Where Have All The Prom Queens Gone?
Hi, Im Mur. Im a geek. While I have embraced this geekdom for the past fifteen or so years, it was terrible to go through high school when my girlfriends didnt share my passion for They Might Be Giants or Star Wars, and none of the boys wanted anything to do with me.
Well, romantically, that is. I had several friends who thought I was - say it with me - one of the guys. I ran for student government; I lost to a girl named Valerie. My Bloom Countyinspired campaign signs were defaced and torn down. Forget running for homecoming queen; thats just ridiculous. No one would even consider geeky little me for such a lofty position.
I was ignored; the smart one who kept her head down and worked backstage in the theater department. The one who wanted to be a writer.
Of course, in college I made friends who understood me, cared about me, and didnt seem to think that I needed heels and pretty hair to fit in. And now that Im an adult, more or less, Im geeky, confident, and dont give a damn about those who made high school a depressing place.
So. How many of you have the same story? Many, I bet. There were several of us geeks in high school, several who saw those four years as long, arduous tests intended to cause so much trauma to us in order to prepare us for the rest of our lives. But as I make friends, many of whom tell me of their geeky status in high school, one question stands out to me.
What happened to all the popular kids?
Seriously. Where did they all go? There are several explanations, I suppose. They could all be right in front of me, just not wanting to say so, uncomfortably hiding under the radar in the same way that kids whose parents paid for their college educations did when friends swapped student loan or work study stories. If you have no high school was hell stories, then youre not terribly interesting in many social circles. Especially if your stories revolve around, I made high school hell for others.
Another option would be that they went into careers that exist outside of my world. I hang out with a lot of artists, writers, and computer engineers. I suppose most of those jobs are done by classically geeky people. I always assumed that the popular kids went off to get jobs as investment bankers or spouses of investment bankers. I dont know any investment bankers. This does not bother me.
But my favorite option is the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. I was chatting with my arch-nemesis Matt Wallace the other day, and I said that I wondered if the popular people just stopped once they left high school; that they had reached the pinnacle of their lives. He said they were all shipped, in their prom dresses and rented tuxes, to the Lost Island of the Prom Queens. This of course upsets the boys, as the island is named for their dates, not them. And broken tiaras lie in dusty corners like discarded bones.
(Incidentally, Matt was also a geek in high school, a journalism geek who had a menacing frame and left at age sixteen to become a pro wrestler. Now he writes horror. Think Im kidding?)
I do remember a book from the 90s where the main protagonist was a woman who had been the prom queen in high school, the most popular girl ever, whose life did stop at eighteen. She led a life of aimless depression because her court had been disbanded and she didnt know what to do with herself. That made the most sense to me; for most of us, life began when we escaped high school. For the popular kids, everything changed. They likely went somewhere that forced them to start from scratch. Maybe they pledged the Greek lifestyle (I know very little about that, as I didnt pledge) you do meet people who were in frats and sororities but no one ever talks about their prom queen heyday.
Id love to end this column with a report on my ten year high school reunion, on how I went back, confident and happy, and saw for my own eyes what happened to Jessica, Beth, Joleta, Teddy, Craig, and David. The beautiful ones, the popular ones. Those for whom high school served as their own personal golden eating trough, what are they doing? Id love to tell that story, but, well
I wasnt invited to the ten year reunion.
Remember what I said about being ignored?
I still havent gotten past high school angst. Im thirty-five, confident, happily married, and actually doing what I wanted to do since I was twelve. And yet I still get shaken and return to the same horrific awkwardness and shyness that I felt back in the day (like the time I desperately tried to get David to notice me). I sometimes wonder if I would be better off if I found out where they were now, what they were doing. Then I realize Im a lot happier thinking of them on the Lost Island of the Prom Queens.
Yup. Thirty-five, confident, and petty. Thats me.
Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.
Daddy Longs for the Good Old Days. Yawn.
Everyone knows prom sucks. Except, I guess, the nostalgic daddies (and probably a few moms) who write columns like this one.
With so many young people ignoring once-sacrosanct dating rites, how can we respond?
Sacrosanct? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means, pops. Dating as you're thinking of it--the boy asks the girl out, they go somewhere public, he pays, they make out a little bit (but no further than second base!!!), he gets her home by curfew--existed for about 50 years in this country.
What daddy's really upset about isn't dating, though. It's
the indifference with which young people today view dating, chivalry and romance,
all three of which are tied up in his mind somehow. It's not a "date" if it's not "chivalrous"--which is to say, if it's not unequal, with the girl waiting passively for the boy to ask her out and the boy making all the arrangements--and without those things, there's no "romance."
But in fact, the situation he's heartbroken over is far older than the one he laments. Here's the story:
Last month, a boy asked my 16-year-old daughter to his school's homecoming dance. She agreed to go, bought a new dress and made a hairdresser appointment.
The boy never bought tickets to the dance. Neither did his friends. They decided that attending homecoming wouldn't be cool, and instead planned to just dress up that night, go out for dinner and then hang out with their dates at someone's house.
Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether the boy asked the girl to the dance (I'm not convinced that daddy here is a reliable narrator): he asked her out for homecoming, she agreed, the kids went out for a meal and then went to a private party rather than to the school-sponsored dance.
So? That's how young people dated for about 200 years, ever since they first started being allowed to court one another rather than relying on their parents to arrange a wedding. Read your Jane Austen, read your Henry James: respectable young people don't *pay money* to entertain themselves in public! They accompany one another to parent-supervised parties in respectable people's homes. When Evelina goes to Vauxhall Gardens with her low class cousins, she's accosted by men who think--since she's out in public--that she's, well, a "public woman," if you know what I mean. She's saved by Lord Orville (who eventually, of course, marries her), a gentleman she met at a *private party* earlier in the story, when she was being watched over by a guardian much better suited to her manners and (as we eventually discover) station.
So much for the "sacrosanct" dating tradition of the public date.
"Yeah right," I hear you getting ready to say. "You're not seriously proposing that we go back to late 18th-century dating practices."
No, obviously not. On the other hand, how about we consider, you know, maybe a nice new 21st-century idea? Which is that instead of sitting around passively
longing for romance. . . . (or) print(ing) up T-shirts: 'Ask me for a date'
--dear god, the horror!--maybe girls, could, you know, actually ask the guys out. If, that is, they really want to go to the damn dance. Why, for god's sake, is daddy here wondering if he should have been
insisting that our daughter's date take her to homecoming,
passively hoping.
as the father of three daughters . . . that more parents of sons would talk to their boys about being respectful, and about the thrill that can come from holding hands
and mistakenly--hilariously!--arguing that
Those of us with daughters need to tell them that empowerment is less about sexual freedom and more about recognizing their true feelings.
How's about this: kids can hold hands at private parties if they want to, so that's a non-issue; "respect" goes both ways and wanting boys to think for girls is the antithesis of true respect; and empowerment means not only "recognizing your true feelings" but also acting on them.
For god's sake, daddy, don't teach her that empowerment means playing the old-fashioned girl who waits to be asked and waits to have sex. Bullshit. Empowerment means you get to make your own damn decisions. If your true feelings are "I want to go to the homecoming dance," then for fuck's sake, don't sit around wishing some boy would ask you. Try asking him. And if your true feelings are "dad, get over it," then, well . . .
Come to think of it, I kind of suspect that this guy's daughter might be a little more empowered than he realizes.
Bitch_PhD went to homecoming and prom and all that and had a pretty good time, actually. But it always annoyed her when she'd ask a guy out and then he'd try to pick up the tab.