of them) perform the gender stuff unthinkingly, because
they’re so well trained. Some are
less trained in personal hygiene or fashion, but they know what their gender
should and shouldn’t do.
And they knew that WAY
better than they knew the science-y thingy they were supposed to be learning.
*A quick fashion segue
– the pants are often just the boys’ pants, or the most ugly cut of pants
possible. Sure, the summer dress
is just a cotton sack, but at least all shapes and stages of development can
pull it off. The pants they offer
girls would make Cindy Crawford look lumpy and Marilyn Monroe look dumpy. Even a butch would look girly in
them. I don’t know how they do it,
but they make every clothing option for girls truly awful.
**Until you leave high school and swear never to wear a dress again and
burn all your school uniforms on the last day, cackling and realising it is
about to get sooo much better. Or
something like that.
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