An article

 

Girls Are Wearing Scarlet Letters to Protest the Sexist Way Their School's Dress Code is Enforced

"We're just tired of being objectified."

 

Girls at Charleston County School of the Arts in North Charleston, South Carolina are protesting their school's unfair enforcement of the dress code in a major way: by wearing scarlet letters.

According to Reese Fischer, a junior at the school who helped organize the protest, their actions aren't to protest CCSOA's dress code itself, which is pretty standard, banning things like pants being worn below the waist, exposed undergarments, clothes with profanity, obscenity, or violence, and bare skin between the upper chest and mid thigh. Instead, Reese and other students are protesting the way administrators enforce the dress code, which they say unfairly targets female students.

"In the summer, you see guys walking around in muscle tank tops with half their sides hanging out and their pants hanging down, and they don't get called out for that," Reese said, opening up about her experience to The Post and Courier. "They don't get called out for wearing a hat, but a girl will get called out for a short skirt in a second."

Other female students recounted uncomfortable encounters with school administrators to The Post and Courier. A junior named Peyton Corder (pictured above on the left) says she was told by a guidance counselor at the school that "heavier girls" needed to wear longer skirts. She broke down in tears as a result. 

Caroline Hamrick, a sophomore at the school, thinks the way teachers check for dress code violations is also completely inappropriate. She says once when she wore a cropped sweater and high-waisted skirt to school (so her midriff was completely covered when standing with her arms at her side), her teacher forced her to raise her arms in the air to expose her midriff. "And of course you could see my midriff once I raised my arms, but I was like, 'still, I'm not like this all the time,'" she said. After that, Caroline claims the teacher leaned down and looked up her shirt to see if she could see her bra, which made her, understandably, very uncomfortable.

To protest the inappropriate and sexist way the dress code is enforced about 100 students (and some faculty) wore red As on their clothing last Thursday. You probably recognize the red A from the popular high school required reading book, The Scarlet Letter, in which a young 17th-century woman is forced wear a scarlet A on her clothing after being found guilty of adultery. Some students wore the letter as part of the slogan, "Not A Distraction." 

adapted from https://www.seventeen.com/life/school/