Your 10 year old wants to wear a crop top, surely that’s too young to be dressed that..sexual?
Your 15 year old wants to wear a crop top to school, is that even allowed?
Your 17 year old wants to wear a crop top to family gatherings where your grandpa will be around, what will they think?
Nothing seems to be triggering the religious trauma of modesty culture like the crop top. I think because it is the ubiquitous style among young people at this fashion moment, our kids want to wear crop tops and we don’t know how to feel about it.
The vibe I am getting from parents who are parenting after modesty culture is that, we don’t ascribe to modesty culture, we don’t want to police our children’s clothing, but we still feel uncomfortable…somehow.
I want to suggest that deconstructing modesty culture is simply hard. Like so many other areas of unlearning, it’s peeling back layers like an onion, we think we’ve shed an entire shell but there’s just another layer underneath. We worry that if our girls are out in the world baring their midriffs that it somehow increases the chances of sexual assault. This enduring cultural myth that the behavior and dress of a rape victim provokes the assault is all that it is, a myth. Sexual assault happens because of the choices of the rapist, not because of what the victim is wearing. We can know this with our rational brains, but our fears reside in a different area of our brain and it sometimes takes the wheel. To demand our girls cover up, change into a different top, is after all, a fairly easy thing to do. Parenting is hard enough, if there’s something easy to keep our children safe, we’d do it.
There’s also the element of “what will the grandparents think?” Will my parenting be judged by the attire of my children? This extends to other, more seemingly benign concerns we have about crop tops, is it appropriate for this context? Is it appropriate to wear crop tops to school, to church, to the grandparents for lunch? I think these are legitimate concerns and we have parental responsibilities to help our kids navigate this. But again, I think sometimes we mask our deeply embedded modesty culture with these more palatable concerns. We say we want our kids to be socially appropriate when at the root we are still reenacting the cycle of oppression. We had to cover up so surely our kids can’t be walking around with all that freedom.
But what if they can? What if the anxieties we have about how the world responds to their dress is not the world’s, but our own? What if the way we were treated when we were girls is not the way our girls are treated in this generation? What if the risk of them getting punished by the world is much lower than the risk of us punishing them before they go out into the world?
We have to remember that our kids are not our precious little robots that we can control and keep safe. They are human, capable of experiencing pain and rejection and learning from their mistakes. We can recommend that they don’t wear crop tops to formal occasions, but it probably will only take one time that they do so for them to discover themselves that they might not want to do it again. We can suggest that they might get sunburned if they expose their skin, but their own bodies feel heat and pain.
If we neglect to warn them of all the consequences of wearing a crop top, they might experience some social rejection, some body shaming comments from boomers who they shouldn’t care about anyway, or they might get a little burnt from exposure to the elements. That is a risk.
However, if we police the way they dress the consequences are far greater. We rob them of the freedom and space to develop their personal expression and style. And this is about so much more than fashion–it’s about trusting their own instincts, developing their relationship with their peers and colleagues and their wider social circles. It empowers them to know who they are, who they want to be, and how they want to move about in life.
I commented in my FB group, Raising Children Unfundamentalist, that one day the crop top trend will likely fade, and the kids will look back at their photos of crop tops and “cringe” at their dated style. And shouldn’t they get to participate in this kind of collective nostalgia and shared fashion history? They deserve the freedom to make mishaps, to learn and grow and laugh at their own choices.
When we tell our girls to hide their midriff, we’re inadvertently asking them to hide so much more than those inches of skin. We’re asking them to erase a part of themselves during formative years where the personhood that they can potentially cultivate will be lost. And speaking from experience, the years and labor it takes to recover that sense of self is a formidable cost indeed.
I think it’s clear that my opinion on the crop top is heavily biased towards: let them wear it. I’ll end with perhaps not my most powerful argument: They are super cute.