Our S(hakespeare)TEM crisis and school dress codes: "My daughter's legs are nothing like spaghetti straps..."

This essay is organized around a piece of literature, something eschewed by the nation's new educational standard: the Common Core. And it has little do with STEM. But I do think, as I am a university professor, it may help get some "college" -- and even "career" ready.

Here is Shakespeare's sonnet number 130, familiar enough I hope:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Technically speaking, the sonnet has 14 lines, divided in to an "octave" (8 line chunk) and a "sestet," (6 line chunk) an ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme.

Remember this quasi-technical stuff from English class?

Let me skip quickly over that try to explain some of the poem's more striking connections to our current world and, in particular, our schools and, even more specifically, our public school dress codes which are prompting me to throw a Project Runway type fit in these last days of warm weather school.

The Shakespearean sonnet follows the thematic concerns of the Petrarchan sonnet (In the middle of the 16th century, courtiers Wyatt and Surrey actually "invented" the English sonnet by translating the older Italian, Petrarchan sonnet -- the main difference being the latter has an abbacddceffe rhyme scheme).

Like the Petrarchan sonnet -- which filled the imagination of male courtiers for at least 400 years before it filled the imaginations of English, European, and then American, Australian, and Canadian school boys -- this sonnet addresses a female subject by identifying specific parts (eyes, lips, breasts, etc.).

In that, the "sonnet" is really connected to the French tradition of the "blason" or "blazon" which also dissected females in to body parts.

 

Here, Shakespeare provides a characteristically original riff on the tradition, refuting the relationship of his girl's "eye" and "lips" and "breasts" to some of their traditional comps: sun, coral, roses, etc.

 

 Shakespeare's is also quite tame by industry standards.

 

Many medieval French blasons border on what we would call the pornographic and, in fact, there are some in the world that still have what strikes me as a peculiar taste for them.

But whatever. We all have our peculiarities.

It is important to note that sonnets weren't just "art" that some pursued.

Every "courtier" -- that is every young man of substance and rank -- was taught and expected to master this form just as he was expected to learn to ride, to hawk, to navigate and so on. Indeed, courtiers were expected to write not just sonnets but sonnet "sequences," many, many sonnets. In the English tradition, I prefer Phillip Sydney's.

Literary historians long ago explicated how this poetic form -- which itself was a form of thinking replicated again and again throughout Europe -- created a misogynistic culture. I can't describe the mass of scholarship on this in a blogpost. I can only assure you it exists. It is like the world of science we so often choose to deny because we still, somehow, think our "opinion" matters.

Briefly, if all your young men are taught to think and write about women in terms of "parts" they will never see women as "whole." Or, to be more precise, they will never see women as real people. Young courtiers were force fed the sonnet tradition. And they ate it up.

To complicate things, all men looked up to and tried to imitate or ape the manners of courtiers.

If we push the Petrarchan form back more directly in to its religious context the depth of the problem becomes quickly apparent.

The Petrarchan lady of the sonnet (the original was named "Laura") is never "real" in the sense that she is a real woman, a person. She is either chopped up, highly sexualized body parts or she is, at best, an "idea," an idea of perfect Godliness that a sonneteer should pursue but never reach. She is either Madonna or whore, but never, ever a person. (Apologies if someone once wooed you with a sonnet -- does happen!)

The whole weird matrix is constructed out of an attempt to join Medieval Catholicism and its desire to depict a perfect (non-physical) "love" (St. Augustine's idea of "caritas") and Neo-Platonism, a return to the Greek philosopher who similarly imagined a perfect "realm of ideals" that had nothing to do with bodies.

Female bodies presented a particular obstacle here. Can't live with them, can't live without them -- literally.

Here, for comparison with the sonnet tradition, is my daughter's middle school dress code, a code that is used, I suspect, in schools across the country:

DRESS CODE RESTRICTIONS (restrictions referring to “tops” apply to both shirts and dresses):
NO tank tops, regardless of the width of the straps. Contrary to urban legend, XXXX does not have a two- or three-finger tank top rule. Sleeveless tops must cover the entire shoulder.
NO wide-neck tops which expose shoulders or show tank top, camisole or undergarment straps.
NO tops with spaghetti straps, no tube tops, strapless tops, crop tops, midriff tops or tops which expose any portion of the stomach.
NO short shorts, skirts or dresses. The general rule is that shorts, skirts and dresses must be at least fingertip level or longer when arms are straight down to the side. However, the school reserves the right to use its discretion when determining whether the length is appropriate.
NO baggy pants or shorts that are worn low enough to expose undergarments.
NO clothing that advertises alcoholic beverages, tobacco products or any substance prohibited

The dress code, of course, concentrates on girls, sexualizing bits and pieces of clothing and body parts, literally chopping young girls into pieces as we have been doing for centuries and, with a modern twist, adding strange yoga positions to try out to see if all is well.

 This is how we -- I am tempted to say inadvertently but that is not quite the right word -- invite ALL to look at girls: spaghetti straps and short length first.

If we think this "normal" or "commonsensical" it is only because we have convinced ourselves of its normalcy over hundreds of years of cultural practice. All those sonnets. All that writing. The results of this kind of thinking are routinely shown to be horrifying.

So: If you have a middle school daughter you will note quickly, I think, how she has similarly been chopped in to sexual pieces and how the school literally instructs its teachers and its other students to "look" at girls this way. We can, again, literally "see" no other way to manage this.

Really?

We can see no other way in part because we refuse to study and consider our own history, our own language, our own culture, the way the past impinges on the present -- even as we babble on about living in the "21st century" as if we have left human history and ventured on to some new planet.

We don't read our own poems particularly well. Now we don't want to read them at all. We want no traffic with this kind of logic or argument or history because it is dense and hard and difficult -- like trigonometry for some or calculus for others.

And that is an educational crisis. Not a STEM crisis. But a Shakespearean crisis.