Girls, your opinions matter.
I, like many parents, am sure to tell my daughter she can be whatever she wants when she grows up. And she takes this assurance to heart. I still have a photo of my daughter crying, aged 7, when Julia Gillard was elected because it crushed her dreams of being Australia’s first female prime minister.
Fortunately, society obliges in providing female role models, offering examples not just of female prime ministers, but female astronauts, film-makers, judges and Nobel prize winner. We tell her that there are no limits on her capabilities just because she is female.
But what if society tells her there are other limits on her, limits that are not just unhelpful, they are representative of dangerous societal norms?
Two examples I’ve come across recently seem at first glance to be the polar opposite, but are actually two sides of the same coin. It’s a coin that is symptomatic of a far broader cultural issue.
The first is the report by Laura Bates, co-founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, on the way school dress codes are used to make teenage girls feel they are responsible for ‘distracting male students’ or ‘making male teachers uncomfortable’. The report includes girls being told the school had dress codes so the male students ‘wouldn’t target or intimidate’ them, and also illustrates staggering levels of hypocrisy (such as when one female student reported being punished for wearing shorts, while male students were free to wear offensive T-shirts about women giving oral sex, for example).
The second report, published in The Weekend Australian, details the growing concern among psychiatrists, police, and child welfare experts about the negative impact of sexting and social media on young people’s mental and physical wellbeing. Like the report on school dress codes, there are some shocking examples, such as the 13-year-old girl who drew “Boner Garage” on her stomach with an arrow pointing to her crotch, then posted it to her public Instagram account.