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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, some of them are very short.  What I don't get is how their mothers let them out of the house like that?[/quote]

My daughter is tall and has long legs. She's also athletic. Basically, she's got a great body. As long as her butt won't show, I don't mind her wearing a short dress. I told her you either show off cleavage or leg but not both. She chose to show off her legs. I made her jump up with her hands over her head both facing me and facing away from me in dressing rooms. Then I had her bend over as if writing something leaning on a table, and I took a picture of her ass and showed it to her and said "are you really comfortable showing this much?" It turned out to be a brilliant idea - she picked a dress two inches longer because of that pic.

But she's got a great body, knows it, and dresses for it. She likes how she looks in the shorter dresses. There is zero correlation between skimpiness of dress and having sex. [/quote]

Then why did you go such great lengths to encourage her to get a longer dress?[/quote]

NP. Length of dress has nothing to do with body shame, the wearer's worth as a human being, or the likelihood the wearer will have sex. However, in our family some things are just not appropriate, and skimpy excessively revealing, short or tight dresses on my high school age daughters, especially when worn to a school event, are one of those things. We required a dress that we felt met the spirit of the dress code for the event and sufficiently covered the private areas of the body. Young men's formal outfits do not typically have the problem of being inappropriate/indecent, but if I had a son and his choice of homecoming outfit were immodest I would also steer him towards something that met these basic standards.

The short skimpy barely there dresses do not look very good, and they do not send a very good message. I discourage them. In general clothing does communicate things about the wearer, and most people choose clothing at least partially with an eye towards social appropriateness for the occasion. These styles of dresses are widely regarded as tacky, showy, and indicative of a poor sense of both taste and propriety. That's not the impression I would like my daughters to make, and honestly they mostly don't really want others to think such things about them either. It is possible to look good and fit in to the high school crowd in a more classy outfit so that is what I guided them towards.

At the very least someone choosing an outfit should be aware of both how they look in it -- the picture from all angles that the PP mentioned -- and how the outfit is likely to fit in at the event and be perceived by fellow attendees. If the wearer is comfortable with the answers to all questions and the outfit doesn't violate the family standards of a minor child's parents, individuals should be free to wear what they like. Similarly, others are free to think what they like about the outfit including thinking that it looks tacky or was a poor or unflattering choice, which is what I generally think of when I see a woman of almost any age in the type of dress OP was describing (because it's not only HS girls' dresses with this problem, you should see what some women choose to wear to formal or professional events!). I know exactly what sort of dresses OP is talking about and I am not a fan.[/quote]

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