Prom season is well under way, and you know what that means. Yes, the newest round of ghetto prom pictures will be circulating to an inbox near you. This year, one school district is doing everything it can to make sure none of its students make it into your emails, twitpics, etc. At least not if school administrators in Oxford, Alabama have their way.
In order to stem the tide of You-should-know-better wear, or worse, the Where-the-fuck-are-your-parents-child? gear that provide us with an annual dose of laughter and head shaking, students attending Oxford High School were presented with a dress code for prom:
Females must wear evening gowns or cocktail dresses. The dresses cannot be made of transparent material, there cannot be slits more than four inches above the knee and there must be no revealing neck lines or back lines. The dresses can be sleeveless or strapless, provided all body parts from the shoulder to the knee are covered. Girls also can’t wear two-piece dresses with the midriff showing or with removable material covering the cleavage area.
Males must wear tuxedos or suits. They cannot wear tennis shoes or oversized clothing.
Great, right? I mean, if the parents or guardians of these misguided, if otherwise lovely children won’t take control it falls to the school to lay out what’s acceptable, or at least less tacky. But that didn’t stop the majority of the style-challenged kids attending Oxford from dancing the night away. Eighteen students were disciplined, but only one was turned away. You see, Oxford offered two forms of discipline for dress code violators: suspension, meaning you couldn’t attend prom; or you could take a paddling before dancing the night away.
I’ll give you a moment to digest that.
So many questions. Are there really schools out there that still allow corporal punishment? Who got to administer the paddling? Were the young girls paddled while wearing their skimpy attire? Where the fuck are your parents, child?
Not only does the corporal option leave me scratching my head about the intentions of someone willing to paddle a half-dressed teenager, but considering seventeen of them actually got to enjoy prom, offering the kids an out entirely defeated the purpose of the dress code, unless the purpose was to let a few school administrators get their rocks off spanking half-naked little girls.
I would hazard that at least a few of these kids actually enjoyed their pre-prom paddling. I’ve got two boys only a couple of years out of high school. I’ve even chaperoned a couple of proms. Trust me, these kids are more sexually advanced than their parents were at that age. I wouldn’t put it past them to look forward to some light S&M before dinner.
Who knows? Maybe this is all just innocent fun. Perhaps the admin at Oxford looks forward, like the rest of us, to the yearly crop of humorous fashion train-wrecks. I admit the creative ways some of these kids can go over the top does make the experience less boring if you’re part of the prom police. Besides, banning them entirely would deprive a few otherwise deserving teens of a notable rite of passage. Isn’t that an even bigger shame?
Maybe. But I know that if it were my daughter getting spanked, I’d be down at that school with a paddle of my own. And they better be prepared with the right answers, because one wrong answer and I’m not smacking their asses, I’m aiming for their heads. If those fools aren’t smart enough to know better, they don’t need them anyway.
