Compulsory Heterosexuality: School Bars Dateless Girls from Prom

Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon at 10:00 AM on May 19, 2008.

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.

By the way, explanation for the academicese in the title: compulsory heterosexuality isn’t just about compelling people not to be gay. It’s about the social pressures to perform heterosexuality that are put on everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Even if you’re straight, you can be subject to this pressure if your straightness doesn’t conform to the get married/have kids/participate in the rituals of American heterosexuality. And so a straight girl who is banned from the prom because she wanted to go with girl friends instead of a date is getting smacked with compulsory heterosexuality, as is the lesbian student who is now banned from going with her actual date.

This article also drives home how high school is, no matter how the music and fashions change, stuck in this bizarre time warp. For example, this quote:

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.

But I digress. The point is that no one in the world outside of high school uses the term “going stag”, except as a joke. It’s a dead piece of slang. But still used unironically in high school. High school is just an anachronism-loaded time. Your textbooks seem to think history ended sometime after the New Deal, the marching band plays the greatest hits of decades before to be hip and with it, and at least when I was in school, most everyone is driving a car of the vintage persuasion, because their parents couldn’t or wouldn’t spring for more.

Tagged as: gender, youth, equality