Ilana Teitelbaum, in “‘What not to wear’ should never be more than a TV show”, , offers an insightful, intelligent and personal account of how rules of women’s dress are oppressive, an essay that reminded me of some of my own high school experiences: I grew up with an enforced code of modesty, and was implacably shaped by the attitudes that go with such an upbringing. I was raised an Orthodox Jew in a stringently Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood. I grew up under the constant, watchful eyes of teachers, principals and neighbors who would make an instant judgment about me if my attire did not conform to the strict standards of Orthodox Jewish law. One teacher in the tenth grade, an internationally respected rabbi, singled me out in the middle of class for a tongue-lashing because I was wearing my hair loose on my shoulders. In the ultra-Orthodox community, such licentious display of a girl’s hair is a flagrant offense.Coming from a community in America where such standards are more relaxed, this was my first exposure to the rule. My homeroom teacher later told our class that this same rabbi would have fainted if he had known we were wearing knee socks instead of tights under our duty-length skirts (trousers, which reveal the legs and groin, are expressly forbidden). I suppose it’s a good thing he never looked up our skirts, though I can’t help wondering why he would be thinking about what was under them in the first place. Oh, yes. There were always men at the front door of the Yeshiva of Flatbush in the morning, whose job it was to “check” the length of the skirts. Sometimes it was Mr. Halevy, a history teacher, a 50+ bachelor known for putting girls with large chests in the seats in front of him. His instructions for essays were: “Should be like the length of a girl’s skirt — long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.” Ha ha ha. Hilarious. Of course, you have to wonder what Mr. Halevy was thinking at the front door as he watched those “skirts” to make sure they conformed to whatever ideas the men were thinking of at the time. One of the strongest parts of Teitelbaum’s essay is where she takes issue with one of the most challenging aspects of this discourse — i.e., the way cultural relativism is invoked in order to protect the rights of those trying to keep women covered. This is such an important topic, one that gets some otherwise open and liberal-minded people twisted in rhetorical knots instead of seeing the issues of justice and compassion right in front of them: I am disturbed because this sort of basic ignorance in the most hallowed halls of academia runs directly counter to any kind of evolution of rights for women. What begins as politically correct praise of an “other,” exotic culture can end with an embrace of the tyranny that women have been seeking to escape...