--- title: Dress Code at New York School Slut Shames Girls, Discriminates description: Don't teach girls to cover themselves from the male gaze. Teach boys to look at something else. canonical: https://time.com/3394549/dress-code-long-island-new-york/ author: Eliana Dockterman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-09-17T21:52:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:56:00.200Z og:title: Dress Code at New York School Slut Shames Girls, Discriminates og:description: Don't teach girls to cover themselves from the male gaze. Teach boys to look at something else. og:url: https://time.com/3394549/dress-code-long-island-new-york/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf243ff151d42c52c/6986a3e13bc999b4851a55a3/73774423.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 73774423 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Dress Code at New York School Slut Shames Girls, Discriminates twitter:description: Don't teach girls to cover themselves from the male gaze. Teach boys to look at something else. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf243ff151d42c52c/6986a3e13bc999b4851a55a3/73774423.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Schools Are Still Slut-Shaming Girls While Enforcing Dress Code  by [Eliana Dockterman](https://time.com/author/eliana-dockterman/)  ## Eliana Dockterman Correspondent Sep 17, 2014 9:52 PM UTC  Close up of girl with hands in shorts pockets outdoors Close up of girl with hands in shorts pockets outdoorsRK Studio—Getty Images/Blend Images  by [Eliana Dockterman](https://time.com/author/eliana-dockterman/)  ## Eliana Dockterman Correspondent Sep 17, 2014 9:52 PM UTC Another school year, another slut-shaming controversy. This time the culprit is Tottenville High School in Staten Island, New York, which [handed out 200 detention slips](http://nypost.com/2014/09/14/schools-new-strict-dress-code-leads-to-200-detentions/) for dress code violations in the first few days of the semester, about 90% of which went to female students. Why did the girls get pulled from class and kept after school? Apparently their clothing was “disruptive to teaching and learning.” This means that girls wearing leggings, tank tops, low-cut blouses or too-short shorts or skirts are deemed “too distracting” for the boys to handle. [As I’ve written before](http://time.com/36997/when-enforcing-school-dress-codes-turns-into-slut-shaming/), dress codes often encourage teachers to slut shame. Rules for girls are blatantly sexual in nature—”cover your skin”—but are not for boys. In fact, the rules are so uneven, that Jessica Valenti recently [pointed out](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/17/women-school-dress-code-violations-legal) in the Guardian they could be violations of Title IX, the law that forbids gender discrimination in schools. Instead of teaching boys to keep their eyes on their books and not on their co-eds’ bodies, schools think it better to tell girls that they are dressing “inappropriately” or that their clothing is too “distracting.” In doing so, they make girls feel guilty for boys’ actions. The argument is not a far cry from telling sexual assault victims that they were “asking for it” by dressing a certain way. And it conditions boys to victim-blame women later in life. That’s why students in both [Illinois](http://time.com/36997/when-enforcing-school-dress-codes-turns-into-slut-shaming/) and [Texas](http://time.com/104676/dress-code-riot-texas/) protested dress code rules last year, picketing in leggings and wielding signs that read “Are my pants lowering your test scores?” They argued that the rules blatantly discriminated against girls. Another group of students at a school in New Jersey began a social media campaign using the hashtag [#IAmMoreThanADistraction](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23IAmMoreThanADistraction&src=typd). ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3394549/dress-code-long-island-new-york/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3394549/dress-code-long-island-new-york/"},"headline":"Schools Are Still Slut-Shaming Girls While Enforcing Dress Code","datePublished":"2014-09-17T21:52:37.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:56:00.200Z","description":"Don't teach girls to cover themselves from the male gaze. 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