Shorty got low, low low, and I've had enough, enough, enough.

Friend, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are unaware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of ________ in your community.  And thus, with the simple filling in of the offending noun, the old Trouble in River City rap begins.

Okay, I know I run the risk of sounding like Professor Harold Hill, or John Lithgow in “Footloose,” but I think I’ve just witnessed my last high school dance…at  least my last high school dance at which I stand by and condone with my silence the mass sexual molestation of girls 14-18 years old.

There is a line in Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Nanny tells Janie , I can’t bear to stand by and let men make “a spit cup outa you.”  Well, mothers and fathers, we have a raised a generation of spit cups.  Before I continue, let me acknowledge and repent publically of my own culpability in this affair. Every year since I began teaching in 1995, my husband and I have sponsored the annual homecoming dance. I’ve always considered myself a fairly “hip” and understanding teacher, and I have done my share of shoulder tapping or long-distance eye-brow raising to let students know they needed to “cut it out” on the dance floor.  But this last weekend I couldn’t stop it. And I’m tired. And I’m sorry.

There’s a new “move” in town, dirtier than any dirty dancing I’ve ever had to break up, and it began raising its ugly head (not touching that one with a 10-foot pole) about five years ago. It’s a little dance piece known as “grinding” in which a young man grasps a girl by her pelvic bones and then backs her in against his crotch as she rubs her buttocks against his genitals in time to the music. Sorry, I know I’m pushing the obscenity meter with this one. I tried to soften it, but I thought it would be best to just call it straight.

I know Mrs. S____ that you sent your freshman daughter to the dance thinking that there would be adult supervision…but there wasn’t. I mean, there were adults there. Plenty of them—myself included—from principals to vice principals to school counselors. But we didn’t stop your daughter from rubbing herself against her date.

I’m sorry Mr. G____ I know you thought that your girl was going out to dinner in her see-through skin-tight spandex homecoming dress to attend an innocent dance in the gym similar to the ones you and Mrs. G____ went to in high school…But she wasn’t. I mean, she did go to dinner dressed like that, just as you thought. But somewhere in-between she had several drinks and when she arrived at the high school and began clutching her ankles on the dance floor, her judgment had apparently been impaired. Well…we did catch that one.

But the rest of you, Mr. and Mrs. K__ and Ms. H____, we did nothing. The only way I can describe it is………….well, it’s like swatting flies at a livestock sale barn. Which ones do you stop?

And so, on homecoming night, your girls backed their buttockses up against young men and ground (or do we say grinded?) to music………some even tried to do it to the beat. What it looks like to them, I cannot imagine, but to the outside witness it looked something akin to an entire room of young dogs humping a mail man’s leg.

Do I want to ban dancing? Heck, no. I know that in the20’s parents cried out over The Charleston and ragtime (libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime shameless music—Pro. Hill, again there.) In the 30’s it was swing dancing. Parents have cried out over jitterbug, and Elvis the Pelvis, Go Go boots, the Twist, the Monkey and the Pony. John Travolta gave us both lycra body suits and skin-tight Wranglers with Saturday Night Fever and The Urban Cowboy. Not long after, Baby and Patrick Swayze gave us a crotch-leg combo called Dirty Dancing.

Kids will always dance. ALWAYS. It’s part of what we do as a culture. I don’t think anybody wants to take dancing away. It’s a courting ritual; it’s a right of passage; and teen dancing has always pushed the envelope.  In fact, statistics show that slow songs have generated enough dance partner heat and friction throughout the decades to power a city the size of Milwaukee for 17 months.

But there’s something blatantly wrong with a room full of grinding girls, whose short cocktail dresses (and there’s another one) come up as they go down to Shorty Got Low, Low, Low. And there’s something even more wrong with a group of adults who stands back and watches as it goes down (or up as the case may be).

I’ve read a dozen blogs on this topic: People crying for bans and people crying for freedom of expression. What we should be crying for is the loss of innocence. We, as a nation have overtly stripped our young women of any mystique, allure or femininity. And we have stripped our boys down to nothing more than mere gropers and ogglers.  We tell boys not to treat women as objects, and then we create girls who see themselves as nothing more.

We’ve created a generation of overtly sexualized children, whose parents chuckle as Charlie Sheen takes three women to his bed, whose mothers get up and perform their morning pole dance work-outs, who watch blithely by as Degrassi and company get all bent out of shape not over the premarital sex but over the lie about the pregnancy, and we stand back and watch like helpless victims, rather than the perpetrators we are.

It was cute when Kevin Bacon taught Chris Penn how to dance (Let’s hear it for the boy) and the whole town, including the preacher, was rescued from the close-minded prejudice against dancing. We all had to learn the “moves” in our day. But sadly enough the only moves these boys have  to learn is something they can perform with an old t-shirt out of the laundry basket in the privacy of their own closets.

I don’t want to sponsor any more dances.  I can’t bear to see your girls (my students) used as spit cups any more. I have enough five days a week just trying to explain that “Mrs. Jones my computer printer sucks balls” is not appropriate on any level of communication. I’m tired of being the teacher who gets up from my office desk to go in the hall and explain to a group of young men or women that “Fuck” is not an appropriate adjective, noun, or verb anywhere in school. I’m worn out of girls who walk up to the drink counter dressed in their Homecoming finest and cry, “Damn,” when they find the water all gone, then yank up their strapless gowns over their escaping bosoms as they flounce away.

On a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, I monitor and am held accountable for state test scores, failing grades, lack of reading comprehension and lack of student motivation. I have classrooms full of kids with depression, eating disorders, and abusive parents. I have a life full of cutters, bingers, drug addicts, alcoholics and teenage pregnancies that walk through my door every day……I guess I just don’t have the energy to preserve their morality on the dance floor, too.  I know, I took that 400-level pedagogy class called Teachers and the Law, that I am officially in loco parentis. But where are the parents on this one? I’ve got nothing more left to give.

Mr. and Mrs. D----, Perhaps it’s time for you to come sponsor homecoming and see for yourselves what your senior son and freshman daughter are up to. Maybe it’s time for mass-control ski-slope management techniques:  two armbands—cut off the first as a warning; cut the second  and it becomes your choice to call home and leave the dance. Because, mom and dad, surprised as you might be to discover this…students aren’t managing themselves. Especially not when they have been given a full head-nod from administrators and teachers alike.

Even in a lucrative society like the United States, when you dress a girl in a scrap of see-through, low-cut, sequined material, put her in high heels, spread makeup on her face, send her out into the night and ask her to rub her body parts on a man……………uh…………..well.

And maybe that’s the darkness that has overcome my heart this Monday morning. I grieve over child pornography, and prostitution that exists throughout the world—especially in third world countries. But guess what, Mr. and Mrs. W___ Mr. and Mrs. A___, B_____  C____ and D____? Even though I’m certain you kissed them good-bye and said, “Act like a lady. No grinding tonight.”  It’s a little closer to home than you thought. At least those girls in those third-world nations, albeit very small amounts, are getting paid. Your girls are doing it for free and nobody cares, and nobody is stopping it.