Suspended for Dancing

[Saltmeister]

Why would you expect young women to possess any more self respect as young men?

The feminist movement partially achieved what it set out to achieve: women gained a greater foothold in the political arena and the workplace. They can now occupy positions of power unthinkable a few decades ago.

But of course it was not a panacea for wo/mankind's woes.

You want girls to act like Lisa Simpson? How about getting guys to stop acting like Hugh Hefner?

But what is it about Hugh Hefner that you find so repulsive? I don't know much about this character. When you make a statement like that you're assuming that I know what makes him a repulsive character. The problem I have in understanding what you're saying is that Hugh Hefner is a real-life person whereas Lisa Simpson is a fictional cartoon character specially shaped to convey a particular message to the audience. If there is something we like or dislike about Lisa, it was the intention of the producers of The Simpsons. There is no "intended message" behind the character of Hugh Hefner as far as I know with regards to what we should find repulsive about him.

Here's my solution to achieve more respect and decorum in this world: every child born out of wedlock costs a man 25% of all his earnings until the child is eighteen-years old. Since a man has to have something to live on himself, he gets three "strikes". After the third child, he's castrated... permanently.

But now you are prescribing punishment here and I don't think that solves the problem. Punishment is a deterrent but it doesn't destroy the desire or motivation. A man is going to find some other way to fulfil his desires.

Besides, I didn't prescribe punishment or condemnation for anyone. I was just saying that a woman can say no.

When I made that comment I didn't mean it to be a one-sided issue. Recall what I said about a man trying to prove his manhood by how many or what kind of woman he is able to take into bed and teenage boys' desires to lose their virginity.

It is seeming, more and more to me that the problem is an oversexualised society. Teenage boys and girls become reckless with their bodies because they want to fulfil their desires before everybody else does. I have seen enough to know that the struggles in the average sex life don't change much when one progresses to adulthood. You still suffer from self-esteem with regards to your sexual worth. Women worry about their looks and body shape. Men worry about their performance in bed. Do you notice all the advertisements on Viagra and erection problems?

When I see all these advertisements of Viagra, erection problems and read stories about divorce and relationship problems, I become rather disillusioned. Sex, women and marriage was never what it was cracked up to be. It makes me think that sex and marriage must be the most horrible thing anyone ever invented. It makes me glad I never lost my virginity. I might as well never have sex.

But I am thinking, more and more, that the problem is society's obsession with sex. If sexual dignity is so important, it should be protected. Society seems to think that freedom for teenagers is more important than their sexual dignity. These discussions are kind of changing me views on that. We could probably give them freedom on other matters, but sexual dignity is perhaps one of the things where they should not have freedom.

Freedom is power. With power comes responsibility. Maybe this freedom is too much for teenagers. Teenagers can't be trusted to keep their sexual dignity. It should perhaps be the responsibility of parents to guard their children's sexual dignity.

A girl can say no to a man but maybe she doesn't feel that she has the power to face up to the possibility of "not being loved." A boy could well see that getting a girl in bed doesn't really prove much to the world in the long term. Once you grow up, you realise it doesn't mean much. Adult men do it all the time but it doesn't give them the happiness they'd like. The boy feels he is in a social environment where it is important.

What is happening here is that people are trying to find happiness in places and people that seem important in their immediate social environment. If they had known better, they'd realise that they have a choice. The girl can say no. The boy should realise that his efforts mean very little. The boy and girl seem very much to be slaves of their social environment. We give them freedom, but that freedom is not being exploited to its full potential. The teenage boy and girl is too ignorant to make the best use of his/her freedom.

One may argue that this freedom allows us to experiment and figure out for ourselves what is good and healthy. But maybe sexual dignity is an exception. It is one of the things that everybody must have. Maybe teenagers just can't be trusted with their sexual dignity. It is too important.

But maybe the problem isn't strictly teenagers. Maybe it is sex itself. Maybe people shouldn't have sex before marriage. If you want to have sex before marriage it's because you want to experiment and explore. It's because you want to practice to be good at giving sexual pleasure. But you wouldn't need to practice to be good at sex if sex wasn't so important in the first place, if sex was just a way of making babies. I think I would rather have an emotional relationship with a woman than a sexual one. Why not settle for something platonic?

In fact, why not go back to the good-old-fashioned days of celibacy and chastity? Is it really that bad to be a virgin, to be chaste and/or celibate? Does everyone have to be a romping Casanova?

Has sex become the next opiate of the masses?

If sex wasn't the ultimate virtue, we wouldn't need all this Viagra and plastic/cosmetic surgery?

 

[citizenzen]

Besides, I didn't prescribe punishment or condemnation for anyone. I was just saying that a woman can say no.

While I may have been engaging in a bit of hyperbole, check out this excerpt from wil's previous post...

I chaperoned my children's high school homecoming dance and got an eyeopener.

But the 11-12th grade dance...wooo...that was something else. First the girls wear skirts that are belts or dresses that barely pass thier crotch. They stumble in on these high heels that they can't walk on, much less dance in, Ginger Rogers they ain't. So soon as they hit the dance floor they plop down and take off their shoes. (there are very few table, now when I say plop down, I mean plop down spread eagle to remove their shoes.) So they say underwear ain't no different than a bathing suit, and true these girls were wearing nice lacy thongs, I never thought of myself as a prude but with a 16 year old daughter suddenly things change somehow.

Now we get to the dancing...at this age it wasn't the mob hop or a slow dance or the waving arms and feet of my day. Sort of the bump and grind without the bump. Groups of boygirlboygirlboygirl in lines grinding crotches, sliding up and down legs...did I mention how short thier dresses were....well this action allowed caused the dress to slide up past the thong to allow you to notice which girls sported lower back tattoos or belly button peircings...

quite the eye opener....

Now it may have come from this perspective because he has a 16 year-old daughter, but what's the angle here? It's all on the women (girls). They are immodest. They dress provocatively. They are the out of control sexualized element in this account.

One might wonder, what about the men (boys)? Where is their responsibility for the display that opened wil's eyes? They hardly rate a mention. They were just fulfilling the role we men have enjoyed for centuries, that of the randy playboy (Hefner). Boys will be boys after all. Besides, how can they help themselves when the delights of femininity is dangled before them? Giving men concrete consequences for their acts will not stop them, but it may slow them down a little. Isn't it time to give men a little something to think about?

What you describe as "punishment", I would call accountability. If a baby is produced it must be cared for. It seems too easy these days to avoid child support. (At least in America.) So do away with the old system. If the child is yours and you are not married to its mother, then 25% of your wages are garnished automatically. Unemployed? A quick trip to the court doctor will ensure that no more babies are produced. Besides, it's reversible... most of the time.

What I'm trying to suggest here is a consequence for men that is roughly on par with what women face, something with long-term impact. If we want fewer children born outside a family unit, if we want fewer abortions, this just might be the way to convince young men that they need to be a little more considerate of where they place their privates.

Men might find that they can say "no" just as capably as you expect women to.

 

[path_of_one]

Up to a certain year level, people tended to have a sense of disgust with the idea of a girlfriend or boyfriend. Girls were suspicious of boys and boys didn't want to be intimidated by girls.

Where I grew up, this ended by the time we were about 11 or 12.

A "square" in the place where I grew up was a person who studied too much or tried too hard to be a know-all. I don't know if you use that term over there in the U.S. Please let me know.

We use the term here in the States, too.

It could be that the question of whether secondary school kids seek out mates depends on the integrity of an informal/de facto fraternity or sorority. Good male and female mateship and bonding may keep males and females away from reckless sexual behaviour.

It's an interesting question. I think the issue is not so much having friends as what one's friends are doing and their outlook on life. I had very few friends (people I consider to be very dear to me, that I can rely on in all circumstances, and that know me very well) but I had many acquaintances, and so I was aware of what the other people were doing outside my own very small circle.

Academic pride may also be another factor. A smart girl or smart boy wouldn't expose himself/herself to the vulnerable situation of being humiliated in a potential break-up from a boyfriend or girlfriend. Yuk! Who wants a girlfriend or boyfriend if you're getting A+'s? You're too good for the opposite sex.

In my school, people just generally had sex with people equally smart/diligent. The debate team literally had hot tub parties and people were swapping rooms at away-from-school competitions, for example. From what I heard, the other geeky people- band, choir, etc.- were all the same. I was not involved with this because I began dating at 16 and never dated a high school boy. I immediately dated men finished with high school and then met my now-husband when I was barely 17 and he was 20. I was always developmentally ahead and had no real desire for all this High School sex-related BS. I am a classic romantic and wanted to fall head over heels in love with a soulmate. I wanted sex to be sacred. Didn't make me less curious, just more picky.

Were you a square like me?

Kind of. I was the weird kind of artsy and brainy girl who wrote poetry and did a lot of art and drama competitions and was a perfectionist, so I aced everything. People didn't quite know what to think of me and only about three or four people knew me well at all, of which I am still close friends with two. I enjoyed that. I have always been a bit of a social experimenter. Much of my high school experience, once I gave up any hope of belonging anywhere, was devoted to playing around with social cues, meanings, and so forth. I kind of considered high school one big piece of performance art, except less fun. Anything to staunch the boredom. I think if I'd had the money and courage, I would have been goth for a while. But I didn't at the time, so I was just odd. I tried to play around with the categories and shake things up every so often.

I later learned I had a real sexual reputation for being beyond anyone's "league" as it were, because I never dated high school boys. LOL I didn't even kiss someone until I was 16, and that was when I fell in love with my first boyfriend. I met my husband at 17 (second boyfriend), we dated two years, I got married at 19, and I'm still married to him.

LOL Shows you how far off kids' ideas can be.

I'm not sure what you mean by "girls who demanded more." What were they demanding?

Time, respect, possibly even love before having sex.

To me, it sounds like from what you're saying that despite political and legal reforms, society hasn't moved on much from judgmentalism and degrading social values and practices. It seems like the changes are largely superficial. Only the semantics are different.

Well, I have a lot more opportunity than I would have in the 1950s. I would not have been cut out to be the mom with the pearls, all excited about a new washing machine. I'm glad other women forged the way and I could go get a PhD and do what I enjoy for a living. I'm glad I'm able to be independent financially if I needed/wanted to be.

But otherwise, there is a lot that just didn't happen. First, women now are told to do it all, and all at the same time. Rather than open opportunities if women want to take them, women are told they aren't that great if they are "just" a mom and wife, yet they are also missing out on "being a woman" if they aren't a mother.

Second, it did not change the pressure on women to attract men. Granted, I may have been exposed more than usual to this because I come from the Los Angeles area, which is like a mecca for pretty people trying to look prettier. But on the flip side, I was raised in a family of mostly women (mother and aunts) who were pretty feminist. And yet I still got plenty of conditioning from peers and so forth. I can't imagine what hope there is for people who aren't sheltered from the media. I mean, we're trying to live up to standards that the most beautiful models and actresses in the world can't meet- airbrushed, photoshopped standards. It's ridiculous.

The thing that is saddest is that women hurt women more than men hurt women in this particular arena. Most men don't notice if a woman isn't up to the latest fashion or didn't have her hair done recently. Many men I know find women attractive just as they are and don't really notice a wrinkle or a bit of plumpness or whatever. Many men find women attractive when they've just worked out and so forth- when they are most natural. Women complain that men make them feel this way, but I don't think that is true. Women feel the pressure to conform to a certain image because other women notice when they do not, and to be honest, women often gossip about one another, shun one another, and so on. Many are not very loyal, certainly a great deal less loyal than many of the men I know are with their friends. Now, certainly there is a certain kind of man who is after the trophy wife, but they aren't that prevalent and in my opinion they aren't worth having unless you have low self-esteem to begin with or are simply wanting to avoid working for a living.

I think the next wave of feminism needs to be women supporting other women. Women refusing to criticize and gossip and read celebrity tabloids, women being willing to give up the national pastime of getting one's self-esteem boost from ripping apart other women. The men, for the most part, seem willing to love us for who we are; the variety in their tastes seems quite wide as a whole. So we need to focus on a different kind of feminism, one that promotes sisterhood and not stomping on one another.

 

[seattlegal]

Jeeze Louise! He was suspended for going to his girlfriend's prom at another school? Would a student be suspended for going to a wedding where there was dancing? Are students who study ballet turned away from attending the school?
(Is this really a Christian school? I don't even think that reform schools are so controlling!)

Why would anyone in their right mind put up with this BS?

 

[path_of_one]

Private schools can do whatever they like, provided it's legal. Up to the parents to read the rules and not choose a school that is so ridiculous.

 

[Pondering1]

I've read that getting by in life requires good footwork. Maybe that has something to do with it.

 

[Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine]

If this is the same case that I've heard/read about, I believe the school the young man attends/attended is Baptist, a Christian sect that prohibits all dancing (but I could be mistaken, as usual. )

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine