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.