A high school in California is making news for removing mirrors from girls’ restrooms and replacing them with “signs of affirmation” reminding female students that they are loved, valuable, and “worth it.”
Laguna Hills High School students look at signs that say things like, “You are beautiful” and “You are enough,” instead of looking at their own reflections.
It was the idea of Sabrina Astle, 17, who told ABC News she, “wanted to find a way to make a difference through our Kindness Club on campus. This is why I started making the posters in the first place.”
“Then we had, ‘What if …’ Week,” she said, which is designed to bring the campus together. “Each day has a specific message. The message for Thursday, March 23, 2017, was, ‘What if we showed more love?’
One California high school posted bathroom mirrors with signs of affirmation.
“I felt that this would be a good time to hang the signs. I put the signs in the bathroom the night before so students would see them throughout the next day.”
Chelsea Maxwell, school activities director, told ABC News, “She [Sabrina] made it her goal for the semester to spread positive messages around campus.”
Even though the signs were designed for the “What if …” Week, reaction has been so positive, Maxwell said, and there are no immediate plans to take them down.
Which is great, in all, but seems to completely ignore the rather basic fact that mirrors have a pretty utilitarian purpose aside from vanity. And I’m not blaming the teen in question for this–she appears to mean exceptionally well and seems to care about her fellow students–but an adult should have stepped in and explained that the presence of a mirror is not necessarily a negative thing. A person could still be loved, beautiful, etc.–but with an added ability to make sure they don’t have something smeared across their face before running off to geometry. This isn’t a sign of any sort of negative self-worth or vanity; in fact, it’s the opposite. The whole thing just screams of an unintended paternalism.
Besides, if this high school is anything like my alma mater, there simply isn’t time for a student to obsess over their appearances in the mirror. Heck, there’s barely enough time to even use the bathroom for its intended purpose in between classes or during lunch, never mind apply some kind of contour or smoky eye or whatever the kids are doing these days.
This doesn’t appear to be an entirely isolated phenomenon, either. Back in February, Bucknell University covered mirrors in its bathrooms as part of “Self Love Week” and “Eating Disorder Awareness Day.” Another school got rid of scales from locker rooms as they were “triggering.”
Which, of course, is a whole other set of insanity. People with eating disorders need counseling, not virtue signaling–it is a very real and very serious mental illness that cannot be treated by simply covering a mirror or saying a nice thing to somebody. Things like this have good intentions, but they’re reducing a medical condition to something trivial for some warm fuzzy feelings. That’s not good.
Written by Christine Rousselle and published by TownHall ~ April 4, 2017.
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