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When news of a yearbook "cleavage controversy" at a Florida high school broke last month, I was intrigued—but I can’t say I was surprised. In fact, I'd just remarked to my husband a few days earlier that I’d noticed many of the senior portraits proudly displayed on front lawns in my neighborhood resembled adult magazine centerfolds more than school pictures. I’m admittedly out of touch—we don’t have a daughter and it’s been a long time since I posed for my high school yearbook photo. It struck me as odd though that these school pictures of girls in their teens—taken during the fall semester of their senior year, so when they're 17, technically still children—were, in my view, trying to look sexy. With or without cleavage showing, I found the poses and facial expressions to be unnerving.
The "cleavage controversy" at Bartram Trail High School in Florida was that when seniors received their yearbooks in the spring, 80 students noticed their pictures had been photoshopped, primarily to cover up cleavage. The yearbook editor had taken it upon herself to edit the photos without consent from the students or their parents.
According to Romper, the dress code reads as follows: “Personal attire may be in the style of the day, but clothing that is immodest, revealing, or distracting in character is unacceptable.” So, do photos with students' cleavage showing violate this dress code? Many people consider cleavage to be, by definition, revealing; whether it’s immodest or not is a matter of debate. I would also argue that the fact that it was "distracting" is proven by the huge controversy it caused. Clearly, the yearbook editor thought she was doing her job in editing these photos, but it is odd in today’s legalistic world that she doctored them without either asking for consent from the parents who paid for the photos or inviting students to re-do the photos in more “acceptable” attire.
How did the parents react? One mom, Rachel D’aquin, said the following according to the Daily News: “If parents aren’t teaching at home how daughters should dress and dress decently, then the school has to parent.” This reaction is understandable and sounds exactly like something my own mom would have said. Speaking of which, I went back to my freshmen yearbook (1988) and looked at every senior photo and didn’t find any cleavage. Most girls were wearing turtlenecks or sweaters over collared shirts with the collars pulled up (so 80s!). In contrast to this one mom, however, it seemed that most parents were angry that the school pictures had been doctored and defended their daughters’ right to express themselves (and their cleavage).
What I’m wondering is this: Why were parents defending their children’s right to look sexy in school pictures? There’s something weird about that. According to Upworthy, one 9th grader named Zoe Iannone said that she felt “sexualized” when she saw they’d added a black band to cover her cleavage. I had to read that twice. She felt "sexualized" when the yearbook editor, a woman, edited out a 14-year-old's cleavage because it violated the school dress code. In Zoe's defense, her mom said she wears that outfit all the time.
On CNN.com I found the following quotation: “No one who looks at that yearbook now or in the future can get around the idea that women's bodies […] are […] something to hide.” But the overlooked fact is that we’re not talking about women’s bodies; we're talking about girls sometimes as young as 14. Why does age matter? Pictures of adult women with cleavage in Playboy are completely appropriate; that’s what the magazine, in large part, is about! But pictures of girls as young as 14 with cleavage in school pictures? Is that really something we want to get behind in this society that, so the accusation goes, sexualizes women and objectifies their bodies?
I teach freshmen exclusively at CU Boulder and frequently read essays written by female students about how damaging the influence of social media pressure can be on their psyche, self-esteem, and body image. They write about the pressure to look good, to be skinny, to wear just the right clothes, to look cute, to be fun, etc. They write about how these pressures are exhausting and depressing and give them anxiety. On the one hand, it’s sometimes hard to muster up empathy for their fabricated crises: to the middle-aged woman who grew up without social media and has no daughter going through that mess right now, the solution, to me at least, is clear: put the phone down. Disable your online accounts if they're making you miserable. Do something else with your time.
And some of them do write about doing ‘social media cleanses’ where they avoid Instagram and all the rest for a period of time and feel so much calmer and more confident.
College students often have more online than in-person presence. We are aware now that pictures last forever, online. Facebook pages outlive their hosts all the time. This quest to be beautifully digitally memorialized could manifest in young girls as the need to look like a supermodel in their school pictures.
Perhaps there's a simple solution—yearbook photos that are headshots only. A smiling young face. Leave the body and the cleavage out of it. Given what these girls will be up against in years to come, they can be memorialized as smart, happy, and confident. And for our children, isn't that preferable to being memorialized as sexy?
