The only issue I have is this: she likes to dress somewhat provocatively. I wouldn’t classify her as an exhibitionist; that description comes with the connotation that she dresses the way she does for attention. I think she’s just comfortable as she is and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. She ran around naked all the time as a baby. Her dad used to take her to the beach in just a bathing suit bottom because he didn’t want her to have a tan line. She’s just always been kind of naked. I don’t find nudity especially disgraceful or disgusting, the way some people do, but she is just a kid. I want to give her the freedom to dress however she wants, but I admit that I’m not comfortable with my teen traipsing around in public in shorts where her bum sticks out the bottom. So I’m kind of at an impasse. She has a tendency to hear what she thinks I said rather than what I did say, and if I say “you’re not grown enough to wear those shorts,” I don’t want her to hear “put your body away. You have no business showing it.” I don’t want to body-shame her into wearing whatever everyone else in the world wants to see her in, but now that she’s growing up and changing her style to be more provocative than perhaps a teen should be, I do have to set some boundaries. But I don’t want her to think it’s because she’s gross or unattractive, and I’m concerned that that’s how she’ll take whatever I say to her.
My mother-in-law said to me that “some dirty old man is going to think she’s asking for it,” which makes me sick to my stomach. If a dirty old man thinks that about a child that is not yet sixteen then that’s what makes him a dirty old man. That’s rape culture talking. She could be wearing a parka and still be raped. Would she be asking for it then?? Or only on warm days when she wears shorts?? What rapists and pedos and abusers think and do is what makes them what they are: not what a woman wears. I sure as shit don’t want to tell my daughter that she’s responsible for what “dirty old men” think of her. By all means, she should be aware that there are people out there that are like that, but it’s not her fault if they do something bad.
Anyway, it’s the last week at school. I know they have some manner of a dress code there, and she’s got her last finals to keep her busy, but after the end of this week I have to have a whole new body talk with her, and I’m not sure how to do it without sounding like I’m telling her that her body is somehow inappropriate, although there is a time and a place for a bare butt, and I don’t want to give her the message that whatever nasty people say or do or think of how she looks is not her fault.
Quandary . . .
