When I first sat down to come up with ideas for my documentary for the Documenting Inequality seminar, I wasn’t sure exactly what story I wanted to tell. I came up with a few ideas that were okay... but my topic still wasn’t clear to me until after a phone call with a friend from home.
In high school, my friend was always very outspoken against our dress code because it was clearly targeting girls in its restrictions. She made me realize that dress code inequality is a conversation I can contribute to with my film. (Bonus: I also got my first interview that day.)
Sexist dress codes aren't just a problem in my particular high school. Unfortunately, this is an issue affecting girls in schools all over the country.
Just to be clear, the problem isn’t that schools have dress codes (almost everything we do in life has some sort of dress code attached to it).
The problem is when these dress codes are written to police girls more strictly than boys, and when they are unequally enforced.
The problem is when girls are taken out of class and lose education time because of what they’re wearing.
The problem is when girls’ bodies are blamed for distracting boys. It’s hyper sexualizing the female body at a young age and it’s teaching girls that their education isn’t as important as boys being able to focus.
In my documentary, I want to raise awareness about this problem and clarify some of the misconceptions about it. I want to hear from young women about their experiences with dress codes in their school.
My goal is to start a conversation.
There are a lot of articles about individual dress code incidents, but so far, I haven't found many which address the topic as a whole and/or are visually interesting. That’s what I want to do differently.
So far in the actual filming process, I’ve filmed two interviews and have two more lined up for next week. Surprisingly, not many girls have been interested in talking about the problems they’ve had, so I might need to adapt the amount of interviews I expected to get.
Everything else is on track, however, and I’m excited to hear from as many people as possible about this issue.
To get things started, here is a video I like. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. (Just don't be... distracting.)
- Riley Corboy