In middle school (thankfully not high school), “tzitzit checks” were a common feature of my morning. The boys in first period Judaics were required to prove to our teacher and anyone who might ask over the course of the day that that we were following the dress code by wearing tzitzit. Failure to do so would, after a certain number of times, result in detention or a suspension for repeat offenders.
In high school, I would be reprimanded at most for failing to tuck in my shirt or, during the required months, not wearing a tie or a sweater as per my high school’s dress code. At no time did I ever feel like I was objectified or sexualized.
This is why I am appalled at the news that Orthodox day schools are hiring non-Jewish women to police their female students’ clothing, just like I am appalled at the stories I hear from my female friends of the times when they felt objectified and sexualized and made uncomfortable by their teachers for the length of their skirts or for otherwise not adhering to the dress code set forth by the school in the name of tzeni’ut, the Jewish concept of modesty in action and clothing.
I did not grow up with the language to discuss privilege and societal advantages in a meaningful way — no one I know did, even if we all experienced it in one way or another. Yet high school was the time when I began to understand what privilege is, even if I had yet to learn the language of checking my own privileges and when I was, in fact, unprivileged. It would take my coming out to first experience it, and I admit I still don’t understand the notion of privilege fully.
As a sensible, progressive human being, learning about privilege comes with the desire to begin abdicating it, along with the guilt that comes from realizing that I, without any actions that I might have done, by simply being born the way that I am — white and male — am privileged in ways that were created by those before me.
This is why the first step to abdicating privilege is acknowledging that it exists and learning how it manifests itself: It manifested itself when I never felt like I was being watched by my teachers and judged because of my clothing choices. It manifested itself when I was able to wake up and never ask myself whether or not my teachers’ vision for how Judaism dictates the laws of tzeni’ut would clash with my clothing choices; on a more practical level, my dress code, as a male, was always much more clear-cut. I always knew what was considered appropriate and inappropriate for the dress code.
This, in turn, raises questions for me, as a product of my Orthodox day school education: what were the implicit messages that I, as a male student, was given because of the dress codes? That women’s bodies were meant to be policed, told what is and is not appropriate for public dress, while I was able to enjoy far fewer restrictions on what I was and was not allowed to wear? In essence, the message that male students receive is that we are held to a different standard because we happened to have been assigned male at birth, whereas our peers, who were in all of our classes, and afforded all of the opportunities that we were afforded in our education, were held to a different standard.
How then do I go about working to abdicate that privilege, keeping in mind that I have not felt the oppression of being objectified and sexualized because of my clothing? Is it even possible for me to ever fully abdicate my privilege beyond just acknowledging that privilege exists?
Part of why it is so difficult to talk about gender privilege is that we are only beginning to uncover exactly how privilege manifests itself in our lives. It’s much more than just women being paid seventy-eight cents to the dollar that every man makes, or that men will not be cat-called in the same ways that women will be. It encompasses so much more than that, and effects men in the sense that we are privileged in being able to ignore what is happening. But we can’t. And we shouldn’t. Acknowledging that we have the opportunity to ignore privilege and not ignoring it is the first step to creating a society where privilege does not exist.
Amram Altzman is a student at List College.
