On Monday, The Guardian published an article about how female students in Auckland, New Zealand have been asked to lower their skirts to knee-level to stop distracting male students and teachers. In response, Erykah Badu started a thread about her thoughts on the issue that flipped #BlackTwitter upside down.
Badu insisted that it is “natural” for women who are of child-bearing age to attract men, and that it is “fair to everyone” for young women to “protect” themselves by wear knee-lengths skirts.
The validity of her statement is clearly open to interpretation. Even so, no matter where she stands on the subject, there are a few things that we can take away from her tweet storm.
We need more education about pedophilia.
While there may be truth behind men being naturally attracted to women of child-bearing age, pedophilia is still a reality, often only addressed in television shows and movies. Schoolgirls are not adults; they’re children. If there’s an issue of sexual abuse or rape involving a male teacher and female student, let’s not throw it up to him having been ‘naturally’ attracted to the student.
Dress codes do NOT have the ability to prevent pedophilia, rape or sexual abuse.
Covering up a student, will not stop a pedophile or rapist from being attracted to him or her. While there should be a standard dress code that treats both genders equally, enforcing one will not make deeply-rooted sexual issues disappear into thin air.
It’s time to get rid of our double standards about male and female sexuality.
Let’s not forget that males don’t always play the role of the abuser in cases of sexual abuse; sometimes they can be victims as well. Sexual abuse isn’t the blame of one gender, and most certainly shouldn’t fall onto the laps of young women who wear above-the-knee skirts.
We shouldn’t consider the sexuality of children to be the same as adults.
If we’re saying that we’re protecting our youth, we really need to protect them. Considering their sexuality to be equal to that of adults does more harm than good, and opens up the playing field for more sexual abuse to occur.
What did you think about Erykah Badu’s tweet storm? Share below.
