Ms. Wieczorek said she sees in the controversy a double standard for men and women’s behavior that is already well entrenched in high school.
“A boy is figuring out how to be a man, but girls are told, ‘You better shape up in order to be respected,’” she said. That much was clear at her school, she said, in the detentions frequently handed out to girls for dress code violations — a skirt judged as too short, spaghetti straps, a glimpse of bare midriff, anything teachers deem too “distracting.”
Boys, she said, are not subject to such dress-related infractions. “It’s telling girls you exist as an object for someone else’s attention, rather than you’re here to learn and that your education is important,” she said.
On Tuesday, Emma Thatcher, a high school student in Florida, tweeted: “I would just like to say that the emergence of this whole ‘teenage boys should get a pass because they’re not mature enough to understand consent’ narrative is probably one of the most unsettling things I have ever witnessed.”
Despite the rise of #MeToo, girls said they still felt objectified by their male classmates. A recent nationwide survey by PerryUndem, a research and polling firm, found that about three-quarters of girls 14 to 19 said they felt judged as a sexual object or unsafe as a girl. And compared to boys, they were more likely to say they felt pressure to put others’ feelings before their own.
Amy Zhou, a 17-year-old high school senior in Scottsdale, Ariz., said that during a national teen leadership summit she attended this summer, some of the boys were caught ranking online photos of the female participants by attractiveness. Even after conference officials addressed the incident, only one boy apologized, she said.
“We need to send a message that people should respect men and women,” she said. “Kavanaugh’s going to be upholding the supreme law of the land, so obviously he’s supposed to embody that principle.”
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