Mean Girls

[joreth]

http://zen-shooter.livejournal.com/38654.html

This is a rant about an article titled ""Mean Girls": Boozing, Bikinis And Bullying: How The Scandalous Behavior Of Five High School Cheerleaders Rocked A Bedroom Community Near Dallas" (http://www.newsweek.com/id/37993).  I highly recommend people go read this rant whether you choose to follow the link to the original article or not. 

Before you go read the article (if you're going to), come up with a couple of scenarious you think this article could be about.  Go on, I'll wait.

 

Did anyone come up with anything resembling the following:

~5 girls get drunk and beat the shit out of some poor freshman
~5 girls get drunk and kill some student
~5 girls get drunk and beat, kill, or otherwise terrorize a teacher
~5 girls force someone else to get drunk and beat, rape, kill, or otherwise terrorize a teacher or other student
~5 girls get drunk and run around downtown in bikinis propositioning the town priest for prostitution

Anything like this?  Well, let me tell you, if you guessed any of the above, you'd be dead wrong.

Here's what the girls *actually* did:

One of the girls flipped off her teacher.
One of the girls, after being told to get off her cell phone, said to that teacher "shut up, I'm talking to my mom".
One of the girls told her teacher to "pull her panties out of a wad"
The girls stole their gym teacher's cell phone and texted "racy" messages to her husband.
Two girls had a picture of themselves in a bikini sharing an alcoholic beverage.
Several girls had pictures of them in "racy" poses showing "glimpses" of their underwear (keep in mind that these are CHEERLEADERS who wear miniskirts and flip upside down in the air at publicly attended football games)
Several of the girls, in uniform, went into an adult store and posed with candles shaped as penises.

These antics were cause for a $40,000 investigation and for Newsweek to use words like "scandalous" and "rocked a community" and "menace" and for one teacher to say (yes, I quote) "Gang members were nothing compared to these girls".

Now, I grew up in gang-ridden California.  I was in fear of my life if I wore the wrong color or said the wrong thing to the wrong person or even just walked down the wrong street.  And I didn't even live in East L.A.  I find this incredibly offensive, as someone who actually had to fear the gangs, to have these pissant, bratty teenagers compared to, and found excessive of, gangs.

There's no doubt that these kids have an attitude problem.  There's no doubt that they need to be taken down a peg.  But all the mouthing off didn't generate any form of punishment by the school.  The pictures, however, earned them a suspension.

I completely agree that they deserve detention, suspension, expulsion if it gets that far.  But they deserve it for mouthing off to the teachers.  I am COMPLETELY opposed to the school suspending them for behaviour done off school property and not on school time.  How far does the school's authority reach if it can punish a student for something done outside of the school's sphere of influence? 

And really, why is this news?  So a bunch of teenagers have an attitude problem and exhibit poor judgement.  Isn't that sort of the definition of teenager?  This doesn't excuse them.  By all means, punish them, but for fuck's sake, why are these girls villified on the level of the columbine shooters (look at the language of the article and the fact that it was front-fucking-page news) when all they did was act like bratty teenagers?  And punish them for what they actually did wrong by those who actually have the authority in that scope.  Which means the school punishes them for breaking school rules and the parents punish them for breaking their own rules and the law punishes them for breaking legal rules.  So, the school should give them detention for talking back to the teachers, the parents should punish them for doing whatever it is the parents don't want them to do, and the law can cite them for underage drinking (although my sweetie doesn't like this one, since they weren't actually caught drinking, but a picture exists showing them "holding a bottle of booze").  And, damn it, don't waste my time with headline news telling me that teenagers are acting like teenagers, particularly when the way the story is told makes them out to be little Adolf Hitlers running around throwing people into furnaces.  They're bratty, they're not "menaces", and it's not the school's responsibility to punish them for off-campus behaviour.  This shouldn't even deserve the time and attention I put into the blog post about it, except it's a symptom of a larger problem, namely how our society handles issues of sex and children and responsibility.  But zen_shooter has more to say on that, so I'll let him.

Comments

[may-dryad.livejournal.com]

You forgot to mention the precise nature of the punishments. 15 day suspensions for the holding an alcoholic beverage while underage photo, 30 days for the holding a penis-shaped object photo. Because clearly, girls who indicate that they know what penises look like and aren't terrified or repulsed by them are twice as bad as girls who indicate that they consume an illegal (at their age) and harmful drug.

Of course, athletes and other popular kids traditionally get free passes for all sorts of bad behavior, but do we see a story in Newsweek about that? And on a slightly related note about something else that horrified me today, how about a story about the fact that the free pass extends beyond high school, at least if you're lucky enough to join the NFL, where you can get a free pass for domestic violence as long as it's "really well worth it." Fucking hell.

[joreth]

I thought about mentioning the discrepancy between the offenses, but I thought I remembered zen_shooter going off on that, so I figured I'd refrain - especially since I hoped someone else would read the article and comment on it too :-)

So yeah, we have several issues all at play here. 1) These girls got away with a lot of poor behaviour until the photos made it impossible to sweep under the rug anymore and started that ridiculous $40,000 "investigation". 2) The frightening reach of the school's authority to punish students. 3) The really-not-newsworthy behaviour of these same students getting coverage that likens them to Stalin or Castro. 4) The incredibly offensive treatment of the "offenses" giving the sexual content one higher punishment and the actually illegal act getting half the punishment.

Reading that NFL article ... WTF? Because the mother of her own child refuses a baptism (and we really don't even know if she refuses the baptism or if she refused *him*, his request, his presence, the date, or what), he is allowed to assault this mother because his intentions of this religious ritual is automatically a "good thing".

I'm just appalled. I don't care if he apologized for it later, I don't care that he thought enough about his job to call his coach right away to do damage control, I don't care what the reason is, if it's not self-defense, these cases are not two completely different cases. In both cases, the male got angry at something the female said or did and chose physical assault as the method of expressing his anger. That's it.

I'm not really in favor of the workplace punishing someone for off-time behaviour - if it's illegal, then he should pay legal consequences and that should be enough. If he has to do jail time, that results in days off work and *that* is usually reason enough to fire someone. But, regardless, if one of them gets fired, they both should be fired. They did the same damn thing. Punishing one and not the other because one had a "good reason" is way too close to the Thought Police for me - where the reasons behind an atrocious act makes it more or less atrocious. People's thoughts are now being regulated.

Plus, I guaran-fucking-tee that if she was a christian and objected to him wanting to do the equivilent of a baptism in some other religion, say muslim or voodoo or aztec or buddhism, there would be no comments like "what he was trying to do was really well worth it ... He was doing something that was good, ... She said she didn't want to do it".

Fuck that.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Not only should schools not be punishing for non-school related incidents, but what is wrong with the penis-candles? Is there anything illegal about the girls having them? And with the booze, if they feel there was underage activity that was illegal, isn't that a matter for the police and not a matter for the school at all?

Telling off their teachers, sure, that's a matter for the school. And they should be disciplined for it.

But the only serious thing I saw mentioned was an accusation of slander (attempting to ruin the coach's career) which apparently was dropped.

[joreth]

EXACTLY my points!

Unless the girls were in an adult store and were under 18 (which is not made clear in this article), then what they did was perhaps in bad taste but not illegal and not "wrong". Neither photo is within the school's scope of authority, and it shouldn't be. If it's a legal matter, then let the cops handle it.

[leora.livejournal.com]

An interesting juxtaposition. Another post on my friends page is about school children misbehaving too.

link

That's a post about a news article about a boy who has been repeatedly beaten, sometimes to the point of losing consciousness, and the system is generally not viewing it as a very big deal.

[joreth]

Argh, we as a society clearly have our priorities fucked up

[joreth]

This reminds me way too much of my own childhood for my comfort. It's about time someone stopped thinking "well, boys will be boys" because this behaviour only extends to adulthood when the boys realize they are not held accountable for their actions and there are no consequences.