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.
By the way, we’re going to Houston overnight, so if your comments aren’t getting moderated as fast as usual, don’t freak out.
41 Responses to “Compulsory heterosexuality: It’s on your permanent record”
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One of my friends from college, many years back, had a great shirt: “I don’t care if you act straight, just don’t act straight around me.”
I always liked that illustration, so many fun details.
“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.”
I saw High Scool Hellcats so I understand where Valente is coming from.
I only went to my senior prom because I was able to go with a gang of my best girlfriends. In fact I was just looking at pictures of said event with one of those old high school buddies a couple weeks ago, reminiscing about how much fun we had by picking and choosing the parts of prom we wanted to participate in, and ditching the boring crap and/or date rape.
The main reason I agree this has a connection to marriage is the prom-industrial complex is like a training ground for the wedding-industrial complex. Not so much because women are expected to be getting married soon after, but because it trains you to be marketed to in a certain way, and to swallow all the ‘traditional’ stuff that you actually don’t have to take part in if you don’t want to. And the wedding-industrial complex is really just a training ground for the offspring-industrial complex, complete with pressure to ‘opt-out’.
If you train women up early not to realize we have agency in even the silliest social details, all the “rights” and “equality” in the world won’t matter because we won’t know we’re allowed to use them.
Straight guys watch porn together all the time. As a closeted gay man, in college and then in the Army, this was a source of much amusement for me. I still watch porn with straight friends from time to time, but the vibe is a little different [sigh].
I hope that groups of girls who want to go together figure out the solution — invite your gay male friends! The unintended consequence of compulsory heterosexuality will be happy homo grinding on the dance floor.
invite your gay male friends!
It’s entirely possible that the school in question has veto power over who these girls can bring to prom, even if the equipment matches up. And, it being Catholic school, they would have no problem saying, “This guy can’t come to our prom because he’s gay.” It’s much more realistic that any “gay” behavior at prom would get the offender kicked out of the dance, and the student who brought him would face disciplinary reprisal from the school. Seriously, do NOT underestimate the ridiculous fascism of Catholic schools.
Of course, there are plenty of ways the girls could bring male dates (even hetero male dates) without it being sexualized or even heteronormative in any way. Bring a platonic male friend. Bring your cousin. Whatever.
I didn’t even realize it was a Catholic school! Now things make more sense, in the way that crazy things make sense when you know they’re being done by crazy people.
Wait, I might have jumped to conclusions… I just saw Staten Island and all-girl school and assumed we were talking about a Catholic one. Aside from a few posh ‘private academies’ in Manhattan (which tend to have long-buried roots in parochial schooling), I’m not aware of any sex-segregated secular schools in the New York area.
woo, thread-hogging!
Yes, it is a catholic school, by the way. I just checked. St. Peter’s Girls School. The especially odd thing is that there seems to be an all-boys counterpart just a few blocks away run by the same parish church. It’s not like the girls have to bring guys so that there will be some boys at the party, or so that the few boys who go with their girlfriends won’t feel atrociously outnumbered (all of which are dumb reasons, anyway).
Methinks there’s more going on here than “we wanted to make sure boys were invited.”
This is where French graduation is so much better - we just sit exams and have private parties to celebrate the end of them/the results. It’s not school-sponsored and there is no such thing as a date.
Yeah someone had the bright idea to do “setup” dates btween the girls school and the boys school, how much you want to bet they have letters out to kids right now matching them up to a partner?
**shiver**
Wow.
You know what I want to know? The prevailing logic of parochial schools (if the ones I attended are typical, that is) is that since it’s a private school and the parents are choosing to send the students there and funding the whole enterprise, the parents supposedly have a lot of say in school policies like this. If parents are pissed about it, why not simply tell the school they won’t force their daughters to comply, or complain to the parish or the diocese? Why come up with lame “solutions” like arranging dates with the boys’ school?
Who came up with this idea, anyway, and who let them execute it?
It’s a girls-only school, which probably means that proms generally have a huge number of girls and not that many guys.
Why would it mean that? I attended an all girl Catholic school - and an all women’s college after that - and in my experience, pretty much any woman who wants a male date for some event can find one. I was a shy, introverted kid growing up, but I still had guy friends I met outside of school (took one to prom, actually), and as someone mentioned, there are always friend’s brothers or cousins, etc. This is not the issue.
The issue is those girls who don’t want to bring a date, or at least not a male one.
And the fact that this rule applies only to the junior prom is really weird. There’s something else going on here.
Anony, the point isn’t “just find a date already”. The point is: why push heterosexual coupling at all? Why should you have to find a date of the opposite sex to attend a school event at all, ever?
In 1984, my high school offered single tickets or two-fers for the prom. While the vast majority went as couples, some girls went dutch date, and some guys showed up “stag”. The reason this changed from my brother’s class was because the administration chose to deemphasize the coupling and reemphasize the school event aspect.
For a generation that murdered the dating ritual, it was just fine with us. Some brought dates, some teamed up otherwise, and it made it possible to travel in packs.
Shouldn’t that be “compulsory heterosexuality”? “Compulsive heterosexuality” sounds like what I practice when I’m drunk at a bar.
Wow. I went to my prom with a group of two guys and four other girls. About the furthest thing from having to find a hetero “date”, I was paired up wiith a friend of mine for all the pictures taken… just wow.
opoponax, parents in the NYC-area Catholic schools seldom throw their weight around. I think they would feel awkward trying to. They’re disempowered. Tuition revenue doesn’t pay the operating costs (or so the churchmen say, anyway) and a good number of the kids are on partial scholarship. “Pay, pray, and obey” survives here, more than it should.
I get that, Unree, but we sure did get that line a lot.
In fact, I was back home over the holidays griping about the fact that our local Catholic high school had just built a second gym but didn’t offer any AP classes. I got the same line from my mother, who paid to put our whole Brady-Bunch sized clan through said school and certainly ought to know what recourse the parents have.
Of course it being the Catholic church this could all be an elaborate fiction. I’m sure nobody would actually pull their kid over something like prom dates.
loosley twisted,
It is worse than that. I attended a small private military school in the late ’60s in Kentucky. There was a small private girls school about thirty miles away plus girls were “recruited” from some of the neighboring towns near where the school was.
If a cadet was unable to find his own date from his hometown or wherever, he was set-up with one of the girls from the school or surrounding towns. And they were introduced half an hour or so before the dance began.
We usually had at least four big dances each year including Homecoming, The winter Ball, Military Ball, and Prom.
The “rent-a-date” was an old and “honored” tradition.
And we provided “dates” to the girls’ school a few times a year as well.
Prom or pr0n, a girl/woman should never be forced into anything.
Anachronistic and time-warped for starters. Parochial or provincial,
either can produce (the expectation of) institutional behavior.
OTOH, (informed) consent and privacy never get old.
I know it can often be read either way, but a principle is an abstract thing while a principal is a school official.
Mnemonic device: the principal is your pal (except in this and many other cases.)
Prom or pr0n, a girl/woman should never be forced into anything.
Anachronistic & time-warped for starters. Parochial or provincial,
either can produce (the expectation of) institutional behavior.
OTOH, (informed) consent & privacy never get old.
Shouldn’t that be “compulsory heterosexuality”? “Compulsive heterosexuality” sounds like what I practice when I’m drunk at a bar.
I agree! that’s why I called it ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ above as well. And I sometimes get that way at bars too.
Clearly, we have a lot in common. What bars do you go to? Maybe we should meet up sometime.
Girls went to dances alone in the early/mid 20th, at least sometimes. My grandmother actually started dating my grandfather following one such dance, which my grandma attended with a female friend who’d just broken up with my grandpa (who was, obviously, also there). But this would have been a social at the synagogue in NYC that my grandparents attended, and in the mid-1940s (?), so that may not be widely applicable, but it wasn’t unheard of.
opoponax—is your hometown in Western PA, by chance?
This is just ridiculous! At my prom (earlier this year) most poeple had dates, but plenty went “stag” or in a group. Honestly, I think the groups had more fun! (no worrying about your friends and his friends, and if his friends aren’t there, entertaining him, how many songs you dance with him vs your friends…)
Nope, M, south Louisiana. Though in a lot of ways those two areas might as well be next door to each other.
Neil, right now I go only to pubs.
Doh! How embarrassing. I fixed it, after leaving it up there for a whole day while away from the computer.
Clearly my spelling and vocabulary skills were shot. My apologies to the pedants—I was rushing to get out the door. Which it turned out I didn’t really need to do.
the word stag isn’t dead.
try looking around at small town newspapers in central/southern illinois.
Bars and Semi-private clubs like the Eagles have Stag/Stagette parties all the time.
Which is basically a singles night.
jerry, I think if you’re using southern Illinois as an example of living culture, you’re pretty much undercutting your argument.
And I say that, as a transplant (though I’m away this semester), with grudging affection.
Anony, the point isn’t “just find a date already”. The point is: why push heterosexual coupling at all? Why should you have to find a date of the opposite sex to attend a school event at all, ever?
Uh…right. My point was that this rule is aimed at girls who are choosing not to bring dates, or at least not male ones. I took it for granted that people would understand I think this is a bad thing.
And I’m still stuck on the fact that this rule is only for the junior class. My sister’s class in high school - a few years behind me in the same catholic school - had a relatively high number of out lesbians. Given that there had bee zero in all previous years, the emergence of 4 or 5 all of a sudden was quite the scandal, especially when a few decided to go as couples to the prom. This story made me think of that and I’m wondering if the principal here is trying to control some junior class lesbian outbreak. (And for the record, I think that would be a bad thing too.)
*shrug*
The all-girls, Catholic high school I attended in the early 1990s has had the same rule for decades (and not just for proms, for ALL mixers). And we had a brother school about 500 feet away–but the girls school and our brother school had separate proms. A lot of schools in my area, whether Catholic or public have the required-het-couple rules.
And that goes together with the whole banning-the-21yo-soldier from the prom thing that was an outrage in my area in recent weeks (can’t remember if it was discussed here, or really even applicable to being discussed here). Due to the rules above, I went to the prom with a 23yo brother of a friend. Apparently, schools around my area, which commonly have the MUST BE HET COUPLES rule for prom, are also now banning 20/21-year-old boy/girl friends of the 18/19 year old seniors.
I think 21+ people should only be allowed to go to school dances with students over 18. And if that rule is seen as “scandalous”, this country has serious problems.
There was one 19 year old in my high school graduating class (and I’d say that only about half of us had turned 18 by the time prom rolled around). It’s not like most high school seniors are 19 and 20 years old.
Banning 21-year-olds from the prom at my school would have probably resulted in banning the boyfriends of about a quarter of the senior class. (And prevented many of us who were dependent on the willing brothers of friends to attend–since it was required that we have a date to attend.)
That may be a problem specific to all-girls schools . . . the reason why so many girls had older boyfriends was because that their regular exposure to teenaged males was through the friends of their older or younger brothers, or the brothers of their friends (and the younger boys are icky
). So, many of them started dating boys 2.5 or 3 years older during their high school years. (Average age difference between siblings.)
And as the comment was elsewhere, the 21-year-olds were seniors when the current senior class were freshmen. So, even in a coed school, both the exposure to those older people, and the opportunity to start dating were there.
Banning 21 year olds would be weird, esp. if they started dating when one was a frosh. and the other was a senior. The older they get, the less the age gap = power gap.
One of my sisters went with a 26-year-old. She was the older of the pair (in terms of maturity), there was no hanky-panky, and my parents approved. The school shouldn’t have a say. And my Sr. Ball date was 19-20 and I was 17. We were platonic—I trusted him, he was funny, and yep, he was my good friend’s older brother.
It was once common (among my parents’ friends, anyway) to invite someone to a party “stag or drag” meaning with a date or without. Maybe “drag” is meant to suggest the cartoon caveman approach to dating, or “the old ball and chain.”
One could also ask if the party was “stag or drag,” meaning, should the person look for a date or is s/he explicitly asked not bring a date? The invitee’s sex is not always male.
Google on the phrase “stag or drag” for more context.
At my Catholic girls’ school, there weren’t a lot of boys at prom, and it wasn’t because the school was full of lesbians (it wasn’t, and no one stopped the handful of out lesbians from going together). Most of the boys were brothers of students forced to go (where they would stand around being uncomfortable and not dancing with their sisters’ friends). Of course, being the last single-sex school in the state, there was no convenient boys’ school, and having high academic standards meant that the majority of students just didn’t have time to hang out with people outside of class. It really wasn’t that easy to find male dates (and the platonic friend I asked–my only male friend at the time, and more of an acquaintance–turned me down, so I went with a group).
The nuns didn’t care if girls danced together or with boys, so long as we “left room for Jesus.” I liked our nuns, although they weren’t perfect on these matters.
I agree that this is an attempt to control a junior class “lesbian outbreak.”