Imagine walking into a room, one of the most important rooms into your entire country. In the very next room is where many of your countries laws are decided. Many of the most important men in your country are gathered. You have all your papers ready, you’ve been preparing for this for months. But just before you go in, the guard at the door stops you, his face is closed, a little apologetic.

“You cannot go in like this.”

“Like how?” You ask, surveying your carefully chosen dress.

“Like that,” he gestures, pointing to your shoulders, “shoulders are not allowed in the speakers’ lobby.”

You are shocked but you manage to not let it show. Your dress is quite modest, except for the simple fact that it is also a sleeveless dress. You want to argue this, but you are a serious journalist and you think of other journalists you have heard of who put on hijabs and tribal wrappers to get to their story. You fancy yourself one of them in that moment and make do with what you have. Sheafs of official paper. Anything to get to the story. You tear off a few, stuff them into the armscyes of your dress. They are big enough that they could just as easily pass as sleeves.

The guard shakes his head and tells you, “Sorry, but this is still not acceptable.”

Not the kind of thing you’d expect from the American Congress, but it turns out that asides trying to take healthcare from 23 million people and trying to protect colonial monuments that celebrate known racists, the American Congress under Speaker Paul Ryan finds time to discriminate against women based on how they dress. The laws that the guard under the direction of Speaker Paul Ryan enforced have been in existence for decades and are obviously archaic. Also, they are not universally enforced, rather the speaker uses their own discretion to decide who has to obey the law and who gets to circumvent it.

It is weird however that 2017, with everything else women have to worry about, they also have to worry about not being thrown out of important meetings because their shoulders and forearms are showing.

Shoulders and forearms being sexualised; check.

Editor