It isn’t wrong for parents to ask teenagers to dress less provocatively

Whatever you do, don’t state the obvious.

Singer Erykah Badu drew the wrath of the progressive pressure cooker when she offered this earth-shattering revelation: "Do I think it is unnatural for a heterosexual male 2b attracted to a young woman in a revealing skirt? No. I think it is his nature."

Badu was responding to the decision of a high school in New Zealand to require its female students to wear longer skirts so that male teachers are not distracted.

Needless to say, the singer has been roundly castigated by the feminist twitterati for "blaming the victim."

Writing in a column for MTV, journalist Rachel Handler explains, "First of all, that whole…‘women are responsible for keeping men’s behavior in check’ thing is played out as hell. This is one of the ways in which society perpetuates rape culture, pure and simple."

Which is a little disingenuous. I don’t know whether you’ve ever met a high-school girl, let alone one in the year 2016, but they’re not trading gumballs. And the notion that only creepy men find teenage girls attractive is just silly.

We can and should castigate and prosecute men who pursue younger girls, but to suggest that men who find high-school girls — some of whom look like adult women — attractive is naïve. Badu seems to be the only one living in the real world here. She tweeted: "I am aware that we live in a sex-driven society. It is everyone’s, male and female’s, responsibility to protect young ladies."

Teachers and parents have completely lost sight of this. A friend of mine wonders whether her neighbor, a nice man in his 40s, has noticed that his 16-year-old daughter is walking around in Daisy Dukes and tank tops, attracting the gaze of adult men. "Why doesn’t he say something?"

When Badu suggests we are all responsible, though, Rachel Kramer Bussel of Salon accuses her of implying that girls and male teachers equally responsible even though "one is in a position of power over the other." Of course Badu is not holding girls responsible for the roving eyes of male teachers. Nor is anyone who supports modest dress codes in schools. She might be saying that it is the responsibility of the girls’ parents, though, to help create an atmosphere where teachers can teach and kids can learn.

But enforcing a dress code is apparently just too much for many of these women. In her new book, "Girls and Sex," Peggy Orenstein describes how high-school girls tell administrators that they want to wear what they want to wear and it is the school’s responsibility to make sure that boys don’t misbehave.

In a New York Times op-ed, Orenstein writes, "Addressing leering or harassment will challenge young men’s assumptions. Imposing purdah on middle-school girls does the opposite." You can challenge men’s assumptions all you want, but that doesn’t mean they will behave.

Even Orenstein is torn — perhaps because she has a daughter. "Cultural change can be glacial, and I have a child trying to wend her way safely through our city streets right now. I don’t want to her to feel shame in her soon-to-be-emerging woman’s body, but I also don’t want her to be a target. Has maternal concern made me prudent or simply a prude?"

How about both? Maybe it’s fine to be a prude when it comes to our adolescent daughters’ sexuality.

In another tweet, Badu explained that "one way to protect youth is to remind them we are all sexual in nature and as they grow and develop it is natural to attract men..." This too drove her critics around the bend, as she seemed to be implying that boys’ urges were uncontrollable. Have you ever noticed that liberals love to talk about how sex is natural and conservatives are repressed for thinking sexual urges of young people can be controlled when it comes to things like abstinence? But when conservatives talk about natural sexual urges, they are encouraging a rape culture?

This "cultural change" that Orenstein and others are hoping for may never come at all. Men might behave better toward women — indeed there was a time not so long ago where boys making sexual comments toward girls in school was actually less acceptable and less common than it is now. But, sorry feminists, the dream that men will stop being distracted by attractive skimpily dressed women seems pretty far off.

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