Little plaid skirts

There’s a great editorial in the Glasgow Herald today, blasting people who feel morally offended by schoolgirls who wear short skirts:

It seems, rather tragically, that we are so scared of young people that we have to take away their freedoms, rather than educate them better into how to use them. The history of fashion is the story of female emancipation: women have spent centuries liberating themselves from the prison of tight bodices, long skirts, bound feet, constricted limbs.

There is, in this respect, something wonderful about the insouciance of modern teenage clothing. Baggy, tight, explicit, baby-doll, extreme: they do it. Because they can.

If you think schoolgirls who wear short skirts are dirty, it’s probably because you’re dirty. Don’t project the blame on to girls because of your guilty fantasies - that’s the gist of the piece.

I went to a convent school - we wore white blouses under our blue pinafores. They weren’t exactly sexy outfits, but we tried our best by puffing up the pinafores above the belts so the skirts would end well above our knees. These days, it’s trendy to wear the belt so loosely that the girls look like newly-pregnant teenagers trying out maternity dresses. I know for a fact that the teachers and principal despair - why do the girls, year after year, wear the uniform the unsanctioned way?

Because we can. Because it makes (made, in my case) us feel individual, different, trendy, rebellious.

Teenagers will always try to rebel, to see how far they can push the rules. They’re in between being adults and children. They’re learning about themselves. The more you try to set rules to regulate behaviour, the more they will break them. Better to teach teenagers self-confidence and promote a sense of self-worth than try to impose rules that mean nothing.

I doubt that if those wanting school uniform regulations to be more strictly enforced were to go quiet, all hell would break loose. If an adult is keen on teenagers / is a paedophile, nothing except their own efforts will stop them from indulging.

Between five and seven children are abducted and murdered a year, a figure unchanged for 30 years. A moral panic over short skirts is as effective as banning men from admiring girls’ legs.

(I’m as bad. I own skirts that play on schoolgirl fetishes because I think they’re great.)

• 22 Jun 2004