If you're a guy, hopefully the man upstairs helped you the month before the high school prom, or whatever else it may have been called (in my school, the underclassmen prom was called the "winter formal" -- different name, same pressure, except you're a freshman and still counting pubes).So where is this pressure coming from? First, from your other duder friends. They're freshmen at that point, too--and, in retrospect, they don't know shit. But in reality, they're still at an age where the information they're absorbing comes from their Baby Boomer dads and moms and the one guy at school who has an older brother who tells stories.
It's a no-brainer that the stereotypical high school prom didn't happen until the 1950s--we all saw "Grease" and "Back to the Future," and we know those prom-induced boy-ask-girl restrictions continue into adulthood. Gender equality and the high school prom are inherent contradictions. Why spend 12 years teaching children that they're all exactly the same, only to throw in "prom king" and "prom queen" at the end of it all?
This is the paradox of the Baby Boomers: they tried to reject society's conventions and then they instituted many of those same conventions when they grew up. Stop imposing antiquated roles justifying your own childhood while at the same time demanding gender equality. I don't want to ask this girl out. The only thing I know about this chick is that she has chemistry third period. If I liked her I would have asked her to the movies months ago.
In the end, what does the guy get out of putting his tiny balls on the line and playing some gendered part that hopefully involves underage drinking? An awkward slow dance and pathetically late discovery that the girl you just spent an emotionally-charged month around likes some random dude that you didn't even know that she knew. It just gets worse as you get older, but at age 15 it's just plain ridiculous.
Coming May 2020: The 5th grade Spring Fling! Everybody gets laid!
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3 comments:
Reading your blog makes me feel a bit like an African-American would probably feel perusing the minutes of a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Having said that, I congratulate you for honing in on how ridiculous and tragic a situation the country finds itself in at the moment, largely because members of my generation have indeed sold out. Your rant is definitely justified! Keep up the good work!
In defense of my generation, our idealism in the '60s also produced many changes in society that were definitely for the good. Yours is the first American generation in recent memory that has not had your life's goals interrupted by the necessity to go off to war. We lost our jobs when we were first married because of Nixon's hiring freeze--another form of economic crisis. People with Ph.D.s in engineering were parking cars back then. Your generation will recover, just as our parents' generation recovered from the Great Depression. I respect your right to rant your heads off about the injustice of this society, however, and will continue to enjoy reading your blog. Bring it on!
My prom date had a school-induced curfew because she was a boarder. So I got nothin'.
However, I did see Lisa C. run around naked at the after-party screaming, "I'm not drunk! Get off me!" at her date when all her date was trying to do was cover her up with a sweatshirt. And I did wake up next to Mike B. having the sex with his prom date -- not Lisa C., but still -- on the couch.
Whatevs. I joined a frat a year later and oh the with the wonders of the Schaefer and the Snoop Dogg and the, as the kids call it these days, creepin' at the "formals."
Yikes.
I must admit that both my winter fomrmal dates hooked up with other guys. Once of which is now my wife...still give her shit about it to this day.
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