A North Dakota high school does not like yoga. More specifically, yoga pants – but only when worn by girls – because they are proving a distraction to boys and some male teachers. Devils Lake High School (awesome name, by the way, it sounds like the sort of place Buffy or Bella might attend, and I really hope they play this song at their pep rallies: Go Firebirds!) has also banned skinny jeans and jeggings. The assistant principal also asked girls to watch scenes from Pretty Woman and “compare their attire to the main character.” Yes, you read that correctly: an educator just compared her students to prostitutes. The school’s motto, by the way, is “To empower students to be life-long learners in an ever-changing world,” a world in which apparently girls could at any moment turn into streetwalkers.
The new policy “is not meant to objectify girls, but stop boys from focusing on something other than class work,” according to the school’s assistant principal. Students are not pleased. Maria Fixen said she was “not too hot about it, because that’s what everyone wears, that’s their whole wardrobe. So, basically sweat pants every day is what they’re asking for.” Others pointed out that the school should be focusing on more serious problems, such as bullying, and “online stuff and people tweeting about each other. They should be focusing more on that and not dumb stuff like yoga pants. We should be able to wear whatever we want,” said Taylor Gilbertson. We heartily agree. It seems a self-defeating policy: anyone who has spent any time with adolescent boys – and anyone who has ever been an adolescent boy – knows that girls could come to school wearing potato sacks and it would still be “distracting”. Also, if you really want to stop students behaving like Julia Roberts, force them to watch Eat, Pray, Love.
