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Unlearn16: Class is in Session
The One Where I Got 'Dress Coded'...That's Not What This Book Is About
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Joe
Foreign. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session. This is a different vibe. So right now I am sitting in my classroom, and it was important I was going to be sitting in my classroom because I need to talk about something that happened as I was sitting right here. First and foremost, if you are listening to this podcast before July 1, 2025, this particular podcast is associated in sort in tangentially. Is that a word? It's connected to a chapter in my upcoming book. That's not what this book is about. Can you order that book? Yes. On learn16.com you can order on July 1st. If you already have the book in your hand, then what you've done is you've scanned the QR code in that chapter and it's brought you to this podcast. So I can talk in a little bit more detail and sort of application about what went on in that chapter, the lessons I learned, and, you know, the tangents that we're going to. We're going to travel along together. All right, first and foremost, I was sitting right here when a student walked into my classroom and sat down. And it was in an era where it was very fashionable for young, for the most part, female students wearing, like, darker colored, you know, undergarments. They'd have. They'd have shirts that would be pulled off their shoulder. Very flash dance. They didn't know that they were ripping on Jennifer Beale circa 1987, but they were very flash dance. Anyways, at the time, there was a lot of. And still to this day, a lot of girls getting dress coded. Right? You gotta cover up. You gotta. I can't. You can't have that off there. I. I don't want to see your stomach. I don't want to see. And so we were telling a lot of young women at the school to cover up. And it became like this thing. Like, you took off guys wearing hats, you took off their hats. Girls were constantly telling them to cover up. And this wasn't okay. And I'm not gonna lie, I was definitely one of those people. I'm gonna talk about the things I needed to unlearn from that. But I had a student, her name's Stephanie. So shout out to Stephanie. Stephanie, funnily enough, doesn't even remember this conversation because we had. We had a conversation after where I told her she was in my book, and she's like, joe, I don't remember saying that. She sat down and she said, listen, I understand. Like, Metro didn't have a dress code, per se. There was just Things you weren't allowed to wear. Like, Wayne really hated ripped jeans and stuff like that. No midriffs. Like, it was a lot of. It was a lot of very specific dress code things, but we didn't have, like, a school uniform or anything like that Anyways. So Steph came in after probably being told to put on a sweatshirt for the 17th time. Oh, by the way, look at how cool this is. If you can't see that. I just held up a boombox circa 1989. You're listening to it. So she sat down and she said, listen, about this dress code thing. And I'm like, look, Steph, I'm doing it. And again, please understand. This came from a very naive, I think, and in all fairness, sort of anti feminist stance that I didn't quite understand yet. And she sat down and she said, why are you telling. Why does a school tell young women what they can and can't wear? And she goes, it's not. We're not a formal school, so there's no, you know, uniform or anything like that. And why is it that you're always just talking about what women are wearing and what they can't wear? And I said, well, Steph, you know, I want you to be, you know, covered up. And she's like, okay, why? And I said, well, you know, because I. I want you to be respected for you. I want you to be, you know, kind of protecting your. I don't know. And I'm making all these arguments now. They're so bad, but, like, your innocence or your youth, and I don't want anybody objectifying you, and I want you to be, you know. And she said, okay. She goes, but why? I stopped. I'm like, I don't. Because, like, we. This is the world we live in. Women get objectified. This is what, you know, patriarchy has done. And we talked about that a bit. And she goes, yeah, but why? And at this point I was like, this kid's gonna make me insane. And she said, why do I have to change what I am comfortable in, what I want to wear, or how I present myself? Based on the notion that men predominantly. Although we could say the same about some women, men can't control how they act, react. If I'm a distraction, if they then feel a certain level of access or. Or they feel as though they've been given consent to do whatever disgusting thing they want to do. Why is that my problem? Why aren't you, instead of teaching me what to wear, so I don't upset them or Distract them. Why don't you teach them to not be so easily led? Why don't you teach them how to be human? Why don't you teach them how to have respect? And I was silent, dead silent. And I'm looking at her and I'm thinking, I spent the better part of my career, my life like thinking that I needed to protect students in some way. Protect obviously younger female students, protect women in general. Again, I felt like this thing where I was just like, I need to be that person. And when in actuality all I'm doing and all I was doing is feeding into the notion that I need to change something that the oppressed is doing that somehow bothers, enrages or distracts those who are doing the oppressive. I need to make the victim responsible for the sexualization, for the objectification. I need to make them change their clothes in order to minimize those negative consequences coming from those other individuals rather than looking at those under other individuals and saying, you need to change. They don't. They can wear whatever they want. Now do I think there's lines? Of course. I once had a student come to school in the other building and it was summer, it was almost summer break and she came with a blow up pool. She came with her bikini, she filled up the blow up pool. We didn't even know because it was outside the school. She filled up the blow up pool, nobody noticing. She had a floaty and she got in it and she was sitting in her floaty come lunchtime with like this little Kool Aid drink beside her, reading a book, floating in the pool in a bikini. So it's listen, kids do hilarious stuff. Obviously you're not wearing a bikini to school, but what's fashionable at that time. And I did a whole other thing about identity and fashion and conformity and stereotype and all of that kind of stuff plays into how people are going to dress in school. This isn't about controlling dress code. This isn't about whether or not it's important to have consistent expectations for all the kids that go to your school. That's not what this is about. Because at the very level of this was talking about patriarchy, was talking about a level of stereotypical garbage that was in my head about how I think we need to handle the problems of sexism in society. And rather than me trying to change all those other things, I go directly to the girls that is affecting the most. I tell them to change. Well, she wasn't cool with that. And from that moment on neither was I. I wasn't now that doesn't mean that I don't still struggle with how does a kid have confidence, do what they wear, sort of reflect that confidence? Are, are they trying to seek, get attention from. All of those things are true, but the funny part is all the kids are doing that with what they wear, how they do their hair, how they walk, where they pants are done up, like it's all a part of that. But I fell into the trap, which is hysterical, obviously, considering I'm a woman, considering that the ideas of equity and social justice are my driving forces, which she very aptly pointed out. And she said, you are buying into the system, asking us to change in hopes that it won't negatively affect us. Rather than telling the powers that be or the people that are in those positions that they need to change and demand that they need to change their behavior, you know. And so since then I've never once. I just won't do it. Now do I think it's important to talk to young students about empowerment, competence, being, you know, an individual, a level of self assuredness, all of those things. Of course, of course I do. But I am no longer going to simply look to people in order to protect them, tell them to change. I'm not into it, I'm just not. And I, I just don't think it's does the job. Because if we're talking, for example, if we're talking about essay. Right. If we're talking about girls, you know, young girls or women in general being targets for violence, sexual advice, if we're talking about that, we gotta, It's a whole culture, you know, because not too long after that there was an art exhibit that was on the east coast and it was an installation piece. And what they had, what this artist had done, and her name is slipping my head right now, which is horrible. But what they, the individual had done is they had put up outfits, full outfits that women were wearing when they were sa'd. And they put this out so you didn't even know what you were walking into. And they put this outfit up kind of like a fashion display in this case. And beside, read the story of what happened to her, what horrible things happened to her, and this is what she was wearing. And outside of it being obviously sort of a social and cultural reflection of where we are, it was also to tap into this notion that what a woman wears. I think we'll all stand here and say what a woman wears has nothing to do with whether she deserves it. Right? That's ridiculous. And those Arguments can't even be made in court anymore. And all. Even though some people still make them in their own heads. But what it tried to unlearn or help us unlearn was that 97% of these outfits were like jeans and a T shirt, a hoodie, jogging pants and a zip up because she was running in the, whatever rubber boots and baggy jeans and a raincoat. Like so. So the funny part is this perception that I had where what, like, like some people would think, okay, well, I. There's an implicit consent factor depending on what she's wearing. And this idea that the only people that were, that were facing this kind of violence, the only one that were facing this kind of violence wore certain things. I didn't think it was justified, but I thought there was a correlation. And then to find out, guys, there really isn't, that it was a false correlation, that it was a made up correlation. And then you start thinking about why was this correlation made up? Well, it was made up because it's. It's a way to take something horrible that's going on in society and still blame women for it. It's a way to not shine the light onto the actual underbelly of the disgusting cultural, social, you know, problems within society as they stood right now. It was a way to switch blame. And meanwhile, and this is how, this is the insidious nature of patriarchy. Meanwhile it had people who thought themselves feminists propagandizing for them against the very women that I thought I was helping to protect. When you have women telling women how to dress and what to do and what the expectations are going to be, that's a much more powerful. And we see it all the time. And I really want to talk about this because it's a much more powerful control factor for women than it is if men are doing it in a really good system of oppression. You don't have the oppressor having direct control or direct conversation with the oppressed. No, no, you elevate or you, I guess, manipulate and brainwash elements of that particular group and you empower them to police the rest of their group. We did it with indigenous people in this country, created residential schools and then put former indigenous peoples in charge of the residential school and said, look, they're doing it to each other. It's not us. It's not us. Same thing is going on here. And same thing is going on when you have, for example, you know, women running for the highest office in political life. You know, pre Kamala Harris, you have Hillary Clinton I remember how women spoke about Hillary Clinton. It had nothing to do with her policies. It had everything to do with what her pantsuit was that day and the fact she stayed with her husband after he was caught being unfaithful. That's what that had to do with. That's what women were saying. Wanna know who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton? It wasn't men, it was women. And unfortunately, I still think the same. True, the same is true for Harris in a different way and under a different auspice. But look at what the first thing they. They start talking about with her. Well, how did she get to that position? Oh, she was dating this guy. And obviously, what. And again, the people spouting these lies and these misconceptions and these flat out manipulation, they're. They're women. They're women doing that job. And as a teacher who. This is an uphill battle. It's really, really, really hard. And I, I balance it because on one hand, I'm not interested in telling people how to live their lives, what to wear, what makeup to put on or to interact. I'm not interested in any of that. I get that. I'm not. But I'm not interested in abdicating my responsibility to having deep discussions about the underpinnings of what we're doing here. And when I see young women propagating and replicating the same patterns that I've seen, you know, my eyes were opened up to in my younger years or through sort of different feminist waves, how do I have that conversation? Because I think you start thinking about those things and start trying to figure out, how do I have a conversation about social justice without dictating what they need to do? And the same would be true for the, you know, the LGBTQ + community. The same would be true for visible minorities, religious minorities. It's across the board. So all of these conversations need to be cracked open. And how do you have that conversation with students? Because I think it's essential, especially the courses I teach. But it's essential across the board because what we used to do in a lot of ways, and everybody will understand this, we used to just heighten women, right? So you'd see, like, women in stem, you'd see school shifting to empower women, more women getting into universities, educational models shifting so that women were being successful. So that you're asking if. If all the guys raise their hand, you're asking for the. The young girls, their. Their answer. So all of that is going on, but is it. How is it Changing because then you've seen, and there's some really cool people, including guy named Scott Galloway, doing work in this area. You've seen this shift to empower women to the negation of our young boys. And I've always said that feminism isn't about human rights, isn't about women's rights, it's about human rights. That women getting rights isn't to the negation or isn't to the depletion of other people's rights. But we've kind of seemingly thought women have all of these struggles, all of these things they're facing. We're going to clear the road, we're going to empower, we're going to lift them up, we're going to do all of these things. And everybody stopped talking about our young guys. Now I'm not, I'm not asking us to stop empowering our young women. I am asking us, we need to be able to do both because as we know, fewer and fewer guys are going to post secondary education. Fewer and fewer guys are being successful. They're being labeled as, with, as having ADD or adhd, troublemakers. They're, they're disturbing everything. They're being kicked out. The majority of private schools that are co ed are filled with boys. You know, guys are always the higher number. Why? Because they're not fitting in the structure. Why aren't they figuring in the structure? Because we've made the structure fit. Empowering young women in a lot of ways, you know, and then we stay quiet, we don't empower these young men. And people will take up leadership in a vacuum. If, if you don't fill that role, if young boys aren't looking to you for empowerment and, and confidence building and education and a connection, they will find it somewhere. And unfortunately now it's with guys like, you know, Tate or, you know, Charlie Kirk or Matt Walsh, these individuals who are now looking to weaponize the negation or the marginalization of young boys and, and their feeling of feeling pushed out and alone and not supported and all of those things. There's reason these men have become popular. It's not because their ideas are good. Their ideas are absolute garbage. It's because nobody else is filling that space. Now there are men like again, Scott Galloway, who I have nothing but incredible respect for and hope to do something with, hope to work with at some point, in some way, because I think what he has to say is powerful, is true and is necessary. But when everybody else is quiet, you know, a 14 year old guy is going to put on something Tate says, talking about how they're the man, how masculinity is all that matters, how it's all you. You got all the power, you got all the control, trying to take it back. Why are women voting? Why? This is ridiculous. Put them back in the. All of this is happening in real time right now. And it's not happening because we've empowered women. It's happening because we haven't educated men. So boys, really. So in the moments where we're giving women all of these opportunities, right, because they've been kept out. So there's different kinds of learning, right? Let's just separate, for example, social and emotional learning over here and academic learning over here. So if we separate those two out, we women for a very long time and young girls have been social and emotional learners, right? Talking about team dynamics, cooperation, nurturing, all of those kinds of things. Multitasking. And now we're pushing the academics, right? That's what we did. Women can be doctors, women can be lawyers, women can be President of the United States, whatever it is. And it's all very, very, very much true. However, we didn't at the same time push a same level of healthy support for young boys, social and emotional learning. Why didn't we do that? Here's the funny answer. Sexism. Isn't that a ridiculous answer? But it's true nonetheless, because we thought we just needed to lift women up. Men were already here, but they weren't. They weren't. We were just judging everybody from sort of a capitalistic, educated, how do I get a job? Kind of way, rather than a holistic individual. Because if we were judging them all by holistic individuals, women were successful in one way because that's how we train them. Men were successful in another way because that's how we train them. What we should have done is elevate both differently. That's social and emotional learning. The ability to regulate their emotions. I watch. Listen. Everybody thinks women are emotional. It's ridiculous. Of course they are. All people are emotional. That's what makes us human. But just because you can see a girl maybe cry doesn't mean they don't have control over their emotions in a more healthy way. Because I'll tell you right now, young men and their inability to regulate their emotion and then control their emotion, that's usually expressed in one primary way, which is rage and violence. Anger. Well, that's just how guys are. Because of testosterone. What if guys are prone to rage, anger and violence because of testosterone, Then we need to mitigate that with actual education about how to control that. I'm not saying anger isn't a part. Everybody feels anger, but how you deal with that anger, well, that says something about you. And we didn't do any of it. Want to know why? Because I still don't think to this day do we really understand and value social and emotional learning. We should start. We should start as we see a rise of all of this trad wife and all of this kind of garbage that's going through and trying to make sure that men are men and women are women. And you stay over there, and you stay over there. And then the negation of the trans community, they're negating the trans community because if they don't negate the trans community, they don't have. They don't have these carefully defined boxes to throw people in. The trans community just like obliterates their ridiculous notions of binary truth, which have never been true a day in their life ever. So when we pushed all of this education for women and access for women, and we didn't equally push this access and education for young boys and what they need differently. Because by the way, I. I teach them. I mean, different students need different things and genuine, generally speaking, and I don't mean I'm not stereotyping, but generally speaking, you know, when you're looking at a. A kid, a young boy in seven, eight, nine, when they're at the sort of the height of puberty and testosterone's flying off the map, they need more physical activity. It's hard. It's. It's not an emotion they're regulating, it's an actual energy. So you got to figure out how to direct that. Because if you don't direct it, then it pops off in class. They get deemed to be having ADD or adhd. I understand some people actually have ADD and adhd, but I think a lot of the times it can also be misdiagnosed. They get, you know, in trouble. They're. They're moving around, they're touching other kids, they want to go to the walk, they want to go to the bathroom. They get. And that's like a physiological response. We're not making space for that. We're just kicking them out of class. Whereas we've created a whole different way of getting at young women in the classroom as students so that they have a different system in order to draw out and encourage and build them going forward in academic. The academic world. Right. We changed the game. We just said, this is the goal. So the goal is. And again, Very anti feminist. The goal is we want girls to be able to do everything boys can do. But that was a bad goal. That was a weak goal. In all fairness, it was a unintelligent goal because the goal should be everybody. If, if historically we were a very functionalist society, we were very, you know, cookie cutter. You do this, you do this. If that's who we were and still are for a lot of moments, then our goal should be elevating everybody out of that monstrosity of a limitation. Our goal should be how do I get all kids, all adults to understand that they need the entire scope of their personality, the entire their mentality. They need to figure it all out in order to become more holistic, balanced, useful individuals that can go on and do great things and they're not being held back by academic, educational, financial or emotional mental health kind of ways. If we really cared about things like mental health, we wouldn't be talk about it so much. We'd have things in place that actually do something. Your mental health matters. Take a day off. That's not fixing anything, that's not adjusting anything, that's not talking about it. That's not giving any sort of real, you know, strategies to mitigate the impacts of all of those feelings that are completely and utterly okay. And again, it's a big shift, right? We've gone from when I was young to nobody had an iep, nobody had mental health issues, nobody had anything because we never talked about it, we never got tested for it. And if you didn't fit the mold, cool. You left school, you got bullied, you like, that's what happened. Now everybody has an iep, Everybody has a thing that they rely on. Everybody maybe will have a different learning ability, you know, and, and an excuse to not get the job done. That's a problem too. That shouldn't been the solution. The solution shouldn't be, oh my gosh, you know, you struggle with dyslexia, okay, I'm going to give you all the books audio wise. What? That's not the solution. When I was a kid, you had dyslexia, nobody noticed. They called you horrible things and they just thought you to be stupid, ridiculous. Now you see this push other way. Oh well, it's the thing they struggle. Let's just make, let's just modify stuff for them. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. How do we help mitigate? How do we help them overcome? How do we help individuals get better at the things they suck at? Isn't that the job? Shouldn't that be the job. Because I promise you, I promise you guys, if all of us were tested, we would all have a thing. We would all have a thing. We're not good at a thing. We need to get better at a thing. We need to strategize for. But what do we do? We avoid it like the plague. I just won't take that class anymore. I won't play sports anymore. I'm not going to do music. We avoid it like the plague. And the only kids that get penalized when they avoid are the kids where they're avoiding courses that we've deemed important. Right? English, math, science. Oh, you got to avoid. You're going to avoid science. Oh, no, you have to do science Again, science is very important. So are all subjects. We've just prioritized what's more important. We say you're going to take English every single year. But phys ed, you can just do that for grade nine. Because who cares about your bodily, physical, health. One strength. What? What? But it goes back to my original contention is this idea that we have decided what the story is, what we need to fix in society and why we need to fix it. And what needs to happen is there needs to be a lot more open dialogue. So if we're really going to talk about equality and equity amongst the sexes, what we should be talking about is equity amongst people. And what we should be really speaking to is how we have geared society to do A and B. But really we're going to need the whole all 26 letters of the Alphabet in order to have different paths to get out the best potential from each individual and make people accountable for the bad things they put in the community. They put in the. The echo chamber, the ecosystem they put into the world around them, rather than making individuals responsible who are the victims of that kind of mentality. That's the goal. So my lunch hour conversation with Stephanie really did set me on a whole new way of looking at education, a whole new way of looking at the gender division of how we treat and how we educate and what we prioritize. It really made me think very hard of how I was lured in as somebody who thought they were fighting for women and lured in. But what I was lured in to do, which is still control women. So I might not understand that subjectively when it comes to indigenous peoples or African Americans or, you know, Asian American or to any minority, I might not understand. But then, then the question becomes. Or the, the. The direction should be when you have students in your class of different backgrounds like that. Let them speak. Let them hear my perspective on my experience on this. And then let them, because this is what critical thinking is all about. Let them apply it to the world in which they see, to their lived experience. And at what point are we controlling minorities? And at what point do minorities have to assume and take a level of accountability for what they're. How they're progressing within it, and are they using their relative power to oppress and control other people? Incredibly important. And that whole conversation started with a simple fashion trend Jennifer Beals made famous. Not Beals. Yeah, Jennifer Beals. She in Flashdance. Yeah, Jennifer Beals. I get mixed up with Jessica Beals. Jennifer Beals. Later, from the L Word. Shout out to Jennifer. But a. But a fashion trend that made me try to control and that in invariably, like almost by kismet, made me sit down and face something incredibly real, not just in our society, but in our schools, our education system, our cultural world as it exists today. So thank you so much, Steph. The fact that I need to learn and unlearn things, absolutely essential. And I promise I will always have that conversation. And on that note, thank you guys for hanging out with me. Go check out my book. That's not what this book is about. Coming out on July 1, 2025. You can get it on learn16.com but until I see you again, have a great day. Try to unlearn something a little bit. I'll see you next day. Same bat time, same bat channel. Dismissed.