Take a second to close your eyes and think back to high school. Some of us are imagining ourselves just four months ago. For others, high school is becoming a distant memory. If you call three years the “distant” past, that is.
You’re at your school’s annual homecoming dance with a group of your friends. The cute guy (or girl) you’ve had a crush on since the fifth grade asks you to dance. You squeal inside and you take it the dance floor.
And you start grinding. Because that’s what teenagers do.
Well, according to the administration at Gorham High School in Gorham, Maine, this brand of vulgarity is simply unacceptable. After having urged students to dance “politely” with each other in the past, administration has had enough with the sex-driven dance moves and has in turn decided to ban all dances besides prom. This includes the upcoming homecoming dance, the Portland Press Herald reported Wednesday. The alternative event to homecoming will be a bonfire, where no dancing will be allowed. As Jezebel so kindly reminded us, this is all too similar to the plot of the cult Kevin Bacon classic, “Footloose.”
As you can imagine, students are tremendously upset about this. One student even went so far as to call this year’s bonfire “lame,” the Portland Press Herald reported. According to a Sept. 2014 article by the same publication, upward of 350 students walked out of the school’s homecoming dance that year in response to administration’s request that they stop grinding.
In all honesty, grinding is pretty gross. And many of us look back and cringe at the thought of ever having put our bottom up against someone’s front, or our front up against someone’s bottom, in a public setting. In a school. In front of the people who teach us.
But we digress. In reality, the alternative is that kids are going to find their own places to party, and they are going to party harder than they would have had they been dancing in a school gymnasium. With alcohol in the mix, these teens would arguably become much more eager to dance, and whatever else it is teenagers do with each other.
Because in a way, educators who ban grinding are enforcing an abstinence-only type of policy. By forcing students to abstain from sexual contact with each other (even in a public setting, which is still making us cringe as we think back to ourselves at 16), educators are backwardly encouraging students to go find other ways to please their sexual desires. Perhaps the butt-touching on the sweaty gym floor really is the better option.
High school educators seem to be separated from reality in this sense. They want to assume that kids will just accept that grinding is banned and move on. But they wont. They’ll revolt. And someday, they’ll realize that their reason for revolting was pretty disgusting and honestly pretty degrading. School dances, though, are a right of passage. Everyone deserves to make cringe-worthy memories to look back upon later in life.
Perhaps there’s a better way to combat this issue than to ban dances all together. “If there’s people grinding, kick them out. Don’t ban the whole thing,” junior Kiara Sweet told the Portland Press Herald.
Sweet seems to be on to something. Not every single student at a high school dance enjoys grinding. Some are just prefer to dance with their friends, which there is absolutely nothing wrong with. Instead of banning dances, let’s encourage an environment in which those who respect the rules get to reap the rewards. In this case, those rewards include dressing up nicely and having a fun and wholesome night out with friends.
In any case, there’s certainly a compromise to be made here. High school administrators need to make an effort to understand the urge students have to dance, regardless of the “contemporary dance culture” the school’s principal, Chris Record, reportedly attributes the issue to. There are always going to be students who show up and take things a little too far, but there’s no reason not to let those who don’t have a good time.
