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Rachel Simmons is co-founder of the Girls Leadership Institute and author of "The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence" and "Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls." Her website is: http://www.rachelsimmons.com/ and her Twitter address is: @Racheljsimmons
She recently posted a CNN opinion article entitled "The damaging messages of proms." Her stated position is that proms teach girls to value money, conventional beauty, waiting to be asked out, and to be "straight." She said it like it's a bad thing. True to her lesbian perspective, Ms. Simmons focused on the allegedly "damaging" messages to girls, dismissing the impact on boys with the remark, "Meanwhile, boys can get away with renting a tux for less than $100." Perhaps this statement, more than any other, demonstrates the alarming degree to which Ms. Simmons characteristically fails utterly to recognize what a prom is.
To be sure, it is also "a throwback cultural primer," "a fun dance that hardworking students deserve," "a cultural report card of sorts." But fundamentally, it is a uniquely human reproductive rite of passage, a modern American fertility ritual, an intrinsic celebration of human sexual dimorphism and healthy heterogeneous psychology that introduces newly functional propagators of our species to the cultural intricacies of "the way we do it." Pigs copulate, but Homo sapiens has achieved our current richness of cultural and social sophistication, until recently anyway, by "doing it" intelligently. We desperately need to get back to exercising conscious control over our basic instinct (which we share with the pigs) to "be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth."
Ms. Simmons is right about what the prom teaches, but she is dead wrong in her judgment that it is "damaging" to those for whom it is intended. The fact is, the lessons of the prom are a valuable part, perhaps the valuable part, of the adolescent educational process. This is probably why the prom is associated with high school. The lessons are lost on the homosexuals, of course, because they're homosexuals, but the cost to the propagators of rejecting those lessons leads to a dangerous diminution of their reproductive potential.
Wealth is a metric of the value a capitalist society places on an individual person's contribution, and the efficiency by which that person controls the value received - income and management, respectively. Evolution encourages human reproductive success in proportion to one's fitness within the social environment. The debutante ball of the old days, involving elite girls and hand-picked suitors, is probably inappropriate in a modern democratic society, but the selection process is still ongoing, nonetheless. Girls who don't acquire money to spend on themselves, or boys who don't have it to spend on their dates, are discouraged, if not outright excluded. Thus, the fertility ritual tends to weed out those likely to produce social or financial failures, subject to misery and untimely death. In spite of modern attempts to subsidize irresponsible reproduction, evolution extracts a terrible reproductive penalty on being poor. It always has. This is something the propagators need to know.
Actually, it's not beauty that's valued, it's attractiveness, which is not the same thing at all. Many are the jokes about beautiful girls who drive away the boys by talking. Look around; ugly girls get dates to the prom too, but they are reproductively attractive in others ways, such as being affectionate or putting out a lot. Looking good once a year requires the least sustained investment of attention, time and effort (especially if daddy is paying for it), which is why the girls tend to favor it. Learning how to really dress up is probably a valuable educational experience though, however infrequent. Modern high school girls don't even understand the concept of clothing, especially the purpose and function of underwear, let alone attractiveness. Left to their own devices, they spend their clothing allowance in pursuit of a characteristic fashion genre somewhere between "Bangladeshi vagrant" and "Zimbabwean whore."
The natural function of men is to protect and provide for the needs of women they desire who are immobilized by the natural function of childbearing and rearing. That's why the girls need a man to be able to do that in the first place, and why healthy men find healthy women of childbearing age attractive. If a girl can't attract the dedication of a potential protector and provider without overtly asking him, everyone, including she, benefits if she doesn't get impregnated at all, as the current plight of modern unwed mothers in our otherwise increasingly androgynous society attests. The "unwritten rule" is, in fact, an evolutionary mandate. "If you do the proposing, girl, be prepared to get, um, 'screwed.'"
I agree with Ms. Simmons on this point. One false belief that our sick society has imposed on young people is that the opinions of strangers are somehow valuable or worthwhile. It's popular, but wrong, and it has nothing to do particularly with the prom. Social networks have produced an artificial currency of popularity that is one of the many damnable lies of which we have convinced our children, much to their sorrow, and probably to that of future generations as well. Anything, anything at all, that adolescents do for the purpose of getting "likes" is at the very best suspect, and at worst detrimental, injurious, hurtful, inimical, dangerous, destructive, ruinous, deleterious, undesirable, prejudicial, unfavorable; unhealthy, unwholesome, and just plain wrong! Somebody should tell them that, but at prom time they are probably occupied with other matters.
And that, of course, is the whole purpose of the prom. Gay people are as human as anyone else, equally deserving of love, respect, companionship, and acceptance for the good of who and what they are. To the extent that the prom has become a social activity, they are probably equally interested in taking part and as unhappy to be excluded. But gay partners are as out of place at the prom as their pet animals, and for the same reason. The prom is all about heterosexual role playing, as inappropriate to homosexuals as a pie eating contest is to diabetics. To be sure, gay people can contribute greatly to society, but experience at the prom adds nothing to that. The simple fact is, they are the most actively deselected by evolution because homosexuality does not lead to reproduction. Like it or not, same-sex couples are forever excluded from the most fundamental activity of the human race. Whatever the gays do at the prom, it is more likely to be a job they feel they have to do to maintain their position in the social hierarchy than it is actual participation in an activity for the basis of which they have no psychological motivation, as Ms. Simmons' reports of her own experience demonstrates. It consists of living out a lie. That's what is wrong with being gay. Straight is not only "better," it's the whole purpose of evolution - like it or not!
Whatever gays do to try to be "equal," it just doesn't work; separate is inherently unequal, and vice versa. It is a lesson everyone, gay and straight, would do well to learn. As long as they pretend that they are participating in the ritual of procreation, they shamefully profane their unique self identity and frustrate the valuable contributions they could otherwise be making in lieu of propagating the species. It would certainly be more honest to be doing something else, perhaps a "gay acceptance party," while the straights are elsewhere learning the social rituals by which modern humanity produces offspring.
Actually, that's the bad news! That's the horrible news! That's the catastrophic news! With their confusion regarding the purposes of love, sex and marriage, North Americans have managed mortally to wound marriage, family, commitment, gender identification, and raising children. To my way of thinking, instances of attempts to eliminate traditional sexual displays, however well intentioned, are misguided, to say no more. Not satisfied with mortally damaging the adults, they are now trying to dork with the teens. Without the moderating influence of social mores and custom, humans become just so many rutting animals, copulating with whomever (or whatever) in any manner they desire. Prom night isn't just for girls or boys, or teens. It is for the beneficial future of the human race.
We'd best not mess with it!