It may have been designed with good intentions. It probably even started out as a way to get people to dress more appropriately, but the new enforcement of the shoulder rule accomplished, well, nothing. Nothing good at least.

First of all, the rule has made girls insecure about something as normal as a shoulder. With enough body image pressure being thrown on young women as it is, there is no need to add another normal human body part to the list of things girls should feel bad about showing. Honestly, it’s a shoulder.

Sophomore Holyn Slykhuis is one such student. “Now I feel inappropriate when I wear tank tops or dresses without sleeves. I’m overly conscious about a body part that has nothing to do with looking revealing,” Slykhuis said.

Even in spite of the rule, there is no less showing of inappropriate cleavage at HHS. Girls can still buy shirts with sleeves that are low cut enough for everything to be seen. We should be working on that rule, instead of something as trivial as shoulders.

Secondly, instead of making girls hide parts of themselves that don’t need to be hidden, maybe we should work on teaching boys not to be so body-obsessed. Girls shouldn’t have to dress a certain way simply because another way is distracting for boys. Instead of requiring girls to cover up shoulders, we should be telling boys to stop over sexualizing normal body parts. Everybody has shoulders, no need to make a fuss about it.

Thirdly, we live in an age where the average women and girl wears things that show their shoulder. Shocker. This means that quite a lot of the clothes in stores for warmer weather are things like tank tops and dresses without long sleeves. Putting on a sweater to cover up when it’s 85 degrees outside makes things entirely too warm.

And last but not least, there is a reason almost every candidate for SCA president included something about changing the rule in their speech. The student body doesn’t want or respect the rule, and this makes it a tough one to keep enforcing.

While I can understand the original reasoning behind the shoulder rule, I don’t believe that it worked the way it was intended. Instead of encouraging modesty, it allowed for insecurity in all the wrong places, trouble shopping, and overall distaste from many of the students at HHS.