I Wonder if the Boys Were Really Distracted

It’s that time of year again.

The backpacks are packed, as are the lunches. The school buses are gassed up and ready to go.

Along with the school buses, the backpacks and the lunches, the double standard is ready to start school.

Kate Darrow’s nine year old daughter attends Callahan Intermediate School in Florida. Upon wearing a tank top to school, the girl was told to cover up because the male students were “distracted” by her bare shoulders.

Pardon my french, but this is bullsh*t.

If she was fifteen or sixteen, that argument may have a shot in Hades of making sense. But she is nine, the school’s reasoning makes no sense. If that was not enough, I have to question how the school sees this young girl. Is she a sexual object who is there just to tempt her male classmates away from their studies or a fully fledged human being who has the right to a real education?

I understand that the school has a dress code. I have no issue with the dress code. But I do have an issue with the fact that the dress code applies one way to male students and another way to female students.

Perhaps next time, the school will think twice when they over-enforce the dress code for the girls, but let the boys slide.

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Mrs. Everything Book Review

Whether we like it or not,when we grow up with siblings, we are assigned roles within the family. However, that does not mean that we stay within those roles as adults.

Jennifer Weiner’s new novel, Mrs. Everything, starts in the 1950’s. Jo and Bethie Kaufman are living an idyllic middle class life in Detroit. Jo is the rebel and the tomboy. Bethie is the little lady and conformist. But their adult roles will not match their childhood roles.

Over the next couple of decades, personal experience and the outside changing world will switch their roles. Jo becomes the suburban wife and mother. Bethie is the rebel who never quite settles down. Though both women seem to be settled as adults, they both question if they have made the right choices in life.

This book is amazing. The details of the time periods that she writes in are superb. I love that the sisters are fully formed, they are so different, but somehow incredibly similar. I also loved that the human quality of the relationships between the female characters. The relationships between the girls and their mother, between Jo and Bethie (a lovely nod to Little Women), between Jo and her daughters was absolutely perfect.

I absolutely recommend it.