Down the glass staircase
One the one hand boys who “identify as” girls and take their athletic prizes, on the other hand boys who shove cameras up girls’ skirts.
A school vowed to take action after sixth form students expressed fury over a reported “upskirting” incident on a spiral staircase.
A group of male students were allegedly caught taking photographs up the skirts of girls using the transparent glass staircase, in the centre of the sixth form canteen area, at Broughton Hall Catholic High School on Friday.
What kind of complete idiot puts a transparent staircase in a mixed-sex school?
Some students told the ECHO that girls have been advised to “wear shorts” under their skirts and were told there may be plans to install frosted glass panels at the West Derby school.
That sounds comfortable, and convenient, and not at all shaming, and not any kind of financial burden. Also brilliant to tell the girls wear an extra layer of clothes instead of telling the boys to stop being leering pervy female-hating shits.
The girls at the school say it’s been a problem for years, the officials at the school say this is the very first they’ve heard of it.
“It used to make us really uncomfortable. We would ask if we could wear trousers but we were told no, we had to wear skirts. There were girls sent home for coming in with trousers on.”
“You have to wear those garments that make it unpleasantly easy for boys to peer and photograph and grope and even rape. Them’s the rules.”
Several other young women who attended the school shared their disgust on social media.
One said: “Today I’m genuinely embarrassed to say I went to Broughton Hall high school and sixth form. In the sixth form building in the middle of the canteen there is a spiral staircase which has glass surrounding it.
“For years girls have said they feel uncomfortable walking down those stairs in skirts yet the school has done nothing about fixing that problem.
“It’s now been said that a group of around 15/20 lads have been sitting at the bottom of the stairs taking pictures of girls walking down them.”
And the adults running the school couldn’t figure out that this would happen because…they’re robots?
Many years ago,girls attending Catholic schools could be forbidden from wearing patent leather shoes because they reflected up (not just a trope, happened to my cousins.) It looks like they’re trying to overcompensate for that silliness now by installing glass staircases.
There’s no way those administrators had “no idea.”
And the boys were told nothing at all?! Shameful.
An architect who – I guarantee – won an award for it.
Yeah, you’d think the boys in question would be in trouble and there’d be a school-wide campaign about why it was wrong and unacceptable and why they shouldn’t do it and especially that boys should prevent each other from doing it if they see it happening.
But as far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to have happened. The girls get the blame instead.
Someone who went to that school told me that she wasn’t surprised at this. She also said, re-enforcing Sastra’s point:
It sounds so very Catholic, doesn’t it. The priests didn’t abuse the children, the children tempted the priests. Single women who get pregnant must be imprisoned (without trial) in laundries, the men who impregnated them have nothing to do with the matter. Children of unmarried parents must be imprisoned (without trial) in industrial schools because it’s all their fault.
Not entirely related, but when the Canadian Opera Company was developing a new opera house, the architects wanted the architectural centrepiece to be a completely transparent glass staircase suspended above the five-storey atrium lobby. The architecture team was eventually forced to make the glass frosted, for obvious reasons, but only after significant pressure from the opera company’s female executives. (I was an employee there at the time.) The all-male architecture team could not see what the problem was.
When it’s instilled in girls so early and so shamingly.
It’s like a sadistic trap, really. 1. You HAVE TO wear these garments that expose your crotch. 2. You WILL be mocked and/or spied on because you wear these garments that we force you to wear.
As for not entirely related, I think it’s extremely related.
When I was in grade school, we had to wear dresses. In Maine. In the winter. NO PANTS. Pants were too…what? Sexy? Manly? Unfeminine? Comfortable? My mother took to putting us in long skirts in the winter so we could wear leggings underneath.
But my school, in conservative Oklahoma by then, started allowing us to wear pantsuits when I was a freshman, back in 1974 or so. They had to be pantsuits, though, matching. Soon they were allowing things that weren’t specifically pant suits, just pants and a shirt put together willy nilly, or something. They allowed jeans and t-shirts to the girls in my sophomore or junior year. In the 1970s.
One reason I opposed school uniforms was the fact that they always seem to put girls in skirts. Girls cannot have fun in skirts. They cannot run and play. They cannot hang upside down from the monkey bars. They cannot be private, because boys will see things the girls don’t want them to see.
When I was in grade school and junior high, one favorite trick of the boys was to walk behind us and use some sort of stick to lift our skirt. They never got in trouble, either. Oh, well, boys will be boys. That’s always the answer. Yeah, well if that’s how all boys are, then they are too uncivilized to be in public. But not all boys are that way, which suggests maybe some boys are not boys? Or maybe that it’s not necessary to look up girl’s skirts to be a boy.
How do you know that they got impregnated by men? Maybe they got impregnated by other women.
iknlast @8, my High School allowed girls to wear pants from around 1980 or so. In fact they created a wide range of shirt styles and colours and three different pant styles (grey flannel, green cotton drill and green dress shorts) that you could wear in any combination. Because previously there had been distinct girls/boys and summer/winter uniforms that had to be worn in strict combinatons, this new freedom was very well received. people could pick what they liked and found comfortable on any given day or their baseline preference.
I checked recently and found that the school has reverted to limited and restricted choices. I found that very disappointing. I might be getting old, but it sometimes feels as though our society has become much more permissive about sex and violence (and not always in a positive way), while becoming much more conservative about gender performance. I think it’s actually tougher to be gender non-conforming now than it was in the ’80s or ’90s – unless you wave the trans flag.
They would let men see the outline of your legs, i.e. they were too revealing. At least, that’s the impression I got from reading books set around the early 1900’s.
Yeah, Holms, my 9-year-old legs were so irresistible! (Unfortunately, with all the nasty stories these days, I’m beginning to understand that may be true.)
And of course, it was my fault for having female legs, not the fault of the males who ogled those female legs. So I got to freeze because I was responsible for their behavior.
latsot@3
As iknklast said, “boys will be boys.”
They can’t help themselves. That’s the way God made them. How dare you question God. — was the attitude I got quite often while growing up – raised Catholic, attended Catholic grade & high schools.
Funny how God didn’t make girls in skirts.
OB, he didn’t make them wearing triangles, either. We need to get back to the basics…no triangles. (Those damn triangles make me think of hoop skirts, something I hope never to wear).
Ophelia, thank you for fixing my earlier comment.