Skirts Should Be a Normal Choice…for Both Women and Men Schoolboys in France stirred up gender norms when they eschewed pants last week. But men in skirts shouldn’t be a provocative sight…it should be a choice as normal as women in pants.
Last Friday, male students and teachers in Nantes, France launched a campaign to fight the sexism that is plaguing societies across the world through their clothing. The 'Ce que soulève la jupe' (or ‘Lift the Skirt’) movement encouraged boys across 27 of the northwest city’s schools to sport skirts to class instead of trousers.
“We noticed that in a lot of high schools in our region, there are lots of cases of sexism and discrimination, so we thought we should do something to change that, and so we came up with the idea,” the campaign’s organizer, Arthur Moinet, told EuroNews.
Conservative citizens, however, called the skirt-wearing boys “scandalous.” Olivier Vial, president of the conservative UNI party spoke out, saying, “We’ll do any old nonsense in the name of equality…This move is inspired by the Day of the Skirt, whose original aim was to allow women to express their femininity in environments where it was often difficult. But this is just denying feminine and masculine identity.”
While Moinet—and the boys who participated—should be applauded for their efforts to show solidarity and raise awareness for the discrimination faced by women, the response uncovered another form of social discrimination—t
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