Hugging is banned in my school.

For context, my school is an all girls school. Usually, in Iraq, gender segregation in schools happens around 7th grade up until college. I am in twelfth. Today in class, I looked over to my friend and saw her hair was showing (she was wearing a hijab) and usually it doesn’t really matter but I wanted to be nice and I fixed it for her, she smiled at me in return.

Then, after a few minutes, the teacher ordered us to stand up and obviously gave the whole “whats funny? Tell me so I can laugh too” speech but after that began lecturing us on how that was shameful.. yeah. Helping my friend with her hair was shameful. She just said “can’t she do it for herself?” and said things like “have you no shame??”. This teacher has always been annoying but this is just over the fucking top.

After that, she turned to the class and spoke about how disgusted she feels when she sees us, all girls, hugging eachother. HUGGING. Like.. umm?! She told us that we are all shameful for it and it genuinely just annoyed me to my core and ruined my day. Because of that, I couldn’t even touch or talk to my friend normally for the rest of the day. And some students were agreeing with it?! That just baffled me beyond belief.