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Monday's Most Active Threads
Yesterday's topics with the most engagement included girls' homecoming dresses, Coca Cola Scholars, the name "Quinn", and life before screen limits.
The two most active threads yesterday were ones that I've already discussed. The first continued to be thread about the Gaza war. The number of posts in that one dropped to less than 600 which is about half of what the thread had been seeing daily. The second thread was also in the political forum and is about the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. That was revived because there will be a vote today that could result in Jim Jordan becoming Speaker. Skipping those threads brings us to a thread titled, "Homecoming dresses are so short!" and posted in the "Tweens and Teens" forum. Exactly a week ago I discussed a thread that I predicted was the kickoff of DCUM's annual "criticize how teen girls dress" season. The original poster (who, by the way is definitely not "judgy") continues that honored tradition by finding current homecoming dresses to be too short and "slutty looking". The thread immediately entered the predictable pattern of some posters agreeing with the original poster that girls are dressing like "street walkers" while other posters argue that teens always push the limits and that their parents didn't like the way they dressed either. But, then the thread turned to the suggestion that this all was a demonstration of internalized misogyny. As a poster pointed out, regardless of style changes, boys stay fully dressed while girls' attire becomes increasingly revealing. There was quite a bit of agreement with this notion, but then that discussion sort of got lost in a debate about whether criticizing how girls dress is "slut shaming" with the implication being that this was also misogynistic. Some parents described how they managed their daughter's fashion choices, in some cases requiring that biker shorts be worn underneath short dresses and in other cases helping to choose looser and longer outfits. There was also quite a bit of comment on a trend of which I was not aware in which girls wear sneakers with their dresses. One more big debate had on one side posters who argued that girls should either be taught or develop a sense of style. Rather than wearing what everyone else does, they should choose clothing that fits their style and body type and flatters them. The other side contended that girls don't need to do anything to please the first group, could wear whatever they wanted, and that the first group should leave them alone. Just as I was about to publish this post I received a fairly angry report demanding that I lock this thread because it was degrading high school girls. I decided to comply and, therefore, the thread is now locked.