Saturday, March 25, 2006
DATING AND HIGH SCHOOL DANCES
NBC News offers a story about Villa Maria Academy, an all-female Catholic high school near Buffalo, where a female couple has been told they may not attend the school prom.
What do you immediately think in reading the story? Lesbian, right? With homosexuality in the news daily, we tend to think that any same-sex couple must be among them.
As I think back on my high school days in the 60s, I remember being shy of boys. I spent most of my time in the company of my girlfriends and my family. On Friday nights after the football game there was a school dance, and my girlfriends and I went to these dances together. We danced together. No, not the slow dances, but those non-touching dances that were popular back then, like the Twist and the Pony. What we were doing was rather like today's line dances where the pairing, if you want to call it that, was not sexual. We wanted to have a good time together, and in the company of our fellow students. It was also important to see what boys showed up, because we were interested in boys...mostly from a distance.
When it was time to pair up for the Prom, some of us were invited and some of us were not. Those of us who were not were profoundly embarrassed about it, as though we were somehow second-class females who were unworthy of the name. That embarrassment tends to cling to the memories of high school like an ink stain on a white tablecloth.
When my daughter reached high school age the school dances presented the same dilemma, but with an option I didn't have. Group dating, if you want to call it that. Several girls and several boys, not necessarily in even numbers, went to the dance together. They were not paired. They were merely friends having fun together. They went out for dinner together before the dance and hung around together during it. All of them had fun. I never asked, but it would not surprise me that some of the girls danced the fast dances together--possibly even in a group. I do know that the boys got together in the mosh pit while the girls stood around and watched the craziness.
Now comes this heavy emphasis on homosexuality, and two girls who want to go together to the high school prom are not allowed to do so. Once again there is no alternative to boy-girl pairing even if the students are not ready for that kind of intimacy. Somehow I don't see this as a particularly healthy development in our social climate.
