A Student Asked Me: “Why Do I Feel Like a Ho? I Barely Talk to Boys”
The first real heat wave of the school year hit late August, and the AC in the science wing gave out completely by third period. My classroom was a greenhouse, and the kids had given up on trying to look fresh. I was standing by the door when Maya came in. She was a quiet junior, kept to herself, always did her homework, and was the kind of student who got missed in the noise of a crowded hall. She had a flannel tied around her waist and was wearing a simple tank top. She was also holding a pink slip.
“Ms. Dova?” she said, placing it on my desk. “I have to go to the office.”
I picked it up. It was a dress code violation. “Inappropriate straps.”
“The AC is broken,” she said quietly. “I took my shirt off because I was sweating through it. That was at ten. Now my strap is a problem?”
She wasn’t crying. She just looked tired. She moved toward the door, then stopped and turned around. That’s when she said it—so quietly I almost didn’t catch it.
“Why do they make me feel like a ho? I barely even talk to boys.”
I didn’t have a good answer. I mumbled something about how the rules are awkward and outdated, and I’d see her later. But the phrase stuck in my head for days. Why do they make me feel like a ho?
When we talk about dress codes as staff, we usually talk about “distraction.” We frame it as a practical issue: a student is wearing something that is pulling attention away from the lesson. But in practice, the message we send to a girl like Maya is entirely different. She isn’t thinking about classroom management. She is thinking about the fact that the assistant principal, a man twice her age, looked her up and down and handed her a slip that publicly announced her body was a problem.
That is the gap between administrative logic and adolescent reality.
Over the next few weeks, I started paying attention to Maya more closely. She came to school in a baggy hoodie every day, even when it was still in the high nineties. She hunched her shoulders. She didn’t try to hide that she was uncomfortable—she just lived inside that hoodie, letting it swallow her. One day, she stayed after class for a few minutes, claiming she was finishing an assignment.
“Does the hoodie help?” I asked.
She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “I just want to be invisible, Ms. Dova. When you’re invisible, nobody can tell you that you’re wrong just for existing.”
I thought about that. Maya barely talked to boys. She had one best friend, a girl named Rachel. She ate lunch in the library. She wasn’t trying to provoke a reaction. But the school’s response treated her body as intrinsically distracting, which made her feel that her body was inherently sexual. When a system tells you your shoulders are inappropriate, you start to believe that you are inappropriate. You start to internalize that word—that awful, heavy word she used.
The “ho” feeling wasn’t coming from a boy. It was coming from the institution.
So how did we handle it? Not with great drama, but with small, deliberate actions. I asked to sit in on the next meeting about dress code enforcement. I pointed out that we were creating a two-stop process: a public check in the hallway and a private shaming in the office. The hall check—where a prefect or teacher calls out a student in front of everyone—was the most damaging part. It single-handedly transferred the shame from the policy onto the student.
We changed that. We agreed that any dress code issue would be handled discreetly. A student would get a small slip taped to her locker or a quiet message passed through a friend. The conversation in the office would start not with “What were you wearing?” but with “Is this comfortable?” and “What do you think the policy is trying to solve?” It sounds simple, but it changes the tone from policing to problem-solving.
I also stopped telling students that the dress code was about “protecting them from distraction.” That reasoning actually hurt more than it helped. It puts the responsibility on the girl for everyone else’s focus. Instead, I started saying, “The school needs a uniform code because institutions love sameness. But that doesn’t mean your body is bad.” It doesn’t fully fix the feeling, but it separates the rule from the person’s worth.
Maya and I talked a couple more times. I told her the word she used—that word—was a heavy word, and I wanted her to unpack it. “Is that word coming from inside you,” I asked her once, “or from the people who looked at you that day?”
She thought for a long time. “I guess it’s just the voice in my head that uses it. It sounds like mine now.”
Adolescent identity is weird. For introverted kids especially, comfort comes from observing, not from being observed. When a dress code check forces them into the spotlight, it shatters their chosen invisibility. It makes them feel like everyone else is looking at them, and slowly, they start to see themselves through those imagined eyes. They develop a hyper-self-consciousness. They stop wearing leggings, or shirts with prints, or they hide under hoodies so no one can attach a label to them.
Maya isn’t fine now. That would be too neat an ending. She still wears the hoodie on bad days. But last week, she wore a regular t-shirt. It wasn’t a dramatic act of rebellion. It was a plain green shirt with a collar. She came in, put her bag down, and didn’t slouch. During attendance, she caught my eye and gave me a small, almost imperceptible nod. It felt less like victory and more like a truce—a temporary ceasefire between how she saw herself and how the world insisted on seeing her.
As educators, we can’t control the adolescent social gaze. We can’t stop the whispering or the weird looks. But we can control whether we, as the adults in the building, are the ones pulling the trigger on shame. We can choose to observe rather than punish. We can create an environment where a student’s body is not a topic of public discussion. And maybe that allows kids like Maya to take one step closer to seeing themselves the way they want to see themselves—not through a filter of condemnation, but just through their own eyes.
I don’t have a perfect answer for her question yet. But I’ve started to understand that the “ho” feeling is rarely about the boys in the hall. It’s about the system that forces a girl to believe her body is a distraction—and then blames her for having one. The fix isn’t more rules or fewer rules. It’s making sure the consequences don’t feel like a verdict on who she is.
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