Some absolutely amazing schoolboys in western France wore skirts into school on Friday to fight sexism. We know. We can’t cope.
Education chiefs at 27 lycées in Nantes decided to take the unusual stand in the battle against sexism by inviting male pupils at their school to ditch their trousers in favour of a skirt. The demonstration, which they’ve labelled ‘Lift the Skirt’ (Ce que soulève la jupe) was the idea of the pupils themselves and was sanctioned by the city’s education chief.
For the boys who didn’t feel up for getting their pins out in the name of sexual equality, a sticker was handed out to show support for the event which read, ‘I am fighting against sexism, are you?’, which might just be the best thing we’ve ever heard.
One of the organisers of the demonstration, student Arthur Moinet said that the event was sparked by sexism in his region. He told Euronews:‘We noticed that in a lot of high schools in our region, there are lots of cases of sexism and discrimination, so we thought we should do something to change that, and so we came up with the idea.’
The event comes a few months after France was involved in a debate about whether or not schools should be teaching gender studies, after extremist organisations organised a boycott of schools after (falsely) claiming the teachers were going to give masturbation classes to young students.
Unfortunately, around 150 members of a conservative group called
protested against the boys’ demonstration outside the school gates, which is pretty depressing and doesn’t really seem in the spirit of an event run by schoolchildren, does it? It’s just skirts...
For what it’s worth, we think that the demonstration was epic and that the boys who took part were really brave. Bravo!
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.