Bare Your Breasts but Don’t Mention Them

Yesterday, I read that high school girls at Baltic, SD, are forbidden to wear “I Love Boobies” bracelets, which are designed to raise the public’s awareness of breast cancer. The bracelets are considered “in poor taste” and perhaps offensive.

It is absurd that anything as innocuous as the message on a bracelet could cause such an uproar. The community of Baltic should be praising its young women, who are actively promoting the awareness of a disease that strikes one in eight of American women.

The picture accompanying the article was of 16 year old Amelia Atkins, who is wearing a “I Love Boobies” bracelet and a Susan G. Komen For the Cure breast cancer shirt saying, “Save the Ta-Tas.” Lord have mercy, she dares to wear the phrase “Ta-Tas” too.

In Clovis, CA, the boobie bracelets have also run afoul of educators. “The school district's dress code outlaws jewelry with sexually suggestive language or images…” So, I guess anything to do with a breast, even mentioning it, is sexual. How about breast feeding? Then again, Clovis is in Central California, don’t you know?

We are much more sophisticated in Southern California. Yesterday, in Simi Valley, CA, I saw a young girl leaving a junior high school with a low scooped blouse revealing a major portion of her bare upper breasts. She didn’t have a lot of protuberance, but what she had proudly jiggled as she walked. This girl is apparently not violating any school dress codes. Of course, she didn’t have on anything saying boobies or ta-tas either. But, I’ll bet that more than one of her male schoolmates experienced a surge of something relatively new to them, testosterone. Do you think that might be distracting to the school’s educational mission?

What gives? Well, clearly we Americans don’t have a consensus on the matter.

To the moral guardians and limiters of free speech in Clovis, Baltic, Colorado, Idaho, Florida and Wisconsin, I know that the courts have ruled that you can limit free speech of students at school. But, I say, “get a life.”

To the complacent educators in Simi Valley, get a backbone and address the issue about your young female students becoming sex objects before their time?

To the rest of you, support the breast cancer awareness movement. You owe it to all the women in your lives. Oh, and say “well done” to Amelia and her cohorts.

Link in this Blog:
Schools ban bracelets promoting cancer awareness