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What works at Facebook shouldn't be taken as the norm for most major American companies.
Silicon Valley is known for casual dress but corporate America and most workplaces have much stricter dress codes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wudge
I'm not so sure you are spot on as regards what represents appropriate business casual wear anymore. For example, day in and day out, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg, is well known for wearing a t-shirt and his "hoodie" to work. And Facebook is now a very large company. I don't know if hot pants are ok to wear there, even on the most casual of Fridays, but I would not be surprised if such were the case.
You first reminded me that this wasn't a criminal trial, but then proceeded to compare it in a couple of ways.
But that is immaterial to the discussion. If you have no desire to hear both sides of the story, then that is just plain wrong. And making a determination on whether the girl is right or wrong without hearing from the officials present is also wrong. You can "side" with whomever you want, but to do so without evidence from obth sides of the story shows your own bias.
As I've said, I have been both a student and a teacher, and can tell you - from experience on both sides of the desk - that a student's explanation is almost always missing information, exaggerating certain parts while omitting less flattering aspects, and will almost never shine a light on their own faults. I've done this myself as a student, and been the recipient of it as a teacher.
I totally agree with you. It is absolutely wrong to form an opinion if you know two sides to the story exists but you have heard only one, or if you believe a second storyline is going to eventually come out, which is not always the case. Because people are often very reluctant to change their mind, even when facts or evidence eventually comes out that demonstrates how unreasonable it would be not to do so.
In criminal cases and trials, it can become a very ugly situation when an attorney for the defense has to select jurors from amongst a heavily poisoned jury pool in which most minds already believe the defendant is guilty, compliments of our crimetainment media (think: Dr. Sam Sheppard's murder trial in my day or the Laci Peterson murder trial more recently).
But this is not a high-profile care that is going to trial. I thought it was but a cute little story that was wrapped around some different opposing views that might make for good debate material, and I truly don't expect this story to have legs. So if the vice-principals have a much different storyline, I doubt that I or we will ever hear it if it is not already our there. However, I know that most reporters do try to reach both sides before they publish a story (think: Sally Fields in "Absence of Malice").
If I am wrong and the vice-principals have a much different storyline that causes me to change my holding, I will happily admit it in a post here. Moreover, I did not think there could be any real harm in my taking position, for the purpose of debate, on but a little story that I don't expect to read about again. I'm real old but still learning and I'll file any lessons I learn here in my book of wisdom.
Finally, I appreciate your experiences with students in situations like this one and recognize why you proffered such. Still, I must tell you that I thought the student offered an extremely intelligent and very reasonable counter argument; i.e., "instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects".
I thought that her position would make great sense to most reasonable people and I further I believe it would make a great getaway line in anyone's closing argument.
Let me say that I'm Christian so my take on this story is heavily influenced by my beliefs.
If the female student's shorts were deemed "too short" then the principals were right in telling her she had to change. Public institutions and businesses have a right to set a standard of expectation in behavior and dress that is in the best interest of all involved.
The behavior of boys is irrelevant in this particular incident because none of their behavior forced her to choose her choice of clothing to wear that day, to the extent of the information in the article.
Her stating that she felt it is a set of rules focused on girls bodies instead of boy's behavior is simply a way of deflecting her personal responsibility. Many full grown women who enjoy using their "freedom" to dress as sexual objects, say the same as Lindsey but substitute the words women and men instead of girls and boys. What girls choose to wear and how boys choose to act, while often related, are two different things when it comes to personal responsibility. One may affect that other but it doesn't give either gender the right to do as they please respectively without regard to overall public standards and safety.
I'm sure if boys start wearing short shorts to school or clothes that reveal the imprint of their package or butt cleavages, they too will be told to change or pull up their pants and put on a belt. Conversely, if girls started touching boys private areas or making lewd comments when boys wear certain type of revealing clothes, I'm sure the girls behavior would be regimented by school staff as well. In either case, the offending gender would be and should be promptly dealt with about their own behavior.
The school should not allow itself to be browbeat by multiple posters put up, FB petitions, nor media attention. They should stand firm and not submit to a student's pathology of victimhood whenever said student is not allowed to get their way or do as they please.
A high school student in her junior year, Lindsey Stocker, felt publicly humiliated by two vice-principals and is fighting back. The following article excerpt outlines what took place.
Quote:
Excerpt
"During third period on that day, two vice principals entered her
classroom and told everyone to stand up so their outfits could be inspected.
'And when they came to me after about two rows of looking they stopped and told
me my shorts were too short and I had to change.' 'They continued to tell me I
would be suspended if I didn't start following the rules. When I told them I
didn't understand why I had to change they told me that it doesn't matter - I
don't have to understand the rules, I just have to comply by them.
Stocker felt singled out and humiliated in front of her class, but what
concerned her more was a set of rules that focused on girls' bodies rather than
boys' behavior. So instead of complying with the rules, she went and printed up
about 20 posters and stuck them up all over the school.
The posters read, 'Don't humiliate her because she's wearing shorts. It's hot outside.
Instead of shaming girls for their bodies, teach boys that girls are not sexual objects.'
The "judgment" of two vice-principals sounds pretty arbitrary to me. Moreover, there certainly was no need to publicly humiliate her, and vice-principals should also have explained to her why she was in violation of their alleged rules. Further, I like her very sensible argument.
Rules should not be arbitrary and humiliating her in public was unnecessary and wrong.
I'll side with her in this situation.
What say you?
She was suspended for wearing shorts that violated the school dress code. Her defense that the school should "teach boys that girls are not sexual objects," has nothing to do with her suspension. I doubt the rule says that only girls are not allowed to wear short shorts so it is not discriminating against girls. I also doubt that any type of instruction to teach boys that girls are not sexual objects would be very successful.
We went through a similar situation when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Girls were not allowed to wear any type of pants. The girls in the school decided they would all wear pants the next day. The principal heard about it and announced that effective the next day, girls would be allowed to wear pants suits. The next day, most of the girls came to school wearing jeans and nothing was said. Shorts were not permitted to be worn by either girls or boys and nobody questioned that rule.
My exerience both in schools and in the business world is that people will always push the limit on dress codes. I see no reason why girls should wear shorts with their butt cheeks hanging out. But a certain percentage of girls seem to enjoy wearing these type of shorts.
I also don't see any reason why guys should be walking around with their boxers exposed and pants falling down below their hips. Both seem very uncomfortable. I'm all in favor of school uniforms to eliminate these issues.
She is in a public institution that is provided to her for free. So she has to abide by the rules. I'm tired of young women like her who think their somehow entitled to dress like a tramp. Do it on your own time. You're at school to learn.
Last edited by allenk893; 06-01-2014 at 01:26 PM..
In authentically patriarchal times, physical roughhousing and brawling tended to be seen as relatively trivial issues. Indeed, the entire domain of physical experience and material aspects of human life were seen as more trivial than today. In authentically patriarchal times, men whined about their emotional and sexual vulnerabilities with regard to women, and cast women as having almost mystical powers to mess a guy up.
-- There's a reason for the shape that the one-sidedness of the self-indulgent patriarchal perspective took. Testosterone is a drug that kicks men's butts in terms of the way they process emotions and passions. It's a drug that's administered to women who are unhappy with the waning of their libido, and women who take it complain that it makes their emotions rage out of control. In general, men have about ten times as much testosterone running through their veins, and men's domain of primary vulnerability with regard to sexual differences has to do with their emotional vulnerability. This is implicitly acknowledged when women refer to the "fragile" male ego, but women are a lot more reluctant to attribute "vulnerability" to men, despite the near-synonymity of the two concepts. The difference is in their connotations.
-- But men tend to be less sensitive to physical and other material risks than woman. This is in part due to the differences in upper-body strength, but it's also due to the way more or less testosterone shape man's and women's internal experience. Patriarchies tend to counsel men to transcend their primitive passions, and to direct their attention toward abstract and other worldly goals, that is, toward abstract intellectual, moral, and spiritual matters, and Medieval civilization seems almost clueless in the extent to which it minimized attention to the physical, sensual, material, and emotional domains of human experience.
-- Over the past few centuries, the focus of Western culture has become increasingly feminized. Part of this isn't due to the explicit demands of feminism, but is due to the inadequacies of Ancient and Medieval conventional wisdoms that manifested the deeper one-sidedness of male-centric thinking. One consequence of this was that the science of the time was an entirely intellectual enterprise, without attention paid to the data of the senses. (This shouldn't be trivialized, though. Without the abstractions of mathematics, logic, and taxonomic methodology that were all ancient patriarchal inventions, the empirical observations that modernity tacked on would be disorganized and useless.) The particular biases of phallocentrism and uterocentrism are not merely important for their impact in gender politics-- they have broader epistemological implications.
-- But when it comes to gender politics, the rules have changed, and the feminine perspective is the dominant one today, manifest not only in the attention given to the physical, material, and emotional domains of human experience, but also in the more particular attention paid to matters about which women feel more vulnerable and the inattention toward male vulnerabilities.
-- With regard to the issue at hand, it is right that we should take very seriously the kind of intimidation and oppressiveness that women have to endure when rape issues are trivialized, but we should also take seriously the intimidation and oppressiveness that men feel when their vulnerabilities to sexual and emotional manipulation are trivialized. The Taliban approach to sexual relations makes Medieval notions of gender relations look almost enlightened, but on the other hand, the views of some feminists, who view the world through an exclusively uterocentric lens and place all blame for gender misunderstandings on men are also extreme, and in the most extreme cases, as extreme as the Taliban.
-- Male and female modes of experience are some respects apples and oranges, and in some respects, even worse-- they're incommensurable, and not to be compared on any coherent spectrum or within any coherent framework. An authentic gender equality movement would take both sex-biases seriously and value both of them equally. Someday, perhaps, this will be accomplished, but not anytime soon.
I'm thinking now that I shouldn't have had that extra cup of coffee today.
I went to all girls catholic school with an all boys school next door. We had uniforms, a jumper or a skirt. We used the fingertip rule and some teachers used to break out the ruler. We had to wear stockings underneath and everyone wore shorts under their uniforms also (way more comfortable and for the peace of mind when walking up stairs). If someone forgot their shorts it was like you felt naked, and usually everyone kept a pair in their lockers in case of emergency.
Boys should be taught though that not everything is sexual. When my daughter was breastfeeding I had to go into the dirty bathroom to feed her because of the stares I would get in public. 98% of places also have no where for a mother to go and breastfeed in private, so you were stuck with either doing it in public and risking people making it into a Huge deal, or go into the dirty bathroom and trying to do it while sitting on a toilet. Our culture is to blame.
Puritanical dress codes don't really mean diddly squat these days.
Back in the 80's, there were some girls at my high school who would wear tight faux leather pants, high heels and low-cut tank tops with no bras underneath. I could see some male teachers ogling them as they "jiggled" down the hallway. They were sexually arousing the horny teen boys and older male teachers and these girls LOVED it. It was all in good fun, and they never got raped.
Moderator cut: Unless a thread is specifically about politics discussing political parties is off topic
Let me say that I'm Christian so my take on this story is heavily influenced by my beliefs.
If the female student's shorts were deemed "too short" then the principals were right in telling her she had to change. Public institutions and businesses have a right to set a standard of expectation in behavior and dress that is in the best interest of all involved.
The behavior of boys is irrelevant in this particular incident because none of their behavior forced her to choose her choice of clothing to wear that day, to the extent of the information in the article.
Her stating that she felt it is a set of rules focused on girls bodies instead of boy's behavior is simply a way of deflecting her personal responsibility. Many full grown women who enjoy using their "freedom" to dress as sexual objects, say the same as Lindsey but substitute the words women and men instead of girls and boys. What girls choose to wear and how boys choose to act, while often related, are two different things when it comes to personal responsibility. One may affect that other but it doesn't give either gender the right to do as they please respectively without regard to overall public standards and safety.
I'm sure if boys start wearing short shorts to school or clothes that reveal the imprint of their package or butt cleavages, they too will be told to change or pull up their pants and put on a belt. Conversely, if girls started touching boys private areas or making lewd comments when boys wear certain type of revealing clothes, I'm sure the girls behavior would be regimented by school staff as well. In either case, the offending gender would be and should be promptly dealt with about their own behavior.
The school should not allow itself to be browbeat by multiple posters put up, FB petitions, nor media attention. They should stand firm and not submit to a student's pathology of victimhood whenever said student is not allowed to get their way or do as they please.
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The principals were right
