Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says, dryly (emphasis mine)

Read her whole post here.

I think maybe even a few months ago I might have gone totally off-course with a typical (and, I swear, perfectly reasonable) rant about how women have to wear purses because clothing manufacturers steadfastly refuse to sew pockets into women’s apparel. And I might even have picked up on the counter-argument that many women, pressured to sacrifice practicality for a “clean silhouette,” won’t buy clothes with pockets. And a few months ago, after straining my little Y chromosomes extra hard, I might have opined that it’s out of control to deny pocketless girls even a small every-day (and not just “special days”) purse while their male counterparts slouch around in cargo pants with such big, baggy pockets that they can conceal not just an AK-47 and extra ammo but a carton of milk, a dozen eggs, and the collected works of Proust.

In those days I certainly would have steered clear of references to school boys and their boners. That, however, was then. This is now. Marcotte, having brilliantly lit a fuse under a rhetorical firework (danger of girls bleeding through their pants vs shooting up a school) sends it skyward where we can ooh and aah (emphasis, again, mine)

Of course, even if the rule was followed to the letter and security guards were miraculously discreet instead of getting a rise out of making teenage girls feel uncomfortable about their socially awkward fact of being members of the second sex—a fact teenage girls are just adjusting to, mind you—carrying the purse to class would broadcast loud and clear to other students that you were having your period. And we all remember, I’m sure, how teenagers are generally a classy set about each others’ sex-and-body mortifications. I guess they could make the mandatory humiliations a little more fair by walking around demanding randomly of teenage boys that they describe their unbidden boners.

The point being that a) unbidden boners (and during class in High School they’re almost always precisely that) are why teenage boys have historically been drawn to the loosest, baggiest pants possible, b) boys, especially lower and “outcast” boys are as subject to teasing about their boners as girls are about their periods but (and here’s why I think Marcotte’s crafted a rhetorical starburst) c) unlike tormented girls, tormented boys and their boners sometimes do shoot up schools! (Take a moment to ooh and ahh — that really was a wonderful device of rhetoric.)

And yet (emphasis mine one last time)...

The small Sullivan County school has been in an uproar for the last week. Girls have worn tampons on their clothes in protest, and purses made out of tampon boxes. Some boys wore maxi-pads stuck to their shirts in support.

After hearing that someone might have been suspended for the protest, freshman Hannah Lindquist, 14, went to talk to Worden. She wore her protest necklace, an OB tampon box on a piece of yarn. She said Worden confiscated it, talked to her about the code of conduct and the backpack rule — and told her she was now “part of the problem.”

And yet… somehow it’s girls, and their purses or lack thereof, that are part of the problem?