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Compulsory Heterosexuality: School Bars Dateless Girls from Prom
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This is extremely bizarre. A Staten Island high school has banned girls from the prom if they don’t have a male date. It’s a girls-only school, which probably means that proms generally have a huge number of girls and not that many guys. Maybe the principle is pitying the boys at the prom, feeling they shouldn’t be outnumbered. There’s other speculations.
“That makes sense only because it probably controls the chaos,” Valente said. “You know you’re there with somebody, you’re less likely to go crazy.”So, there’s a grave danger of high levels of squealing and circle dancing. I say, good practice for the weddings the principle presumably wants them to have in the future.
Added New Brighton resident Mimi Quillin: “That’s really sad, because I thought we’d just gotten to the point where boys and girls, if they wanted to do it stag, alone, whatever, they could do it.”Emphasis mine, because the word “stag” is a shining example of the real world anachronisms of high school culture. Now it’s gender-neutral, which is ironic because the term “go stag” is a very early-t0-mid-20th century phrase that described young men who attended events like proms without dates. (I suspect young women were both not allowed and not willing to go to these events alone, because of the social shame or danger. Correct me if I’m wrong.) In the context, the word “stag” tended to denote events where men hung out in male-only groups. Stag dinners and stag parties come to mind, where they showed stag films (i.e. porno). The fact that men in the past would get together in groups to watch porn amuses me. I mean, I guess we still have some kind of stag parties like that, but most porn nowadays is consumed in private.
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